I become Lightning Incarnate, and the world went silver-white as everything fell away and my vision could see nothing but energy and essence.
The forty metres between us collapses to nothing, and I’m at his flank with my hand already turning gold, as I drove an arc of tribulation lightning to the spot above his third rib that I knew would cause him to fold in pain... but he was not there.
My bolt goes through empty air, and the afterimage of Vrakth tears like wet paper, and I have half a heartbeat to understand I’ve been wrong about something before his real claw catches me across the back. It opens me from shoulder to hip, and I feel the cold of it before the heat.
The power of this attack caused my feet to leave the ground, and I went through the chitin shell of a Khaazim, out the other side, and several dozens of Khaaz before skidding face-down through ash for several meters.
’Oh, this is what happens when Vrakth goes all out.’
I push up onto my hands, silver runs off my chin and floats. My back is open, and I can feel the air in it. It was painful, but this level of pain was something I could now shrug off like it was nothing.
Looking forward, I saw Vrakth walking toward me through the corpses that my body had blasted through. He was unhurried, as if strolling through this hell was something he had done a million times, and that could as well be the truth, knowing his age.
"You reached for me," he says with curiosity in his tone. "You reached for me before I made my move. How odd. Does a child know where the storm falls before it reaches the beach?"
Those words, especially the last part... made no fucking sense to me, but I think I knew what he meant, and I did not answer, as I got a knee under me. Nine loops of his openings, and he didn’t use one of them. I began to smile, Vrakth threw a false image, and then stood inside the place I’d already decided was false and let me commit to nothing.
Damn... even now this demon was showing me new tricks, it was a shame that he was an evil bastard because in another world I would love to fight him forever.
I built my whole approach on him being predictable. He just told me he isn’t.
"Right, Elric... this is what you want. Focus, or you will be a lazy cur." I muttered, "I don’t want to hear that from you, Mel, not for a while."
I threw the playbook away on my knees in the ash, and I stood up empty-handed, and rays of radiance emerged from my eyes that stretched for several feet in front of me as I focused.
Vrakth was close now, enough that I could see all the shifting colors of flames in his six eyes. He raises one hand, and the crown winds up behind his head as the air goes wrong, that black-green taste, that I knew was corruption building. A mass of corruption so massive it was as if a great corrupted moon was rising behind him was beginning to form.
Around us, Khaaz demons began to collapse into pus as the earth rippled and the air screamed. Say what you want about demons, but they were powerful when it counted.
He’s pulling it back, and every instinct nine deaths gave me screams that this pause is my opening, go, hit him now while he’s loading...
I don’t go. The last nine times I went, I paid painfully for that mistake. Instead, I wait. I let the wrongness build, and right at the top of it, the moment before he lets the wave fall, I step into it and put one thin line of Tribunal lightning through the corner of his lower-left eye.
With the thickness of his soul, it was nothing, a mere pinprick on a god. But he’s committed, the whole crown wound tight around a cast the size of a building, and the pinprick breaks his focus, and the cast collapses half-made. The corruption guts out into smoke.
The backlash made his crown crack as the wave of corruption I had been bracing for never came. The fight with Vrakth had taught me that picking the right moment in a fight to make a move was many times more important than making rash moves.
He went still in surprise, then he laughed. His laugh was delightful, and I also joined him in laughter, because we both understood what had just happened.
"Oh," he says. "You can hear the rhythm of slaughter, forgive me." Then he bowed, "I am Narghul Vrakth, the first of my Line, Killer of the Moon Fox."
And he changes.
∞
It was not as if his body transformed, but he began to move differently. The long slow pull-and-push he opened with, the tide I just learned to read, folds into something faster and irregular, no two gathers the same length, and I’m reading a rhythm that’s rewriting itself while I read it.
There would be no easy win here; if I made mistakes, I would be torn to pieces. Vrakth roared, and a massive arm of shadow was created behind him, and then it split into four.
My eyes could barely widen before they blasted towards me. They come at me in sequence, one-two, pause, three-four, except the pause is a lie and the third arrives early and takes my left arm off at the elbow.
I don’t try to keep the arm. I seal the channels above the joint, cut the Anima out of it, and let it drop. Fighting one-armed now. The stump is hot. I keep moving because stopping is the next death.
He drives me with a fury that I had never seen before, and I give ground across the basin, and the basin dies around us, every exchange erases something. A supply wagon left behind goes to splinters. The ridge I’ve watched a dozen sunrises die from caves in.
Vrakth puts a wall of dark flame across my retreat, and I pull a bolt out of the red sky with Lightning Tribunal and drop it into the flame as I blink through, and golden lightning and dark flame hit each other, and neither wins, they just scream before falling apart, and I come out the far side of the argument with my eyebrows gone and my lungs blistered.
And all through this, the smile never left my face.