Explorer of Edregon

Vin was simultaneously relieved to see the ranker king standing a few hundred feet away from them, and more worried than ever. On the one hand, a lone enemy was a lot easier to keep track of than if they’d been forced to fight a small army of golems or trogums. Not to mention the ranker king wasn’t capable of simply crushing them all flat like the Worldeaters could do if they felt so inclined.

On the other hand, that meant the ranker king was a lot stronger than he’d originally thought.

Vin didn’t consider himself the strongest of combatants, and even he’d managed to hold his own against the ranker king. Not only that, he’d permanently maimed the man in the process. But of course, he’d forgotten that the ranker king had clearly stated under no uncertain terms that he’d been trying to capture Vin and bring him in alive, as he wanted his assistance with freeing his people from the surrounding fragments keeping the thousands of rankers he ruled over contained. If he’d finally thrown off that self-imposed restriction…

Stepping forward, Vin cleared his throat and called back, trying to ignore how far-less threatening his own voice sounded. “What are you even doing here?! You sure talked a big game about honor for someone who left all his people behind just to track me down!”

“You challenged me to a fight,” the ranker king called back, still having yet to actually step onto the green grass that signified their battleground. “Neither of us has yet to yield or perish, which means our battle has yet to end.”

“Well crap, I guess that’s how he managed to find you,” Shia muttered, her knuckles whitening around her staff as the ranker king cracked his neck and began lightly stretching of all things, as if he were back in his throne room and not facing off against all of them. “Lumel, what are we dealing with here?”

“He’s definitely in his third prestige,” Lumel whispered, her Magic Eyes passive telling her everything she needed to know and causing her to hide slightly behind Vin as she peered out at the ranker king. “So at least level 60.”

“I’m just happy he’s fair-game for poisons,” Scule grinned, already waiting for an opportunity to load the man up with enough poison to fell a herd of elephants by the looks of things. “Reginald, this guy is too fast. You need to stay out of this one or he’ll squash you like a bug.”

A quiet squeak indicated Reginald was in full agreement with Scule, and the rat hopped into the branches of the nearby tree to join him, deciding to watch from afar.

“Honor binds my people,” the ranker king called out, startling all of them as he continued talking rather than just run over and start throwing punches. “My entire life, I allowed it to bind me as well. Even after you took my hand and fled like a coward, I allowed it as I was busy engaging in battle with the council of eleven who thought myself weakened and vulnerable. My honor required I answer their challenge with my own skill, and thus I was forced to let you escape me. But I never stopped thinking about you.

“You fled to a land so close and yet so far. Separated from my own by fragments of worlds that my people could not bypass, bound as they are to answer challenges by the Thread of Ranks. But I am the ranker king!” he shouted, his voice booming and shaking the sands once more. “Honor binds us, but it is a prison that can sometimes prevent us from doing what must be done. The common rankers, the fools dancing at the ends of the strings, are blind to this, but I see things more clearly! Out of over a million warriors, I was one of the top thousand rankers on my own world. One of the few cursed with the knowledge that honor must occasionally be placed aside and forgotten to do what must be done.”

Taking a long, deep breath, the ranker king hand held out his hands, staring up at the burning sun up above as the very air seemed to tremble around him. “Honor—”

A poisoned dart shot across the open clearing, aimed directly for the ranker king’s bare neck. Nearly faster than Vin could even make out, the ranker king’s hand blurred and he caught the dart between his fingers just before it could pierce his flesh. Scule cursed at his failed sneak attack, already loading a second dart into his blowgun. Vin expected the ranker king to shout again, but to his surprise, the man’s smile only grew wider as relief flooded his face.

“This is exactly what the true ranker king claimed long ago,” he said, staring at the tiny dart like it held all the answers. “She warned that there would come a time when we came upon enemies of our great nation who did not understand the concept of honor. Enemies who fought without giving it so much as a passing thought. She warned us that when such a day came, we would need to be ready. Ready to do whatever it took to end the threat before it could taint our people and destroy our lives.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Alka said, hefting her sword as she prepared herself. “Get ready everyone, I think he’s nearly done monologuing.”

“Honor binds us!” the ranker king shouted, his voice growing steadily louder with each word. “Honor binds us all! But it binds me no longer!”

The ranker king threw his hands out to the side once more, as if to embrace the very concept of honor he seemed to love so much, and Vin blinked as he felt Beyond the Veil kick in almost entirely on its own. Suddenly, he could see ethereal, flickering chains manifest around the ranker king’s wrists, twisting up his arms before piercing his chest and vanishing within his core. Upon his declaration, those invisible chains shattered, the pieces drifting up toward the sky before clumping together to form some oblong shape. Even more surprising, was the effect it had on the ranker king.

Tears began flowing down the proud warrior’s face as he took a deep, shuddering breath, somehow looking as though he’d straightened up after spending his entire life hunched over. As he gasped, the pieces of magic that had bound him finally finished grouping together, suddenly becoming visible to the naked eye as they fell into his outstretched hand.

In the form of a flickering, pulsing sword of crimson light with wavering edges.

“Alright,” Shia said, narrowing her eyes. “That’s probably not—”

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The ranker king blasted toward them without so much as a single word, his tear-filled eyes offset by the beaming smile on his face as he covered a few hundred feet in an instant. Vin’s Threat Detection barely even had time to register the man’s attack, and he blinked as he suddenly found the flickering red sword arcing toward his chest.

“Dimensional Lockdown!”

The ranker king froze in place barely a dozen feet away, his momentum stolen in an instant by Lumel’s spell as she wobbled in place, nearly falling over from the sheer drain of the spell. Vin knew the spell pitted a person’s strength against her magic, and the ranker king was far from a weak opponent. Before she could so much as shout a warning, the ranker king flexed and roared, sweeping his sword forward and shattering her magic through brute force as Lumel’s eyes rolled back into her head and she crumpled to the ground. She’d managed to nullify his surprise attack that would have done who knew how much damage, but at the cost of all her mana.

“Reginald, get her to safety!” Scule shouted, as he began firing dart after dart at the ranker king from his perch up in the tree. At the same time, Alka sprinted forward, her eyes flaring as she lunged and locked blades with the deadliest opponent she’d ever faced.

The ranker king easily evaded the darts without so much as looking as he accepted Alka’s challenge, tears continuing to stream down his eyes as their blades flashed and bright, desert sunlight reflected off metal. Vin was worried about the flickering magic he saw coming off the crimson blade, but it seemed Dream Eater was up to the task, Alka’s own darthsteel and mithral blade clanging off the clearly magical blade without so much as a scratch. As they battled, Reginald scurried over and grabbed Lumel by the neck of her robes, using his impressive strength to drag her behind the tree.

While Alka held him in place, Vin ran to the left, putting some distance between him and his friends. Once he had an opening, he took aim and fired.

“Stone Shot! Stone Shot!”

Again and again he fired empowered Stone Shots at the side of the ranker king’s head, but he might as well have been leisurely tossing pebbles at the man for all the good it did him. Even while defending against Alka’s wild barrage of slashes and dodging Scule’s poisonous darts, the ranker king raised his metal hand and used it to block each and every one of Vin’s attacks, the stones shattering uselessly against the dense metal. Realizing that was getting him nowhere, and that Alka was actually fighting on the backfoot for a change, beginning to get pushed back as she desperately avoided taking the full force of any of his blows using her inhuman flexibility, Vin changed tactics.

“Enhance Gravity!” he shouted, focusing on the space the ranker king was occupying. Having already tried this tactic on one of the other rankers during his prison break and witnessing how little it impacted high-strength warriors, he wasn’t surprised in the slightest when the ranker king barely even seemed to slow down. Still, every little bit mattered right now. The spell definitely took the edge off and allowed Alka to try throwing in her own attack every so often rather than focusing purely on defense, but it didn’t have nearly the effect he’d been hoping for.

Luckily, their combined efforts gave them enough time to unveil their trump card.

A twelve-foot-tall mass of wood and plant life roared as it leapt over Alka’s form, Shia’s Living Giant moving to crush the ranker king under her immense weight. Vin didn’t even have enough time to let out a sigh of relief, however, before the man struck.

“Weight Of My Honor!” he shouted, his smile not even flickering as he reared back and punched the center of Shia’s Living Giant, the shockwave from the blow enough to actually blast Vin off his feet and send him rolling across the sand a good few dozen feet. By the time he’d righted himself and looked up, Vin could only look on in horror at the result of the ranker king’s strange skill.

Where the lush, green grass had once overtaken the desert, there now stood a crater, the edges of which were rapidly filling with sand.

The grass, the trees, and even his friends had been sent flying, torn away by the sheer force of the ranker king’s blow. Vin finally understood why John’s Capstone had warned him that all of Terra would be destroyed, because based on the devastation Vin saw before him, he figured it would only take a few blows like that to flatten Terra and everything within it to the ground.

Lumel and Shia’s bodies were lying a good hundred feet or so away across the sand, unmoving as they lay under the burning sun. Reginald was shakily getting to his feet, his impressive vigor attribute pulling its weight as usual. Despite having been knocked out of the tree when it had been uprooted and sent flying, he still looked relatively okay. Scule himself popped out of the sand not much farther, letting out a stream of curses as he dug himself out. The petian’s left leg was bent at a rather painful-looking angle, but other than that, he seemed alright. Alka’s upgrades she’d received from the librarian appeared to have been well worth it, as the Slayer leapt back to her feet completely undamaged, shaking the sand off her body just as easily as she shook off the force of the blow.

Through it all, the ranker king stood in the center of the crater, not even paying them any attention as he raised his hands to the sky once more, sobbing to himself as he muttered over and over again. “The weight… it’s gone… it’s all gone… so wrong, yet so free…”

They’d been scattered around the ranker king in different directions, which meant Vin was too far away to tell Scule not to draw attention to himself when the Rogue decided to try taking advantage of the ranker king’s breakdown for another sneak attack. Hobbling forward on his broken leg, Scule brought up his blowgun, narrowing his eyes as he took aim and fired at their sobbing opponent. To Vin’s shock, the ranker king didn’t even try to dodge, and he didn’t even flinch as the dart embedded itself in his muscular neck. Letting out a slow blink, he turned to stare at Scule, his tear-filled eyes wide and deranged.

“Hah!” Scule said, throwing the ranker king a rather rude gesture as he laughed at him. “There’s enough poison in that to take out an army! You’re a dead man wa—”

The ranker king blasted forward just like he had with his initial surprise attack, and Vin’s blood ran cold as the man cleared the crater and was suddenly standing immediately before Scule, staring down at the shocked petian. Even as Vin began shouting his next spell, he knew his words weren’t faster than the ranker king’s movements.

“Honor Unyielding,” the ranker king all but whispered in explanation to the question behind Scule’s wide eyes, before he struck. His metal fist smashed down with the full force of a combat class in their third prestige, aimed directly for the petian’s fragile body. There was no doubt in Vin’s mind that there would be nothing left of Scule but paste once that attack landed, and even as his half-finished formation for Redirect Gravity spun together in his mana, he watched in horror, unable to take his eyes away.

But at the very last second, Scule was knocked out of the way of the blow, his life saved as if by a miracle. But it was no divine intervention that saved the petian.

It was Reginald, shoving his lifelong companion out of the way with a desperate lunge, taking the full force of the ranker king’s devastating blow in his place.