Chapter 58: A Stalemate
Fallen and scorched trees littered the terrain. Wind tore violently through the space where the two figures stood, their energies climbing higher and higher without sign of stopping. It had been a month since the announcement of war, and little had changed in Tunish since then. The only significant development was the arrival of about fifty soldiers, with many more said to be coming. The fighting had not yet begun, only lords moving their pawns.
In that same month, Rokku had mastered convergence, and Ren quietly feared that the gap between them had closed entirely. A man was never meant to compete with a spirit beast.
Tuarine watched the two from a distance, astonished by their speed and ferocity.
Rokku thrust both wings forward in rapid succession, sending a wicked barrage of energy blades tearing toward Ren. The farmer sensed them and jumped. A single clean hit was all Rokku would need to end the spar decisively. Ren evaded the blasts by leaping from tree to tree, swinging through the branches like a crazed and highly athletic monkey. The energy came fast, but he was faster. He found brief cover behind a sturdy trunk and began charging his own attack.
He felt a powerful strike incoming and threw himself clear before it landed. The blast hit the tree, tore it from the ground, and flung it backward.
"Energy Scream!" Ren released the gathered charge from both hands. A thin but extraordinarily dense cylindrical blast shot forward, moving faster than anything Rokku had thrown. It missed the spirit animal by the width of a hair, burning clean through a cluster of feathers as it passed. Rokku had only been able to avoid it because of the distance between them. Any closer and the blast would have taken his head off entirely. The attack bored through several trees behind him, punching clean holes through their trunks before colliding with a larger one at the end and reducing it to ash.
"Do they want to kill each other!" Tuarine’s mouth had fallen open. She was enjoying every moment of it. The two did not fight like men having a friendly spar. They fought like the outcome genuinely mattered.
Rokku swept a wing in a wide arc and the trees behind Ren fell in a line. Ren ducked under the attack and broke into a run toward the spirit animal. He understood his disadvantage. Fighting at range against Rokku was fighting on the worst possible ground. The spirit animal was more practiced with ranged energy attacks, and now that he had mastered convergence, mana exhaustion was no longer a limiting factor for him. That particular edge Ren had once held was gone.
If he wanted to win, and win quickly, he had to turn this into a close-range fight. So that was exactly what he went for.
Rokku swept his wing again, sending another wide attack cutting through the air. Ren dodged it without breaking stride. He finally closed the distance and drove a punch at Rokku’s face. The spirit animal turned his head and let it pass. Ren followed immediately with a strike to the chest, but Rokku redirected the force with a graceful movement of his right wing, breaking Ren’s momentum, then swung the same wing back at Ren’s head in a single fluid motion. Had it connected, the fight would have ended there in the most permanent way possible. Ren ducked beneath it and created a short burst of distance between them.
A powerful flying kick came at him and Ren caught it by crossing both arms in front of him. Unstoppable force met immovable object. Mana flared outward from the point of collision as Rokku poured more force into the kick and Ren drove more power into his guard. Turbulent wind exploded from between them. Tuarine’s mouth was open again.
Was this the moment a winner would emerge?
The ground beneath Ren’s feet cracked and split apart as the collision of energies tore the earth open, carving a deep indentation into the soil. Neither of them moved. Ren would not be pushed back, and Rokku was not withdrawing the kick. One of them had to do something different to break the stalemate. Ren did.
He spun, seized Rokku’s leg mid-kick, carried the momentum of the spin with him, and launched the spirit animal upward. He did not stop there. He followed the throw immediately with a rapid series of blasts from both fists. Rokku recovered almost at once. He could manage something close to flight when thrown into open air, and as Ren’s blasts came for him, he neutralized them with clean, precise counters.
Then Rokku tucked his wings in and dove. He wrapped himself in a dense field of energy as he fell, a full coating that caused Ren’s follow-up blasts to deflect harmlessly off him, and came straight down.
Ren rolled clear at the last possible moment.
They both stopped. Both of them stood breathing hard, chests heaving, taking stock of the wreckage around them. The forest had taken a considerable punishment, and the fight showed no sign of being close to finished. There were also the soldiers to consider. Carrying on much longer risked drawing attention they did not need.
"Why don’t we call this a draw? We have fought enough, haven’t we?" Ren said between breaths.
"Yes. A draw is fine." Rokku’s own breath was coming heavier now. "It tells us we are equals."
Ren nodded. They ended the spar for the forest’s sake, not because exhaustion had caught up with them. That was what they told themselves, and they were both content to leave it at that.
Tuarine dropped from the distant tree she had been watching from and jogged over to them.
"I hope we did not almost kill you," Ren said with a grin.
"Not at all. One of your blasts came in my direction but it missed. I would have dodged it regardless." She said this to Rokku, who received the information without visible reaction.
"You two were spectacular. So fast. I could barely keep up with what was happening. How do you both use that much mana and not run dry?"
"Convergence," they answered at the same time.
"Yes, convergence. You had mentioned." She said it with a slight note of dry amusement.
Tuarine had been their sparring partner throughout the month, and the improvement in her showed clearly. She was nowhere near the two cultivators in raw power, but she had learned a great deal from training alongside them. Her mana control was sharper, and her reaction speed had climbed noticeably. She moved with more intention now, less brute force and more precision.
Ren could hardly have called her a friend a month ago. Now, without either of them having made a particular decision about it, they undoubtedly were. They had been forged into it through shared spars and a shared understanding of what was coming for their village.