Chapter 95. VS Bast
Rhys wracked his brain, but came up with nothing. Beating Bast wasn’t even on the menu; avoiding getting the shit beaten out of him was the best he could dream of. Even then, there was little he could do to prevent or put off that beating. It was the finals of the tournament. He couldn’t just say no or back out. Laurent would probably kill him if he backed out or surrendered immediately after the quite frankly humiliating way Rhys had beaten him. Hell, he would probably kill his opponent if he’d gotten head-slapped with a sword then ring-outted via spin kick, only for his opponent to go ‘nah, no thanks’ and hand the finals to the guy he really wanted to fight. There was no backing down. He had to face Bast, and it had to look like a legitimate fight.
The problem laid in that any legitimate fight with Bast was a sure and painful loss for him. He wasn’t afraid of pain, if that pain meant gaining something. What he didn’t like, was pain without gain. That was just masochism. Which was what this fight was looking to be: an exercise in masochism, at the hands of someone vastly superior at melee combat than him.
Rhys sighed. He put his head in his hands and took a deep breath. There were no two ways about it. He’d go out there, give it his best shot, and get the hell beaten out of him. As long as he put up a good fight, he shouldn’t have Laurent coming after him, too, and it wasn’t like he’d never been beaten by Bast before. He was used to it. It would be fine.
The platform was already in good shape, since Rhys and Laurent’s fight hadn’t destroyed it much. The maintenance mages quickly replaced the pieces that were out of shape, and a referee gestured Rhys over. Reluctantly, Rhys approached the platform.
A familiar masked figure, clad in white robes, stood opposite. Solaire gave no indication he knew Rhys, and Rhys returned the favor. It was like when he ran into his female friend at the con, after he’d handed off the costume. They didn’t know one another. He was just some guy.
Solaire bowed, and Rhys bowed back. He stepped onto the platform, and Solaire stepped forth opposite. In a flash, Solaire drew his sword and darted toward Rhys.
Rhys’s sword flew into his hands. He angled it instinctively and activated Trash Intent, already knowing the exact direction and angle Bast would strike from. Their swords clashed. Rhys stepped backward from the sheer force of the blow, his eyes widening. Bast was way stronger.
Duh. We were kids back then. Even so, his blow was proportionally much stronger than they had been when they were both children. Just like when they were kids, Bast followed up the initial strike with a flurry of rapid blows. Rhys barely blocked most of them, taking glancing hits on his limbs and body where Bast got past his defenses. To Rhys’s surprise, though, none of Bast’s blows hurt too much. It almost felt like he was…
Holding back? Rhys looked at Bast’s eyes, but couldn’t see them through the mask with the way the sunlight poured down from overhead. He glared. “Don’t you dare.”
The next hit knocked him physically back. If Bast’s hits had been heavy before, they were almost unbearable now. For all that, the hit finally gave Rhys breathing room, even if only a heartbeat’s worth. He tossed out a handful of trash between the two of them and activated his rat spell. Bast charged, only for Rhys to spawn a chair in front of his leg as he stepped forward. Bast absolutely splintered the chair, and the manifest burst into motes of blue light. It had been a long time since the backlash of a broken Trash Intent had hit Rhys, but it slammed into his head like a sack of bricks. Earlier, Laurent had broken the intent by breaking the piece of trash; in other words, he’d broken the trash, not the intent itself, so he hadn’t gotten a backlash. Instead, the trash had become unusable. Still, if I can’t dismiss a Trash Intent before an enemy shatters it, it might be better to destroy the trash rather than take the hit.
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Rhys flinched, squinting against the sudden headache, and in that instant, Bast reached him. A blade swept toward his stomach. Rhys activated another piece of Trash Intent to snare Bast’s legs and keep him from approaching closer, and lunged forward at the same time, throwing out his hand. The rat leaped at Bast’s mask, then swirled behind it and chewed at the string keeping the mask on his face. Bast immediately clapped his hand to his face, smacking the rat into tiny blue smithereens, but that was all the opening Rhys needed. He dashed in.