Rebirth: Necromancer's Ascenscion-Chapter 130: Fang vs Prophet II

Ian twisted, a contortion that should have been impossible for a man just impaled.

However, the wounds had longed healed.

Judgement, an extension of him now, caught one rod with a clang that vibrated through the air.

But the other, a streak of dark crimson, struck his shoulder with a sickening crack of force, the impact echoing like a falling tree.

The blow staggered him, forcing a sharp intake of breath.

He didn’t fall.

He wouldn’t fall.

A low growl, more animal than human, ripped from his throat—and Kaelsythra, like an inferno born of his essence, surged from the wound in his side.

It wasn’t a passive bleed; it was an eruption, burning backward in a grey-tinged flare of pure, agonizing energy that caught Fang’s extended wrist.

Fang flinched, a minute, almost imperceptible recoil, but he did not cry out.

The scent of seared flesh, sharp and acrid, briefly cut through the other smells of battle.

Instead, with a grunt of effort, he drove a knee hard into Ian’s chest, the impact solid and unyielding.

Ian was sent sliding backward across the dust-choked ground, carving a shallow trench in the loose soil.

He landed hard, the air driven from his lungs.

But with ingrained combat instinct, he rolled with the momentum, absorbing the force, and sprang back to his feet—half crouched, blade held ready, humming with a barely suppressed hunger in the vibrating air.

"Your ability...your soul erasure," Ian rasped, his voice strained, each word punctuated by a ragged breath.

He could feel the throb in his shoulder, the burning protest from his pierced side.

"It doesn’t seem like sanctified magic to me. Something that consumes existence itself, if i were a heretic I’d call you demon too."

Fang, standing poised and seemingly unruffled despite the burn now marring his wrist, allowed a faint, almost imperceptible smile to touch his lips.

It didn’t reach his eyes, which remained fixed on Ian with unnerving intensity.

"Not all of us who wear the cloth serve with the supposed purity of holy light, demonblade. Some understand that true power requires a different kind of devotion."

There was no more time for words.

They charged again.

The second clash was louder, more ferocious, a crescendo of destruction that dwarfed their initial engagement.

The earth itself seemed to scream as it split further beneath their feet, chasms yawning open like maws of some subterranean beast.

Magic detonated in relentless, breathtaking torrents—Ian’s shadowy gray flames forked and danced, seeking purchase, while Fang’s crimson lances of solidified faith pierced the gloom like angry comets.

Walls of skeletal hands, summoned from the very essence of death by Ian’s will, clawed upwards from the corrupted soil.

They were shattered by waves of burning scripture that erupted from Fang’s rods, each symbol a miniature explosion of sacred—or perhaps profane—energy.

Their figures became blurs within the maelstrom, blinking in and out of perceivable reality.

They vanished in one spot only to reappear in another, their re-emergence always marked by a brutal flash of impact and another deafening report.

Every collision sent thunder rolling through the broken field.

Debris—stone, shattered bone, fragments of forgotten relics—rose into the air with each shockwave, only to fall back to earth like a macabre rain.

Behind their precarious cover, Caelen gritted his teeth, the sound lost in the overwhelming chaos.

He risked a peek around the edge of the shattered stone, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and awe, only to flinch back violently as a searing streak of pure red light carved a trench meters deep into the earth precisely where his head had been.

The air sizzled, and the smell of superheated rock filled his nostrils.

"That’s... those are not men," Caelen hissed, his voice trembling, pressing himself flatter against the cold, unforgiving stone.

"I told you," Lyra snapped back, her own face pale beneath a smear of grime and what looked like blood from a shallow cut on her brow.

She didn’t look at him, her gaze fixed on the periphery of the titanic struggle.

"We’d only get in the way. We are ants witnessing a battle between dragons."

They both ducked instinctively as another wave of immense pressure rolled overhead, deafening and thick, like the heartbeat of some vast, dying god.

The golem statue groaned, shedding more fragments, and for a terrifying moment, they feared their flimsy shelter would collapse entirely.

Ian, mid-motion, a dark wraith amidst the chaos, used [Bonecraft.]

Shards of sharpened rib and jagged femur, glistening with an unhealthy light, speared upwards from the earth around him.

They formed a bristling, protective circle. With a powerful leap, he landed atop one of the largest bone spikes, twisting in mid-air with acrobatic lethality.

He hurled another jagged spear—this one a massive thigh bone honed to a wicked point—directly toward Fang.

It flew like a bolt of dark lightning, trailing ephemeral wisps of shadow.

Fang didn’t even seem to flinch. He raised one of his rods, the tip glowing with an intense crimson.

A single, complex rune pulsed into visibility on its surface—and the bone spear, imbued with necrotic energy, shattered into a million harmless fragments upon impact, dissolving into dust before it could reach him.

Ian landed hard from his aerial maneuver, slamming his free hand onto the trembling ground.

His voice, though strained, carried an undeniable authority.

"Risen Maw."

The very soil beneath Fang exploded upwards. A gaping, skeletal maw, impossibly large and formed of countless interlocking bones, burst from the earth.

It was fanged with sharpened stones and shards of dark metal, shrieking with the collective, tortured whispers of bound souls trapped within its structure.

It snapped with terrifying speed at Fang’s legs.

Fang, however, seemed to anticipate the attack.

He danced backward with the nimble grace of silk caught on a breeze, his crimson robes swirling around him.

He twirled both rods in perfectly mirrored arcs, their movements hypnotic and deadly.

He whispered something—words lost to the din but potent in their utterance.

A thousand shimmering red threads, like spun blood, wove into being from the very air around him.

They coalesced with unnatural speed, forming a deadly net of light.

They whipped forward, fast as striking vipers, slicing into the colossal jaw of the skeletal construct.

There was no resistance, no sound of impact—only a horrifying disintegration.

The Risen Maw dissolved, its components turning to fine dust, the bound souls within releasing a final, collective whimper before vanishing into nothingness.

The red threads dissipated as quickly as they had formed.

The two combatants, inexorable forces, closed in on one another once more.

For now, there was yet to be a winner.

It were almost like...death had met its match.