Chapter 33 - Berserk.
Bernard stood with his eyes wide and his mouth half open, and no power left in him to move or to speak. Alistair and Arswald held Edith up from either side, while the rest stood frozen beside them.
The fire took tier after tier as it jumped from crown to crown in an orange glare and ate through the giant trees with a rising roar.
Aren pushed off the ground, and a shockwave rolled outward, scattering the burning ash and the broken branches.
Black-stone armor shot through with pulsing red veins covered his whole body along with a scarlet aura; colossal claws of energy sheathed both his arms.
Ursus threw its left clawed paw forward in a wide grasping movement, though Aren slipped inside the attack while he was still in the air and ran the whole length of the limb with fast cutting strokes.
Every stroke cut the muscle to the bone, until the beast-god's left paw came apart into several pieces that flew off to the sides.
Aren closed his right hand; in a fraction of a second a mass of black stone grew around the fist and drove straight into Ursus's ribcage, so that a heavy wave slammed through the air and threw the beast tens of meters away.
It struck the trunk of one of the giant trees with its whole back — the tree split at the base and then came down with a heavy crash that raised a wall of dust and burning sparks.
The gust of wind thrown up by the fall caught the tongues of flame and drove them higher through the crowns, and the survivors at the edge of the clearing had to cover their faces with their hands.
Arswald turned to the others and shouted into the smoke-filled air.
"WE HAVE TO GET OUT! RIGHT NOW!"
Edith did not even turn her head and kept her eyes on the billows of smoke ahead.
Ursus got up on the paws it had left, and then its gaze swept over the space.
Then it saw Aren coming through the wall of fire toward it at an unhurried walk, with his dark eyes lowered.
Ursus closed its fangs, then drew energy to the stumps of the damaged limbs and rebuilt the flesh with the crunch of tissue re-forming.
After the paws had grown back it roared with such force that the air shook in the ribs of everyone on the battlefield.
Ursus tore forward with a deafening surge and reached its top speed within the first three bounds.
Aren stopped in the middle of the clearing and kept the claws lowered toward the ground.
Suddenly he pushed off and flew to meet the beast-god.
Just as their claws should have met head-on, he slid sharply aside along a curve in the air.
Aren caught the trunk of a tree standing directly behind the beast, then drove off it in an instant straight at Ursus's back.
He worked over the whole surface in a lightning series of cuts, every one of which sank deep into the layers of muscle and opened the living flesh along the spine.
Ursus turned and swung a front paw in a wide arc.
Aren brought a hand up to meet it, and a scarlet shield took the blow with a flash of energy that threw him back.
He touched the ground with a sliding step and killed the momentum, though Ursus was already moving into the next attack and bringing a series of blows down from above.
The claws came at a quickening rhythm and pressed Aren down into the soil with their whole mass.
The scarlet claws met every attack of Ursus with a block across it and turned the beast's paw sharply away, and an immediate counterblow opened the muscle underneath.
At every clash a sharp gust of wind broke out of the point where they met and swept across the burning ground on all sides, so that the flame in the crowns shuddered, reached higher and ate into fresh stretches of wood.
The beast-god changed the tempo the very next moment and went from single blows to doubled ones split by fractions of a second. Then its aura flared brighter, and the next blow came at twice the speed of the ones before it.
Aren took a sliding step aside, though Ursus's claws raked across his right shoulder all the same, punched through the stone of the armor and opened three deep furrows in the flesh beneath it.
He stepped inside the next blow instead of pulling away and let the paw pass over his head, then buried both clawed hands in the beast's side. Dark blood poured out of the long wounds, and Ursus itself was rocked sideways.
Allowing no pause, Aren climbed onto his opponent's ribcage and hammered short punching blows into the center of the breastbone.
Ursus caught him across the body, then threw him aside so hard that Aren flew sideways clean through the trunk of the nearest tree and came out on the far side in a cloud of splinters and bark.
Aren stopped his flight by sinking the scarlet claws into the next trunk, and they tore furrows two meters long out of the bark.
He pushed off and threw himself back in, and the two came together with the explosion of energy shells colliding, which knocked the nearest trees over in several directions.
Then Ursus drove off into the depths of the Great Forest, and Aren went after it.
He caught the beast-god within seconds while it was still in the air, then brought a series of cuts down on its neck and shoulders at the very point of landing and drove it into the soil.
Ursus came up off the ground and knocked Aren away with a shoulder.
Thrown against the trunk of the next tree, Aren pushed off it at once and was on the beast again.
They moved at a rising speed, both in fury, both past any rhythm that had been possible until this moment.
Ursus drove through trunks with its shoulder without slowing, and every one of them came down with a crash and threw up a wall of burning sparks.
Aren cut into the line of its movement from above or from the side and brought the scarlet claws down on the back, the flanks, the shoulders, the neck; new wounds opened before the earlier ones could close.
He sprang onto Ursus's back again and sank the claws deep into the muscle between the shoulder blades, then wrenched them apart and tore the tissue to the bone.
Blood poured over the black stone of the armor, and the beast-god reared sharply and tried to shake him off, though Aren held his grip to the last.
Ursus rolled over its shoulder and pinned Aren to the ground under its own mass, and the plates of black stone on his chest cracked.
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Aren drove the burning claws into the soil hard enough that the ground threw Ursus up off it, and then he got up and pushed the beast off himself.
Ursus burst through another tree with its chest, while Aren crossed the black cloud that rose from it and drove the flaming claws into the center of the open wounds on the beast's back, putting it down onto one knee.
Their fight carried deeper and deeper into the Great Forest and cut fresh lanes through the dark thicket with every bound, leaving behind them fallen trunks, torn-out roots and living strips of fire that ran along the felled trees into the darkness.
They were destroying the Great Forest as they moved through flame, smoke and darkness into its very heart.
Not a second of pause separated the blows any longer, and the space between them turned into one unbroken stream of destruction.
Aren struck without going clear of the answering attacks and took every blow of Ursus on the armor as well as the open wounds, until the black-stone plates cracked, fell away in pieces and bared the burning flesh beneath them.
Ursus stopped evading and met the attacks head-on, so that the ground heaved up in slabs at each collision and blood flew off in wide arcs at every hit.
Both built up the intensity with every wound taken, both grew faster with every blow.
The beast-god turned straight into the oncoming movement and gave up its left eye, into which Aren drove himself.
In answer Ursus closed its jaws and bit off Aren's right arm, and blood poured out of him.
Time slowed for Aren for a moment, and then the fury inside him went past the line where pain exists.
Aren threw his head back, and a wild roar broke out of him that made the air around him shake, while his scarlet aura burst outward in a wave of such power that Ursus recoiled sharply and let Aren's arm drop out of its jaws.
The aura turned into flame that took in the whole of Aren's body and burned away the black stone of the armor.
The right shoulder flared, and out of the torn joint burning energy began to grow into the shape of a forearm and a clawed hand.
His eyes blazed with that same scarlet flame, and while the deafening roar went on pouring out of him, he built up speed for the run and left a strip of scorched earth behind him.
Back at the edge of the battlefield the ground kept shaking while Arswald got clear of burning branches that had come down from above, and he moved at once to the next obstacle and skirted the reared-up roots.
Alistair was clearing a path and throwing burning pieces of trunk aside, while Edith turned to Bernard, who was at the other end of the ground and casting about as he cut around the burning roots.
"Bernard!" she shouted, though her voice was lost in the crash of another falling tree.
The shaking of the ground grew sharply stronger, and everyone in the clearing lost their footing at once.
Out of the dark depths of the forest something huge and burning flew toward them, breaking trunks apart on its way.
Bernard sprang aside at the last possible instant, and the huge burning body of Ursus came down right in front of him.
Aren dropped onto the beast-god from above, all of him in blazing fire, with burning claws that struck blow after blow at a monstrous speed and sent pieces of flesh flying.
Edith froze, staring in horror at the state Aren was in, and she understood that she had seen this before.
"That's..." she whispered, barely audible, as fragments of the past came up in her mind.
A young Edith with her left palm pressed to her wounded shoulder. The Cursed Forest around her, filled with thousands of creatures of the abyss that climbed in from every side through black smoke.
Edmund Born stood in front of her alone with a two-handed battle axe, covered by a similar scarlet aura that took in his whole body with open fire. He moved forward and cut the creatures down in rows.
Another roar from Aren brought Edith back out of the memory, and she saw that Ursus was no longer attacking: it covered its muzzle with a paw against each new blow and tried to hold Aren's onslaught back.
In the beast-god's widened pupils, for the first time in the whole fight, there was a raw animal fear.
The next moment Aren broke off the attack and pushed away from the beast's body, and a shockwave burst to all sides from the point where he left it and pressed Ursus into the soil.
Aren rose up through the burning canopy of crowns and into the dense column of smoky ash that lay over the Great Forest.
The flame around him grew with the speed and turned him into a burning shot that climbed higher and higher through the smoke.
Aren came out of the smoke into cold clear air, in the sky above the Great Forest, and then the speed of the climb died away and left him in silence for a moment.
He turned slowly in the air, his eyes fixed below him, and then the scarlet aura flared brighter still and burned the air around him into an open cone of flame.
Aren started down, and within the first seconds that movement grew into a headlong acceleration, so that the flame around him strengthened with every moment.
Ursus was rising slowly off the ground, and it saw a burning point coming down on it fast from above.
It pressed every limb it still had into the soil and gathered what energy it had left, then pushed off with a deafening surge that sent a shockwave rolling across the clearing and knocked the survivors at its edge off their feet.
Ursus shot upward with a roar that drowned out every other sound.
Aren answered with a cry of his own as he fell, and the two voices ran together into a single howl.
From a distance it looked like two trails of fire closing on each other fast along a vertical line.
At the moment when they reached each other in the air, a sharp white light flared above the forest and washed the space from one edge of the clearing to the other in a scarlet glow.
The blast of the collision swept around the perimeter of the clearing as a rolling shockwave of scarlet energy, which made the fire flare across the whole space and the branches of the trees fly off in every direction, so that whatever was still standing came down in a single moment.
Bernard dived behind the nearest root and held himself to the soil with both hands. Alistair dropped with Edith behind a broken length of log and covered her with his own body, and the burning branches flying everywhere passed over them. The rest pressed themselves to the ground and to the roots with their hands over their faces against the scorching air, while the space of the clearing turned into one continuous hum, crash and flame.
Then the ground boomed under the weight of a huge carcass coming down, and everyone lying on the soil felt the shock through their whole body.
The survivors slowly raised their heads and lowered the hands they had covered their faces with; their eyes found the center of the clearing through the settling smoke and flame.
Ursus lay on its back, breathing heavily, with its chest laid open to the ribs across its whole width. Both front paws and one of the middle ones were gone completely.
A dark silhouette was climbing slowly up the beast's belly, barely made out in the billowing smoke.
Aren walked along the surface of Ursus's body at a slow, swaying pace and climbed steadily higher toward the chest of the beast-god, which could not even lift its head.
Bernard raised himself from behind the root, and his face froze in horror.
The left half of Aren's face was stripped to the skull, though he walked on without slowing.
Aren was dragging one of the beast-god's claws, which left a grinding furrow behind him along Ursus's body.
He stopped exactly over the center of the beast-god's chest, where he could feel the heartbeat.
Aren took Ursus's claw in both hands and raised it above himself with the point down, directly over the beast's breastbone.
He looked up at the muzzle of the beast-god, whose eyes were barely open.
Ursus met his look with its pupils wide, and nothing was left in them of fury or of the will to resist.
Exactly one second of absolute silence passed between them.
Aren let out a snarling cry, then drove the beast's claw straight down with all the strength he had left, so that it punched through Ursus's breastbone as far as it would go and struck the heart.
Ursus let out a last roar, and everyone covered their ears.
A short silence hung over the space again, until a few seconds later energy began to gather slowly out of Ursus's pierced chest, came through the edges of the wound in thin glowing threads and filled the ribcage with light.
In the next fraction of a second a bright column of white light struck up out of Ursus's chest and flooded the whole space with a blinding glare.
For everyone standing around, time stopped in the literal sense, while Aren saw only white light filling his field of vision.
The light dissolved smoothly, and Aren opened his eyes.
He found himself kneeling on a stone floor, badly at a loss and with no sense at all of where he was. The fury, too, seemed to have evaporated and left his mind in its ordinary state.
He looked around at a half-ruined arena, with tiers that had partly collapsed on one side and columns standing at an angle.
Beyond the edge of the stone floor lay a darkness that fell away into the depths with no visible end.
He raised his eyes to a night sky, only more vivid, with far more stars and colors, which wrapped not only the space above him but everything below as well.
The arena hung in that cosmic space as a single broken fragment of stone.
Aren raised his hands in front of him and found his body whole, without a single wound or trace of the fight.
Swords rose out of the cracked stone across the surface of the arena, driven in to half the blade and scattered in no visible order.
His eye caught at once on a figure that sat motionless at the far end of the arena.
A large figure in massive armor, the head covered by a helmet, from under which hung long thick hair closer to fur.
The figure rose slowly and grew with every moment, until it stood at full height some three meters above the stone floor.
An enormous hammer stood beside it, and the hammer's head alone was as wide as a grown man's shoulders, with runic carving on both flat sides.
The warrior lifted the hammer and turned slowly to Aren, and the whole shape of him showed: heavy bronze armor with engraved plates over the entire surface, horns on the massive pauldrons.
In the slits of the helmet, where no face could be seen, a cold blue fire burned that Aren knew.
Aren's eyes widened when that light matched exactly the one he had already seen.
Ursus... went through his mind as he understood who was standing in front of him.
The warrior took the hammer in both hands with his grip at the middle of the haft, then settled into a firm fighting stance, and the stone floor cracked under his weight.
He waited with his eyes on Aren, and everything about him spoke of the final duel he expected.