Chapter 34 - Final phase.
The arena spread as a vast, half-ruined plateau in a space filled with dense starlight, so that none of its surfaces cast a shadow. In every direction beyond its edges burned countless star clusters, and spiral forms of enormous distant galaxies rotated, filling the space with a living, diffuse glow.
The stone floor was wide and ancient, with deep cracks across its entire surface, through which the sharp edges of sunken slabs stretched. Several columns along the perimeter stood at angles, the rest had collapsed, leaving long stone fragments across the floor, and the steps at the far edge had crumbled away in layers, opening the arena's boundary directly into the depths of stellar space. Across the entire surface, swords protruded from the cracked stone, scattered at dozens of points.
At the far end of the arena stood Ursus, an enormous three-meter figure in heavy bronze armor with engraved plates, a two-handed runic hammer in his hands.
He held a combat stance with heavy forward weight, shifting his mass onto his front foot, making his figure stand out sharply and solidly against the stellar space behind him.
Aren slowly rose from his knees, finding his head filled with a violent scatter of thoughts and images that categorically refused to form a coherent picture. Several minutes ago his body had been pierced by a fury that left nothing but the fury itself. Now before him were a stone arena, cosmic infinity, and a three-meter warrior with a hammer, forcing two completely incompatible states to converge in his mind simultaneously.
Aren looked at Ursus, frozen in his combat stance and clearly not intending to move first.
"What the hell is going on?… I was just in the forest…" he thought.
He lowered his gaze to his right hand, completely whole and undamaged.
Memory returned the last seconds in the burning forest, the weight of Elen's head on that palm, his final exhale. Aren's pupils narrowed, and the pain in his heart, which had dulled in the crucible of rage, returned with its full original force.
Aren looked around, seeing the same infinity in every direction, with spiral galaxies deep in the space. He turned his gaze to one of the swords protruding from the stone floor at his feet.
"He's not moving at all… waiting for me to take a sword?…" passed through his thoughts.
Aren closed his eyes for a moment, then tried to focus on the sensation of the white-stone armor, but where energy had always responded, there was only emptiness. He tried the same with the energy claws, receiving the same emptiness in reply.
"Magic… it doesn't work here… has the effect not passed yet?…"
Aren closed his eyes, listening to his own sensations and what they told him about the state of his body.
"No… from that effect I felt my entire body screaming and pierced with cold… but now… I simply can't use magic…"
Aren slowly walked to one of the nearest swords, then stopped over it, examining the hilt. He raised a tense, angry gaze at the motionless figure of Ursus at the far end of the arena.
"If only you knew… how sick I am of you already… and this time…"
Aren gripped the hilt with one hand and pulled the sword, and it came out of the stone with a drawn-out metallic sound.
"I'll definitely kill you. For Elen… for everyone you've killed, you bastard." he finished the thought.
A sharp impulse passed from the hilt, felt immediately throughout his entire body.
Aren looked down, finding leather armor forming right before his eyes, dense plates covering his forearms, shoulders, and torso one after another. Behind his back unfurled a wide green cloak, a heavy length of cloth reaching his heels.
Aren examined himself with evident surprise, after which a sharp movement ahead drew his attention.
Ursus tightened his grip on the hammer's hilt with both hands, then began to walk slowly forward, the heavy impact of his steps resonating in Aren's feet as a light tremor.
The distance between them shrank with every slow step of the warrior, then Ursus suddenly broke into motion, launching into a swift charge.
The hammer, brought back along his right side, swept in a wide horizontal arc, forcing Aren to leap sharply backward.
The attack continued immediately, Ursus stepping sideward forward from the same angle, striking Aren's shoulder with his full weight.
Aren lost his balance from the impact, falling to the floor at the moment when Ursus sharply drove the hammer upward from below in a powerful circular motion, forcing it to pass several centimeters from his body.
The hammer swept up into the air, where it hung at its highest point for a second, then came down swiftly directly toward where Aren lay. He rolled aside with a tumble, escaping from under the blow, while behind him the hammer shattered the stone floor with a sharp crack, sending fragments flying outward in wide arcs.
Aren scrambled to his feet, ran to a far distance, then stopped, feeling the furious pounding of his heart in his chest. This fight had nearly ended in the very first seconds after it began.
Ursus slowly raised the hammer, straightening with his back to Aren, then turned and again began to walk slowly forward.
Aren bent his knees slightly, focusing his attention on every movement of the warrior and studying his character.
"The attacks are monstrously powerful… as always, just like in his beast form… one strike and I'm dead… but at least now, he's not a giant six-limbed bear…"
Aren sharpened his attention on Ursus's eyes, glowing with cold blue fire from beneath the helmet.
"I need to do what we did with Bernard… counterattack… don't strike first and don't expose myself…" he decided.
Aren tightened his grip on the hilt, settling into a stable stance, while Ursus began to build tempo, moving into a light run with the rising hammer.
Aren instinctively dodged sharply to the side, expecting a direct overhead strike, but Ursus held the hammer a fraction of a second longer, so the dodge came too early. The hammer came from above to the left, catching Aren, who in his confusion managed to raise his sword to meet it.
The sword shattered to splinters, and Aren was hurled sideward with such force that he rolled across the stone floor and stopped at the very edge, face down.
Aren raised his head with a heavy exhale, then recoiled backward in fright upon seeing that his head was several centimeters from the edge above the stellar abyss.
He slowly turned back to Ursus, who was again moving toward him with a slow step, then rose, feeling sharp pain in his ribs and right shoulder, which had absorbed the impact softened by the sword but still brutal.
"He… struck with a delay?… damn, I don't fully understand… he moves slowly, but at the moment of attack he accelerates sharply…"
Aren noticed one of the swords to the side, ran to it, then tore it from the stone in one motion. His ribs cracked and set with a sharp sensation, and the pain in his shoulder disappeared at the same moment.
"What the…" flashed through his thoughts, but the shadow of the hammer falling from above cut the thought off before it could complete itself.
Aren jumped to the side as Ursus drove the hammer into the floor with a blow that cracked the stone in a radius of several meters from the point of impact.
Without raising his weapon, the warrior pressed the hammer into the stone, then drove it forward, carving the floor with a deep groove amid the roar of shattering stone.
Then Ursus ripped the hammer out along a steep upward arc, flinging stone fragments out of the carved groove forward as swift projectiles.
Aren retreated backward, deflecting several fragments with his sword, but the rest struck his legs, and one sliced his lip, and blood began to flow down his chin.
Aren exhaled with a snarl, spitting blood to the side.
"ALRIGHT. GET IT TOGETHER!" he threw at himself mentally.
"Think… what do I know right now?… I can't use magic, but the swords can heal my wounds and create armor… can they give other effects?… and Ursus strikes with sharp attacks, often with follow-through in unexpected combinations… and he's not using magic either…"
Ursus continued to close in slowly, not changing his pace and not changing his direction.
"Fine, then we'll check everything on the go." Aren decided.
Ursus broke into a sharp charge, swinging the hammer behind his back, and Aren expected a weapon throw, but unexpectedly the warrior made another identical lunge forward instead of a hammer strike, hitting Aren's shoulder and forcing him on pure reaction alone to deflect with his sword and roll backward from the inertia of the blow.
Ursus immediately moved his hand for a strike, and Aren leaped backward, expecting him to finally attack with the hammer, but Ursus again held a second delay and then sharply threw the blow, sending the hammer directly at Aren, who had jumped aside too early.
Aren arched backward in alarm, letting the hammer's head pass over him, grazing the very tip of his nose before crashing into one of the columns and lodging in it with a deep crack.
Aren immediately lunged forward, bringing his sword down for a counter with a snarl, and the sword struck the lateral armor plate of Ursus.
The blow failed to pass through the metal, returning vibration and pain up Aren's entire arm from hilt to shoulder, barely letting him keep his grip.
Ursus turned slowly toward Aren with a deep, low rumble, then sharply released one hand from the hammer's hilt, seizing Aren by the throat and cutting off his air.
In the next second Ursus slammed him down onto the floor with a sharp motion of his entire body, and Aren crashed into the stone with his back with such force that he expelled blood from his mouth in a sharp, pained exhale.
Ursus turned to the column, gripped the hammer's hilt with both hands, then began methodically pulling it from the stone, breaking the material around the point of lodging with each exertion.
Aren lay on his back in a stone crater with broken bones at several dozen points across his body, unable to move a single limb. Each breath came through dense resistance in his ribs, so that air entered in small, interrupted portions, never reaching full volume.
Attempts to move his arms returned sharp, severed pain from places where bones had ceased to hold their shape. Aren stared straight into the stellar space above the arena, hearing the scrape of metal against stone transmit through the stone floor as weak pulses, reaching the body as quiet vibrations.
The scraping from the column stopped, then stone fragments rained down. Ursus stood over Aren at his full three-meter height, slowly raising the hammer with both hands.
The shadow of his raised figure covered Aren's body to the very edges of his field of vision.
Aren looked up from below, unable to turn his head, keeping in his field of vision every detail of the slowly rising hammer head.
The hammer shattered both of Aren's legs below the hips with a single downward blow.
The pain of the previous strikes proved to be merely a background compared to what arrived in that second. Aren exhaled a hoarse, drawn-out scream, full of agony and hellish pain.
Below his hips the pain spread across points that had long since ceased to correspond to the contours of a body, so that his mind refused to assemble them into a single image.
Ursus waited for the scream to die, then slowly raised the hammer a second time, deliberately drawing out the lift.
Every second of that motion pressed against Aren with a separate, conscious weight, so that watching the slowly rising hammer head with blood and pieces of his own flesh and bone dripping from it had to be endured in complete helplessness.
Then Ursus moved the hammer aside and raised his right foot, bringing it directly over Aren's face.
The shadow of the foot covered his entire field of vision, and starlight disappeared completely.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The foot came down with a sharp motion, crushing Aren's head flat.
A flash of white light flooded the arena's space in a single instant.
Aren opened his eyes, feeling the pressure of cold stone beneath his palms.
He was kneeling on the stone floor of the same arena, which bore no trace of the last fight.
Ursus was at the other end, sitting face toward Aren, head lowered, one hand holding the hammer's hilt where the head rested on the floor, the other braced on his own knee.
Aren slowly lowered his gaze to his legs, finding them both whole, without a single trace from the strike that had shattered them seconds ago.
He ran his palms along his right thigh, then his left, feeling through the fabric of his clothing and the living flesh beneath it, finding it completely untouched. His arms were the same, without a single injury beneath his probing fingers.
"What… what the…" passed through his head.
Aren remembered every second of what had happened with a precision that left no room for doubt. The pain under the hammer, his own scream, the shadow of the foot over his face.
A wave of phantom pain passed through his legs in the next second, and Aren grabbed his thigh with both hands.
His fingers found solid, living muscle, completely undamaged, but the phantom echo held at its previous intensity, not responding to physical reality.
Aren tried to clench his fingers into fists, and noticed in them a fine, steady tremor that yielded to no act of will. Despite his body being completely whole, the tremor still existed in the space between what had been lived and what was happening now.
Ursus slowly raised his head, then stood, took the hammer in both hands, and assumed his combat stance with the same unhurried deliberateness.
Suddenly he launched from the other end of the arena in a sharp, high jump, swinging the hammer overhead during the flight.
The hammer came down onto the point where Aren had just been kneeling, shattering the floor in a radius of several meters, but Aren had rolled aside with a tumble, then reached for the nearest sword, tore it from the stone, and felt a sharp lightness through his entire body.
Ursus slowly turned toward him, returning the hammer to a ready position.
"What was that just now?… I definitely died… or didn't I?…" flashed through his thoughts.
Ursus made his next lunge with a hammerblow along an arc, and Aren again dodged too early, but the lightness in his body allowed him to react a second time, escaping the delayed blow with a sharp spring.
Aren quickly scanned the swords scattered across the entire space of the arena.
"That doesn't matter right now. Right now he's far more important…"
"So every sword has its own effect… and Ursus really does strike with a delay… and after the delay he accelerates instantly… I need to catch that moment… but at the same time, I need to be careful with his combi—" the thought didn't finish before Ursus had already driven the hammer into the stone floor.
Fragments exploded from the shattered stone in every direction, and Aren shifted sideward.
Ursus was already charging at him with weapon in hand, forcing Aren to duck sharply, letting the hammer head pass over him.
When the hammer head flew past, Aren began to straighten, but Ursus completed a full rotation without stopping the blow's trajectory, so the spinning head caught him from the other lateral side with the full inertia of the rotation.
The blow threw Aren into a column, and he went into it spine-first with such force that the stone received his body to half its depth.
Several ribs broke outward through his flesh from the force of the impact. His lungs burst, making any attempt to breathe produce a soft, wet sound instead of normal breathing.
The scream Aren tried to release remained as pressure inside his chest, having no outlet through the blocked airways.
Aren hung in the stone, driven spine-first into the shattered column, with the edges of his broken ribs protruding outward, bleeding.
The pain was monstrous, clear and distinct, so that his mind remained in full awareness, living through every second of a slow dying without the ability to shut off.
Ursus slowly straightened, holding his gaze motionless on this scene. The column, stripped of its structural integrity by two successive destructions, slowly tilted, then collapsed, covering Aren's body with its entire mass.
A white flash erased everything happening from the arena's space at once.
Aren was on his knees again, on this same arena again, again without a single trace of what had happened, with Ursus at the other end, sitting and waiting.
Aren fell to all fours, and his empty stomach seized in a convulsive spasm.
Painful dry heaves came for several seconds in a row, making Aren produce hoarse, convulsive sounds from his throat.
The memory of what had happened held in full clarity. The shattered legs, the burst lungs, the shadow of the raised foot over his face, and not one moment of it had faded.
Ursus rose, took the hammer in both hands, then slowly moved forward.
Aren straightened with effort, pressing his palm to the stone floor, then stood, feeling a fine, unceasing tremor in his hands. He tore the nearest sword from the stone, then raised it before him.
Ursus made a sharp lunge, bringing the hammer back, and Aren jumped to the side.
The blow initially passed wide, so that Aren for a fraction of a second believed he was making it, but Ursus held the arc and let the hammer continue its motion late, catching Aren at the moment when he had not yet completed his escape.
The hammer head struck his right torso with full weight and the inertia of the blow, and several ribs on the right side broke outward through his flesh once again.
Aren flew several meters and struck the stone floor on his side.
He lay rasping through blood in his lungs, unable to rise, so that each exhale produced a wet, gurgling sound, and blood came to his lips in small portions.
Death came slowly, taking over a minute, forcing him to remain in full awareness throughout, while each next breath came harder than the last.
White flash.
Aren was on his knees again, hands trembling and the memory of the gurgling sound in his lungs still echoing in his ears for several more seconds.
He stood, took another sword, feeling from it a heavy density through his entire body, an obvious increase in physical strength.
Ursus immediately broke into motion, then swung briefly and hurled the hammer horizontally straight at Aren from twenty meters away. The spinning head flew at a speed many times greater than that of a hand blow.
The hammer punched through Aren's chest and struck the fragment of a column behind his back.
Death came instantly, so that the next flash was almost a relief.
Aren was on his knees again, trying in confusion and disorientation to assemble his thoughts in order, then he stood, took the sword with the lightness effect, and Ursus moved forward again, building tempo, then struck the floor, threw out stone fragments, and immediately drove the hammer in a horizontal arc close to the ground.
Aren jumped over the arc, but Ursus immediately continued the attack, driving upward from the low point, and the hammer head caught Aren in mid-jump and threw him upward.
He crashed onto the stone floor with his whole body, instantly breaking his spine.
Aren died after a couple of minutes, unable to move arms or legs, only able to breathe and stare into the stellar space above the arena, feeling everything below the waist as a monotonous distant hum, while Ursus took his time finishing him off.
Flash.
On his knees again. Disoriented again and uncontrollable heaves again for something that wasn't in his empty stomach.
Ursus continued his attacks, in one of which he rotated a full 360 degrees, catching Aren with the hammer from the other side, so the blow struck him in the head.
A white flash took him before anything else could arrive.
In the next attempt Ursus threw the hammer at a different angle, not horizontally but downward along an arc.
Aren jumped to the side, but the hammer ricocheted from the floor and caught him on the rebound with a completely unpredictable trajectory, shattering his right arm in several places.
Ursus walked over, grabbed him by the ankle with his left hand, lifted him, and drove him into the floor with such force that only a severed arm remained in the warrior's hand.
Flash.
Over the course of the next several dozen attempts Aren died in different ways, but always with full clarity of sensation at the moment of death itself. Ursus struck him in the back through what appeared to be a blocked attack, because the block held only at a strictly direct angle. Ursus stomped on him when Aren fell. Ursus grabbed him by the shoulder and drove his face into the stone floor again and again, until he stopped feeling resistance.
Hot blood ran down his ribs, and Aren felt its warmth in every movement of his body. Shattered bones shifted under pressure, forcing him to feel every change in position. One time the hammer struck him in the stomach with such force that his internal organs burst in several places simultaneously, so that for the next several minutes he remained conscious, feeling something warm slowly filling his body cavity from within.
Another time Ursus drove a horizontal hammerblow close to the ground, and the hammer head took Aren's legs above the knees.
The next attempt he spent in a maximum jump over the horizontal blow, only to receive the hammer head downward at the peak of the jump, when Ursus had added a second element to the combination.
Every flash returned him to the same place — to his knees, on the cold stone floor, with hands holding the memory of pain from previous deaths.
The first few times he rose slowly, waiting for his legs to stop trembling. Then he began to rise faster, because waiting changed nothing.
By the fifteenth death the fine tremor in his hands had become noticeably less. By the twentieth Aren had stopped waiting for it to pass and began moving immediately.
He died from a hammer throw and ricochet. Died from a combination he had never seen repeated. Died from a horizontal floor strike in which Ursus deflected the head with a final movement of his wrist, changing the angle in the last fraction of a second. Died because he had learned in time to escape one blow, but that same maneuver placed him in the blind spot for the next. Died when he thought he had understood the pattern, and Ursus immediately added another element to it that hadn't been there before.
By the end of the hundredth death Aren's mind had passed through several clearly distinguishable states. In the wake of that came mounting disorientation, because the phantom pains from previous deaths accumulated in layers, causing Aren to lose the ability to tell which of the burns or fractures was fresh and which had already passed.
In his mind there existed simultaneously memories of dozens of different ways to die.
On the hundred and twelfth attempt Ursus destroyed both of Aren's arms above the elbow with two successive hammer blows delivered less than a second apart. The first took the left before it could react, the second caught the right at the very instant the body had already begun to fall.
Aren collapsed to his knees with two stumps, from which blood was leaving fast and heavily, so that the stone floor around his knees began to darken in an expanding stain.
There was nothing to hold a sword with. Nothing to roll away with. Ursus was slowly raising the hammer overhead, stretching the pause that Aren could not fill with any of his learned maneuvers.
The pain in his stumps blended with chaotic noise in his head, rising with every second.
Aren lowered his head, then screamed straight into the stone floor.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!" tore out of him in a raw shout, his voice breaking on the last word.
Ursus stopped, holding the hammer at its raised position motionless.
Aren snapped his head up, meeting the warrior's gaze above him. Tears and blood mingled on his cheeks, leaving his face both wet and hot at the same time.
"WHEN DOES THIS END?! WHAT'S THE POINT?! HOW MUCH MORE CAN THERE BE?!" he screamed, not lowering his face.
Silence settled across the entire space of the arena, forcing even the sound of blood dripping from Aren's stumps onto the stone to become audible in the pause between them.
Ursus stood with his hammer raised, and Aren looked up at him from below with wide-open eyes in a stream of tears and blood.
Suddenly, completely unexpectedly, a deep and monstrously low voice came from deep within Ursus's chest.
"Get used to it." the warrior said, without changing his position or his tone.
For Aren the entire world came to a complete stop in that moment. He stared at the warrior with his mouth slightly open, while one short word, spoken for the first time through all of this, settled into his mind, unfolding in its meaning slowly and inexorably.
"Wh… what…" he breathed in a hoarse break, before the hammer began its motion.
A white flash erased everything happening from the arena's space at once.
Aren found himself on his knees again on the cold stone floor of the arena.
The familiar tremor in his hands was completely absent this time. Phantom pains existed as an accumulated layer of pulling sensations in every joint and muscle, but he was not noticing them, only staring straight ahead, in a stupor so deep that for the first several seconds he could not determine where the shock from the single spoken word ended and the ordinary post-death state began.
Ursus sat motionless at the other end of the restored arena, head lowered, one hand holding the hammer's hilt where it stood on the floor, the other braced on his own knee.
He slowly rose, took the hammer in both hands, then moved toward Aren with his already familiar, even, unhurried step.
Aren watched the warrior approach, but remained on his knees, because in his mind images from another time were already unfolding.
Before him rose evenings in the Greenfields house, a long wooden table with a worn surface, the warm light from candles on their stands, Bernard's voice explaining to Leo why he couldn't carry off parts from his forge, while Mia arranged the little flowers she had found across the table.
Grandma Martha served bread straight from the oven, hot with a crisp crust, so that the smell of hot dough filled every corner of the kitchen with a dense, almost palpable warmth.
He saw Bernard in the forge, guiding his hands over the anvil with a broad palm, explaining through touch how to feel the metal, while sweat appeared on Aren's cheeks from the heat of the coals.
Despite living in complete ignorance of who he was and why he was here, he had been happy.
But then, the happy memories were overlaid by Selma's tears at the city gates of Okkhaven. Then Sir Rowan Hart on the sandy floor of the tournament grounds, covered in blood, beaten half to death, while Schtance with her mechanical arm loomed over him.
He saw Grant's remains in the burning forest, a broken blade without a hilt, a helm pressed into the earth so deeply it was barely visible, and the mark of a bear's paw that had occupied all of that space in a single crushing imprint.
Then the mountains of bodies on the burning battlefield among the giant trees, the air above thick with heat and the smell of burning flesh, a crimson rain covering every surface, while the crowns of the giant trees burned, sealing the sky with black smoke.
And finally, Elen on the ground of the burning forest and his palm falling from Aren's chest in the last moment.
Phantom pains and fear of the next blow retreated, giving way to a broad, pressing emptiness in his chest that had taken the place of everything else.
Aren felt that emptiness as a physical weight behind his sternum, so that breathing was possible only in the upper portion of his lungs, in small, incomplete portions.
Everything was beginning to lose meaning for him, because all he was receiving was pain, suffering, and death, the truth he had craved so much nowhere among any of it.
For the first time through all of this, Aren felt how deeply he regretted ever having wanted to learn the truth at all.
Ursus's right foot came down before Aren with a deafening crack, and the stone floor ran with cracks in a radius of several centimeters. The shadow of the three-meter warrior covered Aren to the very edges of his field of vision.
Aren stared at the stone floor before him, having accepted what was to happen next, without raising his gaze.
Suddenly, Elara's voice sounded in Aren's mind, clear and calm, without the slightest distortion.
"Words do not define who you are. Your actions and your own faith — that is what makes you who you are."
"Keep believing in yourself, in your strength, in your purpose. Listen to your heart and believe… believe that you will certainly find the truth and reach your goal. With faith, we are capable of whatever our hearts desire."
Aren's pupils expanded until his irises almost disappeared within their volume.
Ursus swung the hammer and drove the head into the stone floor with full force, raising a cloud of dust and flying stone fragments.
Raising his weapon, the warrior found beneath it only cracked stone and dispersing dust, without a body and without blood. Turning his head to the side, he saw Aren rising from a roll, holding a sword in his hand, from which leather armor formed across his entire body instantly, a wide green cloak at his shoulders.
Ursus immediately broke into motion, charging toward Aren in a sharp lunge.
Aren kept his gaze straight ahead and, standing with his back to the approaching Ursus, tracked the attack only by the sound of approaching steps and the sensation of closing distance, so that at a precisely judged moment he stepped sharply sideward, slipping under the elbow of the striking arm, then drove the sword into the joint of Ursus's armor at the armpit to its full depth and left the blade there.
Aren immediately rolled away from the warrior, sprang to his feet, ran to another sword, tore it from the stone in one motion, feeling a sharp lightness through his entire body that instantly made every movement more precise.
Ursus stopped, wrapping his enormous hand around the hilt of the lodged blade, then began methodically working it out of the gap between the armor plates.
Aren had been counting on this time from the very beginning of the attack, using every second to reach the right distance and position.
When the warrior finally pulled the blade free, he raised his gaze to the opposite end of the arena.
Aren stood there, calm and focused, with a cold, steady gaze and relaxed shoulders, holding his sword along his side.
Ursus was already prepared for another attack, but he stopped abruptly, and his pupils expanded until the blue fire in the helmet's visor grew brighter against them.
The reason for the beast-god's surprise was that Aren slowly raised his free hand, then with his open palm directed a short gesture, inviting Ursus to attack.