Thane roared, a sound of pure, unadulterated ego. His numen flared, a dark, oppressive purple aura that pushed back against the wind. He swung his axe upward, unleashing a wave of raw kinetic force.
"Get down here!"
The shockwave disrupted the spell. Aegis frowned and drifted backward, landing softly as the gravity well dissipated.
"Why are you here, Kazar?" Thane asked, rolling his shoulders to pop the joints. "You didn't come all this way just to lecture me. The Wanderers usually stick to the wastelands."
"We are here for the balance," Aegis replied, his hands weaving complex patterns in the air, preparing the next spell. "The Kvothe Kingdom... the Roric Kingdom... you play games with powers you do not understand. You harbour demons. You breed monsters. The Goddess demands purity."
"Purity," Thane spat. "You sound like my maid, atleast she has enough sense keep her mouth shut."
"We are the storm that washes the filth away," Aegis intoned. "Gaoth... Dominio"
A tornado began to form around Aegis. It wasn't large, but it was incredibly tight, a drill of grey wind that sucked the oxygen out of the clearing. The fire from the burning tents was pulled in, turning the tornado into a pillar of spinning flame.
"You were a Captain of the Blazing Lord," Thane shouted over the roar of the wind. "You commanded the finest knights in your Kingdom! And you threw it away! Why? Did the King not pat your head enough? Or did the medals get too heavy?"
The tune of grief coming from Aegis spiked. It screamed. For a split second, the stoic mask of the Wind-walker cracked, revealing a face of utter torment.
The flaming tornado launched toward Thane. He gripped his axes with both hands. Thane didn't try to block the tornado. He dove directly into the eye of it.
It was madness. The fire and wind tore at his skin, scorching his clothes, cutting shallow lines into his face. But Thane was the embodiment of the offensive. He pushed through the pain, through the heat, breaking through the wall of the spell to reach the caster.
Aegis's eyes widened. He hadn't expected a man to jump into a meat grinder.
Thane burst through the wall of fire, smoking and burned, but grinning like a demon. "Found you!"
He thrust his sword.
Aegis barely reacted in time. He summoned a barrier,"Gaoth Muro", a wall of solid air.
Thane's axe slammed into the barrier. CRACK.
The force of the blow sent a shockwave rippling through the camp, knocking over nearby trees. The barrier held, but cracks appeared in the air itself.
They stood there, locked in a stalemate. Thane pushing with all his might, his face inches from the invisible wall, staring into Aegis's eyes.
"You hear it, don't you?" Thane whispered, his voice raspy from the smoke. "The tune. My tune. It's the sound of a man who doesn't care if he burns, as long as he takes you with him."
Aegis looked at Thane with a mixture of pity and disgust. "I hear nothing but noise."
Aegis shoved his hand forward. A blast of concussive force exploded point-blank in Thane's chest.
Thane was launched backward. He flew through the air, crashing through a burning tent, rolling in the dirt, and coming to a stop against the stump of a severed tree.
He lay there for a second, staring up at the night sky. The stars were beautiful.
Thane laughed. A low, menacing chuckle that grew into a full-throated cackle.
He stood up, using his axes as a crutch. His coat was ruined. His skin was singed. He looked terrible. He looked exhilaratingly alive.
"Finally," Thane said, wiping the blood from his mouth. He looked across the ruined battlefield at the floating figure of the Wind-walker.
"Finally," Thane repeated, raising his sword again. "Someone worth killing."
"You know exactly why I am here, Thane," Aegis replied, his voice calm despite the chaotic winds swirling around him. He floated a few feet off the ground, looking down at the captain like a priest inspecting a stain on the altar. "An impure soul like yours... it shouldn't exist. You weren't just made into a killer; you were born a monster. Your very existence is a dissonance in the Goddess's wishes."
"We came here for another reason," Aegis admitted, his eyes drifting toward the distant Obsidian Tower for a split second. "The Goddess directed us to a different target. But since I have walked all this way... since I am standing before the Serpent's Head... I will take care of you, too. Consider it a cleansing."
"Multitasking?," Thane grinned, gripping his Redstone Axes until his knuckles turned white. "You won't be able to complete even one, old man."
They clashed again.
This time, the impact was not merely physical; it was atmospheric. Aegis unleashed his Phantom level aura. The air pressure in the camp plummeted instantly. Tents that hadn't burned yet were flattened as if crushed by a giant hand. The ground groaned, cracking under the strain of the mana flooding the area. "Gaoth... Dominio"
Aegis thrust both hands forward. A hurricane materialized instantly—not a natural storm, but a horizontal tunnel of shredding wind, filled with debris and compressed air blades. It roared toward Thane, tearing up the earth in a trench ten feet deep.
"Haaaaa!" Thane roared, swinging upward. He cut the hurricane in half.
The shockwave of the parry blasted outward in a ring of destruction. Trees snapped like toothpicks. The remaining Serpent soldiers and the attacking Wanderers, who were locked in mortal combat moments ago, stopped. They looked at the two catastrophes clashing in the center, and a collective realization dawned on them.
'This isn't a battle. It's a natural disaster.'
"Run!" a Serpent knight screamed, abandoning his post. "Fall back! Get away from them!"
Both sides scattered. Knights scrambled over barricades, diving into ditches, running for their lives as the clash between the two monsters turned the camp into a crater.
Thane noticed the fleeing men. He noticed the destruction eating away at his supplies, his tents, his resources. He didn't care about the lives, but he hated losing assets.
'Too messy', Thane thought, listening to the screeching melody of the wind. 'If we keep this up here, I won't have a chair left to sit on.'
Thane launched a flurry of heavy strikes, each one heavy enough to shatter a castle gate. Aegis blocked them with barriers of wind, but he was being pushed back.
Thane was herding him.
With every strike, Thane forced the Wind-walker to retreat toward the treeline. Thane advanced relentlessly, a juggernaut of violence, driving Aegis away from the camp and toward the dark, writhing edge of the Marsh Forest.
"What's wrong, Kazar?" Thane taunted, swinging his sword like a baseball bat. "Don't like the mud? I thought you Wanderers loved nature!"
Aegis frowned, sensing the change in terrain. He tried to fly upward to regain the advantage, but Thane anticipated it. Thane stomped on the ground, kicking up a massive boulder, and batted it straight at Aegis's chest.
Aegis blasted the rock to dust with a wave of his hand, but the distraction cost him. Thane was already there, slamming his shoulder into the Wind-walker's chest.
They crashed into the Marsh Forest together.
The moment they crossed the treeline, the world changed.
The forest was awake.
Skreeeee!
The trees, already in the accelerated stages of Metamorphosis, reacted instantly to the intrusion of a prime and a phantom, two rich Awen sources. Not even these trees could control themselves when they see a full course cuisine and so they attacked.
Massive, pale roots erupted from the swampy ground, thick as pythons, lashing out at both men. Branches elongated into spears, stabbing downward with unnatural speed.
Aegis hovered back, his eyes widening as a wooden spike aimed for his eye.
He spun, creating a buzzsaw of wind that shredded the attacking branches into sawdust. "This forest... it is alive with foul energy. Another corruption you allow to fester!"
Thane laughed, ducking under a lashing vine and severing a root that tried to grab his leg. With the sharpness of his axes made up of Redstone, chopping down few trees, let alone vines is no big deal for him. "It's not corruption, Aegis! It's survival of the fittest! Even the trees want a piece of you!"
The battle became a three-way chaotic brawl. Mud exploded into the air. Wood splintered.
Aegis floated higher, weaving through the grasping canopy. He looked down at Thane, who was knee-deep in the sludge, hacking away at the roots and dodging wind blades simultaneously.
"You fight like a beast, Thane!" Aegis shouted, his voice booming over the groaning of the trees. He gathered a massive sphere of compressed air above his head, glowing with a terrifying white light. "Speir... Gran Impacto"
He hurled the sphere down.
Thane looked up. He couldn't dodge. The roots had wrapped around his ankles, holding him in place. The sphere hit.
BOOM.
A mushroom cloud of mud, water, and splintered wood rose into the night sky. The shockwave flattened a hundred meters of the forest, creating a perfect clearing in the middle of the swamp.
Aegis hovered over the crater, breathing heavily. The expenditure of Awen was significant.
From the bottom of the crater, a low, guttural sound echoed. It wasn't human.
The smoke cleared. Thane was standing there. His coat was gone. His armour was heavily damaged, even his shirt was shredded. But his skin wasn't bruised and he was smiling.
A dark, viscous shadow began to leak from his pores, pooling around him like liquid tar.
Aegis stared, his face twisting in holy revulsion.
"There it is," Aegis whispered, raising his hand to prepare another spell. "I knew it. You hide it well in yourself, but the Goddess sees all."
Aegis's voice rose to a shout, echoing through the terrified forest.
"Stop holding back, Thane! Use your monstrous side! Show me the abomination you truly are, and DIE!"
Thane looked down at his hands. The black tar, pulsed beneath the skin of his palms, begging to be let out. It wanted to consume, to destroy, to warp reality just like Aegis's wind did.
They called it a Beast. They whispered that he was losing control. Thane scoffed, clenching his fist until the veins popped.
'Fools', he thought. 'There is no beast. There is only me.'
He could unleash it at any moment. He could have turned that forest into a wasteland in a heartbeat if he had just opened the floodgates of his Awen. But where was the fun in that? Where was the glory in vaporizing a man with a spell? The one thing he loved is beating his enemies to a pulp with his own fists, not by some spells.
'No.' Thane ran a thumb over the jagged edge of his Redstone axe.
'I don't need Awen to kill even a god', he told himself, suppressing the dark power back into the depths of his soul. 'I will break them with nothing but my iron and my blood. I will force them to bow to my Numen.'
'What would my men say?' Thane thought, tightening his grip on the twin Redstone axes until the shafts groaned. 'That their Captain is weak? That he needs to use his broken nature to win a fistfight? No. I will not give them a reason to laugh.'
He charged. The fight resumed, brutal and unceasing. The Marsh Forest roared around them, a chaotic third party that hated them both.
Aegis hovered backward, weaving signs. "Goath Mur"
A barrage of wind bullets hammered Thane's chest. Thane didn't dodge. He tanked them. His muscles, dense as iron, absorbed the impact. He swung his left axe, cleaving through a massive root that tried to strangle him, and used the momentum to hurl his right axe at the Wind-walker.
Aegis deflected it with a wall of air*, "Gaoth Muro",* but the distraction was enough.
A massive, pale branch from an Elder Tree whipped out from the canopy. It caught Aegis mid-air, wrapping around his waist like a constrictor snake.
"Ugh!" Aegis gasped, his concentration breaking.
The forest slammed him into the mud.
Thane grinned. "Even the grass hates you!"