His eyes traced the dragon as it destroyed the mountain with the force of his strike.
Righting himself midair, he straightened himself as he landed.
The silver glow was still in his fists -- fading now, retreating back into the skin, shy, like something that had shown itself by accident and wasn't sure yet if it should have.
He looked at his knuckles. The marks there. Something under the skin, under the damage, under the drying crimson…
He filed it once more.
The serpent came this time.
Head down, flat, fast -- trying to get beneath his guard the way it had learned in the last two exchanges, adapting. Good.... He was adapting too.
He dropped. Let the head pass over him. Got both hands around the neck behind the skull and locked his grip.
BAM!!!
It was slammed on the ground! The impact cratering the ground where they stood. In the far far future one day this improvised move would be known as a Snapdown Slam in wrestling.
BAM!!!
Still gripping the serpent with one hand, he struck it with the same strength with which the dragon was sent hurtling...
Bam!!
Once...
Bam!!
Twice...
CRACK!!!
Three strikes driving its head into the proto-matter.
The ground detonated each time -- craters blowing out in rings, shockwaves seeping through the abyss and hitting the others before they'd found their feet.
The serpent went still on the third.
Still. Not finished. He filed the distinction and turned to the next beast...
The behemoth had not stopped for long.
It came with its shoulder again -- the same opening, the same mass -- because why change a thing that had already worked?
He understood this about it now. It was not a thinker. It was a force of nature that had been given legs.
He dashed at it. A Shockwave bursting from the force of his launch.
And at the last moment -- dropping low, inside the sweep of the horns, his shoddily reset arm screaming the whole way -- drove both hands upward into the underside of its jaw.
BOOOOM!!!
The behemoth left the ground. All four legs. The largest thing he had fought so far, and it was lifted off the ground -- a gargantuan body, flying a few dozen metres till gravity reasserted it's dominance and it starting falling.
His eyes tracked it's descent, bloodshot. His left arm steaming as the silver light that ebbed away now materialising again, now in the likeness of fireflies around his body.
Steam wafting off as his arm and his body as a whole started letting out cracking sounds. He stopped tracking the beast falling deeper into the miasma and turned to look at his arm, confused...
It was healing... He realised, the pain he felt now a distant memory.
The behemoth fell down somewhere in the dark. He didn't watch where. But he heard the roar as it disappeared from his senses.
. . .
The dragon was back.
Of course it was back. Things that had been thrown that far and returned had always, in his brief experience, come back worse.
Angrier now. The talons were down before it had finished the dive.
He was not where it aimed.
He had moved along with the shockwave this time -- right call...that's it -- and came in from the side, getting under one wing, he drove his shoulder upward into the joint where the wing met the body.
CRACK!!!
The wing snapped in 3 pieces,bones jutting out of the membrane. The dragon's shriek shook the abyss for a whole moment, the miasma curdling and collapsing with the deadly frequency -- a sound so monstrous it distorted the world.... Or its approximation of what it is now -- and it spun, off-balance, one wing torn at the seams from before and one broken now. He grabbed the broken wing by the spine, and swung!!
CRAAASH!!!
Right into the serpent, which had gotten back up. It had always been going to get back up.
The serpent was very old and very stubborn and had, until approximately thirty seconds ago, never lost a fight. The two of them went down in a heap of scale and membrane.
He stood over them. Breathing. The silver now humming around his whole being -- it was solidifying, a rejection to the miasma and these beasts that are coming after him again and again.
He felt he can mould this if he wanted to, it was responding to his thoughts and wrapped around his arms as he willed it into doing so.
Interesting….
At the far edge of the cleared space, the abyss thickened.
He felt it before he saw it -- the temperature dropping, the feel of the surroundings getting heavier in one direction. The way the air went cold before something very huge decided to move.
He turned.
Many heads. Countless arms. So large the abyss arranged itself around it rather than the other way -- the darkness was its cradle, its frame, its shadow.
The line between where the leviathan ended and the Primordial began was a question that had no answer and probably never would have one.
The serpent had been the size of a country.
This was the size of a continent.
Gargantuan....spanning thousands of miles in height and hundreds in bulk
Its eyes -- all of them, the many heads all watching simultaneously -- were bottomless.
Not pale gold, Not any colour, Just darkness.
The depth of something that had been in the dark long enough that the dark had started to look like it instead.
It had been here since before the serpent.
It had sent the serpent.
He understood that now.
. . .
The leviathan did not charge.
It just was there. One moment there was no presence, and in the next... there it was.
It appeared in the way a storm surfaces. Sudden, abrupt and wholly encapsulating.
The first tentacle caught him across the back.
SMASH!!!
He coughed up blood mixed with bile with the impact.
Down he went, hurtling.
The second was already waiting, wrapped around his torso before he hit the ground, and it squeezed -- all of that mass through one point, his ribs screaming as they cracked and he felt them slowly snap one by one.
The third slammed the back of his skull.
He saw white...
The white one starts seeing when their body goes past the point of tolerance and consciousness.
Past the copper taste, Past the instinctive damage assessments, his eyes just saw white.
He faintly gathered being moved, fast.
The miasma blurring into streaks.
Then ~
BOOOOM!!!
He was slammed on the ground, a crater trenching for miles in diameter.
Every bone screaming in protest, top to bottom.
His left arm, just healed snapped again. His right following close. Faintly, he could feel that his ribs and his spine were also somewhat wrong. He just didn't have the mind to wonder just how wrong....
He laid still. As if lying still would magically have the leviathan leave him alone and go back to the churning abyss.
Didn't it know he didn't want to fight...
The leviathan moved over him. Its massive bulk creating a shadow over the whole crater he was embedded in. It braced itself at the border of the crater, it's gargantuan head leaning inside.
One of its heads dropped low.
He looked up at it.
Too many eyes, all looking back...
It tilted it's head the forty-five degrees that we saw in the past as a quirk of a certain someone. It watched his injuries slowly mending.
Not wanting this anomaly to create more problems. It pressed down. As if to squash a bug and it's life along with it.
He pushed up against that, as if saying.. no!!!
Slow. Both arms shaking. The ground cracking under his palms from the opposing forces.
One inch... Two... His knees came under him.
The leviathan increased the pressure and his knuckles split open against the ground..
The silver bloomed again -- not a little this time, not shy this time, flooding out of the cracks in the skin, out of the damage, bright like the stars, brighter, the only light in the Primordial besides the serpent's pale gold eyes and those had gone very wide indeed at the sight of it.
Finding his feet, he stood up this time. Straight and unbending. The silver turning darker at the edges and wrapping around his arms and fists like hardened armor. A sheen of silverish black coating threatening to unmake the the surroundings.
The leviathan reared back in agitation. Every head, all at once -- a movement so large it displaced the dark around them for a hundred metres in every direction, a shockwave of pure recoil.
Not a choice. Not a strategy. The oldest thing in existence, encountering the first thing that screamed danger to it. The solidified silver aura, making it hesitate with what it's instincts were screaming at it.
Death!!!
He had one second.
His right hand drew back. Muscles bulging and coiling as he clenched his fist. Small shockwaves pulsing out of his fist as the sheen hummed with his intentions of absolutely annihilating that damned beast.
The Silver ran down his arms to his body, the sheen growing solid, the weight of it now being felt by the environment -- the body's own assessment of every hit taken, every fall, every twinge from every cracked bone, converted into something that thirsted for payback...
Eyes bloodshot, he grinned at the leviathan as he launched towards it, eyes reflecting flecks of silver...
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
The cataclysmic impact vaporised the illusory landscape for miles on end. The miasma fluttering to solidify and failing again and again. Such was the impact of that strike.
He stood still for a few moments, floating amidst the miasma as it tried to solidify into the same churning landscape it was before. The Silver aura slowly ebbing away once more sensing no threats left to erase.
He turned to look at the horizon, the horde soup. Still writhing as if perpetually angry. But this time, the anger has no reprive. Everything it sent to erase the anomaly was erased in return.
It would not forget that just yet....
To be Continued...
(Author's note: And thus Ends the First fight of our protagonist against the Primordial Horde.
If you all are new to my novel, please leave a review, drop a few powerstones and just enjoy the story!
Though now as a contracted novel, I wouldn't mind if a reader throws some coins to this author now and then 😂)