FREE USE in Primitive World

”I don’t care what cursed, forbidden art you used to stand back up, boy,” Bruga growled, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying register that vibrated in the chests of every man present. ”I don’t care if you can talk to beasts or patch your broken bones with dark sorcery. You are running on borrowed time. Your spirit is depleted, your core is a hollow shell, and you are standing in the middle of my valley.”

You three go and contain these hounds.” Bruga roared to the other layer 4 and chiefs, his massive muscles swelling as he gathered every ounce of his Layer 4 physical essence into his arms.

The air around his massive bone club warped and distorted, turning a deep, dangerous slate-grey. ”I will personally grind his skull into powder this time, and I will make sure there is not a single piece of his soul left to crawl back!”

Far across the clearing, standing amidst the sea of severed limbs and rabid, howling Blood Hounds, Sol slowly tilted his head.

His neon-crimson eyes flared with a cold light... a light that held not a single trace of fear, exhaustion, or doubt.

The internal fractures of his core were nearly sealed, his essence channels thrumming with the newly harvested life force of dozens of warriors, and his Free Use reserves were steadily settling into a lethal, concentrated trigger.

Sol raised Zeyra’s twin silver daggers, resting the flat of one blade against his shoulder while the other pointed casually at the three Layer 4 leaders advancing toward him.

A wide, terrifying, and deeply mocking grin spread across his face.

”We’ll see who will grind whose skull, you ugly bastard.” Sol whispered softly, but still his voice echoing over the battlefield.

With a soft, fluid step forward, Sol vanished into the air once more.

The air ruptured where Sol had been standing a fraction of a millisecond prior.

A high-pitched sonic crack echoed across the clearing as Sol breached the physical limit of human acceleration, turning into a shadow-like streak of motion.

Instead of charging towards Bruga’s front... he angled low, hugging the blood-stained limestone slate, using the scattered corpses of Zharun warriors as stepping stones to mask his body.

Seeing him disappear, Grand Chieftain Bruga didn’t flinch. His bloodshot eyes didn’t try to track Sol’s body; instead, his Layer 4 instincts flared, reading the displacement of air and the sudden pressure drop beneath his colossal frame.

”TRICKS!” Bruga roared, his voice shaking the surrounding air.

Without turning his torso, the twenty-foot titan swept his seven-foot bone club back in a terrifying, low-altitude horizontal arc.

The weapon was so massive, and driven with such absurd, compressive physical force, that it pushed a solid wall of compressed wind before it.

A physical shockwave of air pressure, six feet high, plowed through the limestone floor like a snowplow, pulverizing boulders and sweeping dead men into the air.

Sol was already in the strike zone.

With his dynamic vision heightened by the resonance of the Dreadwing spirit, the incoming wall of bone and compressed air looked like a slow-moving tectonic plate. Yet, the pure scale of the weapon left no room to simply step aside.

Sol planted his right boot into the slate, driving his weight down.

BOOM!

The bedrock shattered beneath his heel as he launched himself straight up, leaping over the seven-foot bone club by a hair’s breadth.

The vacuum created by the club’s passage pulled savagely at his black armor, threatening to drag him into the crushing vortex behind it, but Sol kicked off the flat of the moving club itself with his left boot, using Bruga’s own momentum to propel himself straight toward the titan’s face.

In mid-air, Zeyra’s twin silver daggers flashed in an ’X’ pattern, aiming directly for Bruga’s exposed throat.

”GOT YOU, PEST!” Bruga bellowed.

Instead of trying to pull the heavy club back, Bruga snapped his left arm upward. His massive, pillar-like forearm, slammed forward like an iron wall.

CLANG!

Sparks erupted in a blinding shower as the silver bone daggers struck the dense, essence-reinforced bracer.

Sol felt a violent, bone-rattling shockwave travel straight up his arms, numbly vibrating through his shoulders.

The sheer physical density of a Layer 4 warlord’s body was akin to striking an anvil with small chisels; even with Zeyra’s high-grade weapons, Sol’s blades barely bit half an inch into the toughened hide before stopping dead.

Before Sol could adjust his grip, Bruga’s left hand closed like a massive bear trap, snapping toward Sol’s torso mid-air.

Sol twisted his body violently, deactivating the Dreadwing’s lightness and invoking the heavy, stubborn weight of the Great Badger. His body abruptly dropped like a stone, ducking straight beneath Bruga’s grabbing fingers.

He plummeted between the giant’s massive, tree-trunk legs, landing smoothly on the ground behind him.

Without missing a beat, Sol drove both daggers upward into the back of Bruga’s right knee... a precise, lethal strike designed to sever the patellar tendon.

SLASH!

Dark, thick blood squirted from the double wound, but Bruga barely grunted.

The layer of compressed, slate-grey physical essence coating the giant’s muscles acted as a dense, shock-absorbing cushion. The daggers cut muscle, yes, but they failed to reach the deeper structural bone.

”IS THAT A KID TICKLING ME?!” Bruga screamed, spinning his entire massive lower body with frightening agility for a giant.

His massive right heel came driving backward in a brutal, horse-like kick that kicked up a gale of dust.

Sol raised his arms, crossing his forearms to block while channeling every drop of the Badger’s defensive essence into his upper frame.

BANG!

The impact was catastrophic. Even with his spirit-shield active, the sheer, staggering disparity in sheer physical weight and Layer power sent Sol skidding backward across the limestone like a stone skipped across a pond.

His boots cut two deep, smoking trenches through the bedrock for over fifty feet before he managed to dig his daggers into the ground to bring himself to a halt.

Sol spat a mouthful of dark, iron-tasting blood onto the white stone.

His chest hollow hummed frantically, channeling freshly harvested soul-essence to repair the microscopic stress fractures spreading through his forearms.