SSS Ranked Reincarnation: Dark Dragon Legacy

Silva groaned as he struggled back to his feet, his head ringing hard. He looked up and saw the figure standing at the edge of the crater and looking at him with a smile on his face.

Silva gritted his teeth. He spread his wings.

’I don’t think attacking straight on will work. He has shown he is stronger,’ one mind said.

’That’s exactly why we attack head-on,’ another said.

’Exactly. This is not a battle of who can outsmart, but rather a battle of who has the greatest drive to keep going, who wants the power more,’ the third mind said.

All minds came into agreement, but before they even did, the main mind had already pushed the body. Silva did not have the time to wait for all his minds to come into full agreement before he attacked.

He crossed the distance in an instant and went in with a slash to the head of the figure. The figure stepped back and blocked the attack. Another massive shockwave ripped out, and he was pushed a few feet back. He smiled and pressed hard against Silva, but Silva held his ground.

”Come on, show me that desire,” he said.

Silva’s eyes glowed, and then he unleashed a stream of black flames twisted into a slim stream, only for the figure to lean back to an impossible angle and evade the attack. He pulled himself back up, only to be tackled by Silva, who then flew high into the air and pushed him further into the air before readying himself and then unleashing a barrage of slashes. Each flame arc that fired out was at least twenty meters in length. He covered the entire sky with his attack.

The figure looked down and saw all the attacks that were coming. He smiled and held his sword with both hands.

”You still do not want to go all out yet!” He slashed and unleashed a flame arc over fifty meters long and extremely massive, blocking out the sky. The arc slashed right through each of the attacks that Silva unleashed. Explosions rang through the air and painted the sky.

’He is attacking me with better versions of what I use.’ Silva gritted his teeth. He pointed his hands up, and tendrils burst out of the floor, surging through the air fast, going for the figure. He flew down and began to evade. One came in from the right, and he weaved to the left with a spin, then proceeded to bank up hard and evade the one that shot toward his head.

He spread his wings and banked right in a spin. He looked down and locked onto Silva. He shot down, evading more and more of the tendrils until he got to Silva and thrust at him.

Silva caught the thrust on his blade, and the crater beneath him went deeper.

The ground cracked outward in every direction from the point of impact, spiderweb fractures spreading twenty meters before they ran out of momentum, and the shockwave that rolled out from the block flattened every loose rock in the vicinity and sent dust surging outward in a ring.

The figure smiled through the pressure.

”More,” he said simply.

Silva answered by pushing.

They separated and came back together faster than the dust had time to settle, blade against blade, each clash producing its own shockwave, the mountain pass around them taking the accumulated damage of every exchange and recording it in craters and shattered stone and sections of rock face that had simply ceased to exist.

Silva attacked with everything he had, not holding back the angle or the force, and the figure matched every single strike with the ease of someone who had more left in reserve and was waiting for him to find it too.

A clean kick came through a gap in Silva’s guard.

It connected with his chest, and he went backward, fast and hard, the force carrying him through one rock formation and then another and then a third before he hit the ground and skidded to a stop in a cloud of debris and dust.

The dust was still settling when the transformation began.

He spread into his full dragon form from the ground up, the size of him filling the space in the pass, wings snapping open, and he launched straight up without waiting for the figure to see it coming.

The figure saw it anyway.

He transformed in the air, rising to meet Silva as his own draconic form took shape, and they came together above the mountain range in a collision that shook the peaks on either side.

Then they broke apart, and the dragon breaths started.

Silva fired first, black flames pouring from his jaws in a concentrated stream aimed directly at the figure. The figure banked sideways and answered with his own, a massive torrent that Silva had to fold one wing and drop hard to clear, the heat of it washing over his scales close enough to register.

They circled each other.

Attack. Dodge. Circle. Attack.

The dragon breaths crossed paths, and when they did, the explosions they produced hit the mountain walls and the ground below and the air itself, some of the impacts carving craters into the peaks, others landing in the pass and turning sections of the floor into scorched glass.

Neither of them stopped moving.

The figure chased Silva across the sky, and Silva chased him back, both of them unleashing and dodging and unleashing again, the rhythm of it building into something sustained and escalating, the sky above the pass lit continuously with the overlapping light of every exchange.

Then they both stopped.

Facing each other across two hundred meters of open air.

Both drew in simultaneously.

The streams that came out were not like the exchanges before them. These were everything, the full depth of what each of them had, and when they met in the center of the gap between them, the flames burned the air itself, the heat visible as a distortion, and the collision held.

Neither side gave.