SSS Ranked Reincarnation: Dark Dragon Legacy

The flames burned hot and powerful for minutes, and neither side gave up until the figure began to spew even more flames and began to defeat Silva’s flames. It blasted through and slammed into Silva, throwing him back. He slammed into the ground with a thunderous thud, and the ground cracked like spiderwebs.

”You still do not want it hard enough!” The figure said and unleashed a heavy breath of flames. Silva raised his head and countered with flames. They collided in an explosion. He shot up and through the flame, slamming into the figure and flying higher.

”You do not know how bad I want it, how far I have gone to ensure that I get it. I have given my all every single time, over and over and over, and I’ll keep doing that,” Silva roared before using his tail. He wrapped it around the neck of the figure, spun, and hurled him down. The figure slammed into the ground hard.

Silva followed up and unleashed a heavy barrage of flames. Each one slammed harder and cleanly into the figure.

Silva flew down and landed on the ground. He transformed back into a human and started walking toward the figure.

”Hahaha, that’s it, that’s it,” the figure said and then transformed back. He gripped his sword and blasted forward again. He slashed, and Silva blocked. Their swords caused the entire area to tremble.

He looked right into the eyes of Silva.

”You are the true form of pride and hunger, desire for what is to come.” He pushed Silva back and then flew in with an attack, slashing from all angles. Silva blocked every attack, retreating as he did so.

Silva then landed on the ground and thrust his hand forward. Dark tendrils shot out of the ground and wrapped onto the figure long enough for Silva to fly in for a counter. He swung down at full speed. His blade stopped a few inches away from his head. A force stopped the blade.

The figure looked up and smiled. Silva looked at him and knew something had gone wrong.

The blade was pushed back a second later, and the figure rolled sideways, creating distance, coming back to his feet with the easy motion of something that had decided the ground was optional.

Silva was already moving.

He came in from above, wings carrying him in a steep dive, blade angled for the figure’s shoulder, and the figure brought his sword up and met it, the contact producing a shockwave that blew out a ring of dust across the entire floor. They separated, and Silva banked hard, using the wing to change direction faster than his legs alone could have managed, cutting back at a different angle before the figure had finished accounting for the first.

The figure matched him.

Blade against blade, the exchange moving across the space at a pace that left marks everywhere it touched. A rock formation twenty meters high took a diagonal slash through its middle, and the top half simply slid off and hit the ground in pieces. The earth between them accumulated scars with every exchange, deep lines cut into the stone where a swing had extended past its target and found the ground instead, each one long enough to read the force behind it.

Silva pushed into close range, and the figure pushed back out, and they traded in the compressed space between them, neither able to hold a decisive angle long enough to convert it into something final.

The figure went airborne.

Silva followed.

They moved through the air above in wide arcs, using the wings to change direction mid-exchange, the fight taking on a different character above the ground, less about footing and more about reading trajectory, each of them cutting through the air at speeds that made the movement between strikes almost invisible.

The figure slashed down from above, and Silva met it going up, the collision sending them both sideways in opposite directions before they corrected and came back.

Another exchange. Another. The ground and rocks taking the strikes that went wide, chunks of stone falling away from the impact points, the structure slowly recording everything the fight had passed through it.

The figure pressed harder.

Not frantically, but with the deliberate increase of someone turning a dial, the attacks coming with slightly more weight and slightly less predictability, finding the edges of Silva’s defense and pushing on them consistently, and Silva felt it, the incremental accumulation of pressure that came from fighting something that had more in reserve.

He retreated.

Not in panic, in thought, moving backward through the garrison with his guard maintained, letting the figure come forward, watching the patterns in the way the attacks were constructed, looking for the thing that repeated without meaning to.

He found it.

The figure telegraphed a committed overhead strike with a slight drop of the left shoulder, just a fraction, just enough, and Silva read it coming three exchanges before it arrived and started building the response.

The overhead came.

Silva met it with a block that looked like a defensive reaction and was not, absorbing the impact and using it, letting the figure’s weight commit fully to the strike, and then he moved sideways around it, fast enough that by the time the figure’s sword finished its arc, Silva was behind him.

He swung.

The figure’s guard came up, but Silva’s blade hit it with everything he had behind it, and the guard shattered, the force blasting through the defensive position entirely, and Silva let the momentum carry the tip of his sword forward until it stopped a few inches from the figure’s neck.

Neither of them moved.

Silva’s chest rose and fell. His arms were shaking slightly, not from fear but from the sustained output of everything the fight had taken from him, his body honest about the cost even if his posture was not.

The figure held completely still.

Then he smiled.

”I guess I win,” Silva said.

His voice came out rough and breathing-heavy and entirely certain, the words carrying none of the performance of someone trying to sound confident because the confidence was simply there, earned through everything that had just happened in this garrison.

”Haha, I guess you do, Dark dragon.”