SSS Ranked Reincarnation: Dark Dragon Legacy

Clang!

Two knights clashed with Silva. The shockwave from the attack caused the ground to crack. Both knights stepped back immediately, and then launched their attack again, one coming from high and one low.

Silva blocked the attack low while dodging the one above by squatting. He pointed his hand at one of the knights and blasted him with a stream of flames. The attack threw the knight back a few feet while he turned to focus on the other one, who had already vanished from his sight and was now behind him.

The speed it moved at left afterimages. Silva didn’t bother turning. He dodged the attack cleanly before turning and attacking with a slash of his own, unleashing a full flame arc. The knight blocked the attack.

The knight behind him swung, and Silva was already not there, the blade cutting through empty air as he stepped sideways and drove a flame arc into the knight’s chest, the impact throwing it back into the wall hard enough to crack the stone.

It came off the wall and came back.

”They really do not go down easy,” one of the clones said somewhere behind him, his voice carrying the tone of someone making an observation while actively being attacked.

Silva did not look. He could feel all of them through the connection, ten separate points of awareness moving through the fight simultaneously, each one feeding back into the whole.

He focused on the three in front of him.

Two came high and one cut low, the coordination between them clean and practiced, and Silva blocked the high ones on the flat of his blade while lifting his foot and kicking the low one in the face, the impact snapping its head back. He followed immediately with a full flame arc that hit all three at once and blew them down the hallway.

They started getting up before they finished sliding.

Across the fight, clone four had a knight pinned against the far wall, both hands locked on its sword arm, and was driving it repeatedly into the stone with the patient efficiency of someone who had decided this was the approach that was going to work even if it took a while to prove that.

The knight’s cosmic law fought against it every time.

The wounds closed. The strength came back. The body refused the conclusion that the fight had reached.

Clone four drove it into the wall one more time and then ran its sword through the joint at the neck, the place where the armor did not fully meet, and held it there until the law ran out of things to work with.

The knight stopped moving.

”Found it,” clone four said.

Clone seven was fighting two at once, which was a bad position to be in against opponents this fast, and it knew that, but it was also buying time while clone nine got behind the further one. Clone seven took a hit across the shoulder, staggered, and threw itself sideways into the near knight’s legs as clone nine came through from behind with a flame arc that caught the further one full in the back.

The near knight went down under clone seven’s weight.

Clone nine finished the further one while it was still processing the flames.

Clone seven pushed itself up from the floor, looked at the damage to its shoulder, and looked at clone nine.

”You could have been faster,” it said.

”You could have not gotten hit,” clone nine replied.

Silva blocked three incoming strikes in sequence, the knights working in rotation to keep the pressure constant, never giving him a full second between attacks. He moved back through the hallway, using the space, making them follow him rather than letting them set up angles.

One overextended.

He stepped inside its reach and drove his elbow into its chest, the impact doing nothing structurally but creating the half second he needed to grab its sword arm and redirect the next knight’s strike into it instead.

The two knights collided, and Silva used the moment to fire a compressed stream of flames at the floor between them, the explosion throwing them both sideways.

Clone two and clone six converged on the downed ones before they could recover.

Clone two took a hit getting in close, the kind that would have stopped a normal fighter, and kept going anyway with the particular stubbornness of something that knew it could not afford to slow down. It found the gap in the armor the same way clone four had, the joint at the neck, and did not hesitate.

Clone six finished the other one three seconds later.

The hallway was getting quieter.

Silva pressed forward, the remaining knights tightening their formation as the numbers reduced, their movements becoming more precise as the group shrank, and Silva matched the change, no longer working the edges but driving directly through the center, blade and flames working together, clone three and clone eight flanking on either side to prevent the formation from fully closing around him.

The last two knights fell within seconds of each other.

Silva stood in the hallway among the aftermath of it, the clones dissolving one by one as he released them, each one folding back into nothing with a small sound that echoed briefly off the stone walls.

He looked at what remained.

Then he looked at the door at the end of the hallway.

He walked to it.

His hand found the handle, the metal cold under his grip, and he pushed it open.

What was inside stopped him completely.

He stood in the doorway and did not move, his hand still on the handle, his eyes taking in what the room held, and for a moment that stretched longer than moments usually did, Silva simply stood there.

His clones saw this and moved closer to see what was wrong. Even Zion appeared above and peeked through the door to see, and all of them froze.