novelraw Chapter 59: Discount Action Hero
Chapter 59: Discount Action Hero
The knight didn’t answer.
Instead, it planted its sword into the earth, both gauntleted hands on the pommel, and the violet eyes behind the helm blazed until the light spilled out through the visor slit like liquid fire.
Then it screamed.
A deep, guttural roar that shook the ground and made the fog recoil in every direction.
The dark flames on the knight’s armor surged, crawling faster, burning brighter, the low simmer of a controlled fire escalating into an inferno that engulfed the armored frame entirely.
Its body shifted.
The armor that had been sealed tight across every joint began to open.
Plates at the knees split apart, revealing gaps that glowed with the same lightless fire that burned on the surface.
The elbows cracked open next, the metal peeling back like petals, and from each exposed joint a column of black flame erupted outward.
The helm’s visor widened as the metal warped from the heat within, and the violet eyes doubled in size until they were no longer eyes but twin furnaces burning behind a mask.
The knight’s entire posture changed.
It widened its stance, threw its head back, and pushed. Like a man straining against invisible chains, every muscle beneath the armor coiled and released simultaneously, and the resulting shockwave flattened the fog in a fifty-meter radius.
’Oh no.’
Revan’s grin died.
In the same instant, the knight’s body detonated.
Hundreds of bolts erupted from every gap, every joint, every exposed flame vent in its armor. Fist-sized spheres of compressed black fire tearing outward in every direction like rockets leaving a launcher, each one trailing a tail of dark flame and accelerating as it flew.
"Tch—!"
Revan threw himself sideways as three bolts gouged the earth where he’d been standing. Two more streaked past his head. Another burst to his left and the shockwave threw him off balance.
’This is what I get for running my mouth. "Not used to bleeding?" Really, Revan? You just had to poke the seven-foot fire knight with the ego check. Couldn’t just win quietly. No, you had to deliver a one-liner like some discount action hero, and now look at you.’
He pumped a burst of amplified Aura into his calves and moved.
The gauntlet turned the trickle into a flood and his body shot three meters sideways in a quarter-second, fast enough that the cluster of bolts converging on his previous position hit nothing but smoking earth.
’Okay. Numbers. Focus on numbers.’
Revan sprinted.
The bolts tracked him, curving in the air, homing on the heat of his manifested Aura. He ducked one, deflected another with the flat of his blade, and sidestepped a third that scorched the mud beside his boot.
’My mana pool before this nightmare started was already pathetic. I had died before. Clinically died. Came back, sure, but the resurrection only restored roughly thirty-one percent of my total reserves. That’s what I’ve been operating on this entire time.’
He burst sideways again, another surge through the calves, another impossible change of direction that left a trail of shattered earth where his boots pushed off.
Behind him, a chain of bolts collided with each other where he’d been running and blew apart in a cascade of black fire.
’Of that thirty-one percent, the Dead Zone has been taxing me since we crossed the perimeter. Every Aura usage in a suppression field costs roughly triple what it would outside. Conservative estimate: sixteen percent of my total reserves burned in combat.’
A bolt clipped his shoulder.
The impact spun him but the manifested shroud absorbed enough to keep the flesh intact. He gritted his teeth and kept moving.
’Thirty-one minus sixteen. Fifteen percent. That’s my operating budget to fight an S-class guardian that just went Super fucking Saiyan in front of me.’
Each speed burst cost him.
He could feel the drain, the mana flowing out of his core like water from a cracked jug. Every explosive movement that made him blur across the battlefield was a chunk of his remaining reserves gone.
’Every burst eats roughly one percent. I’ve used three. Twelve percent.’
He slid under a low-flying bolt, came up spinning, and slashed two more out of the air in a single arc.
The amplified Aura dispersed them on contact, but each deflection sent a jolt through his sword arm that made his fingers tingle.
’And the Manifestation itself is hemorrhaging reserves at a constant rate. Even with the gauntlet multiplying my output, the input still has to come from somewhere. At current rate, maybe six minutes before I hit zero. After that, the only thing left to extract is life force.’
The knight was still firing.
Wave after wave erupting from its body, each batch tracking Revan’s Aura signature with relentless precision.
’Can I fire back? Shape my Aura into a construct the way this thing does?’
The answer formed before the question finished.
’No.’
Shaping projected Aura into a separate construct required channeling through the peripheral nervous system, routing energy through hundreds of individual nerve clusters simultaneously.
Every nerve used was a nerve damaged. His internal channels were already in ruins. If he tried, the fractured network would shatter.
’I was lucky the involuntary Manifestation didn’t kill me outright. The gauntlet handled the distribution through its own grooves instead of forcing it through my channels. My body was the power source, the gauntlet was the circuit board. Without it, that eruption would have fried every pathway I have left.’
Eight bolts had broken away from the main barrage and were curving around him in a wide arc, each one adjusting its trajectory to approach from a different angle.
They weren’t chasing him anymore.
They were surrounding him.
’Clever. You’re boxing me in.’
He could keep running, but the bolts were closing their net. In three seconds they’d converge regardless of which direction he moved.
Running meant getting hit from behind.
So Revan did the only thing that made sense.
He stopped.
’If they’re all tracking me and I’m standing still, they all hit the same point. And if they all hit the same point...’
Eight burning spheres curving inward from eight directions.
Revan waited.
Counted.
Felt the heat building from every side.
At the last possible instant, he burst forward. A single explosive stride that cleared ten meters before the net collapsed behind him.
’Eleven percent.’
The eight spheres slammed into each other.
The blast consumed the fog in a thirty-meter radius and turned the packed earth beneath into a shallow pool of molten stone.
Revan skidded to a halt, coughing, ears ringing.
The heat from the blast licked at his back. For half a second, he thought the barrage was over.
Then the wall of black fire split open.
The knight walked through the inferno.
The flames parted around its armored frame as if recognizing their master, splitting like a curtain to let the burning figure pass.
Its sword was already mid-swing.
’Of course.’
Revan caught the swing on his blade.
The impact drove him back and he felt something wrong in the steel. A vibration that hadn’t been there before.
The gauntlet was channeling boosted Aura through his arms, and the residual energy was leaking into the sword through proximity.
The carbon steel, the non-magical steel that Volkar had specifically forged to carry zero Aura, was absorbing it anyway.
’The blade is overheating. The energy isn’t flowing through it because it can’t. It’s building up on the surface. If I keep blocking at this output, the steel is going to reach its stress limit and snap.’
The knight pressed.
Three rapid strikes that Revan parried with thinning precision, each block sending another pulse of trapped energy into Volkar’s blade.
He could feel the sword weakening. The metal singing at a frequency that meant fracture.
’I need to go hand-to-hand. But—’
He burst behind the knight, a surge through his calves that carried him in a tight arc around the armored frame.
Drove his right fist toward the exposed flesh where the chestplate had fractured.
His knuckles connected clean.
And his hand exploded with pain.
’FUCK—!’
The knight’s body was impossibly dense.
Hitting the exposed flesh felt like punching solid iron. Without the gauntlet’s protection, his right hand had taken the full impact against an immovable surface.
He felt knuckles crack.
He ducked a retaliatory swing. Rolled. Came up in a crouch, shaking his mangled hand.
’I can hit with my left and the gauntlet absorbs the recoil, but every right-handed strike is my own bones versus iron. I lose that trade every time.’
’Unless...’
The information the gauntlet had uploaded into his brain during the initial surge included something he hadn’t had time to process until now.
A technique embedded in the artifact’s memory like an instruction manual written in sensation.
The concept was mechanical. Simple in theory.
The gauntlet could function as a spring.
When Aura was channeled into the left hand and compressed through the artifact’s grooves at maximum output, the energy didn’t have to exit through the left fist.
It could be stored, momentarily, held in the compressed space between the grooves like a coiled spring under tension.
And when that stored energy was released, redirected through the body’s channels into the right arm, the transfer carried a unique property.
The compressed Aura retained its density even after leaving the gauntlet.
But because it traveled through flesh instead of metal, it couldn’t be contained by the fist. It would overshoot. Extend past the knuckles.
Project outward in a shockwave that carried the full force of the blow without the fist ever making contact with the target.
A punch that hit without touching.
Revan straightened.
The knight was closing in. Sword raised. Flames roaring.
He set his stance. Left hand forward, gauntlet humming. Right hand drawn back, fingers loose.
’Alright.’
He channeled.
The gauntlet compressed.
Energy built in his left fist, dense and cold, straining against the grooves like a bowstring pulled to its limit.
He threw the right hand forward.
The air between his fist and the knight’s chest cracked.
The shockwave hit the knight square in the exposed flesh.
The armored figure flew backward, trailing fragments of dark flame, and hit the ground hard enough to bounce.
Revan’s right hand was unbroken. Untouched.
’...Holy shit.’
He stared at his own fist. Then at the gauntlet. Then at the knight struggling to rise.
Revan laughed. Blood ran from his nose into his teeth.
"Okay," he breathed, settling into the stance again.
"Okay. I can work with this."