CAPITULO III: Shadow of death

Part I

“I accept my share of the blame, but accept yours too, asshole…” said Bayón as he showed Torgann the middle finger.

Torgann grimaced, he was clearly upset, but didn’t respond, he only disappeared again and reappeared in front of Bayón to land another blow.

His vision was a mix of black spots and lights bursting in his retinas, and still Bayón was there, blow after blow, discharge after discharge.

He could barely lift his fists to strike, but he was still fighting back.

His body was a map of wounds, burned skin, torn muscles, but each heartbeat reminded him that he wasn’t dead yet.

And Torgann was in front of him, frustrated, irritated, stained by something he couldn’t control: a slave who refused to fall.

“Why the fuck won’t you fall?!” spat the noble, snapping his fingers as another burst of lightning exploded around him.

“Would you…?” Bayón panted, spitting blood.

“As long as I can keep hitting your stupid face, I’m going to stay right here.”

“Because I was just quietly watching the city, you were the ones who screwed things up first.”

Torgann growled and raised both hands.

An electric sphere crackled in the air before falling and exploding in a violent discharge.

The shockwave hurled Bayón through the air, crashing through the glass window of a floating restaurant.

Cries of civilians, tables flew, glass fell like sharp rain… Bayón crawled among broken plates and burned tablecloths.

“Evacuate! Get out through the emergency exit!” shouted a worker, helping a child to get up.

Bayón felt a sting different from pain: urgency.

He forced himself to move, pushed with his legs and leaned against a column.

Torgann appeared like thunder to his right, bursting through the restaurant’s main entrance with an electric kick.

“Don’t run, pig!” he roared.

Torgann didn’t see him and Bayón pushed himself to the side.

Bayón grabbed a metal table, and spinning around himself, threw it as an improvised barrier toward Torgann, not to hurt him, to gain a second.

Torgann deflected the table with a lightning bolt, but lost visibility.

Bayón took the chance to run through a walkway that connected to a lower platform; every step tore a scream from inside him.

“I’m crazy… I’m fucking crazy…”

But if he could make Torgann chase him… if he could draw him away from the civilians…

He managed for a few seconds, Torgann landed right in front of him.

“Your bravery is as useless as your life.”

Bayón crouched just in time to dodge a blow that broke through a containment barrier.

An electrical discharge exploded against an urban control unit, blowing out the lights of the whole sector.

Sparks and alarms went off everywhere.

“You’re making me use more energy than your existence is worth!” Torgann roared, clearly affected.

“Then I’m winning, asshole…” Bayón said, spitting on the ground.

Torgann, clearly annoyed, disappeared and reappeared in front of Bayón and struck him directly in the stomach, the air left his body as if his soul was ripped out and he flew several meters, crashing onto a vacant patrol car, the windshield shattered, in the distance, red lights flashed, official drones began to surround the area.

Bayón could barely move, but his gaze caught something on the ground: a metal piece torn from the damaged unit, the size of a manhole cover.

“A trap… I’m not going to beat him. I have to distract him and disappear into the city.” He crawled.

Torgann was walking calmly, sure there was no fight left.

Just as he got close, Bayón used his body to push the metal cover under the noble’s foot.

He slipped just slightly, but enough for his discharge to miss and hit a nearby transmission tower.

The explosion was brutal.

Pieces of the tower began to fall, Bayón rolled and a beam missed him by centimeters.

Torgann roared furiously.

“Enough already, damn pig! I’m going to pulverize you!”

“Try it…” Bayón said without a drop of fear.

His arms trembled, blood dripped without control, and the city was coming down, little by little.

Bayón could barely see.

Sweat and blood clouded his vision, but his ears still caught the screams: guards calling for reinforcements, civilians running, automatic alarms screeching as if the city itself begged for mercy.

A shadow fell in front of him. Torgann, intact, his boots sank into the melted asphalt.

“You know what the worst part of this is, slave?” he murmured, his voice dripping with contempt.

“That you’re nobody… and yet I still have to keep beating you.”

Bayón leaned with difficulty against a twisted beam, coughed a thick, metallic mouthful. “Then do it quick… because you’ve been going on and on with your powers and you’re still running around.”

Torgann didn’t answer, he only raised an arm and unleashed a whip of lightning that split in two a patrol truck parked a few meters from Bayón.

The fragments of metal rained across the intersection as the official units scattered.

Bayón rolled instinctively, covered his head and crawled behind a broken wall.

Just then he saw a guard trapped under the remains of a combat drone, a steel bar piercing her thigh, her eyes locked with his for an instant.

“Damn it…” said the guard while trying to draw her weapon and pointed it at Bayón.

“Stop right there, bastard! Don’t you dare do anything to me!”

“First, I’ll empty this clip, before I let you take my weapon.”

“Calm down…, I’m not going to do anything to you nor take your weapon, I can see you’ve got a problem.”

“Look, I don’t have time, and I’m not going to ask you to lower your weapon, just let me give you a hand.

If you’re not going to die here…, I’ll get closer slowly, ok…”

The guard hesitated a second, but she knew she had no chance if she stayed in that state.

“You’d better not try anything weird.”

He had almost no strength, no time left, but still, he crawled up to her, used his back as leverage and, with a cry, lifted the drone just enough for the woman to slip out.

“Why…?” the officer gasped, surprised.

“Because it’s what has to be done, just remember to do the same someday.” he spat, before standing up shakily.

A discharge passed centimeters from Bayón.

Torgann had already seen him.

“Now you hide behind the guards, trash! You’re disgusting!!”

“You’re the one throwing lightning around like an idiot, I was just fixing your mess,” Bayón said, raising his chin and stretching his neck.

He lunged toward a corner where remnants of digital signage hung, kicked the post, making a still-sparking holographic screen fall just as Torgann jumped at him.

The impact caused no harm… but the discharge that followed, fed back through the circuits still charged from the digital signage, threw off the noble’s leap.

Torgann landed badly.

He didn’t fall on his feet, he slipped.

“Ha, ha, ha, I didn’t think that would work.” Bayón laughed, mocking Torgann.

It was just an instant.

But it gave Bayón enough time to throw himself at him with a chunk of broken marble, aiming at the noble’s center of mass.

The hit wasn’t clean, it bounced off his shoulder, but it made him stumble more, he fell over a pool of green liquid, that looked like coolant spilled from one of the futuristic vehicles.

Bayón didn’t think.

He threw himself with everything, giving Torgann a strong kick to the face, taking advantage of his carelessness; the blow landed straight on target amid sparks while the electricity tried to repel the strike.

“Fuck you, bastard!” Bayón shouted furiously, taking a heavy electric discharge.

This time Torgann’s strong bolts were not enough to deflect Bayón’s strike, as he landed a solid kick straight to his face, knocking him down completely with a dazed expression.

It was as if his energy was losing strength, maybe because of the green liquid he was soaked in, but Bayón would not waste the opportunity and lunged at Torgann.

Bayón didn’t think.

He just threw himself with everything he had left; they rolled across the ground amid sparks in an animal-like fight.

Torgann tried to get out of the puddle, but Bayón struggled to stop him with all his strength, taking advantage of the moment to give Torgann a good beating.

“Die already!” Torgann shouted, then clenched his teeth.

“After you,” said Bayón, slamming his fist into his face.

Both of them got back on their feet, wrecked, one wounded, the other barely exhausted.

Part II

The blows grew more intense from both sides, Torgann’s lightning-fast strikes began to burn Bayón’s skin, but he kept fighting back.

Landing a kick to the stomach, he knocked the air out of Torgann.

And Torgann, clearly enraged, responded in the same way, kicking Bayón in the stomach and knocking the air from him, then grabbed his leg and spun around like a vortex, hurling him through the sky.

Bayón felt the vertigo, an eternal second of pure air.

Then the fall.

Torgann appeared above him in the air, with a fist covered in lightning.

The impact smashed him into the water; he had fallen into the Singing Fountain, the blow had sent him flying all the way there.

Although the water softened his fall, some of his ribs broke from the impact and his skull fractured as he bounced across the ground until crashing into the bushes near the food stalls.

“Damn it… this is really bad…”

“I’m starting to lose consciousness,” Bayón thought, coughing blood and struggling through the pain to stand up.

Bayón could barely make out the letters, and though he couldn’t read them, he knew it was the sign of the food stall belonging to the lady who had been kind to him.

Torgann descended, floating amid lightning, calm, but this time with his face visibly swollen.

This time the electricity built up to such a degree that sparks leapt from his shoulders to the walls of nearby stalls, destroying them, as he walked calmly toward Bayón.

“That son of a bitch isn’t holding back anymore! If he throws another one of his electric attacks and I manage to dodge it, it’ll hit the stall.”

“Damn it, the lady doesn’t deserve this… she reminded me of my grandmother, she was always so kind to me, even though I was a disaster, but I didn’t do enough for her, and I regret it, she deserved better,” Bayón thought as he stood tall, ignoring the pain, now only getting in the way, his mind fully focused on stopping Torgann.

“I guess I’ll see it as giving back a little of her kindness to the lady,” Bayón said with a cold look, as if he knew the outcome of what he was about to do.

“That speed is insane, but it’s useless if I’ve already seen what someone as arrogant as him does with it… he always goes straight forward,” Bayón thought as he stretched his neck. “Too confident…”

Torgann approached with more energy than ever; it was obvious, you could feel it as he drew near.

And then he vanished.

“Shit!…”

“I don’t care what happens to me, but I won’t let him destroy the stall…” Bayón muttered, clenching his teeth.

Without thinking, in a split second, he threw a punch with all his strength straight ahead, and before it cut through the air, his fist landed squarely on Torgann’s face.

The strike connected right on the jaw, dislocating it.

CRACK…

Bayón’s arm bone broke completely, the impact was so brutal that his skin split open and the bone jutted out like a white blade. Lightning snaked across his arm, devouring flesh with every millisecond, burning his flesh from the absurd speed of the impact as his punch connected with Torgann’s face.

The world lit up, and a massive discharge exploded with the blow.

The electric explosion tore the air in every direction, shattering the tiles, shaking the concrete, making even the lights tremble.

The next moment, Torgann staggered and fell onto one knee.

Clearly affected by the blow.

And Bayón, barely conscious from the force of the impact.

“Shit… That was messed up… I wonder if it worked,” thought Bayón motionless, his body completely shattered. “I can’t let him get up…”

By sheer willpower, he raised his other arm, the one that wasn’t damaged, and with no strength gave Torgann a hit on the head, which was bowed down, but he no longer responded—he had lost consciousness.

“I don’t feel anything anymore… I think I went too far… heh, heh, heh, too late to be thinking about that, at least I hope it was worth the pain and that the stall wasn’t destroyed.”

With the last drop of strength he had, he gave one last blow.

And lost consciousness on his feet.

Long seconds passed in silence while the dust from the electric explosion floated in the air, until the sound of the Royal Guard patrol sirens could be heard in the distance, approaching the scene.

“Damn pig!” exclaimed Torgann as he regained consciousness.

With his jaw still dislocated, clearly enraged, he began to charge an electric magic circle that seemed much more powerful.

“Stop…”

A mysterious voice was heard coming from the Cle’PPier house carriage that was descending slowly.

They had been observing the fight from the sky.

“This time you lost, Torgann. You may have had much more power stored, but you lost consciousness. You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

We are leaving.

Get into the carriage before the media arrives, your fight lasted longer than expected, and I don’t want House Cle’PPier to lose its reputation.

If it were to be known that the champion of House Cle’PPier lost a fight against a slave, you’d be disqualified from the regionals, and not to mention what it would do to your reputation.”

Torgann, clearly upset, did not question his master’s orders. He got into the carriage, but not without first looking with hatred at Bayón’s motionless body, and they left, abandoning the whole disaster behind.

Shortly after, more guard units arrived at the scene and found Bayón completely shattered and unconscious, but still standing.

“Shit, this guy really got beaten to a pulp, I’m impressed he’s still breathing,” said one guard approaching.

“Well, he had it coming, damn pig. For all I care, let him stay like that, but we have to restore his slave brand to recognize him and make his master pay for all the damages,” said a second guard, as he put magical chains on Bayón’s broken body.

“Damn… turn around and look at that shit,” said the first guard while pointing at the old lady’s food stall.

All around the food stall everything was destroyed, all the other stalls were shattered, but that food stall Bayón had fought so hard to protect was intact.

“Everything’s a mess, but the albodisuabes are still here…”

“Lucky us, I haven’t had the chance to try her famous triton meatballs,” said the second guard while summoning a magic circle that made Bayón’s body levitate.

“Truth is, I love all her meatballs, but last time I had the pleasure of trying the triton ones, and they’re on another level, though they’re damn hard to get,” said the first guard, pushing Bayón’s levitating body along.

“Envious… and you don’t even share,” replied the second guard.

“Although… speaking of which, what was the carriage of the Lord of House Cle’PPier doing here? No one’s ever seen the face of that damned old man, if only we’d arrived earlier,” said the first guard, changing the subject.

“Even though he ended up like this, it’s strange… it seems like he spared his life,” said the second guard in a more serious tone. “I’ve heard many rumors about the Lord of House Cle’PPier, that bastard is ruthless.”

“The craziest rumor I heard about the old man was that he’s the longest-lived of his race. Can you imagine how many years he must have?” said the first guard while loading Bayón onto the patrol.

“Now more than ever they’ll want to know who our roasted friend here is,” replied the second guard, looking at Bayón.

The patrol started and began to drive away slowly, and behind them the first news drones were arriving.

No one had seen the brutality of the fight, only a handful of civilians caught in the chaos had witnessed the electric explosion and the final blow.

Only they knew the truth, and even if the security cameras caught something, House Cle’PPier would make sure to erase all evidence.

And the patrol vanished into the neon glow of the night city, swallowed by a labyrinth of lights in a city that had only just awakened.