Chapter 38: Spear Against Calamity
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Calhoun didn't wait for the dust to settle.
He left the Commander and the wounded adventurers behind the line he had drawn to shield them and walked into the open, his spear spinning lazily in one hand. Then he broke into a run, kicked off the cracked earth, and launched himself at the monster.
The Commander wanted to shout a retreat. He swallowed the order before it left his mouth. Where would they run? The creature had crossed a ruined forest in the blink of an eye, and it would not let a single one of them leave. He tried to push himself up and his legs buckled, still half-dead from the earlier fight. He could do nothing but watch.
The monster saw Calhoun coming, and its grin stretched wider, serrated teeth gleaming through the black flames. The Commander found the expression more unsettling than any roar.
Then the punches came.
They came so fast that the Commander swore the beast had grown four arms. He blinked hard, again and again, but the blurs of black muscle were real, fists hammering from every angle at once.
CLANG!
CLANG!
CLANG!
Calhoun met every one of them. His spear flashed in short, brutal arcs, turning each blow aside, and with every parry he knocked a fist off its line and searched for a gap. The monster answered by speeding up. Its punches sharpened into a storm, and Calhoun began spinning the spear in front of him so quickly that it became a humming disk of silver. Fist after fist struck it and glanced away. Sparks rained across the clearing, and each impact sent a tremor through the ground.
But the strain was showing. Calhoun's jaw was clenched, and sweat ran down his face. The Commander understood why the spear was holding. If it had been anything less than a mythic-grade weapon, it would have shattered in the first few seconds.
Then, for half a heartbeat, the monster stuttered.
It was only a flicker, a hitch in its rhythm. Perhaps the wounds from the earlier fight were still knitting together inside it. Calhoun had been waiting for exactly that. He twisted his spear and drove it down on the monster's right fist as it fell toward him.
BOOM!
The fist hit the ground, and the spear pinned it there. Calhoun planted his boots, and with a surge of monstrous strength he held the huge hand against the earth. The monster tried to heave it free and couldn't. Its glowing red eyes locked onto Calhoun's face, and for the first time the Commander saw something on that hideous face that looked like shock. How could a mere human match its strength?
Furious, the creature swung its left fist at Calhoun's head.
BOOM!
The sound rolled through the silence. Everyone stared. Just as before, Calhoun stood unharmed, and the monster's enormous fist hung motionless a hand's breadth from his face, stopped dead by something no one could see.
"How?" the Commander whispered.
The monster seemed to be asking the same thing.
And Calhoun, still holding the beast's pinned hand, smiled.
It was the opening he had been waiting for, and something inside him seemed to ignite. His speed jumped to a level the Commander couldn't follow. He ripped his spear free, and in an instant he was inside the monster's guard, between its arm and its chest, the weapon still spinning in his grip.
He took the spear in both hands, set his feet, and swung upward like a woodsman splitting a log in reverse.
The spear caught the monster under the chin. The sound was like a thunderclap, and the shockwave knocked loose dirt and leaves for a hundred paces. The beast was thrown into the sky and went climbing up toward the gray clouds, far above the treetops.
Calhoun was far from finished. He crouched, the earth cracked beneath him, and he shot upward after it, meeting the monster in the air at the top of its arc, just as it began to fall.
"Sovereign Spear!"
Wind began to howl around his spear and gathered into a tight, shrieking spiral at its tip. He pointed it at the falling monster.
"Piercing Butterfly Technique!"
He thrust.
The wind burst outward from the point and wrapped around the monster in a roaring tornado. It slammed the creature downward like a hammer on a nail, spinning it as it fell.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
The impact echoed through the forest and set birds screaming out of the trees. The monster hit the ground so hard that a fresh crater opened beneath it, and a great plume of dust and smoke rolled across the clearing.
Calhoun came down in a soft landing and rose from his crouch, spear pointed at the center of the crater and his stance unbroken.
"Incredible," the Commander said under his breath. *That was a direct hit from his full technique. There's no way it could have...*
ROOOOAAAAAARRRRRR!
The roar shook the forest, and the Commander's thought was cut off. The dust burst apart, and the creature stood in front of Calhoun, its whole body wrapped in crackling black lightning.
"It closed the gap in a blink," the Commander said, almost without a voice.
What came next could not be called a duel between a man and a beast. It was a clash between two monsters, and the Commander could no longer say which of them deserved the word. Calhoun and the creature hurled themselves at each other, attacking and blocking in a storm of steel and black lightning that tore the air apart.
The creature threw three heavy punches in a single heartbeat. Calhoun twisted, spun his spear, and blocked each one. He slipped under the next, then turned another aside with the shaft, dodging and parrying with a fighter's precision, as if he had been born in a ring.