Fight Against Evil

A sonic boom rips through the garden. Quick as a bullet shot from a sling, a tremendous force slams into the air only inches from Renard’s head. His ears pop — the shockwave tousles his hair — and in that long, frozen second, there is the snake, seething mindless as a ghoul. It has shot across the yard with the force of a firework, its palm extended to strike, that would have mashed Renard’s skull, through his armour, instantly into pulp.

Had the blow hit, that is.

The moment passes. Arsene skims forward by yards then floats gently down to land on the grass, in defiance of his own inertia, and plainly wracked with confusion.

That had not been a warning strike or an intentional miss. Renard adjusts his footing and his grip on Kingslayer. No window to counterstrike that. Arsene badly overshot out of range.

Black and purple lightning crackles out of the cut on the tree. The gash is like a groaning maw on the bark, and though it may only be a ghost of Renard’s mind, there, trapped in the whorls of the wood, is a face screaming in agony.

Sap gushes out of the wound as torrentially as the early spring rains. Its colour is not red or clear, as Renard somehow expected it to be, but black and thick as burbling pitch. The perverting reversals of Kingslayer have affected even the body of God. A complex sentiment squirms in Renard of simultaneous pride and incredible shame, for this is a wound for which he would be severely judged — Arsene seeing sheds all confusion, and murderous again shoots for Renard.

And again, misses by inches. The tailwind of Arsene’s passage batters like a cyclone, so inhumanly fast is his velocity, indeed as quick as a snake. But Renard catches his footing and smoothly casts off the pressure as if landing a step in a waltz — while Arsene stumbles with confusion to catch himself, again.

And surges in, again.

And misses, again. Again and again and again, batterings of wind strike Renard, but by minuscule adjustments, paper-thin parallels, they do not become anything worse. Sweat beads on Renard’s forehead. The batterings could make him go deaf. Then it comes, in one single instant, the opening to strike.

Renard grabs Arsene’s departing bandanna, steadies his aim quicker than thinking—

“Auh," gasps Arsene.

—and plunges Kingslayer into its back.

There is strangely little texture to the innards of this beast. It is like he has punctured an inflated burlap doll. The blade smoothly crests out of the beast’s spine as Renard releases his hold, and Arsene’s original momentum carries him again to a skimmed stop. Half-kneeling, he peers over his shoulder, at the injury on his own back — a brilliant cloud of glittering gold and pearl and sapphire and emerald nebulae seep out of the wound like a cirrus sweeping over the sky, and bloom into a cumulus the same way that blood blooms in water, wafting out into the air.

That would be a fatal injury on a human. Arsene is plainly more durable than that. Frankly, the creature does not even look hurt, just rattled.

All the same, adrenaline rushes into Renard’s head sweeter than treacle. He licks his lips. A furious grin splits his face. Sure as anything, the beast can bleed.

Camille and his pet, before Kingslayer, both of these liars do bleed—!

Arsene bristles. His pupils constrict. He jumps magnificently into the sky to close the gap and instead brawl Renard, seeing that his approach as yet has not worked, but this approach works even worse. He lands — and Renard lands, one slash across the snake’s gut, one across his face, and with a final twirl, a heavy blow to the flank that knocks Arsene to the ground, bleeding worse.

“How are you hitting me!" Arsene screams.

Renard answers. “You’re as practised as dirt."

It is that simple.

Arsene’s a terrible fighter.

His strikes are fast and his body is strong, far more than any human. But exactly because of these natural advantages, he has not honed even a pebble’s worth of technique. Every one of his attacks is as readable as a child’s first picture book. In most cases, the sheer difference in power between him and a human would render Arsene’s incompetence irrelevant. But present someone too skilled, and Arsene cannot adapt, or even notice how they are adapting.

Fitting. It is not disappointing, or underwhelming, quite, since Renard indeed is sweating, but more than anything it is bitterly fitting. A creature that kills with its poison is useless once cornered into a real fight…

It is hardly believable that the world was ruined by this.

Grimacing with anger, Arsene pushes himself off the dirt. The cuts are so severe that the flow of nebulae are cloaking his form, and his mud-stained, grass-stained limbs for the first time struggle to support him. An arm spasms — its body is crumbling. Renard adjusts Kingslayer. Less so like a flash, and more like a cart rolling downhill, when the beast surges in this time it pauses at the end of its vector to hook around Renard’s back. It is the first inkling of strategy the beast has suggested, but it is telegraphed, the movement is ungainly, injuries slow its pace, and the blink-quick pause of its readjustment is still an opening so effortless to seize for Renard that it is more like an invitation.

As soon as Arsene charges in, Kingslayer is already there. He sticks himself through the gut, like a chunk of pork jumping on to a skewer.

With a smooth flick of the arm, Renard casts off the beast to the ground, the blade simultaneously curving a deep slice through its belly.

“Hkguh," Arsene chokes as it impacts the grass.

Blooms of nebulae rise and spread as unceasingly as dark smoke from a wildfire. The volume of the brilliant, dark paint smearing over the sky must be greater than the depth of the creature’s whole form.

It strains to pick itself up — but its arms give. The thing’s body is as brutalised as a paper doll, left with a child with scissors.

“No way," Arsene mutters. Renard’s shadow, and the shadow of Kingslayer, fall over the creature. Its shout is that craven disbelief and panic of so-thought gods: “No way!"

Way, beast.

Shulk.

“I am Renard Cox."

Kingslayer sheaths itself in the creature’s neck. Its back arches, its hands scrabble for air, but it is pinned to the dirt.

“You were a waste of an adversary."

A curl of the blade — and off pops the head. It gruesomely rolls like an egg over the grass, locked forever in a mask of utter astonishment, before the curtain of bleeding stars and space obscures the grisly sight.

As if still alive, its arms reach frantically upwards in search of that head, but these limbs too seize and collapse. Between the flowing ribbons of the black fog, its body soon slumps still.

So it is done.

The beast is dead.

Sweat drips off Renard’s chin and his nose, but even then, he is not that exerted.

Poignant thrills of victory usually come to him in these sacred moments after a sincere battle. This time, as the coiling blooms of nebulae dissipate into the air, and that tattered body is revealed bare on the ground, pathetic as a rag, no such triumphant surge comes. What lingers is merely that feeling of dissatisfaction, and frustration, that even with the foremost enemy of mankind dead, Renard still needs to do more.

He squints through his sweat, silent as a cliff.

If combat is a conversation, and blades are Renard’s first tongue, then this was the most worthless opponent he’s ever had. Not a single spark of his passion was acknowledged, much less reciprocated. But even worse, the serpent’s incompetence forbade it from cultivating such pathos of its own, that it could stand for, fight for, and say with a chest full of pride, ‘this my belief, for which I will challenge you’. Even were it a wicked belief, it would be something to grasp and rebuke. Instead the sheer passionlessness, and cluelessness, and… emptiness underlaying every twitch of that creature have evoked nothing in Renard but disgust.

There is nothing lovely about casting one’s convictions against a brick wall.

If there was something to prove, a truth, a principle, anything, then it was not and would never be conceded to by Arsene.

Renard grunts and hoists Kingslayer to shred the corpse more, as if pointless butchery will sate this unfulfilled itch. Fifty mortifying realisations slam into Renard the second the tip kisses the creature—Renard’s eyes bulge—If Arsene is dead they have no free ride back to the surface! And the tree is still… in a state, and he may have just forced circumstances that will waste Fidel’s wish, and, perhaps they will find some solution inside the Demiurge’s house—but Lord’s graces, why did Renard always have to be such a scatterbrained idio—

An incredible impact slams the pit of Renard’s back, ferocious as a log shot from a carriage.

The force of it sends him somersaulting into the air; his back crashes flat against a wall. Winded, he wheezes a gasp.

“Sire!" Fidel shrieks somewhere afar.

The serpent flashes in front of him. Kingslayer flashes up to defend — too slow. Fists as heavy as rocks rain blows upon his cheeks, his brow, his jaw, like a hailstorm, all the bones in his face shrieking and cracking under the assault — at the end of this it is unlikely he would even look like himself anymore. Arsene grabs him by the shoulders and shoots down to the earth.

Boom.

The force of a hammer drop lands wholly in Renard’s shoulders. Even as his back rattles in an earthquake of pain, he cannot focus upon it, too busy gasping at a sharp jab to the gut from the knee of the creature now straddled atop him. Arsene — Arsene!

As the creature winds up a slow ferocious punch to cave in Renard’s forehead, Renard regains his wits just enough to jab Kingslayer up — into the beast’s breastbone — and skewer the creature’s angle minutely. The deadly punch goes wide. Arsene hisses in fury and grabs Renard’s neck to headbutt him — squirming, Renard wrestles his arm over Arsene’s neck instead and with great effort rolls himself on top, the creature pinned and writhing on its belly below him.

Renard punches the back of its head. His knuckles crack against its thick skull. These are not good quarters for Kingslayer. But breaking his hand against this thing is hardly intelligent either—he adjusts his grip on his sword—and falls inches to the ground as the mass below him vanishes for Arsene has blinked away. He turns, lunges. Yes, Arsene is behind him, but stands out of range of the strike.

Arsene raises his hand — Renard shoots to the sky, slams against a wall — Arsene lowers his hand — Renard shoots to the ground, crushed against the earth — and Arsene plunges his hand out straight. Renard shoots backwards and backwards and backwards through air, parallel to the ground and yet endlessly falling as if he has stumbled off the edge of a canyon.

He slams against a wall, with exactly the force as if he had fallen down into a canyon.

But there is no time to breathe. Arsene lunges forward, as he did originally, to swoop upon him before he can recover. Even after that battering, Renard is still greater than such a crude technique. He again catches Arsene on the tip of his blade, sticks him, keeps him just an arm out of range.

Arsene hisses in frustration, starry darkness trailing out of its back. Switching tracks, he grabs Renard’s arm as if to coil around it, mouth open wide to bite down. Two wicked, curved fangs in its maw catch the moonlight.

Renard frantically bashes his arm against the earth and squeezes his free hand around the creature’s maw. With its head wrenched back, it cannot bite, and the drips of oily black venom trail harmlessly out the corner of its mouth. It sneers, it cringes, it struggles, once again pinned without knowing how beneath Renard’s great muscles. Wild kicks buck at the air from beneath him. The monster rips away plates of his armour, for that’s all it can reach.

The tenor of this melee has changed. These are not the stupid unconsidered reflexes of the first bout. It looks dirtier, but it is thinking. Renard’s previous victory has wounded the creature’s pride, and now it is fighting for that.

Good. But it won’t be enough.

Renard wrenches up the beast and tosses it to the ground. It blinks onto its feet to catch itself, then in a breathtaking display of failure to adapt, blinks behind Renard once again. More than wise to this manoeuvre, Renard is already there with Kingslayer’s wicked point poised — and this time, so is Fidel.

Fidel stands ready behind the beast and yanks hard on its jacket. Unprepared for an attack from this angle, it slips and topples like a tree.

“Not fair."

No sooner does it voice these words than does Kingslayer sink into its breast. It seizes, clouds of night darkness boiling out of its mouth like the froth of a whirlpool, seeping too out of its torso, and finally effusing in a great, fat glut when one smooth chop severs its body in twain.

Its eyes roll back. In the smoke, the body falls familiarly limp, and dead.

The taste of iron wells in Renard’s mouth. He wipes his jaw; a bloody smudge comes off the brutalised flesh. Sweat and blood mix together in rivulets coursing down his body, every span of bone and muscle in him hurt and throbbing. Dented pieces of armour dig uncomfortably into his flesh, threatening circulation. He is in rough shape. He does not doubt his fundamental superiority as a fighter, but the beast did get a drop on him.

There are now two ruined corpses of Arsene strewn across the yard, each definitely dead. Renard adjusts Kingslayer in ready position. There is some mechanism by which the creature can return immediately into fighting shape after being killed. This is not just a challenge of strength or strategy now. It is an endurance battle, which will proceed until the creature loses its spirit, or until the crux behind this tenacity is discovered and stopped.

Or, until Renard is killed.

Renard breathes heavy. Fidel, check the house. There may be a clue there, and if worst comes, use the wish — so Renard thinks to order, when a voice cuts into his head.

‘Fine, then.’ It is the serpent’s voice, at a much higher fidelity than its usual mild whispers. It is as clear and striking as pristine water cascading down a fall.

Renard tightens his grip on Kingslayer. Holds a breath, braces for it to appear.

‘He’s not watching. He’s not even here,’ Chills rattle down Renard’s spine from the dripping, and growing, spite. ‘He won’t care… it won’t matter to him if I let myself be ugly.’

The environment shifts with the same subtle stickiness as when passing through Nix’s portals. Though the garden and house and the tree and the lake all remain present, the sky widens, and the earth widens, as if it were all projected on the inside of a ball, that had widened. Grids of white squares on gray flicker in and out over the expanded space. It becomes suddenly hard to judge distance; things seem simultaneously far and near; the garden is simultaneously humble and resplendent; the cottage is also a castle; the tree in the yard is both a shrieking bush and a golden behemoth whose boughs stretch too high for Renard to ponder.

And Renard’s gut drops in dread, as he cranes his head back.

For then, does the serpent appear.