Chapter 8: Hunter Confrontation 2
The oak groaned faintly under the man crouched in its upper branches, his shoulder-length blonde hair catching moonlight through gaps in the canopy. Beside him, two women kept just as still, all three watching the clearing below with the particular stillness of people who understand they are witnessing something that will require a formal report nobody will believe.
He had been ready to swear he was hallucinating.
Even granting that the figure below them was truly Ares von Loweswater, the King of Destruction, the name history used to frighten children into behaving, the man was operating at only Rank 5. A coordinated squad spanning Rank 6 down to Rank 4 should have buried him inside a minute. Instead, three Rank 6s and a Rank 5 already lay dead in the dirt, and the survivors were being forced onto the defensive by someone who looked, if anything, faintly bored doing it.
The blonde man swallowed. "This isn't possible."
Beside him, a sharp-eyed brunette with a scar running along her left cheek kept her voice down to almost nothing. "Captain. Should we intervene?"
"Not yet." His conviction didn't match the words leaving his mouth. "Orders were clear. Observe first. Only engage if the primary team fails."
The youngest of the three, pale, her hands trembling faintly against the branch she gripped, whispered, "He's supposed to be at thirteen percent. That's what the assessment said."
Nobody answered her.
Because the assessment was starting to look like something written by people who had never seen him move.
Down in the clearing, Ares rolled one shoulder, feeling the last of his cracked ribs finish knitting themselves shut under a slow crawl of crimson energy. The light flickered along his skin before settling into a low, contained hum, the kind of glow you'd miss if you weren't looking directly at him.
The remaining hunters had stopped charging blindly. They spread out now, building angles, trying to buy themselves options they hadn't bothered securing earlier.
Smart. Too late for it to matter, but smart.
"Four left who can still move properly," Ares said, mostly to himself. "One Rank 6. Three Rank 5s. The Rank 4s are hanging back near the treeline, either cowards or just waiting for an opening that isn't coming. Doesn't matter either way."
The man with the sledgehammer, the Forgery user, planted his feet and hauled the weapon back up, black energy pulsing thick along its head. Eight feet of forged iron looked almost comical in the hands of someone barely five feet eight, right up until you accounted for the density pouring into it. One clean hit from that thing would have turned an average Rank 5 into paste on the forest floor.
"You talk too much for a dead man," the hammer wielder growled, half fury, half the first honest fear he'd let himself feel all night.
Ares' mouth curved, thin and unimpressed. "And you swing too slow for someone who's still breathing."
The Rank 6 came in with a full-body roar, the hammer arcing down in a strike meant to end the fight in one motion. The air itself seemed to fold around the weapon's path.
Ares didn't dodge.
He caught the hammer's head with one open palm.
The ground beneath his feet cratered outward in a wide ring, stone and packed earth bursting into the air in a choking cloud, and his arm did not move a single centimeter. The force traveled up through bone and reinforcement and had nowhere left to go.
The Rank 6's eyes went wide. "What—"
Ares' fingers closed around the hammer head. Crimson light ran up his forearm, sharp and exact.
Ancient Art, Destruction. Technique, Axis.
A cut passed clean through the haft, invisible and total, as though the metal had never once been solid to begin with. The upper half of the weapon dissolved into drifting black particles that scattered and faded before they hit the ground. The Rank 6 staggered forward, suddenly off balance for the first time since the fight had started.
Ares closed the distance before the man could recover his footing. A reinforced knee caught him square in the sternum, folding him with a wet crunch that carried through the clearing. Before he could hit the dirt, an open palm caught the side of his neck. One sharp crack, and he dropped like something with the strings cut clean.
Three Rank 5s remained in the immediate fight.
This time they came together, no hesitation left in any of them, no wasted motion, angles chosen with real coordination for once. Purple, green, and silver signatures flared as they closed from three separate directions at once, boots tearing through undergrowth.
Ares breathed out once through his nose. "Better."
He moved.
Not with overwhelming speed; he simply didn't have the reserves left for that, but with the kind of economy that only comes from three centuries of doing this exact thing to people who thought they had a chance. Every step measured before it landed. Every counter already decided before the technique in front of him had finished forming in the air.
The purple signature Rank 5 threw a reinforced punch aimed at his throat, the fist compressing the air around it into a visible ripple. Ares slipped half a step past it, felt the knuckles graze his collar, caught the man's wrist mid-recovery, and twisted until bone cracked audibly. Using the borrowed momentum, he threw the man directly into the swirling green vortex meant for his own back. The two collided hard. The vortex detonated on impact, sending both bodies tumbling away in a tangle of limbs and scattered light.
The silver signature user tried to bind him from behind, coiled energy shooting forward with the speed of something alive, seeking to wrap and restrict.
Ares didn't turn around.
Ancient Art, Destruction. Technique, Boom.
A precise, point-blank blast launched the man backward into a tree trunk hard enough to knock every ounce of fight out of him in one instant. He slumped against the bark, groaned once, and went still.
Ares paused. Listened. No breathing followed.
He sighed, quietly disappointed, the way someone sighs over a broken tool rather than a death. "Weaker than I expected."
He turned toward the last two. Both bloodied now, one favoring a dislocated shoulder, the other spitting a mouthful of blood from a split lip, green energy still guttering unsteady around his knuckles.
"You were ordered to bring me in dead or alive," Ares said, almost gentle about it. "I'm offering you a chance to leave alive. Take it while it's still on the table."
Neither man retreated. Pride, or fear of what failing this mission would cost them personally, kept their boots rooted in the churned dirt.
"Pride, then." Ares raised a hand, crimson light gathering dense enough in his palm to visibly bend the air around it.
Before either of them could fully commit to whatever they had left in reserve, a voice cut through the clearing from the treeline, calm, unhurried, and carrying enough weight that both surviving hunters froze mid-breath.
"That's enough."
Ares stilled mid-motion. The light in his palm dimmed but refused to fully disperse. His eyes tracked toward the source of the voice with the same clinical patience he'd been reading the whole fight with.
A figure stepped out from between the trees, and the entire shape of the night changed the moment his boots touched open ground.