Affinity:Chaos

Grey and Reynolds left the Inner Court shortly after, heading once more toward Lapis City.

Just as they had done when entering the Magical Beasts’ Forest, the bunny leader sent scouts ahead the moment they cleared the Inner Court’s range. The small creatures vanished into the trees in different directions, searching for any sign of trouble.

A few hours later they were only a few hundred kilometers from the forest’s edge. Grey suddenly slowed and narrowed his eyes.

“What?” Reynolds asked, already scanning the surrounding air.

“Killing intent,” Grey said. “Aimed at me.”

Reynolds flexed his right shoulder, lightning faintly crackling under his skin. “They attacked us on the way in and now they’re attacking on the way out. Aren’t they tired?”

Grey shook his head. “I don’t think you should join this fight.”

Reynolds froze mid-motion. “Peak Sovereigns?”

“Most likely. And dangerous.” Grey’s gaze swept the empty sky. “We need to be careful. Let’s—”

“Kikiki. Boy, you’re really as sharp as they say.”

The voice came from nowhere. Two black hands tore open the air, ripping a wide portal into existence. Two figures stepped through. Both were thin and fully covered in black robes, faces hidden behind dark cloth so that only their eyes showed. Their auras pressed outward at once—Peak Sovereign, and not ordinary ones. Each stood at the very limit of the Peak stage, close enough to the Half-God Plane that a single opportunity might push them across.

Grey’s chest tightened. Even before either man moved, the danger was clear.

“More dogs running errands for the Gnomes,” he said coldly.

“Gnomes, humans, what’s the difference?” the first man asked. He was the Space Elementalist who had opened the portal. “We’re all Elementalists climbing toward the top. Why should the method matter?”

“Exactly,” the second added, his voice just as grating. “Strength is the only thing that counts.”

Both sounded middle-aged beneath the cloth masks.

Grey said nothing more. He glanced at Reynolds and gave a short signal. Reynolds understood at once. In a fight of this level he would only become a liability. He flew back several hundred meters and settled in the air to watch, Void and the bunny leader joining him. None of them looked particularly worried, but none of them looked relaxed either.

The two men chuckled when they saw Reynolds withdraw and made no attempt to stop him. Once the distance was clear, both summoned their puppets. Two more Peak Sovereign auras exploded outward. One puppet radiated dense fire elemental energy; the other crackled with sharp lightning.

Grey’s eyes narrowed. They knew who he was, yet they still brought the puppets out. He released his mental attack without hesitation. As expected, nothing happened. The links between the men and their puppets remained intact.

Both men laughed.

“Immune to your little trick,” the Space Elementalist said. “I hope you have more than that. It would be disappointing if the famous Grey Dawson only had one card to play.”

Grey did not answer. The pressure rolling off the four Peak Sovereign auras was already heavy. For a few seconds both sides simply watched each other. Then everyone moved at once.

The lightning puppet vanished in a streak of white-blue light and reappeared at Grey’s left, spear already thrusting toward his ribs. At the same time the fire puppet raised both hands and released a wide wave of compressed flames that sealed the space on his right. The two men themselves did not stay idle. The pure Darkness Elementalist flicked his fingers, and black chains shot up from the empty air, trying to coil around Grey’s limbs. The Space Elementalist tore open a second, smaller portal directly behind Grey and thrust a darkness-coated blade through it.

Grey’s body flickered.

He used a short spatial hop to slip the lightning spear by a hair’s breadth, then twisted and met the darkness blade with a hastily formed earth wall. The blade punched halfway through the wall before Grey shoved the entire construct sideways, forcing the portal to close. The fire wave arrived an instant later. Grey crossed both arms and wrapped them in dense water elemental energy, letting the flames slam into him and hiss away in a burst of steam. The impact still drove him backward several meters.

“He’s fast,” Reynolds muttered from the distance.

“He’s also already on the defensive,” Void replied, tail flicking. “Four Peak Sovereign auras at once is ugly.”

The bunny leader only watched in silence, ears sharp.

The two men pressed harder. The Space Elementalist opened portals in rapid succession, above, below, to the sides, each one spitting out darkness spears or sudden grasping hands. The Darkness Elementalist layered the attacks with more chains and corrosive black mist that ate at Grey’s protective essence. Meanwhile the puppets coordinated without needing orders. The lightning puppet kept forcing Grey to move with short, vicious thrusts, while the fire puppet shaped the battlefield with wide walls of flame that limited his escape routes.

Grey’s expression stayed cold, but the strain was already visible. He answered with multi-element bursts, lightning to match the puppet’s speed, earth spikes to disrupt the chains, wind blades to cut the mist, but every exchange left him with less room than before. A darkness chain managed to graze his left ankle and left a burning, numbing sensation that slowed him for half a breath. In that half-breath the lightning puppet closed in again. Grey blocked the spear with a reinforced forearm, yet the force still sent a jolt up his arm and forced him to give ground.

He tried to create distance with a longer spatial jump. The Space Elementalist seemed to anticipate it. A portal opened at the exact exit point Grey had chosen, and a darkness palm slammed into his shoulder the moment he reappeared. Grey spun with the blow, coughing once, and answered by driving a fusion of fire and lightning straight back through the same portal. The Space Elementalist sealed it just in time, but the delayed explosion still forced him to lean away.

“Not bad,” the Darkness Elementalist called, voice mocking. “You’re better than the reports suggested. Still not enough.”

The fire puppet roared and expanded, turning into a spinning pillar of white-hot flame that crashed down toward Grey from above. At the same moment the lightning puppet split into three afterimages, each thrusting from a different angle. Black chains rose again from every direction, sealing the remaining gaps.

Grey’s eyes sharpened. He dropped straight down, using a burst of gravitational force to accelerate, and opened a spatial corridor at his feet. He vanished into it an instant before the pillar of fire hit, reappearing fifty meters away with smoke trailing from his clothes. A thin cut ran across his upper arm where one of the lightning afterimages had still managed to graze him.

Reynolds frowned. “They’re not giving him any clean openings.”

“They’re not supposed to,” Void said. “Those two are used to hunting together. Look at how the puppets cover the men’s blind spots.”

The bunny leader’s voice was quiet. “The Space one is the real problem. He keeps cutting off Grey’s exits.”

Grey clearly understood the same thing. He stopped trying to create large distances and instead stayed in mid-range, where his physical strength and multi-element control could still matter. Blue flames wrapped his fists. Lightning coiled around his legs. He shot forward again, this time aiming directly at the Darkness Elementalist. The man responded by wrapping himself in layers of black armor and summoning a wall of writhing darkness. Grey smashed through the first layer with a space-enhanced punch, then the second with a point-blank lightning blast, but the third layer held long enough for the fire puppet to intercept. A flaming fist collided with Grey’s guard and blasted him sideways.

Before he could recover, the lightning puppet was already there. Spear tips flashed. Grey blocked two, slipped the third with a short spatial shift, and took a shallow cut across the ribs from the fourth. Blood beaded along the wound. He clicked his tongue and forced the injury shut with a thread of light elemental energy, but the delay cost him. Fresh darkness chains snapped around his right wrist and left knee, locking for a full second before he shattered them.

In that second both men and both puppets struck together.

A storm of fire, lightning, darkness spears, and spatial tears converged on his position. Grey’s figure disappeared inside the overlapping attacks. For a moment only residual explosions and black smoke could be seen.

Reynolds’s expression tightened.

Then a figure shot out of the smoke on the far side, clothes torn, a line of blood running from the corner of his mouth. Grey wiped it away with the back of his hand and kept his eyes locked on the four opponents. His breathing was heavier than before. The pressure had not lessened at all.

The Space Elementalist tilted his head. “Still standing. Good. I was afraid this would end too quickly.”

The Darkness Elementalist flexed his fingers, more black mist curling around them. “Don’t give him time to breathe.”

The puppets moved again without needing further instruction. Fire and lightning surged once more. Portals began opening in a tightening circle around Grey.

From a safe distance, Void’s voice drifted over the noise of the battlefield, dry and slightly annoyed.

“He’s actually struggling.”

Reynolds did not look away from the fight. “Yeah. This time they came prepared.”

Grey lowered his stance, blue flames and lightning rising around him again as the next wave of attacks closed in. The fight was far from over.