The captain rushed to Hirrus, obviously enraged by what had happened. After dealing with the Gley, his charge was utterly heedless of further obstacles. He just kicked his way through all the smouldering debris. Even when his passage caused the flames to flare up around him, he only had eyes for Hirrus.

Slit-pupiled, reptilian eyes.

And Hirrus was just fine with that.

The bloodlust in his heart sang for the fight to come.

He knew he had a dozen smarter moves. His foe was near a match for him even before the Merciless transformation. A fighter less thrilled by the prospect of combat might have taken advantage of his foe’s single-mindedness, and led him through the flaming town to let the fires chip away at him. A fighter more concerned with assured victory might have turned to his own Merciless Transformation before the fight was met.

But Hirrus wanted to fight. His blood was pounding in his ears, and he wanted to shed it. Memories of his time as a lawless mercenary were bubbling in the back of his mind. Deep down, beneath the layers of calm and peace that Julissa’s warmth had bundled around him, there was still the angry young man who only felt alive in the thrill of battle.

He tried not to think about what it meant that the more violent part of him was starting to take on a life of its own.

He stood his ground.

The armored man’s mace came down in a brutal overhead swing. Hirrus wanted to meet it with a block, but he knew that the Merciless form would make him regret it. He took a quick step aside, and found that it was the right move. When the mace hit the street a one foot diameter chunk of the Hari Path’s stone shattered to gravel. If Hirrus had tried to stand against it, the force would have smashed through any defense he could muster.

The power devoted to the blow left the captain wide open.

Hirrus’ hooked blade whipped back and forth in a pair of strikes. They both did just over three thousand damage - reduced by the man’s enhanced Merciless Form defenses, but increased dramatically by his fully-stacked Crushing Blade buff - and one of them activated a double strike, doing another two thousand damage immediately after the first impact.

The mace came up again in a vicious diagonal sweep, and instead of smashing his axe down on the man’s shoulder, Hirrus interposed it in the mace’s path to parry the blow. The impact sent a reverberating shudder up his arm to his shoulder, but he still managed to redirect the line of the attack up and away from his body. He slashed his hooked blade across the man’s forearm, dealing another three thousand damage and forcing the scaled monstrosity to back off with a hiss of pain.

The armored figure gave an aggravated snarl, but didn’t immediately charge in again. Hirrus had won that phrase of the fight handily because the man was leaning on raw strength and letting rage drive him. He had to calm down. Calming down took time. Hirrus didn’t need to win quickly and decisively. He wasn’t the one with his precious Merciless Transformation ticking away.

When the armored man came in again, it was calm and calculated. The mace flashed in with more speed than power this time. Hirrus was able to deflect it with his sword instead of needing the extra weight of the axe, but as soon as the line of the attack was disrupted, the mace swung around to attack again. This time Hirrus caught the flanged head of the weapon on the side of his icy greataxe, stopping it cold instead of deflecting. The armored figure stepped to the left, giving the weapon a whirl before sweeping it at Hirrus’s head. An ambitious attack. Hirrus simply stepped back and ducked down to let the weapon catch only air.

Hirrus stepped back in and his hooked sword swept left-to-right, and the armored man stepped back, letting it slice air with the first cut. The second attack was both sword and axe, moving in opposite directions like the blades of a pair of shears. The man stepped back from that as well, and while he prepared another attack of his own, Hirrus’ hooked sword lanced forward, the wide chisel tip of the weapon looking to jab into an armored joint. The captain abandoned his attack to use the haft of his mace to bat the attack aside.

Skill for skill, they were relatively well-matched. When they focused on pure strength of arms, unclouded by emotion and with no Arcana, this fight could go on for hours. Possibly all day.

The armored man backed off after their brief exchange, and started to circle around Hirrus. Hirrus followed suit for a moment before he realized what was happening. The Merciless form’s timer was a bait. The stats of the Merciless form were superfluous if neither could land a strike. Why then was he content to back off and circle? Why hadn’t he chosen to trade blows with Hirrus, accepting damage in exchange for dealing out a crushing blow in return?

Once the captain had regained his composure, he’d elected to stall the fight out. He’d sensed Hirrus’s lack of urgency and had decided to turn it against him. Reframing the fight as a matter of hours instead of minutes had turned the clock around. The armored man didn’t need to race against his Merciless form’s duration. Hirrus needed to race against Rumi’s continued work.

“I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” Hirrus said, breaking the silence between them.

“It doesn’t have to be, brother,” the monstrous form of the armored man snarled, his voice guttural and low from the transformation. “You don’t have to fight us. You can join us.”

“That’s not what I mean. I was starting to enjoy myself. I wish I had the time to test myself against you properly. Instead, it must come to this.”

Hirrus started with Going Ape. The captain rushed forward to interrupt him preparing his new buff suite, but he left himself wide open by doing so. Hiden Sokyaku sent Hirrus’s foot into the man’s gut, sending him staggering back with another four thousand damage. It was just enough space to cast Xhrun’s Balance before the armored man could close the distance.

“I wanted to match strength against strength,” Hirrus said, ducking under the next sweep of the giant mace. “But you’ve forced my hand. I can’t allow you to stall me any further.”

The only response from the monstrous figure attacking him was a snarl of rage. Hirrus raised a hand and flung purple pellets of energy at the man. The attack was quick, but heavily telegraphed, and the armored figure nearly threw himself to the ground to avoid them. The mace smashed into Hirrus’s hip for three thousand damage. It was an impressive hit - Hirrus had only done so much at a blow with the help of a 30% damage buff from Crushing Blade. He immediately used High Jump to launch himself into the air, out of reach of the armored man.

The time spent in the air gave Hirrus an opening to prepare for when he came back down. Logarius Shroud and Eyes On Me enhanced his magical abilities further. Looking down, he could plainly see the captain gauging where Hirrus would fall, moving into position to catch him with another attack. Hirrus countered the strategy handily with Oil Sear, flinging a ball of flaming pitch to the ground where he was going to land. As his own Arcana, the flames and oil wouldn’t harm Hirrus, but the armored man would take considerable damage and a painful complement of debuffs for stepping into it.

Heedless, the man ran into the flames, taking three thousand damage instantly. Despite Hirrus’s best attempts, he managed to adjust for the reduced attack speed, and when Hirrus touched the ground there was a sweep of a giant mace ready to meet him. Hirrus caught the attack on his weapons, crossing them to catch the blow with both arms, but the impact was far too heavy for him to properly block. His BUR stat - governing his physical strength - had been swapped with his rather anemic ATT stat. The swap gave him tremendous magical power, but his arms were too weak to fend off the heavy blow. It rattled his good, pushing through the block and delivering a critical hit to him - nearly four thousand damage. A significant loss.

The blow sent Hirrus staggering out of the flames, letting the armored man chase him onto safer ground. Fortunately, Hirrus was more than ready for that. Mortal Ray blasted the man for an impressive nine thousand damage, but more than that, the knockback sent him back into the Oil Sear, burning him for another two thousand damage.

All the while, Hirrus’s Cosmic Barrette was slowly recovering his health. He’d almost forgotten about it while revelling in melee combat, but the healing from it only came when he struck with an Arcana. Now, as he bled away the armored man’s health, he was restoring his own.

This fight was over. Victory was assured. All that was left was how long it would take.

Hirrus used Resplendent Orb to smash another four thousand five hundred damage into the man as he staggered from the flames. He was falling into the pattern now, ramping up his magical stats to prepare for a devastating finisher. He paused only long enough to use TK Bullets to push the captain away when he lunged again. The forming desperation was making him sloppy, and he failed to avoid the hail of purple pellets this time. He suffered six thousand damage under them, and was sent staggering back by the knockback effect.

The man stopped, and started to ready an Arcana, a silvery light settling over his scaled hide. Hirrus didn’t know what it was going to do, but if Hirrus were in his position, he would employ a defensive measure against what was to come. Rather than continue into Ioun Flechette, Hirrus sidetracked himself to cast Trembling. The earth shook with the casting, and while it did a surprisingly low one thousand damage, the glowing white shield was stripped away by the dispel effect.

“Coward,” the armored man spat. Despite all of his rage, he recognized his own impotence now. Even cornered like a rat, he was unequipped to fight back now.

Hirrus wondered for just a moment at how easy it was to end the fight once he turned to Arcana. He briefly considered that it might be a trick. But that wasn’t the case at all. Arcana had damaged him more severely for a reason. The man had come to the fight accompanied by a Gley. This had been part of his strategy. He matched Hirrus pound-for-pound in physical stats because he’d neglected his own magical defenses. A low GLE meant that his only defense was that Arcana. And he’d just wiped it away with minimal effort.

“The cowardly move was to rise to your challenge; to fall into your trap,” Hirrus said. He let a purple dart of energy loose from his fingers, and Ioun Flechette bludged the scaled man across the snout before returning to Hirrus. “No, not cowardly. Selfish. I wanted to fight you. I wanted it so bad I could taste it. As much as I would enjoy the challenge, I can’t do so in good conscience.”

“Spare me your speech,” the man said. He struggled for a moment to take off his helmet around his reptilian snout, revealing his scaled head. “Take your easy victory, if you want it so badly.”

“Being a hero does not always mean taking the path of most resistance,” Hirrus said. He raised his hand and called his final Arcana to it, preparing Andrew’s Z-Cutter. The Ioun Flechette leaped to join and empower the ability. “I set aside my pride, so that I can save the lives of others.”

The final blow was a devastating one. With all his power mustered and maximized, it cut the man cleanly in half.

Twenty-eight thousand damage at a single stroke.