“Not today!” A voice rang out over the clamor, and from the north, a flaming comet streaked across the sky, the size of a tank.
As it neared, Pyotr made out the sight of a monstrously large reptilian beast, with a plethora of limbs, and a body so hefty that it could have stood in place of a castle wall without flinching. It was Rax. Somehow, the beast had reached E Rank during his exploration of Earth’s dungeons. It seemed that beasts had it much easier in terms of ranking up, especially if they were sapient, as a counterpart to their disadvantages like lack of access to the Tower.
Rax opened his mouth, and an orb of incandescent light streaked out, the air rippling before it. Then it struck the beam of unstable, chaotic energy, and deflected it away from the city. While the original technique was undoubtedly more powerful, even a small angle of change caused it to land outside of the city, because of how high its origin point had been.
There was a shuddering boom as a wave of force turned ten miles of countryside into a wasteland of slag and drifts of corrupted crystal, killing everything that had once lived there in a matter of moments. Before the twin E Rankers could recover, Rax had reached the city, and the herpetopede barreled into the two men, slamming through buildings in his haste to get there.
A shockwave raced through the city streets as the monster used a skill, empowering his momentum to obscene levels. The attack contained every ounce of the power he had gathered by flying here, multiplied many times over. One moment the E Rank invaders were there, and the next, they had broken the sound barrier as they streaked into the distance, armor cracked and flesh torn. Rax came to a sudden halt a few dozen feet from Pyotr, all of his momentum gone. He turned towards the defenders, a smile on his reptilian features.
“It’s been a bit, hasn’t it?” He asked, a lot more confident than he had been before. The words came naturally to him, and anyone would have thought a human was speaking, had his true form not been so aggressively on display.
“You came just on time,” Pyotr breathed in relief. “How did you know we needed help?”
“I didn’t. It was traveling around the world, looking for E Rank dungeons, when I decided to check in on the faction. It seems like you lot need my help now.”
“That we do. How did you get so strong so fast?” Pyotr asked, resting on his ax for a moment.
“I’ll answer that, but the battle isn’t over yet,” Rax replied.
The monster leaped into the air, forming wings of glorious flame behind him. Then he flapped them once, the sky tearing before him. Pyotr raised his ax once more, and let loose a war cry, charging behind the E Rank herpetopede. Now they had a chance.
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Rax galloped across the sky, his many legs adding to his momentum as he coated them in conceptual power, working in sync with his wings. He zipped across the sky in the blink of an eye, landing before the E Rankers, who had already recovered, and were in the process of teleporting back to the city.
The monster met a coruscating beam of corruption with a claw slash that was so densely coated in flame that it looked like a tiny star. He slapped the attack to the side, sending it skipping across the ground, melting through the rocks and scree that covered the ground beyond the city limits.
Then he barreled into the Chaos mage, sending him flying. His twin, the man attuned to Order, let out a cry of anger and swept his fingers across the air, a blade of crystal forming out of the ether. It impacted Rax’s side, cracking scales and sending him reeling. More of his strange Dao energy condensed around his form, even as blood ran from his mouth. He let out a chuckle as he sent the momentum of the strike back into his muscles, returning the force of the blow. The monster had gained a fundamental mastery of the Dao of Momentum, which, coupled with his ungodly durability, allowed him to generate immense amounts of force whenever he was struck by something that would have killed a normal fighter.
His claw whistled through the air, cracking straight through the sound barrier with consummate ease. The Order mage raised one hand, a bulwark of crystal forming before it, but he was still tossed into the air, no match for the force. While Rax wasn’t able to do any lasting damage to them, at least for now, he was able to stall. Although he was nothing like Sam, who could have obliterated both of the mages in a matter of seconds, he was quite a bit stronger than the norm for his Rank.
Pyotr and the others caught up about a minute later, his ax hurtling through the air towards the reeling Chaos mage. He had no hopes of actually defeating the man, but he could help Rax. His attacks might have been little more than paper cuts to an E Ranker like these ones, but that still added up.
His ax slammed into the man’s robe, but instantly stopped, strange momentum vectors twisting the weapon around in the air, Chaos taking hold of the world around the mage. Pyotr found his ax beginning to turn into a host of various materials, ranging from butter to gold. He quickly pulled it away, barely managing to stop a permanent change. Then a fist of bone hammered into his torso, covered in patches of peeling flesh. Pyotr coughed up blood as he went hurtling back, tearing great furrows into the ground.
The other defenders piled in, trying to stall the E Rankers. Every time one of them came near to death, Rax barreled in, deflecting beams of energy with his durable scales and hide, gathering up momentum within himself. His body started to glow with a bright internal light, and with a roar, he released all of the stored energy. A cone of force erupted from his mouth, blasting through the E Rankers’ defences, shattering crystal and warping Chaos with equal measure. There was a boom as the two invaders were sent down into the ground, great tears in the earth opening up from the momentum. Rax reared up on his hind legs, and came crashing down, sending a pulse of power through the ground.
