Chapter 1195: Spirit of Kingslayer

War Tiger slowly opened his eyes.

Spirit of Kingslayer opened its eyes.,

War Tiger gripped the Dragonslaying Giantsword with both hands.

Spirit of Kingslayer gripped the Kingslaying Giantsword with both hands.

War Tiger raised his blade high above his head.

Spirit of Kingslayer raised its blade high above its head.

War Tiger’s weapon melted into a beam of gray energy.

Spirit of Kingslayer’s weapon melted into a line of deep gray, shooting toward heaven like the folding line of the book that was the night sky.

“Wrath of Ten Thousand Bones!”

A line drew pedantically across the vertical line, quickly widening into a gaping wound, from which waves of countless skeletons poured out.

Like another horizon in the sky, the energy waves roared and howled as they crashed toward the rotating horn rising from the ground. The tremendous blade aura collided with the horn, leaving a cross-shaped scar on the night’s black veil.

The vertical and horizontal “wounds” pushed in opposite directions, wobbling in place as the battle of power entered a gridlock. Turbulent energy splattered like wild currents. The entire world flickered between dark brown and grey as the land continued to crumble, sending more shards of stone toward the sky.

While the two powers fought for dominance, War Tiger and Wrath moved.

War Tiger’s stomp crushed the giant boulder beneath his feet. He streaked toward Wrath like a gray shooting star with the Spirit of Kingslayer shrouding him. Wrath, in the form of a minotaur, charged toward him like a brown meteorite.

The father and son began another round of fighting. Both used the floating stones as springboards to clash, collide, and give chase like two stars in a binary system, trying to devour each other while exhausting themselves.

The same was happening to the cross-shaped wound in the night sky. The two powers exhausted themselves to cut the other.

A minute crawled by.

The binary stars continued to clash, but at a slower speed and lower frequency.

The brown horn and the gray blade aura failed to cut each other, either. Instead, they decayed and dimmed, losing to their own entropy. The giant tower gradually crumbled. The blade aura faded. The littering of stones began to fall.

The match with no spectators was entering its conclusion.

War Tiger was covered in bleeding holes, his left arm broken and his right calf gone. His greatsword was nowhere to be seen. He would’ve crumbled already if not for the Spirit of Kingslayer possessing him.

Wrath didn’t fare any better. Long, deep gash covered its body, impossible to mend. Its rotating horn had stopped spinning, broken in half.

With a final clash, the two stars plummeted to the ground in an intertwining swirl, leaving a blinding energy trail.

Boom!

The father and son fell into a large crater. A hemisphere of energy rippled and burned everything in the vicinity in an instant, casting the black-and-white world in gold temporarily.

The two had almost exhausted themselves, yet they kept fighting.

No, it was no longer a fight, but a scuffle.

The Spirit of Kingslayer shrunk and weakened, barely maintaining the function of War Tiger’s tattered body. It could no longer stay on two feet. It transformed into a critically injured white tiger.

Wrath began to decrease in size and power, too. Its brown flames turned into bandaids to barely seal the slash wounds. It turned into a dying bull.

The bull charged and hurled the white tiger off the ground.

Bam!

A frail boy got kicked into the closet behind him by his father. The closet door cracked, spilling old clothes that once belonged to the boy’s mother, before her death.

“Don’t look at me like that! Like that bitch! It’s because of her blood running in your veins that you’re so weak...”

The father growled, enraged and intoxicated.

The boy lunged at him with a shout, the anger he had been bottling up in his frail body exploded.

Growl!

The slightly smaller white tiger jumped and tackled the bull to the ground, biting at its neck. The bull quickly turned away and stabbed at the tiger’s chin with its broken horn. The tiger’s teeth clamped down on the horn.

“Ahhhh!”

The boy knocked his father to the ground, slamming his fist toward the man’s face with surprising power generated by frail arms.

“Hahaha!”

The father shielded his head with both hands.

“Good! Keep punching! Keep swinging your fists! That’s my boy!”

Boom!

Before the white tiger could crush the bull’s broken horn with its bite, the bull cranked its forelegs before kicking the tiger off it.

The bull rolled to a stand, shaking its bleeding head. Weak yet dangerous puffs of blood came out of its mouth. It leveled an enraged glare at the white tiger.

Huff.

The skinny boy climbed to his feet and spat out blood, staring at the tall, broad man with steel and the rage to destroy everything in his eyes.

“Come on, little bastard! Swing your fist!”

Mark staggered toward War Tiger with increasing excitement. The white tiger growled and lunged at the bull once more.

In the messy, rundown room in dim light, the father and son grappled.

“Ahhh!”

“Keep going! Is this all you’ve got?”

“I’m gonna kill you!”

“Haha, a scrawny brat like you? I’m the Boxing King! I’ll never lose...”

The white tiger pinned the bull down once more. The bull struggled in the last moment of its life, its sharp horn breaking after piercing into the tiger’s chest. The broken piece remained lodged in the tiger’s body, after the tiger’s sharp fang broke the bull’s neck.

The drunk man stopped shouting. His mouth was filled with blood and broken teeth, his nose broken and his face bruised. He lay unmoving on the ground as the young man continued to swing his bony fists at the man’s bloodied face. One punch. And another. Then more.

𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

The world became monochrome again. In the night sky, the slowly toppling tower scattered into a rain of brown energy particles upon the land. And the blade aura consisting of countless skeletons dispersed into gray particles, filling the night sky.

Whatever colors the particles held faded under the gaze of the white moon, turning into pouring snow.

Within the bumpy crater lay two torn bodies. Snow fell and covered them up with careless indifference. Soon, they were no longer visible.

Bam!

The boy slammed the door shut at three in the morning. The wasted man lay prone on the floor, unconscious with blood coating his face.

Equally covered in injuries, the young man threw his mother’s belongings and the models he had held dear into the fire pit in the backyard, burning them to ashes. He packed quickly and left home.

In the snowy darkness, he walked with a heavy bag on his back. He had the eyes of someone abandoned by the world but held strong out of sheer stubbornness. Leaving deep and shallow footprints on the ground, he swore in his mind,

I will never return no matter what.

But he did, and he died on the same snowy night as the one from his distant past.