Chapter 1013: The Hunter’s Fury
Helena’s breath caught. She couldn’t move. Her legs obeyed. Her arms obeyed. But everything else in the world resisted.
She blinked—and Rughsbourgh materialized right before her, hand extended.
Before her eyes could register the speed, she was struck.
Her body spun violently midair, skidding across dirt and rock, crashing through a monolithic black tree that hadn’t been there seconds before. Her vision swam.
She wiped blood from her nose, then rose again, trembling.
"You are a Bender."
Rughsbourgh grinned.
"Space Bender? Ah right. There are the Elementalists, then the Benders. A measly classification humanity used to define the kinds of talent that exist."
He shrugged with his bare shoulders.
"Yes. I am. But this is beyond bending space, Helena. If you are going to touch me, you will need to come at me with more resolve than that."
Helena glared at him. She growled ferociously and launched herself once more.
Black thunder cracked behind her. It formed into a longbow this time—fashioned from condensed storm and grief. She fired a single bolt of lightning, aimed not at him—but at the storm above.
It ruptured and darkness fell.
And from the sky descended Helena.
Multiplied.
Twelve copies of her fell at once, screaming, twirling with rods, each one infused with blood, hatred, and will. One of them was real. Eleven were death feints.
Rughsbourgh glanced upward, unamused.
"Spatial Collapse."
The air around him buckled. All twelve Helenas folded inward—imploded into a point.
Then silence fell on the atmosphere.
Barely a second later, the wind screamed.
Helena reappeared from below, eyes wild, face bloodied, rod in one hand, the other hand casting marks that seemed written in anguish itself. Her body blurred, not because of speed, but because she wasn’t entirely present anymore.
She had fed herself to the storm. It was almost like a pseudo-transformation of sorts.
Because since she was not a Paragon, she was not truly capable of essence manifestation.
But Helena’s talent allowed her to manipulate the storm. If the storm was willful, then it was possible to bond with it. If it was not willful, it was possible to control it even better.
Her talent ability [WildForm Awakening] granted her the leeway to merge with essence of the wild. The storm was a perfect example of essence of the wild.
The entire surrounding seemed to be drenched in her presence as she vanished from the naked eye, disappearing into the storm.
Even Rughsbourgh’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Helena whispered.
"I will feed you to the storm next."
With a roar, she unleashed her final attack.
Dozens of rods. Screaming wind. Cracking lightning. Every breath in her body was thrown into war.
Each rod collided with his air shields and spatial folds, but this time, she didn’t stop. She leapt forward. No evasion. No tactics. Just fury.
Even as her attacks warped or failed, even as she was stabbed by her own redirected rods, she kept going.
Rughsbourgh blocked one blow—and for a moment, faltered.
A sliver of darkness pierced his shoulder.
He looked down.
Helena was staring up at him—laughing, blood streaming down her cheeks like war paint.
"Finally, you bled."
Rughsbourgh’s face turned cold.
Space bent—and Helena was suddenly flung out of the space and across the battlefield like a ragdoll. She hit a stone. Then another. Then a cliff. Her bones screamed. Her body refused to move.
He stepped through folded space, traversing great distances in a step and appearing beside her. His boot pressed against her throat.
"You did well. But space is infinite. And you’re just... wild."
Helena choked. Darkness began bleeding from her mouth. Her vision flickered.
And then—
From afar, lightning split the sky again.
—
Immediately the storm scattered. Northern, who was watching Aster and Vida’s fight, paused for a moment and turned around. He watched as something streaked across the distance, hitting and crushing stone before landing on a cliff and crushing it too.
None of them in that instance were in the eye of the storm anymore. At that point, he knew it was time to step in.
He had missed the battle for the most part, but it wasn’t like he was expecting Helena to win. An Ascendant against a Paragon was impossible. And Rughsbourgh was a Luminary.
’If she managed to make him bleed, then it would mean I underestimated her greatly.’
He turned and then extended his hand outward. At once the sky trembled and a massive whip of lightning streaked into his hand.
It was not vanishing—the lightning danced in his hand, peeling away his skin, but the skin was healing itself at a rapid pace.
Aster, who had been fighting with lightning sparks dancing around his sword, couldn’t help but freeze for a moment.
He owned the lightning talent and had trained in it since he was born. He knew everything that lightning could do. But he had never in his life realized that a man, a mortal man, could hold the lightning that connected from the sky to the ground—could hold it right in the middle.
Northern looked like he was a Star Incarnate, wielding nature as a weapon.
It made his heart tremble with primal fear—such that he forgot in a moment that he was in battle. Luckily for him, he wasn’t the only one that forgot—his opponent had the same reaction.
She had been watching Northern for much longer, silently competing against him.
One thing that this Academy battle had helped her realize with stark clarity was that she was foolish and too ambitious. She did not know what Northern had done to get to this height of power.
But they all went to the same continent, and he came out like this. She was very sure it wasn’t by luck. If it was by luck, then he would have had very rotten luck that only thrust upon him experiences that would break other people.
Because that was how he was standing like this—stronger than everyone she had ever laid her eyes on by a terrifying and unrecoverably wide margin. That too as a Sage!