I was still some meters away from Damon when I shifted my attention from him to the tree next to him. The moment I closed the distance, I leapt and planted my feet against the trunk of the tree. Then using the momentum, I launched myself off the bark, spinning mid-air as I brought the black blade down with everything I had.

Clang!

Damon had raised his axe to block my strike.

Because his level was significantly higher than mine, he didn't shudder under the impact as much as I did.

Still, I ignored the stinging numbness that shot through my arms and immediately ducked beneath the sweeping arc of his return swing. As the massive blade of the battle axe whistled through the air just inches above my head, I shifted my weight, pivoting on the muddy ground to find a fresh opening.

I tried to immediately follow up with a heavy strike of my own, driving the black katana upward in a desperate, lunging arc aimed at his exposed ribs.

But he leapt back while simultaneously bringing his axe down with a guttural grunt. A furious clangor of metal suddenly exploded again, sending a fresh spray of sparks and wet grit into the fog between us.

With me relying on my attribute and Damon relying on pure skill, we both dissolved into a furious cacophony of metal, moving with incredible speed and precision under the rain. In just a span of seconds, we exchanged numerous blows, all of which were dodged or blocked and the forest blurred around us as the black steel of Aika met the abrasive grit of Cerberus again and again.

There was nothing elegant about the fight between us. It was just barbarous brutality. But the thing was, while Damon was doing everything in his power to break or cripple me, I was doing everything in my power to kill him.

Our voices sounded like that of wild beasts as our weapons clashed in a final, bone-jarring heave, before we eventually disengaged and staggered away from each other.

'This bastard is strong…' I thought, gritting my teeth as I quickly looked around the forest.

I couldn't just spam my flames of decay so that I wouldn't mistakenly end up burning a tree, because if I did that, I would end up as a tree myself.

I wasn't the only one cautious of this. Even Damon was too, as he avoided swinging his axe near the trees.

But in the next second, he suddenly wound his arm back then threw his axe with a guttural shout. The massive weapon cut through the fog, spinning like a deadly, sand-grit windmill toward my chest.

I pivoted my torso to the side and the axe whistled past my side. Since I currently had three ravens perched on a tree in different locations, I could see the entirety of the battleground and so, I didn't need to look back to know that the axe had narrowly missed the trunk of a tree, curving sharply around it before returning to strike me from behind.

I dropped into a low crouch, avoiding the blade as it swept through the space where my neck had been just a second before. But right at that moment, the blade stopped in front of me and a notification popped up for me.

[The character Damon Kaiser has activated the exclusive skill: Koryne.]

The axe suddenly expanded in size until it was more than triple its original size. It was not big enough to get caught in a tree, but just enough to obliterate anything in its path. Then it suddenly swung downward with a weight that felt like a mountain collapsing.

I didn't have time to get clear of the massive shadow it cast, and so I immediately activated [One with the ravens] and my form erupted into a flurry of dense feathers. By the time the axe descended, it crushed the life out of the raven I had swapped with.

My form coalesced on top of one of the trees. Then, in the same second I reappeared, I reversed my grip on my katana, aimed at Damon, and threw it at him.

'Over to you, Aika!'~

Damon saw it coming and quickly jerked his head to the side at the last possible moment. The black blade hissed through the air, grazing his cheek and leaving a thin red line before it buried itself into the ground behind him.

Damon's eyes widened as he seemed to have remembered my last duel with him, and so the moment the blade buried itself into the ground, he quickly called for his axe. The weapon shrunk in size, wrenching itself off the ground and began returning to him.

At the same time, the katana on the ground immediately shifted into Aika with a wakizashi. She lunged forward with predatory speed, but just before she could deliver a lethal strike, the axe had returned to Damon's grip. He immediately raised it to intercept her blades, the heavy metal meeting her steel with a bone-jarring impact.

"Fuck!"

Damon reeled, and staggered back as he had been caught completely off-balance by the raw force of Aika's momentum.

She didn't slow and used the opening to kick his gut. The impact sent him stumbling further into the mud.

Aika then brought her blade down again to finish the job, but Damon quickly rolled through the muck, and the moment he did, a notification popped up for us:

[The character Damon Kaiser has activated the exclusive attribute Beast of War.]

[Due to the effect of Beast of War, the strength, agility and durability of the character Damon Kaiser has increased twofold.]

He quickly rose to his feet and swung his axe in an explosive horizontal arc.

Aika leapt back to dodge the blade, but with Damon's agility doubled, she couldn't fully clear the distance and the blade caught her mid-air.

However, just as the heavy edge was about to cleave through her, Aika exploded into a flurry of feathers.

Meanwhile, I leapt down from the tree and began to fall through the rain like a dark shadow, then landed on the ground with both feet and locked gazes with Damon, who had turned around after killing my raven.

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