Walking elegy( Tensura/Marvel self insert): chapter 10: Velgrynd

Fighting against Velgrynd felt like fighting against the world itself. It felt like fighting endless crushing mountains, world-swallowing blazes, hatred and disdain and arrogance shaped in an idea of domination and violence.

Fighting against Velgrynd felt like fighting the inevitable, the kind telling you you’ve already lost, that you were the mangy thing the world had decided to bet against.

Still, I fought because was there anything else to be done other than that? Anything else other than fighting what felt impossible to win against?

Under, around, everywhere, monsters and humans would look at us, look at her, look at me.

They’ll hope, hate, wish, beg because we, all of us here knew this battle would be decided on one factor only, on one thing only, on what would falter between acceleration and nothing, between fire and death, curses, destruction between her and I.

A fist encased in blue death crashed against a face worthy of a love and war goddess and ground it into mince crimson paste or at least tried.

She dodged, the act so seamless, so natural it felt less like a reaction and more like something danced on the rhythms of an invisible melody.

Fire bloomed. From nothing to the equal of Sol to surpassing it.

She struck.

Pain exploded.

I responded in answer, a curse taking this pain, changing it, shaping it until it became as real as the sky and the earth, something sinful, something evil and I threw it in her face.

A hand moved in a blur, batting it the way one would with a fly. It flew to the horizon, carving through his path human and monsters alike before expanding and exploding turning the sky the color of petrichor.

She continued moving, seemingly nary a thought of what I just threw at her, hands ending in talon-like claws swapped at me.

A magic shield winked into existence between us in less than a blink.

It didn’t change how I fell from the sky trailing sparks and fire as the only thing following.

I braced the moment I touched the ground and pushed, throwing myself forward. The earth screamed in agony.

Had I been a moment slower, something told me that I would have been the thing that broke.

A flick of a thought was the only thing necessary to call forth a spear made from the concept of nothing I embodied.

This was not the first time Velgrynd and I fought and it probably would not be the last time.

One of the things I had learned from our encounters was that I should not expect any instances without her attacking.

If you fought against her and thought that she wasn’t attacking, it just meant that you failed to notice and just like expected, stars began to fall from above.

They came with heat. They came with blaze. They came overshadowing the sun t melting the ground under my feet, dusting anything living around the two of us not strong enough or without any protection to withstand but a hint of the might of a true dragon.

I didn’t stay idle. I didn’t wait for them to fall. Doing so would be akin to letting the older dragon lead our current dance.

No, instead, I moved, no, it would be more accurate to say that I made the world itself move me.

I blinked into existence just before one of the falling stars, my spear, shaped and made from nothing thrust forward, the tip of it lazingly flickering and grazing the star before I was gone and near another, back turned to it, striking it by pushing the spear behind me without looking at it, my gaze on the only mattering, on the shape of the other true dragon above looking at me, held by two gigantic wings made of fire as if she was a god and i the would be sinner she was judging.

Nothing grazed against flames again as I continued my dance amongst stars, a thrust there, a shift here, a downward strike that came like this, a beheading motion.

I didn’t look at those stars the moment my creation touched them. After all, what were stars before the nothing that was before the first lights of the universe?

A snap of fingers and I exploded. Another one and I burned. Another one and I was akin to a corpse set ablaze.

Had it not been for Stillness, the magical drug I had created to erase, deal with emotions, feelings that would have brought me down, maybe it would have been enough but it didn't because here is one truth of the universe, pain is nothing but a feeling and like all feelings, it is something that can be discarded.

More than that, it's not as if I wouldn’t be able to be evade her attacks or even stop her from even inflicting pain, even coming into existence around me had I not wanted to.

I was Nothing after all and the same way everything came from it, the same way it couldn’t be touched until everything became nothing again.

The head of my spear struck against arms covered in dragon scales with a world-ending sound, one louder than thunder, one infinitely more violent than it.

Nothing struck against the flesh of a true dragon. It should have, would have turned everything it touched into its like.

Saints level fighters, heroes, demigods and even more would have been felled by such. Nothingness was akin to an eraser on the painting that was the world and nothing, nothing that could say to live in the world no matter how strong they were would, should have been able to be touched and not be undone.

It would have been the case had Velgrynd not been what she was.

The only thing it did was send her flying through enemies' line, trains and rivers of blood marking her wake as everything and everyone she came into contact with exploded in red and guys.

Feet touched and dug and moved and danced against the ground, turning what seemingly had been an uncontrollable fall into something almost ballerina-like.

The true dragon in human shape as if she was not in the middle of a battle stretched as if she was a cat that had woken up from a particular good nap before looking at me, smiling in a way that felt both condescending and smug, in a way that screamed without word is that all while she was looking the same as she had since the beginning of our fight.

There was nothing else to expect from her. There was nothing else to expect from a true dragon.

“Hi, little sister,” acceleration and draconic flames in human shape greeted me.

I answered by raining death from above, rain, drops of malignancy, of hatred, of pain and hatred, from the dying and the dead, from regrets and fear of the living.

I took from the grasp of misery and guided it to enact dearly desired despoilment of others.

Dozens of thousands died, flesh corroding, life-stealing rain extinguishing their lives the same way a breeze would with a candle.

Their lives, their souls, their suffering in turn strengthen the potency of my spell. It came back planning at me the way a newborn would for its mother.

It came with strength and power, with might and magic.

A spear struck against the world itself and the world bent.

It came with sound, shockwaves and a total erasure of everything on my path other than the older true dragon. It was as if a nuclear bomb had gone off.

I rushed, moved through the world, past the still happening effects, consequence of my gesture.

Fire-covered fists clashed against the body of a spear from nothing. A beheading motion from the spear was pushed on the side, a fist sent to crash against me, a step to the side dodging the strike.

I dodged only for the second to hit.

I felt, yes, felt in what felt for an eternity my right eye he reduced to mush, exploding into its socket and turned into a gooey mess.

I felt my bones or the equivalent a true dragon like me in humanoid shape would have break.

I felt my jaw dislocate.

I also felt the fire, burning and sizzling my flesh, devouring and ravaging like fast-multiplying cancer cells.

My spear came back swinging with a pull, like a dark comet toward the neck of Velgrynd.

The older dragon ducked under it.

Another strike made her push with the heel to create the distance necessary to dodge.

A right hook came flying again. It was stepped aside. A uppercut stopped with the body of the spear before with a flick of my will, I shifted through the world, my spear moving past the crossed arms she had put in defence, moving to pierce an eye.

The only sign that it was something she hadn’t expected was her smile widening.

She bent, in a way too abrupt, almost animalistic, the spear cutting in the end only strands of hair. She didn't stop moving. She danced because that was the only word that came close, a leg covered in fire extending to stop the follow-up strike with her bare foot

“Nuh nuh nuh~. You will need to be much stronger, much better if you want to have a little more chance little sister,” she said with that same damned fucking smile.

My answer came and it came through beams of nothing. They came into existence above my shoulders before I fired them up.

She pushed against my spear, sending herself flying away. The beams and I followed her.

The beams were faster.

They zeroed in on her like heat heat-seeking missile.

One came from above.

Another from under.

Her answer was moving as if she were a skater.

Fire roared under her feet, flickering flames before they lit with a deafening boom.

She three sixtied, one move and a push from the flames under her feet to evade one, another burst of fire sent her skidding, finger nails tracing the length of one of the beams.

She looked at me at that moment and yes, that was a wink she did before falling on her knees the moment the beam she had touched shifted where she had been but moments away.

Another burst sent her flying this time now looking at me while the fire still pushed away.

A snap, sparks and the world became fire.

It wasn’t a continuous beam or just a singular big one.

It would have been easier if it were the case but of course, she would not make things easy for me.

No, instead, what came was hundreds, thousands, probably so many giant swords made of fire that were so intricated together, so set close together that had I not had the vision I had as a true dragon, I would have thought them one.

More than that, something tells me that she was not nice enough to make it something that would not follow after me.

I guess it was time to play dodgeball again.

A jump sent me flying at the top of a mountain.

Another one sent me into the clouds.

They followed me like I had expected coming from under like a reverse dawn.

The spear disappeared to only leave blue scales colored hands.

With another flex of my will, my wings disappeared letting me breathe one last time before gravity came back to make me another Icarus.

I fell into hell and found it wanting.

A hand closed around a handle made of flame, an aerial pirouette to dodge three others, a flick of the forearm to crash 4 others, flames set up in a greater bonfire between my palms before exploding.

The shockwave came with a push that brought me in the middle of soldiers fighting, of monsters and humans, of my subjects and my enemies.

They seemed frozen as if everything was put on a stop at the touch of the button of a remote, thousands, killing with magic, killing with spears, killing with swords, killing with skills, all would be killers and murderers.

I moved, fire-shaped sword between the grasp of two hands, a slice, a cut and hundreds lost their head before I had even finished moving, their blood bright red, bright scarlet under the fire still following me in this moment of frozen forever.

A twist and a push sent me just before an ogre on the point of being beheaded from behind, signs of fear and hatred only things etched on his face as he looked at the smiling face of his would-be killer, himself clad in the likeness of a knight of yore, sword stopped moments away from the carotid.

A push on the shoulder pushed the monster away, and another turn put the human on the path of following fiery hell.

Velgrynd’s flames didn’t stop and continued in search of a purchase of my flesh.

They burned him into cinders, into ashes and those ashes themselves into nothing.

Another step brought me before another human.

She looked young.

She burned the same as I put her in the way of the flames.

The eastern empire when it came to numbers overwhelmed us to a point where it wasn’t even funny anymore.

They had at least half a billion soldiers in their totality and their legions counted each in the hundreds of thousands at least.

The same couldn’t be said for tempest which meant that any occasion, any chance of making them haemorrhage soldiers on top of that with the flames of one of their leaders was only good.

More than that, my magic was one that only grew in strength, in power the more suffering there was, the more death touched, the more pain became a faithful companion.

Velgrynd and I both knew that she was much stronger.

We both knew that she was playing, that she was not taking things seriously.

I may be a true dragon like her but she was one millennium older than me. On top of that,  those years had been ones where she had fought and triumphed, bled and learnt.

I was a true dragon but I wasn’t like Rimuru who probably would have found a way to win even though demon lords should not be able to win against true dragons.

The reason why Velgrynd had attacked was probably something more complex than simply wanting to fuck with me.

After all, I couldn’t leave the battlefield while she was still there which means all other fronts that may necessitate my help to hold on wouldn’t have it.

The only way to make her back down would be fighting either at the side of Veldora, Rimuru or Milim but them coming here also meant letting a hole in the defensive perimeter around our nation; the Jura-tempest federation.

Something tells me that this would be a result the older dragon would find more satisfying no matter what damage she may incur.

This current battle could even be said to be already lost.

It wasn’t at this point a question of if we were going to hold, if we were going to win.

It was just a question of how badly we would lose and thus, I killed.

I killed using her flames to burn into cinders and ashes soldiers, humans of the eastern empire.

I blocked a would-be fatal attack aimed at soldiers of Tempest.

I healed, protected, pushed, covered.

I stabbed, beheaded, crushed, bit, made explode, broke dozens, hundreds, thousands, dozens of thousands and so much more until blood and ashes were the only thing I could breathe, smell and see.

I did such as fire followed me like a mantle.

I ran and outspeed the world.

I ran and broke through the world.

I turned mountains into crumbles.

I slid into rivers before emerging as they began to bubble into violent mist.

I danced with fire.

I grabbed it like a partner and serenaded it.

I avoided its wanting touch.

I cut into it with bare fists.

I skated on it, feet warmed as if in a bath.

I pushed against it.

I pushed toward it.

I crushed it.

I dodged it.

I did so in a forever dance until embers and sparks rained and bathed the world around me in a deluge of flames.

A sound akin to a loud bass. One so loud I felt my body shake was what made me move.

It wasn’t enough.

Fire-covered fists crashed against mine layered with nothing.

The world went mad in horror and pain as they met.

Canyons came into existence, deep scars, the kind making you think that the world almost ended once as I was pushed and my feet dug into Earth, plants, mountains, blood and corpses.

A left hook stopper with a forearm.

A liver shot stopped with a knee.

A cut with draconic nails made an older dragon bleed before the cut closed itself as if time had rewound.

A duck of my part was turned useless as the strike avoided showed itself to have been a grab deceiving itself as other.

Two hands in a grip worthy of Atlas grabbed an arm and threw me hundreds of meters.

I crashed into things.

Things that felt alive and not at the same time.

Maybe they were my soldiers.

I hope it wasn’t the case.

That was the only thought allowed before the older true dragon became visible again.

One of my hands dug into the ground.

Telekinesis came to aid as I invoked it and with a flex of the will, the Earth, mountains, rivers, sea, forest or what remained of them rose.

A closed hand, more psychosomatic akin to self-hypnosis at the moment than something truly needed on my part to make hundreds of billions of tons move made it all crumble into fine pieces.

Another blink and those pieces became harder.

Even before I exacted what would have come, Velgrynd moved and as she, they did too, rising in a violent wave.

They rose like darkness trying to swallow the sky, like an apophis trying to devour the bright star Velgrynd had become above.

A bow, one made of starlight and flames, one as tall as hills and mountains' tops, one of war and glory overshadowed the sun with its radiance.

Velgrynd set herself ablaze, another yellow star in a sky where only one should have reigned supreme.

The wave continued its advance rushing at her like thousands of snakes trying to bite and swallow a juicy morsel.

It surrounded her, from above, under and her sides.

It moved to crush her, hundreds of billions of tons, each piece reinforced using magic, each piece moving independently yet simultaneously.

Velgrynd took it like a challenge, one where she screamed she would not be touched.

Amongst them, she launched upwards, above crushing pieces, then seemed to corkscrew through the air, her body simultaneously flipping head over heels while twisting along its length, a dizzying helix of motion that made her seemingly impossible target to touch.

Still, I made them follow, made them flow faster, more violently, more unpredictably.

Her answer was to become a human top, spinning a full, horizontal rotation in the blink of an eye.

Wings of blue bloomed from her back tucked before being tucked tight to her body to accelerate a spin that made fragments of wave miss her again before flaring them out to stop the spin abruptly.

With a bat of her wings, she threw herself upward, toward the bow made of flames that had only become more intricate.

I didn’t like that.

I needed to destroy it.

I forced myself to drop to the ground or what remained of it.

I ignored it as it cratered in a web of fractures exploding outwards, my only focus the true dragon and the bow above.

A finger was pointed, a ball the size of a lemon, one made of the magic of death and curse and suffering clashing and mixing into something cold and unholy before being cradled into the bosom of nothing to become something worse was sent forth from my finger to the bow.

The only sign that she had noticed was the flicker of her gaze.

She didn’t break stride, seemingly uncaring, perfectly at ease with what would happen to the bow.

A two handed slap on the surface of one of the pieces of a broken mountain sent her diving forward, her body folding into a controlled dive, her legs tucking up and through her arms before she pushed off, extending back into a sprint on the other side of the broken mountain, still on the path of her bow and thus on the path of my orb.

In the sky, her body began to spin, a rapid series of tight, traveling rotations on her left foot before she came with her right one and kicked into the orb as if it were a football back in my direction.

It fell covered in flames like a meteorite.

It fell faster than the way it had ascended and I knew that while I had been its begetter, Velgrynd touching it made me sure that it wasn’t something I wanted to touch if I could.

The meteor whistled beneath me, a blur of steel that met only air as I planted a single palm on the ground, my body becoming a momentary wheel as my legs scissored over the orb, my feet finding purchase again before the orb had even passed, a graze of the nail turning the fiery inferno into nothing in less than a blink.

Above, Velgrynd didn’t stay idle and neither did the wave of Earth.

A leviathan-like piece swung a clawed limb the size of an Olympic pool.

She didn't dodge.

She used it.

As the blow descended, she threw herself backwards, directly into its path.

She threw her head and shoulders back into the void, tucking her knees for a split second to initiate a rotation.

Her boots, shimmering with roaring bright flames met the fiery cord of the bow.

The impact was not a landing; it was one akin to a thunder strike.

The fiery limbs of the bow bent as she pushed, putting her entire body weight into it.

While doing so, she was looking at me, her smile giddy and bloodthirsty.

She looked supremely confident and even with stillness running in my veins, I felt a flick of anger burning bright.

This was but a game for her.

All of this.

All of those who had died.

All of those I had to kill simply because the eastern empire had seen the existence of tempest, of a nation of monsters as something they didn’t want to allow.

She acted as if she had already won even though the sky had been swallowed by the wave of earth I had summoned, as it surrounded her as if to contain, swallow her.

My magic surged as my will imposed itself over the sky and the darkness I had made rise from the earth.

Clouds, lightning, Earth, mountains, rivers, the texture of the world itself.

They were all folded against each other.

This world I was now living in, of fantastical and impossible things, where god like beings were born or were becoming, in this world that had only been in my past life a web novel, a manga, a fiction.

In this world where things did and didn’t make sense.

Saying out loud the name of an attack like a shonen protagonist was both useless and necessary.

Useless in the sense that like my fight so far with the Velgrynd had shown, you didn’t need to scream something cringy every time you attacked.

Necessary in the sense that words, names could hold power.

When you named an attack, a spell, or an action, you gave it weight and by giving it weight, you made something more.

A laser beam without a name and a laser beam with a name even if they came from the same person using for the both of them the same amount of energy would not be equal.

It was not an exception.

It was the rule and thus, words were spoken to give weight, to give power, to give strength.

“Paradise lost,” I named and thus a lost paradise appeared in the heaven.

It was something big, so big that it couldn’t be called only a planetoid.

I named it such and the world screamed in protest.

The air itself became a weapon, a shrieking, hurricane gale that ripped the very soil from the ground and pulled it upwards towards the impossible mass.

The light died, not like nightfall, but like the closing of a tomb door, as the colossal shadow fell over the battlefield.

The pressure changed instantly.

My own draconic ears popped, and a lesser being would have been crushed.

I felt it not as weight, but as a presence, the gravitational tug of the newborn body pulling at my blood, at the rivers of lava now bursting from the fractured ground below.

The temperature plummeted, then spiked violently as the compressed air under my creation ignited into a permanent, roaring firestorm, painting the underside of my paradise in hellish shades of orange and black.

You would have thought it would be enough, right?

I would have said so if the one I was fighting against was not Velgrynd herself.

Nothingness came clawing and biting and tearing into the world. It ate at matter, at atoms, at what was and after its touch would never be again.

It ate at everything, slithering, twisting until it took the shape of a giant snake.

The gap that was its mouth opened wide with a creak and a disgusting wet crack.

A handle presented itself to be grabbed and when grabbed, when touched, when pulled, it came with the end of everything, a flickering sword shifting with the colors of a dead universe.

Above, a continent-sized planetoid began to burn.

It wasn’t burning from the surface. From deep within its core, a terrible light bloomed.

Fissures of incandescent gold cracked open across its face, like an eggshell from which a star was hatching.

It was Velgrynd. It could only be her.

The planetoid, this absurdity of hundreds of billions of tons, did not stop her.

The moment she was released, it ceased to be.

The fire did not consume it; it simply declared that the rock had never existed. In the span of a single, drawn-out heartbeat, an eternity granted by my draconic perception, I watched a continent turn to light.

The rock didn't melt, it sublimated, turning directly from solid matter into a blazing, expanding cloud of plasma.

I never saw the bow fire.

The sound however, I heard it. I don’t think that there was any living in this world that hadn’t. It was not a twang, but a thrum that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly in the soul, a single, world-ending note.

Wanna know something?

There is a speed limit to the universe. The speed of causality itself: 299,792,458 meters per second.

Nothing with mass can reach it, let alone exceed it.

It is the universe’s ultimate, unbreakable rule.

Velgrynd broke it.

She was a true dragon.

The Embodiment of the Concept of Acceleration.

Why couldn’t she?

After all, didn’t Veldora and her teach me how the rules didn’t apply to true dragons because we were them?

From the heart of the newborn sun that had been my planetoid, she emerged.

A streak of faster-than-light fury, her body sheathed in the flames of a concept that defied reality.

There was no travel time.

There was only the point of origin, and the point of impact: me.

She was truly fucking annoying.

I knew how it would in the end.

The only thing that I hoped was that my army and I had gutted enough of their force, that I had truly been able in the end to save some of Tempest’s soldiers, that Shale, Kael, Lyra, Borin, that they had all survived.

My body moved before my mind could command it to prepare to meet her.

My left hand gripped the hilt, my right braced the blunt edge of the blade.

My knees were bent, my center of gravity sunk into the earth.

I was not preparing to swing. I was a spring coiling, a dam wall about to break.

There was no sound. There was only light, and force, and the screaming failure of reality.

The universe fractured.

The clash wasn't metal on flesh; it was two absolute concepts meeting at a point and annihilating each other.

My sword, capable of erasing concepts, met her fist, which embodied a fundamental force of existence.

For a nanosecond, they held.

I felt the impossible feedback, not a shockwave, but a tear in the fabric of everything.

I saw the light of creation and the darkness of the void at the same time.

Then, I blacked out.