Chapter 86: Chain Duel

“Oh, neat,” Sean said. “I have something like that too. Weapon-wise, I mean. It will be cool to see how you use it.”

The orc gave a war cry as a response and started moving in.

“Not much of a conversationalist, I guess. That’s fine,” Sean said. “There’s still a kind of communication this way.”

The orc was good with those chains. Very good, really. Sean wasn’t getting any information from the system about its level or even the normal descriptions he’d get if he had met this thing out in the wild. But those kinds of things were often deceptive, anyway. Oh, they’d be accurate enough in terms of what they told you, but there was no way they’d ever include anywhere near all you wanted to know. For that, you had to fight and put skin at risk.

Sean didn’t rush in. If he did, he’d have to face both chains at once. It was a new weapon type, one he wasn’t used to dodging, and he had no idea how much the orc could actually do with them. Instead, he ran at a nearly 90-degree angle from the direction the orc was in, strafing towards the wall.

Seeing him do this, the orc jerked back his chains and started giving chase. He apparently couldn’t move, or couldn’t move fast, if the chains were in the air. That made him more of a defensive fighter, really, like a turret with a certain effective range. Sean couldn’t count on the physics of the chains matching that of the pre-system world exactly, but he was guessing they were most dangerous at the outside edge of their range, where they moved the fastest.

Sean hit the arena wall, then turned and started following the curvature of the space, indirectly approaching the orc as he did. The orc came into effective chain range only a few moments later. Sean heard the iron-on-iron screeching of the shackles as the chieftain whipped them out towards him, and clocked the weapons coming towards him at an alarming speed, one trailing the other by a split second’s worth of travel time.

Sean ducked the first as it came in, smiling with satisfaction as it hit the wall behind him. The walls were curved, and so was the path of the chain, but that didn’t mean that the orc would be absolutely perfect at controlling the range of the things. The chains were heavy and Sean was moving quick, which left the chain hitting the wall, decimating some of the masonry, and losing a lot of power in the process. Instead of the momentum continuing and the iron flying back to the orc, he now needed to spend some of his attention jerking it back towards him and getting it moving again.

The next chain came in from the opposite direction and missed completely. The orc had pulled it back to avoid hitting the wall and lost control of the accuracy in the process. Sean kept hugging the wall as close as he could as he moved closer to the orc.

The next two chain swipes didn’t come in on a horizontal circling arc. They came from overhead instead. But Sean hadn’t been running quite at top speed and surged forward just enough to let the two chains miss him. That trick would only work once. If Sean was the orc, he would send one chain first and one a little in front to catch any future shenanigans.

The orc wasn’t any dumber than Sean, at least as far as chain handling went. After it redirected the two near-miss swings back into motion, Sean glanced up to see the two chains coming back towards him, perfectly staggered and just as he had imagined them. Instead of running into them, Sean burned a charge of Hard Time on the first chain, speeding it up to make it land in front of him before he got there.

The chain passed so close to him that one of the spikes woven in its structure opened up a cut on his face but otherwise the plan went perfectly. The orc might have been used to people being able to block the chains or dodge them, but there was no way he had much experience with people enhancing them. Not only did the chain miss Sean, it slammed its full weight into the ground, where it sat in a deep furrow in the sand.

Could Sean run on a chain, like a demented circus tightrope walker? Absolutely. He was picking up little puncture wounds to his feet the whole time, but the thickness of the soles of his boots meant the spikes could only penetrate so far. His VIT was easily closing those tiny wounds up as he ran. It was pain, but what was pain to him anymore? He got hurt all the time now.

Even the toughest of warriors could get distracted and Sean was halfway back to the orc before it realized what was up. It jerked on the chain, but Sean’s weight multiplied by his sheer velocity was enough to pound the chain back down when it did. By the time the second chain came back around horizontally and forced him to duck and dodge far enough that he lost his footing on the weapon, he had already closed most of the distance.

Sean lunged with the Mystereamer held low, managing to get a stab just inside of the orc’s left hip, one that hit with normal, conventional piercing damage for once. He immediately dove to the side just after as the chains chased back after him, towards the orc. They looked for all the world like they were going to slam into the orc himself.

No way that’s gonna happen. He has to have a skill for that.

He did. As the chains came back, they changed their trajectory and speed in an entirely unnatural way, snaking around the orc’s arm until all twenty feet of each chain was wrapped around one of the orc’s forearms. Both of the orc’s arms were now mass weapons which he swung wildly at Sean, spinning with the force of each blow to maintain motion for the next attempted hit.

Sean dodged in and out of the range of the arcing punches and peppered the orc with stab wounds. They weren’t doing that much, honestly. He would need dozens and dozens of stabs to take the thing down, while it probably only needed a single good hit with its massive, iron-weighted arms to put Sean down for good. But Sean’s SAV-enhanced battle sense was telling him to wait, that if he just kept stabbing, an opportunity would show itself soon enough.

The orc eventually got tired of getting stabbed. The next time its foot landed after a swing, it narrowed its stance. Where before the orc had been making big, looping swings, the tighter position let it pull in its arms like a figure skater, leveraging conservation of angular momentum to speed up its spin. As it came around to face Sean, it thrust both arms straight at him, throwing two straight punches his way.

Sean had been ready for something like that. Crouching, he held up the jellyfish buckler, letting his weight move backwards with the punches as the shield sapped some of their force. He couldn’t kill nearly all of the force, but after moving with the punches for an inch or so, he suddenly stiffened up his shield-arm and jumped a bit, letting them fling him instead.

He’d have a nasty, nasty bruise after this, but his maneuver left him nearly ten feet away, well out of the orc’s effective punching range. And then, for the first time, he found himself fighting an enemy big enough to easily hit with a new weapon of his. While still midair, he reached down and unlooped the Heavy Heart from the hooks on his belt, did a quick single spin on the sand as he landed, and let it fly.

He couldn’t blame the orc for picking chains. The sheer feeling of weight as he let this thing go, the impression of power that it gave, was better than eating cheesecake.

Unlike the Trash Compactor, the Heavy Heart was a two-handed weapon. Sean’s right hand rested on the handle, while the left held the chain itself. That meant that, to some extent, he could manipulate the exact arc of the swing by shortening the chain with his offhand. This worked perfectly, and at the end of his first real combat swing with the weapon, it was headed directly at the orc.

The orc didn’t take this lying down. As the weapon arced towards him, he pressed both of his chain-wrapped forearms together, smashing them together like a gate closing and intercepting the Heavy Heart at its exact planned point of impact.

Both the orc’s arms were blown away. It didn’t matter how strong it was, or how heavy its arms were. The sheer speed and weight of the Heavy Heart in motion made it a portable catastrophe. As a weapon, it had a lot of shortcomings. It was slow. It was a bit hard to aim. And if Sean missed, it would leave him wide open for counterattack.

But trying to block it? That wasn’t going to work.

Sean brought the weapon around again, this time intentionally aiming for the orc’s arms. The monster tried to deflect it upwards this time, which worked a little better than a direct block but not much. He was left reeling and off-balance from the attempt, and as he barely got his arms up in time to block the third blow, Sean heard something crack under the chains. The next time, he only got one arm up.

One arm was not nearly enough to stop the forward motion of the weapon, and the impact spun the orc around so far the next rotation of the heart caught it in the back of his shoulder, completely ruining his ability to use the blocking arm.

Sean had kind of hoped the next strike would take his opponent’s head clean off. He knew it wouldn’t, really. The neck of the orc was all gross, orcish muscle, thicker than Sean’s thighs. Instead, the weight came down on the enemy’s head, driving him fully off his feet and into the sand. As Sean approached the twitching body, he saw the head was still fully attached, if not exactly shaped like a head anymore.

He knew it was dead, and so did the system. It didn’t wait for the body to stop moving to send the next notification.

Arena Exit Option

You have defeated three rounds of enemies in the arena, and can now opt to leave between any two rounds of combat. Every round after this point will increase your rewards but comes with much increased danger to your life.

Note that rewards are issued relative to the overall performance of every participant undergoing this trial. The more competitors you outpace, the more loot you get. It’s that simple.

Continue on to the next round of combat?

Y/N

Sean mashed Y without even thinking about it. The orc was much harder than the other rounds but not invincible. He couldn’t see it effectively taking down most of the people he had played dodgeball with, much less a trained powerhouse like Eike.

And he’d be double-damned if he was going to let Eike get a leg up on him, unimpeded. He might not be able to win. But he wasn’t going to let Eike get more power just because he didn’t feel like trying.