SSS Ranked Reincarnation: Dark Dragon Legacy

Here’s the chapter:

”Tch, I’m playing around too much.”

Silva exhaled once and his expression changed.

The sword came up and the black flames that covered it changed with it, no longer the controlled burn he had been using to push them back but something fuller, the fire responding to the shift in his intent and expanding across the blade until the heat of it was visible in the air around it.

He moved first this time.

He went at the nearest one without waiting for it to come to him, covering the distance in a burst and driving the blade through its chest before its arms could organize a response. The black flames followed the blade in, spreading from the entry point outward across the monster’s body the moment the blade connected, and he pulled the sword free and was already moving to the next one while the first burned.

It did not survive.

Two came at him simultaneously from either side, four arms between them swinging in overlapping arcs designed to give him no clean space to move through.

He went up.

Wings snapping open, he cleared both sets of arms in a single motion and came down behind them with the sword already swinging in a wide arc that caught both in the same motion, the black flames spreading across both bodies on contact, and he stepped back and let the fire do the rest while he turned toward the remaining seven.

One opened its mouth.

He read it and moved sideways, the blast tearing through the space he had occupied, and he drove his sword through its jaw from below while it was still firing, cutting upward through the blast at the source. The flames that poured from the blade met the energy in the blast and ignited it, the resulting explosion consuming the monster from the inside out.

He walked out of the smoke without looking back.

Three rushed him together.

Silva stopped moving away from them and toward them instead, the change in direction taking a half second off the distance between them that made all four arms of the first one useless before they had fully committed to a swing. He drove his shoulder into its chest and released the black flames from his palm at contact range, the fire consuming it from the front while he used its falling body to vault past the second one and take the third across the neck with the blade.

The second tried to grab him from behind.

He let it grab him.

The moment its hands locked onto his arms he ignited everything, the black flames erupting outward from his body in every direction, the monster’s grip lasting exactly as long as it took the fire to reach its hands.

It did not last long.

He turned.

The trees around the clearing were burning now, the black flames having spread from every exchange into the undergrowth and up the trunks, the light of it casting everything in the particular color that only black fire produced, deep and consuming and nothing like natural flame.

three remained.

He went through them the same way, not methodically but efficiently, each one burning before the next came to replace it, the sword and the flames working together in the way they worked when he stopped thinking about them separately.

The last one stood in the burning forest and looked at him.

He looked back.

It threw a punch.

He stepped inside it and put the sword through its chest and held the flames until there was nothing left to hold them in.

He let it drop.

[…..]

Elsewhere in the forest, one clone of him was having considerably more fun with it.

The clone came in on one monster with his sword swinging and a grin on his face that the original rarely wore in a fight, the blade already covered in black flames as he closed the distance, and when the monster’s arm came down he ducked under it and came up laughing.

”Come on,” he said, and drove his palm into the monster’s chest.

The flames that came from his palm were not the blade-channeled kind. They came directly from him, raw and unstructured, and they spread across the monster’s body fast enough that it barely had time to understand what was happening before it was entirely covered.

He turned to the next one before the first had finished burning.

This one swung all four arms simultaneously and he read three of them and took the fourth on his shoulder, the impact shoving him sideways, and he laughed at that too before grabbing the arm that had hit him and using it to swing the monster around and into the one behind it.

Both went down.

He put his palm on each of them in sequence, the flames jumping from hand to body with the ease of someone who had been doing this long enough that the transition between deciding and doing had disappeared entirely.

”Two,” he said to no one, and moved on.

[…..]

The third clone of him was not laughing.

He came into his section of the fight already dual wielding, both blades covered in black flames so thick the fire was touching between the two swords when he held them close, and he opened his engagement by swinging both in opposite directions simultaneously at the two nearest monsters.

The flame slashes that followed each swing were not attached to the blades anymore by the time they hit. They extended beyond the reach of the swords in arcs that covered more distance than the weapons themselves, and what they connected with they did not merely damage.

They obliterated.

The third monster tried to blast him from a distance and he cut through the blast with both swords crossed, the black flames eating the energy as they met it, and came through the far side still moving, both blades coming around in the follow through that ended the monster before it could generate a second shot.

He moved through the remaining ones with the same economy, each swing paired with its opposite, the double flame arcs clearing space faster than the monsters could fill it, and he did not look particularly interested in any of it.

He was simply doing what needed to be done, and doing it completely.