A Tale of Two Demons

Blink, a powerful teleportation spell, moved the knight to Shitenshi's back, and Solus drove in for the kill. The everdancing blades caught Solus and turned the blow to the side, but even this Searanin was prepared for. He turned one floating katana up with Solus, and caught the opposite end with his shield. He drove it down to his knee and, with all the force a demon elf could muster, snapped the blade in two. A cry of anguish and death rose up from the magical weapon. It dropped to the ground smoking.

Shitenshi spun, Searanin could feel his rage, and drove both his blades down, but the knight rolled under the attack and sprung. He speared Shitenshi, knocking the masked elf to the ground.

Searanin could have pushed the advantage, and won there, simply by channeling the strength of Sol's holy smite through his body and into Shitenshi's. That would have destroyed them both, however. Though it was questionable that either of them were truly evil, they were both products of demonic powers and a crazed god bent on revenge against his mother. Searanin could handle using his smiting abilities in small doses, but channeling enough to destroy Shitenshi...

The knight rolled up, and popped to his feet. Shitenshi kipped up, and the two began to circle, their swords held down low, pointing towards the earth.

“I'd had that sword since I was a child...” Shitenshi said.

Searanin shrugged. “War's a bitch sometimes.”

“The blood on that blade...”

“Does not equal the amount of blood on my soul,” Searanin said. “You were an assassin. You struck small targets, and took maybe a hundred lives at once. I was a general. I commanded armies that numbered in the millions of troops. The death toll on my soul numbers in the billions.”

“I remember plenty of those battles,” Shitenshi said, his voice sounding hollow again as it came from behind the mask. Searanin wished he would take the damn thing off, not seeing anything but his opponents eyes was unnerving. “It was my blades that bathed in the blood of the damned. My blades that made it possible for your armies to win the day. The blood on the battlefield did not fly high enough to hit your boot on your precious airships!”

Shitenshi moved, a blur of blue fire across the battlefield. His blades went up and over, down and around, the three of them seeming to fly every direction at once. Searanin fell back on his original plan. He back pedaled, and drove off some attacks while he caught some with his shield and the rest with his armor. The dents and dings were getting too him, all the vibrating metal surrounding his bones. Just the sound of it was enough to drive a man crazy. And the aches that came with it, rising up off of him high up into his mind and driving the signals there crazy.

Searanin pushed, enfusing Solus with divine power, and lashed out at Shitenshi. The sword cut a golden path through the air. Shitenshi took a step back, but not fast enough. The very tip of Solus' blade caught cloth and chainmail and flesh, biting through all of them and leaving a sizzling scar behind. Shitenshi reeled as the real attack came through, the divine power, drove in by a single millimeter deep cut, blew through his veins. It boiled his demonic blood, and an unrelenting pain washed over him in a golden wave.

The knight felt his own blood boil from the attack, every nick and cut and scrape along his arm blazed with divine fury. Sometimes that pain was right and fine, like his god congratulating him on a job well done. Now it was a right bastard that drove him to his knees. He dropped Solus to the ground as his hand cramped and his fingers spread apart in a horrific fashion.

He heard the attack coming almost too late.

Shitenshi's blade cut a great arc through the air. It was only one blade with this attack, one with both of Shitenshi's hands clenched around the adamantine katana's hilt. The blow was meant to decapitate him, giving him and honorable death after the idiotic attempt at seppuku with the smite. But, Searanin heard the blade as it cut through the air, and instinct proved faster.