Reflections on the Warpath - [An Isekai Progression Fantasy]

Akira knelt beside the vault room's ancient looking walls. Using Jiki as a lever, he pulled a brick free from the others. He rolled it in his palm, taking in every angle.

Initially, he wasn't sure this would work. They were in a training room. It was only a simulation of a brick, not the real thing.

Maybe that makes it easier?

A thought for another day…

He closed his eyes, shrinking his world until he and the brick were the only inhabitants, and their true essences communicated with each other.

Bricks rarely existed alone. They were seldom useful that way. When Akira looked towards the essence of the brick he held, he saw not one, but many. A tower of repeating, orderly stone that spiralled upwards. Constantly building. Perpetual construction.

Together, many bricks accomplished what one could not, they work-

No. Wrong line of reasoning.

Akira asserted his authority over the brick tower. The inevitable tug of gravity pulled it to the ground.

What goes up must come down.

Entropy in action.

But the tower built itself back.

It laughed in the face of mere gravity, ascending towards the heavens, cowing a primordial force of nature beneath its will.

That's what I do.

And you can too…

When Akira opened his eyes, he withdrew his hand. The brick didn't drop to the floor, it floated.

Defiant.

Nice!

He heard shouts from the south.

No time to make more.

"They're coming, Lyra. Get ready."

Lyra barely looked his way before returning to the vault. An ethereal, outlined twin gracefully stepped from her body. It stood on guard, watching the south entrance with Lyra's characteristic composure.

Akira lifted the brick into the air, leaving it to float just below the ceiling alongside the five he'd made earlier.

He didn't know how much of a difference they'd make in a fight, but it was always good to have another weapon.

Tia walked into the vault room, arms raised and ready to fight. Akira charged at her, swinging Jiki out to his left while he held Juryoku in a defensive grip.

A hardy looking tree sprung out from cracks in the stone tiles, rapidly rising to intercept Akira's sword.

Jiki cleaved it instantly. The shorn branches tumbled through the air in its wake. Akira continued forward, he planted his lead foot in the ground and curved the blade's arc towards Tia.

Her arm shone a bright white, tattoos shifting beneath the glow.

Jiki clanged into a forearm made of steel. Tia reeled from the impact, feet sliding across the ground.

A vine crept up Akira's foot. He jerked his leg away, but the plant rooted him to the ground. Akira hacked at it with Juryoku, but Alf's distraction had bought his teammate enough time to strike back.

Tia raised her knee to her chest. A green glow crept out from her leg as she kicked it at Akira. He stepped back. The kick kept coming. Her foot ballooned thrice its size, it pounded Akira's chest, shoving him away.

I guess these are the enchantments Lyra spoke about.

BOOM!

A ground-shaking explosion rattled the vault room's ancient walls, shaking dust onto the ground.

Jay?

Tia's eyes widened. She glanced back through the entrance. Alf stood silently by the doorway and took a step out into the corridor.

"Who do you think caused that one?" said Akira, knowing that it was probably a thunder punch from Jay. Fox didn't have many explosive attacks.

Tia looked back and smiled, equally confident in her teammate.

"Who do you think survived?"

Thunk! Cadunk! THWANK!

A series of bangs drew both fighters' curiosity. They grew louder, until Alf walked back into the room.

A vine followed him, dragging a half-conscious Fox into the vault room.

The gladiator didn't say a word as he got to his feet. He didn't even look around.

He spotted Akira, drew his axes, and started running.

Fuck.

Where'd he go?

Jay pressed his palms into the ground and forced himself up to his knees. His head throbbed from the impact, and the world still spun around him, but he was beginning to piece his reality back together.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

A weird vine dragged him out…

Alf?

Jay rose to his feet, using the wall he'd just slammed into to support himself. His world had given up on spinning and had settled into a mere wobble. Jay took a tentative step away from the wall. He couldn't stay here forever.

Fuck's sake!

If he was here alone, that meant everyone else was in the vault room.

It meant he'd failed.

He picked up his Quicksnatch rope and coiled it round his arm. It hadn't helped him much, But Jay didn't want to leave it behind. The dagger looked spent, and Jay hoped he hadn't wasted its only use on a practice drill.

Jay tried to move on from Fox, from his failure, but it gnawed at his mind.

I didn't even stand a chance.

He leapt over a cluster of shattered stonework, fists curled and mouth clenched into an infuriated snarl. He pounded his feet against the maze's stone floor, springing back to the vault.

The fight wasn't over yet.

He still had a chance to redeem himself.

A dense, thorny thicket blocked the entrance to the vault room when Jay finally got there. A sentry of brown and green, guarding the doorway. It stirred as Jay grew closer, like it acknowledged he would try and break past it.

Jay ran forward, hands outstretched and charged into the plant. He'd already failed his friends once today, he wouldn't leet a stupid fucking plant stop him from rejoining the fight. Jagged barbs pierced Jay's skin as his hands caught fistfuls of thorns. Spikes of agony needled through Jay's fingers as blood rolled down his forearms.

He clenched his fists, jamming his arms in deeper.

Although Fox had weathered Jay's burrowing bolts of electricity, Jay doubted the plants could.

Electricity rushed out of Jay's hands. Flooding into the plants, racing down their winding stems. It injected the defenceless thorns with more energy than they could possibly handle. And then it sent more.

Because after one failure today, Jay wasn't satisfied with merely killing whatever stood in his way. He needed to obliterate it.

Energy poured into the dying plant cells. Forcing them to vibrate with its uncontainable fury.

Vibrations became heat.

Heat became fire.

The once-dense thicket combusted before Jay, announcing his arrival to the vault room. He stepped through the flames, a vengeful silhouette lit up by two burning blue eyes.

Jay yearned to charge at Fox once more, to right his previous wrong, but Eye of the storm kept him disciplined. He assessed the battlefield. Scanned for a target.

Alf was closest. He stood inside a birdcage of vines, watching the fight unfold while attacking Jay's teammates from a distance.

He's the weak link, but could I help the others out first?

A grasping root launched at Akira, forcing him to abort an attack on Fox's left leg. Not that it would've done much. Fox's limbs had a silver sheen to them, like they were coated with metal. He hounded the frustrated samurai around the room.

He's stalling.

What I should've been doing…

Jay's attention switched to Lyra, who had given up on the vault and fought against Tia alongside her twin. Plants harassed her as she attacked.

She was pressing Tia back but couldn't force a finish.

She needs help too.

Can't crack the vault while you're fighting.

Jay stopped waiting and ran towards Alf with Ping in tow. Taking him out was Jay's original plan, and removing the mage's support would ease the burden on his team.

The plant-man turned around. Jay almost didn't mind if Alf saw him coming; any attention on him was attention away from his teammates. The vines of Alf's cage tightened. Three tree-like plants sprung from the stones in front of Alf, their branches ready to swipe at Jay.

Once I'm in there, I win.

Jay kicked off to the right. Ping flew above him.

The plants shifted too. Their roots slithered across the stones.

Jay stared at Alf.

He twirled his left wrist.

Whip-like branches sprung forth from the bunched together plants. They stood tall between Jay and their master.

Jay closed one eye. He had no way to thread the needle and attach the rope to Alf's cage.

So he didn't.

He tossed it upwards.

Jay raised his left arm and pulled his wrist back. The Quicksnatch activated mid-air, latching onto Ping's smooth back face instantly. The rope pulled taut. Ping yanked Jay upwards. She flew forward, accelerating Jay faster than Alf's vines could react and whipping him over the first line of defence.

Jay raised his wrist again and released the rope as he plummeted towards Alf. He smashed into the birdcage, thorns pressed into his cheeks as he pushed his face into the bars.

Even with Jay so close, Alf looked unshaken.

Not for long.

Fancy manoeuvres were nice, and Jay was happy that his had just worked. He needed to integrate Ping and his other tools into his fighting style after all.

But they didn't win fights.

They couldn't.

In a fight, a proper fight, you might not get the chance to pull one off. The circumstances won't always align for you to pull off that one technique you spent hours practicing.

That's why the great fighters relied on the basics and forgot all the fancy shit.

But the best fighters… Sometimes, they didn't even use the basics. Because even the simplest of techniques are situational.

Sometimes, in order to inch past that final hurdle, technique goes out the window.

And brute force takes its rightful place at the heart of the battlefield.

Jay pressed his hands against the bars of the birdcage. He tugged them apart, wrestling open a gap. Like the thistles in the doorway before it, the birdcage's brambles sank into Jay's fingers. Poison seeped through them into Jay, he sensed it invading through his bloodstream, hounding for his heart.

The cage fought well, but no poison could ever break Jay.

His stormforged body was hardened by the ruinous havoc of uncontrollable electricity. Tempered by constant combat. The poison in his blood rushed to debilitate his heart, but the foreign invaders succumbed to electricity's wrath before they even reached his chest.

Not. Fast. Enough.

Jay's body burst into blinding white radiance. His skin burned with the never-ending fury of electricity itself. He seared the vines inside his grasp, curling their thorns up into twisted black husks and infecting them with an electrical poison of his own.

Jay tugged against the bars. He could sense them weakening. He forced them open, wide enough for him to squeeze his head through. Jay set his eyes on his target.

Alf looked fucking terrified.

But even though he was so close, Jay wasn't in range yet.

Which meant his opponent still had a chance.

Alf may have been scared, but he was a gladiator through and through. Nobody climbed up the coliseum's rankings by crumbling under pressure.

Grasping vines crashed into Jay's legs from behind him. Ping tried to defend him, but she couldn't block them all.

Electricity burned the first few away. But they just kept coming.

Each time one vine died, another two replaced it. They coiled up Jay's legs, locking him in place.

Without the constant forward pressure of battle, the screams of electricity quietened within Jay. Cowed beneath the eternal endurance of nature.

Alf's expression faded from terror to relief.

Jay raged against the vines chaining him to the spot, writhing his entire body for mere inches of space. But he didn't have the power to completely break free.

Jay snuck a glance at his opponent. Alf had dropped his guard.

NOW!

Jay knew that the best fighters didn't need techniques, fancy plans, or strategies. But Jay had learned a lot about himself over the last month. And every battle, from his first meeting with Valorus, to the fight with the gorilla, his sparring with Cyrus, and the scuffle with Fox less than a minute ago had made something abundantly clear to him.

He was far from the best.

He didn't have the brute force necessary to win every fight on his terms.

Sometimes, in order to reignite the dying embers of a losing battle, he had to get a little creative.

Jay ducked.

He could've squeezed through the bars of the birdcage, they were flexible enough, but the vines wrapped around his legs rooted him to the spot. He was trapped.

Ping wasn't.

She whizzed over Jay. Directly at Alf.

And flew right past him.

Jay looked up at his rope trailing behind Ping. Soaring through the air, the Quicksnatch activated as soon as Jay grasped it. Jay couldn't outmuscle the shackling vines, but the sudden acceleration pulled him free.

He jerked into the air. Ping pulled him into the birdcage.

Jay socked Alf in the jaw mid-air. Clattering into him and collapsing on top of his body. He pulled back his fist and drove his steel knuckles into Alf's forehead.

The jutting bark guarding Alf's skull cracked as Jay pummelled his fist through it.

Alf's body collapsed into mist.

One down…

Jay analysed the other two matchups.

Who's next?