God of Trash-Chapter 95. VS Bast

Rhys wracked his brain, but came up with nothing. Beating Bast wasn’t even on the menu; avoiding getting the shit beaten out of him was the best he could dream of. Even then, there was little he could do to prevent or put off that beating. It was the finals of the tournament. He couldn’t just say no or back out. Laurent would probably kill him if he backed out or surrendered immediately after the quite frankly humiliating way Rhys had beaten him. Hell, he would probably kill his opponent if he’d gotten head-slapped with a sword then ring-outted via spin kick, only for his opponent to go ‘nah, no thanks’ and hand the finals to the guy he really wanted to fight. There was no backing down. He had to face Bast, and it had to look like a legitimate fight.

The problem laid in that any legitimate fight with Bast was a sure and painful loss for him. He wasn’t afraid of pain, if that pain meant gaining something. What he didn’t like, was pain without gain. That was just masochism. Which was what this fight was looking to be: an exercise in masochism, at the hands of someone vastly superior at melee combat than him.

Rhys sighed. He put his head in his hands and took a deep breath. There were no two ways about it. He’d go out there, give it his best shot, and get the hell beaten out of him. As long as he put up a good fight, he shouldn’t have Laurent coming after him, too, and it wasn’t like he’d never been beaten by Bast before. He was used to it. It would be fine.

The platform was already in good shape, since Rhys and Laurent’s fight hadn’t destroyed it much. The maintenance mages quickly replaced the pieces that were out of shape, and a referee gestured Rhys over. Reluctantly, Rhys approached the platform.

A familiar masked figure, clad in white robes, stood opposite. Solaire gave no indication he knew Rhys, and Rhys returned the favor. It was like when he ran into his female friend at the con, after he’d handed off the costume. They didn’t know one another. He was just some guy.

Solaire bowed, and Rhys bowed back. He stepped onto the platform, and Solaire stepped forth opposite. In a flash, Solaire drew his sword and darted toward Rhys.

Rhys’s sword flew into his hands. He angled it instinctively and activated Trash Intent, already knowing the exact direction and angle Bast would strike from. Their swords clashed. Rhys stepped backward from the sheer force of the blow, his eyes widening. Bast was way stronger.

Duh. We were kids back then. Even so, his blow was proportionally much stronger than they had been when they were both children. Just like when they were kids, Bast followed up the initial strike with a flurry of rapid blows. Rhys barely blocked most of them, taking glancing hits on his limbs and body where Bast got past his defenses. To Rhys’s surprise, though, none of Bast’s blows hurt too much. It almost felt like he was…

Holding back? Rhys looked at Bast’s eyes, but couldn’t see them through the mask with the way the sunlight poured down from overhead. He glared. “Don’t you dare.”

The next hit knocked him physically back. If Bast’s hits had been heavy before, they were almost unbearable now. For all that, the hit finally gave Rhys breathing room, even if only a heartbeat’s worth. He tossed out a handful of trash between the two of them and activated his rat spell. Bast charged, only for Rhys to spawn a chair in front of his leg as he stepped forward. Bast absolutely splintered the chair, and the manifest burst into motes of blue light. It had been a long time since the backlash of a broken Trash Intent had hit Rhys, but it slammed into his head like a sack of bricks. Earlier, Laurent had broken the intent by breaking the piece of trash; in other words, he’d broken the trash, not the intent itself, so he hadn’t gotten a backlash. Instead, the trash had become unusable. Still, if I can’t dismiss a Trash Intent before an enemy shatters it, it might be better to destroy the trash rather than take the hit.

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Rhys flinched, squinting against the sudden headache, and in that instant, Bast reached him. A blade swept toward his stomach. Rhys activated another piece of Trash Intent to snare Bast’s legs and keep him from approaching closer, and lunged forward at the same time, throwing out his hand. The rat leaped at Bast’s mask, then swirled behind it and chewed at the string keeping the mask on his face. Bast immediately clapped his hand to his face, smacking the rat into tiny blue smithereens, but that was all the opening Rhys needed. He dashed in.

Rather than use his sword, Rhys threw it aside and grabbed Bast in a bear hug, slamming him to the ground. He immediately tried to pin and pound Bast. Two punches in, and Bast reversed the pin. Rhys’s shoulders hit the stone, and the air went out of him in a familiar huff. He barely had time to get his arms up before Bast started pummeling his face. freeweɓnøvel.com

Their childhood wasn’t all laughter and nostalgia. Like any kids, or two people who had to spend their entire lives around one another, they had sometimes fought, and being two hot headed young men, those fights had often devolved into outright scraps, down and dirty no-holds-barred brawls where the winner took all, but no one actually won. Straw wasn’t the kind of adult supervision to prevent a couple of boys from learning how hand-to-hand combat worked, so the fights had gone to their inevitable conclusion time and time again. Rhys’s win rate was something like 1 to 9, with his few wins coming on days Bast trained too hard, or where he found some environmental factor to make the difference.

He could throw trash at Bast all day, but that wasn’t his move. Rhys looked inward instead, to where the impurities filled his body and core. He ignited them, pushing them all together into one huge trash star. A flash of power filled his body, only a moment, but that was enough. He jabbed his hand out, breaking his own block to grab Bast by the collar of his robes. Bast hammered his head, but couldn’t hit him fast enough. Not while the trash star burned. Rhys slammed Bast in the temple, and Bast reeled, his mask knocked askew.

For the first moment since battle had begun, Rhys saw a route to victory. He flipped Bast onto his back and pinned him, smashing at his mask. The eye holes weren’t lined up with Bast’s eyes anymore. The man was blinded, and had to breathe through the mask, too. He struggled, trying to grab his mask and put it back into place, but Rhys knocked his hands away in between beating his face. No chance. He wasn’t going to give this up for anything.

“ARGH!” Bast roared in frustration, and his aura surged. Rhys kept pounding at his face, but it was already over. Bast broke free of his hold with more speed and strength than Rhys could keep up with. He grabbed Rhys by the shoulders, lifted him, got his leg under Rhys—and threw him, tossing him over his head like Rhys was an infant. Rhys watched the ground rush by, pedaling his arms and legs like a dog in water. The stone platform passed underneath him, and he crashed down into the dust.

Silence. Absolute silence in the stadium. Rhys laid there for a moment, stunned from the impact, and it almost felt like the stadium sat stunned with him. He understood, though. He understood. He, the trashy contestant who should never have made it to the semifinals, let alone the finals, had forced their precious Sword Saint’s apprentice to not only fight seriously, but enticed him to brawl like a lowborn in a back alley, no technique or skill involved. It was truly a silence-demanding ending to the tournament. The cool Solaire, who stood upright and cooly dispatched all his foes with a single strike, brawling like a schoolboy and screaming in rage.

Belatedly, Rhys had a moment of self-reflection. Do I bring out the worst in people? Or… the trashiness?

On the platform, Bast scrabbled the mask back into place and stood, brushing off his robes as though nothing had happened. He sheathed his sword and bowed formally to Rhys.

Rhys bowed back, then jogged to the platform to pick up his abandoned trash and tossed-aside sword. Bast marched off as though there were nothing more to say, as if that fight had been completely normal and nothing strange had happened.

As Bast passed, Rhys muttered, “Sorry about that.”

Bast snorted. “What do you mean? That was the most fun I’ve had all tournament.”

Like that, they parted, like two ships in the night, but passing by and never touching, except for the time the two ships brawled in the dirt like little kids ten seconds ago.