Harmony: Harmony Book 1, page 44
Something hitting Leah’s side made her cover her head on instinct. She for a brief moment thought the man had used a spell against her, but she quickly discovered that he had mimicked her trick and thrown a piece of furniture across the room. She wouldn’t really have judged him if he was bringing his spells into the fight, but she didn’t want to fight Nate the mage. No, she wanted to beat up Nate the warrior that she occasionally saw in the dungeon.
The werewolf alpha was getting up when something hit her shoulder. If she had taken half a second longer, she would have been hit in the neck. Looking at her shoulder, she saw a handle sticking out of it, making it very clear that the pain she was feeling was indeed from having a knife stuck in her.
Staring down Nate, she growled deeply in response to the arrogant expression the man had on his face. That expression really didn’t suit him, Leah thought. She much preferred it when he was confident than when he smirked arrogantly as if he considered the battle won just because he thought Leah had forgotten that he had weapons to use. Taking that into account, she didn’t have to think long before deciding to wipe that smile off his face.
Just as Nate had used the distraction of the furniture being thrown to hit her with a knife without her noticing the projectile being thrown, Leah picked up a piece of wood from the floor and hurled it at the man. As soon as he began to dodge as she knew he would, Leah acted.
The girl knew Nate had a regeneration power, but this was still something new to him. He simply wasn’t used to fighting while ignoring all damage below a certain threshold. Therefore, when the man stepped aside to dodge the flying piece of wood, she pulled the knife out of her own shoulder and threw it at the place Nate would come to a stop.
“Fuck,” Nate muttered as he suddenly felt his own throwing knife penetrate all the way to the hilt into the side of his abdomen.
“You’ll need more than a few toothpicks to stop me, Nate,” Leah said. “You have no idea how many men and women I’ve beaten within an inch of their lives to maintain my position as alpha and my status in the Great Pack. Some even more powerful than me at the time.”
“And that’s the difference between us, my friend,” Nate growled with his eyes gleaming with restrained power. “All my opponents need tombstones.”
That was bullshit. Complete and total bullshit, but it had the necessary effect. For a fraction of a second, Leah flinched and recoiled as if she were about to back down, and it was in that moment that Nate acted. He first threw the two throwing knives he had hidden from her sight. Both knives made contact, hitting one shoulder each.
Nate knew he wouldn’t be able to restrain her movements like this for long, but he didn’t need much time. Closing the distance between them, Nate first delivered a strong kick to the girl’s knee, causing her to lose her balance. He then unleashed a powerful right hook to her snout, even making a tooth fly away.
Leah, however, was far from finished. Past the initial shock of the man’s intimidation, she ignored the pain of her wounds, knowing her regeneration would handle it, and fiercely counterattacked. Once again proving to him how someone with a strong regenerative ability should fight, she lunged at him before he could move away and brought them both down. Or rather, onto the couch that broke under the damage the two of them had inflicted on it.
There, she struck his face with her claws, her heart actually squeezing a little at the sight of the four red lines that appeared as her claws cut him like a razor. Nate, to his credit, didn’t even scream. On the contrary, he tried to maneuver the situation in his favor, but Leah wasn’t playing games.
Nate attempted to use grappling techniques to escape the situation, but the truth was that the girl was stronger than him. Faster too, but that mattered little to none there. He might have had better technique, but she could simply overpower him with brute force. When a second set of claws drew blood from the other side of his face, Nate knew he had to find a way out.
As serious as the fight might have seemed to an external observer, Leah wasn’t trying to seriously hurt him. She could have gone for the throat, after all. Similarly, Nate hadn’t used his spells or his silver-ammunition weapon, something that would definitely give him an absurd advantage. The young mage was annoyed, it was true. He wanted to beat her up, definitely. But he by no means wanted to kill her, or for her to think that was his intention. Even when he made his cringe-worthy comment about tombstones and opponents, he had called her a friend to try to make it clear that wasn’t what he was going for there.
With no more ideas, Nate grabbed Leah’s hand with one of his when she tried again to make cuts on his face. Without hesitation or concern, the girl used her other hand, which Nate also intercepted.
With a smile on her still healing canine face, Leah began to force their hands down. Perhaps if Nate could use both hands to hold one of hers, he could win this little struggle, but that wasn’t possible. The moment he let go of one of her hands, she would cut him with the other. Likewise, if he didn’t let go, then even more damage would be done.
Nate refused to accept this. Although his ego and masculinity weren’t so weak as to be shattered by losing to a girl or to someone younger than him, especially one with her background, that didn’t mean he liked losing. He had to think of something, and fast.
“You’re not giving your best,” Leah growled with her snout pressed against his face. “If you lose here, I’ll never let you forget it.”
Well, if she wanted him to try his best, then it was time for him to start using the spells he had been saving in reserve. Making his decision, Nate divided his attention between the effort to keep Leah’s hands away from him and the creation of a mana pattern for a fireball. Before he could cast his spell, however, something that left both of them wide-eyed happened.
Nate’s right hand, where the mana to cast the spell was gathering, began to push Leah’s hand back. For a moment, the two of them looked at each other with their mouths agape as the Tier 1 overcame the Tier 2 in a strength competition, but Nate understood what was happening before the girl did and took full advantage of it.
Manually controlling the mana in his body, he drew a significant portion of mana from his core and divided it into three parts: One for each hand, and one for his right leg. He didn’t consciously do anything with the mana, just transporting it through his mana veins and leaving it there, but in the end he was right about what had happened.
When Nate first gained his new body, Jess had informed him that he had become a magical being and that his body needed mana to survive and function properly. He just hadn’t considered that his body could go beyond just ‘functioning properly’. With his hands and arms flooded with mana, the young mage used all his strength and pushed Leah’s hands back.
The action had a more profound effect than he expected, causing the girl to be thrown almost entirely off him. Nate wasn’t finished, however. Before the girl who was looking at him with wide and incredulous eyes had a chance to regain her balance and resume her offensive, he kicked her in the chest and sent her flying to the other side of the room, where she crashed against the wall with an audible thud before falling to the ground.
For a brief moment, Nate worried he had seriously hurt his friend, but a primal laugh that echoed through the room made him reconsider. Rising apparently without any difficulty, Leah didn’t even wait to stop laughing to advance again on him, this time faster than ever.
“I knew you were holding back!” The girl exclaimed as she laughed, which left her opponent extremely uncomfortable and thinking she had lost a screw in her head with the impact against the wall. Not that he would ever say that to her.
Nate tried to use his new trick to counter her speed, but he soon regretted it when he unintentionally launched himself to the ceiling, where he hit his head. Laughing even more, Leah didn’t wait for her opponent to fall to the ground before attacking him. Instead of trying to slash him with her claws, she punched Nate in the stomach and sent him flying against a wall in a mirror image of what he had done to her.
Getting up with a grunt, Nate created a small knife in each hand and lunged forward, meeting Leah halfway. Being faster than him, the girl delivered the first blow, but Nate managed to dodge in time and stab with the knife he held in his right hand.
Leah simply ignored the new puncture in her belly and tried to kick his knee, but Nate reinforced his leg with mana and withstood the attack. He still felt the impact and suffered some damage, but she had hit him so hard that he had no doubt he would be dealing with a shattered knee if he hadn’t acted quickly. Returning the favor, Nate feinted by pretended to punch her in the face and seized the opportunity to deliver a kick the side of her knee. With his mana-filled attack, she lost her balance and started to fall towards Nate and the knives he held.
With one, he struck a blow against the right side of her chest, while the other was diverted from drawing a line on the girl’s lupine face. He saw some fur falling to the ground, though, so maybe he had managed a small cut. A kick from her that he couldn’t dodge sent him walking a few steps back until they were both facing each other.
“Hey, Leah,” Nate taunted. “Ever heard of death by a thousand cuts?”
“And you say I’m the cliché one,” Leah rolled her eyes, which was a bad idea in the situation she was in.
Nate capitalized on the wolf girl’s momentary distraction to deliver a blow to her belly. He couldn’t see blood through her fur, not so soon after the attack, but the red staining his blade was more than enough proof that he had achieved what he planned.
“Oh, you’re gonna pay for that, Nate,” the alpha growled, putting her hand over her belly and watching it soak red along with her fur.
They then began a deadly dance. On one side, Leah used the claws on her four limbs to cut and shred Nate. On the other, he used his blades to stab and slash at any opening the girl gave him. Both of them had their clothes almost completely shredded, with the man barely able to maintain his modesty. They were both positively drenched in red, too, whether it was their own blood or each other’s. In the end, Leah had spilled much more blood than Nate, but he was the one who was losing.
Throughout the exchange of blows that lasted minutes, Nate was able to once again realize that his regeneration ability seemed to be inferior to Leah’s, at least in speed. This meant that he was accumulating much more damage over time than her, who with each passing second had a wound that was there previously disappear. Nate, in turn, had to fight much more carefully, not only because of that but also because he needed a constant flow of mana flowing through certain parts of his body to match her physical strength. Unfortunately, flooding his wounds with mana seemed to have no observable effect in his healing speed, making it even clearer that the young mage had to end the battle as quickly as possible. Thus, he devised a plan.
“You look like shit, Leah,” Nate said in a magnanimous tone. “Why don’t you surrender now before you pass out from losing all that blood?”
“Alphas don’t surrender to enemies, we fight to the death,” Leah roared dramatically, making Nate huff and roll his eyes. He knew that if that were true, half the werewolves who tried to take the alpha position would be dead, but according to Harper, the number of deaths they had per year for something like that was actually relatively small.
The girl fell into his trap, however. As soon as she saw the boy distracted, she charged at him. Her speed had decreased drastically over the course of the battle as her injuries increased and the mana levels in her body decreased, but she was still a little faster than Nate.
Before the girl could reach him, Nate let his throwing knives fly from his hands. His target was nothing more than the girl’s feet. That was by no means the most efficient target if he wanted to cause the most damage possible to tax the girl’s regeneration, but it was the ideal target to slow her down.
With her feet suddenly in pain, Leah took a misstep and almost lost her balance. At that moment, Nate was there. He didn’t create new knives to attack her, nor did he use the ones that were still stuck in her because she didn’t bother to remove them. Instead, he grabbed one of her arms and threw her to the ground over his shoulder.
Her back had barely touched the floor before Nate was on her. Ignoring the claws she had stuck in his belly, he put the rest of the mana left in him into his fists. He had used a large amount of mana to keep his attacks being effective, and he hadn’t had the opportunity to recover his mana in combat since Leah was waiting for that. So this would be the last round of the battle, for better or for worse.
Steeling his nerves and convincing himself that he wasn’t really assaulting his friend, he punched her lupine face. Her head turned with the punch and she clearly saw stars, but Nate didn’t stop his offensive. Instead, he used his other hand to deliver another punch. And then another and another, all while Leah eviscerated him with her claws.
When Nate’s mana finally ran out, he fell on top of Leah, exhausted. Exhausted and technically dying, actually. Not that it would really happen, but the situation he was in at the moment was not the best.
Using the last of his strength to push himself out of the girl who was having trouble breathing, Nate threw himself back, settled beside her on the ground and tried his best not to notice the part of his small intestine that had been left on top of her. Or rather, the parts, since she hadn’t been content to just take the organ out of him. His belly was a bloody mess, and Nate didn’t know how only the small intestine had come out. He was sure her claws had damaged other organs, though. Strangely enough, he wasn’t in the infernal pain he thought he would be in this situation. Whether this was the effect of the shock he was certainly in or his body being more resistant to pain, he didn’t know, but he was grateful nonetheless.
Leah, for her part, wasn’t in a much better state. Her body itself was more or less intact, if one ignored the fingers she had lost to his blades during the fight. And the nipples, but she had more important things to worry about. After all, the girl didn’t need to see her own face in the mirror to know that it had been destroyed. Pummeled. Decimated.
She would have been very pissed at Nate at that moment if she weren’t so turned on. The most turned on she had ever been in her life, in fact. Seeing him meet her on equal footing in battle had been practically an aphrodisiac for her, but actually seeing him win in such a violent and definitive way? She had no words to describe how much she wanted him in that moment.
If they were being honest, it was hard to say who had won the battle. While Leah would naturally recover completely given enough time, Nate’s injuries were more severe and fatal. However, the opposite was also true.
Leah’s eyes had been crushed, her ears rendered practically useless by the buzzing and strange sounds she was hearing, and she didn’t even want to think about why she couldn’t breathe through her nose without an absurd amount of pain and blood making themselves present. At that moment, someone could enter the building to finish them both off, and she would never know what was happening. Meanwhile, Nate could simply consume the remnants of furniture around them until he had enough mana to place some mana spears at her neck until she was decapitated. For all intents and purposes, it had been a draw, but neither of them cared about that at the moment.
“I think we may have gone a bit overboard,” Nate murmured to himself as the pain he expected finally began to hit him. Trying to sit up and immediately regretting it, Nate consumed the debris around him until he had enough mana to activate the spatial enchantment of his ring of holding. He then retrieved a healing potion and drank it before he had no strength left even for that.
Immediately, he began to feel better, but he still had at least one organ outside his body. Leaving out a grunt and wondering how his life had come to this point, Nate proceeded with the gruesome task of stuffing himself. He didn’t know or care if he was putting his intestines back in the right place, trusting that the potion would take care of it. In the worst case scenario, Gwen could take a look at him when she showed up.
Knowing that he was no longer about to discover the limits of his regeneration ability, Nate forced himself to sit up and fed a healing potion to Leah. He was worried when she started to choke on the potion, but in the end, everything worked out, and he managed to feed her a second potion before taking another himself.
Looking at the work he had done on her face, Nate couldn’t help but shudder. Her head didn’t even resemble a lupine head anymore, if he was being honest. Her snout had been flattened and then smashed until parts of it were hanging on her face or scattered around, with the skull bone horribly appearing to greet his eyes.
And speaking of eyes, he wouldn’t be able to find hers even if he had the courage to look for them. They had been crushed when the eye sockets gave way, after all. Her ears, on the other hand, were mostly intact. He doubted she could hear anything properly, though, with the amount of damage she had taken to the head. She must have the mother of all concussions, and if she were a human on Earth, Nate doubted she would survive until an ambulance arrived.
But since she wasn’t, her face had been completely rebuilt. And not just her face, but her entire body. Even the fingers she lost had grown back. Nate had given her two more potions during the healing time, but he didn’t know if they had been necessary or not.
“Wow, these potions really are something else,” Leah sighed in relief as she felt her face with her hands to make sure everything was in place. “Miraculous, even.”
“I actually think a lot of that is your own regeneration working in conjunction with the potion,” Nate deduced. “You recovered from the injuries faster than you should have.”
“Good to know,” Leah nodded her head and then turned her attention to the man sweeping the debris from the furniture into a corner of the room. “Hey Nate, are you fully healed yet?”
