Fiesel's attempt at turning Leopold to his cause was born of little more than a twisted intrigue, for he knew the righteous knight would never partake in frivolous slaughter. Predictably, the Hurricane was quick to refuse his offer, instead promising to cut down the much-maligned Hellfire Knight for his crimes- both against humanity and God.
"Now..." said Fiesel, lenses gleaming under the crudely drawn pentagram of blood on his forehead, "Are you ready to burn?"
With his sword at the ready, Leopold inhaled deeply and made one final inquiry. "You accursed dog, why have you chosen now to take such wretched action?"
"I thought that much obvious," Fiesel chuckled through his mask's soot-cached filter. "It took some time to accrue the strength necessary to challenge you, dear friend."
"And so now you believe yourself capable?"
"Oh, beyond that- I'm quite certain of it," the madman mused nefariously.
Leopold returned a slow nod of acknowledgment. "I see. And from where is this certainty rooted?"
"I've kept a close eye on you throughout our many battles, Sturm. Every technique, every limit- by now, I've witnessed everything you have to offer," Fiesel answered with sinister confidence.
"And based on that, you believe yourself wise to my full capabilities?"
Tilting back his head, the fiend cast the glare from his lenses and beamed toward his former ally with clear, hate-filled eyes. "Are you suggesting that you too have grown in such a short time? That you might have the ability to keep pace with my evolution?"
"Of course not," Leopold scoffed. "To the contrary, I warn that you cannot begin to fathom the extent of the abilities that I have held from the start."
Caution briefly flickered in Fiesel's eyes before his smug glare returned. "You're too much, old friend, you really are. Even faced with imminent death, you find humor in your situation. That's why I've always been partial to you."
"Only a degenerate could find humor among the corpses of women and children," Leopold growled.
"Really?" asked Fiesel, tilting his head exaggeratedly, "I thought them a lovely set piece! You don't share my preference in décor?"
"Enough wasteful talk!" snapped the stalwart lieutenant, tightening a leather glove around his blade's grip, "If corpses are your idea of decoration, then I will create a worthy centerpiece!"
Fiesel shook his head dismissively. "Oho! Where was this fire before? This war could have been over and you returned to your little one by now!"
"My power, when unleashed in full, has a high propensity for undue collateral damage," Leopold explained as he prepared to strike, "However, looking around, I see that I need not make such considerations here. By murdering these people, you have assured your swift judgment."
Raising a curious eyebrow, Fiesel leaned slightly forward. "What's that?"
In an instant, the madman was torn from his footing and slammed into the town hall behind him. He was then rooted firmly in place by his throat as the entirety of the building collapsed atop him, battering his head and body with heavy debris. Now, surrounded by rubble, Leopold maintained his grip on Fiesel, holding the fiend aloft.
"What have you done to Michael and Erma?!" the lieutenant roared in his dust-covered enemy's mask. "Where are they?!"
Slowly, Fiesel raised a weak finger past Leopold's shoulder toward the charred crater where Scharf's grenade had detonated. "There..." he gasped before pointing off to another indistinct position on the ground. "And a little over there..." he cackled breathlessly.
No sooner did a flash of rage overtake Leopold's face before he flung Fiesel into the air, leaped into the sky beside him, and cleaved the madman in two at the waist. The dismembered torso, followed by its lower half, then collapsed atop a pile of splintered wooden floorboards before being crushed under the lieutenant's heavy jackboots and bursting into a puff of ash and flame.
"My my, Sturm. Straight for the kill? Not the slightest hint of sentimentality?"
Leopold turned to the village square and found Fiesel, completely undamaged, standing in the open. Before his enemy could utter another word, the swordsman immediately closed the thirty-meter gap between them and slammed a knee into his ribs. Though winded, Fiesel was quick to retaliate with a flame-laced uppercut. Before the pyromancer's burning hand could make contact with his jaw, however, Leopold snatched the madman's wrist and tore away his entire arm. Stumbling back, Fiesel was unable to protect himself from a crushing kick, which launched him clear through several wooden houses, causing them to collapse in his wake.
"Good thing no one was in those houses, hmm? No one alive, anyway," Fiesel spoke up from behind the swordsman.
Leaping forward, Leopold spun around mid-air to face his opponent before landing a fair distance away. He then raised his arm and, bending the wind to his command, clutched his hand into a fist, creating an extreme air pressure difference that crushed Fiesel's bones in a fraction of a second. The sheer force was so great that it forced the traitor's eyes from their sockets, causing them to pop against the lenses of his gas mask. With his body reduced to a sack of skeletal shards, Fiesel quickly collapsed into a broken heap, barely recognizable as having once been human.
As Leopold had come to expect, a psychotic cackling soon erupted from a nearby rooftop.
"You made much ado about the supposedly unknown depths of your strength but I've seen nothing of note. Was it all hot air?" Fiesel taunted with a shrug.
In a blinding flash of steel, the traitor was cut to ribbons and buried beneath the sudden collapse of the house he had been standing atop. It seemed Leopold had not moved a centimeter, despite the catastrophic damage inflicted a substantial distance away; a testament to the Hurricane's unmatched speed in combat.
Despite having his body destroyed several times over, however, Fiesel was quick to reappear, this time from a towering column of flame directly in front of his adversary. "You're either toying with me or there truly is nothing more to your power," he hissed, annoyed by Leopold's lack of serious follow-up. "For the sake of time, let's rule out the former at once."
The masked psychopath then raised one clenched fist in front of his face before being overtaken by an intense, flaming aura. What little of his hair was left exposed by his helmet began to give off a fiery glow, matching the color and flicker of the surrounding blaze, as his irises took on a burning orange hue.
"How do you like it, dear friend? This enhancement took quite the 'human cost' to acquire, but I've found it more than worth their suffering. I call it my 'First Degree.'"
More disgusted than impressed by the fiend's surprise transformation, Leopold made the unexpected decision to return his sword to its sheath. Fiesel, caught off guard, took the gesture as an admission of defeat.
"So then you feel it, too?!" the traitor exclaimed in a shrill, excited voice, "The infinite depths of my strength?! The succulent fruits of my labor?! Now you know that there is no hope of victory!"
"You are wrong," Leopold answered calmly. "I simply refuse to dull my blade on your bones any longer. I shall crush them to dust with my own hands."
"Will you?!" the masked fiend challenged with anxious joy in his tone.
With a horrid, echoing screech, Fiesel vaulted high into the air before coming engulfed in a pulsing fireball. He then rocketed downward, slashing his blazing fist toward the lieutenant like the claw of a wild animal. The vicious rend met its target with such devastating and explosive force that the surrounding area was totally destroyed, forming a crater over a hundred meters from end to end, and burning every structure caught within its radius to ash in seconds.
"I will."
Suspended in the air by his otherworldly power, Fiesel found his attack blocked by the forearm of his adversary. Though the destruction surrounding Leopold was complete, he himself remained unharmed. The swordsman promptly catapulted Fiesel into the a half-kilometer into the air and leaped after him with enough power to shake the ground below. Meeting his opponent as they careened through the sky, the mighty Hurricane struck him several times with fists so swift that their mere movement created violent shockwaves. After pounding the madman through several kilometers of cloud cover, Leopold booted Fiesel with overwhelming force, blasting him downward in an ardent streak of firelight, ultimately colliding with the war-ravaged wastes of no man's land at over five hundred kilometers per hour.
The resulting blast wave leveled sheered trees and leveled the surrounding terrain, leaving a long, deep scar across the earth where Fiesel had deflected across the ground. While dust and debris still lingered in the turbulent air, Leopold, aided by his control over wind, made a soft landing halfway down the muddy furrow, and cast his gaze toward its end. There he caught a glimpse of Fiesel's distinct, orange glow rising from the billowing smoke. The traitor then stumbled forward from his obscurity, cracked his neck, and spied something resting at his feet.
It was a regular piece of coal.
Fiesel retrieved the lustrous black rock and clutched it firmly in his right palm. Then, without warning, he lunged forward at incredible speed, slamming his fist into Leopold's face with such unrestrained might that the blow parted the clouds above and shattered windows as far away as Hastings- on the other side of the English Channel. The coal within Fiesel's fist, pressurized and heated to an immense degree, was transformed into diamond and subsequently shattered into a fine, sparkling dust that blanketed the area.
Leopold Sturm, however, offered only a defiant glare past the trembling fist still planted firmly against his jaw.
For the first time in his depraved life, Fiesel felt a tinge of fear. "Y-you... What the hell is this?!"
"You were warned, demon."
Vaulting backward, Leopold levitated himself within a powerful updraft, leaving his cape to thrash around violently at his back. He then raised his open palm to the sky, stitching the blown-apart clouds back together into a darkening sheet over the barren land. The murky billow began to swirl and extend downward from the heavens as wind speeds picked up substantially.
"Coward!" cried Fiesel, throwing his hands to his sides, "Have you called on your divine to smite me?! So be it!"
The funnel cloud snaked its way downward, increasing in strength exponentially before touching down as a tornado of unparalleled destructive potential. Its walls then expanded outward, stripping the surrounding area bear and jettisoning rocks and wooden debris all around at deadly velocity. One such missile shot into Fiesel fast enough to punch a hole clean through his chest, though he was able to quickly regenerate from the injury.
"Sturm! I know you're hiding in there!" the madman shrieked at the catastrophic twister. "Come out here and face me, worthless rat!"
With the towering outer wall of the tornado creeping toward him, Fiesel steeled himself against the earth and thrust his palms against the relentless torrent of air. Much to his shock, he could now feel that the storm's wind speed was still increasing.
Seven-hundred... Eight-hundred... No, nine hundred kilometers per hour... It can't be, this type of speed is impossible...
A deafening roar bellowed as the tornado's rotation speed broke the sound barrier. Desperate to match the astronomical energy output of the storm, Fiesel tapped into the vast legion of souls held within his core, making their vitality his own. This caused his hellish aura to flare, bringing the ambient temperature to over two hundred degrees.
I will not lose like this... I cannot be defeated!
By this point, the speed of the funnel's rotation had reached levels unmatched by any such climate event in the planet's history. It radiated a continuous shockwave, amplifying the storm's destructive range by a great deal, while destabilizing the very earth below. The ground buckled and warped, exposing bedrock which itself shattered into innumerable rocky projectiles. Even the friction generated by supersonic debris threatened to ignite wildfires.
Ironically, Fiesel was able to harness this heat to further increase his strength. Where he once stood hopelessly unmatched, the fiend now found himself reinvigorated. Pressing his palms against the supersonic funnel, he trudged forward against its gale, actually managing to push the heavenly finger back a small distance. This small victory snowballed into significant momentum, and Fiesel was able to displace the tornado to an even greater extent.
"I told you!" he howled into the all-consuming roar, "No one can match me now! I'll scorch the weakness from this whole sickening world!"
For all his confidence, Fiesel had missed one key detail. In reality, it wasn't his influence that had relocated the tornado's outer wall, nor had the storm been significantly disrupted. The twister had instead begun to compact inward, sacrificing its size in exchange for substantially accelerated wind speed. Just as Fiesel caught on to the sudden shift in the atmospheric phenomenon, Leopold dropped to the base of the funnel and began to deform its tip around his forearm. Realizing what was to come, the masked traitor hopped backward and braced himself.
"Come now, Sturm! Give it your all!" Fiesel cried aloud, making no effort to evade the impending strike. "I fear nothing, not even your Destroyer Cyclone!"
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