Chapter 99: The Quarter Finals: Yr'Arl Vs Boledo Part 2

Yr'Arl hurtled out of the other side of the now-destroyed comet in a shower of blue lightning. It clung to his armour and scattered off into the void of space, lancing across various asteroids and carving huge gouges out of them wherever they touched. 

While BB had told me off for thinking that Yr'Arl might have been holding back against me in our previous fights, I was now wondering if I had actually been right about that. Yr'Arl was moving at such speed, and with such power, there was no way that this was the same guy that I'd fought time and time again… was it?

<I think you're underestimating yourself here a little bit,> BB said, <Sure, you're not as strong as someone like Lara, but you're way stronger than Yr'Arl, even with this display of strength.>

I sunk down into my beanbag chair to get a little bit more comfortable. I wasn't sure if BB was only saying that to try and make me feel better or not. But then, he'd never lied to me before, so there was no reason to think that he'd be lying about this now. 

I turned my attention back to the unfolding fight. 

Boledo launched one of their manna energy whips and just about managed to catch Yr'Arl with it. The whip wound around one of his arms and tied it tight to his body. With a savage twist, Boledo pulled the whip taught and swung Yr'Arl around on the end of it. 

Unable to do anything to get away, Yr'Arl was driven through asteroid after asteroid, smashing into them one after the other. 

But I quickly realised that Yr'Arl wasn't getting away from the attack not because he couldn't, but seemingly just because he didn't want to. 

With a blast of blue electricity, Yr'Arl stopped himself before he impacted another asteroid. The move looked familiar, the static power elevating him just above the surface of the rock. 

<It's the same strategy that Ke'Zuc used in their fight,> BB confirmed. 

There he was again, copying techniques from the people that he fought and watched fight. That was the scariest thing about Yr'Arl as a fighter. Not the amount of power that he was currently displaying, but the fact that he could take pretty much any ability out there and use it as his own.

I had no idea what he was going to do when he figured out how some of my abilities worked. Yr'Arl with propulsion or anti-gravity fields when he was already as strong as he was? That was a version of Yr'Arl I didn't think I would ever want to fight. 

Boledo wasn't able to react to the fact that Yr'Arl had stopped fast enough, and was completely unprepared when the feline alien grasped the manna tether with his other hand and started swinging it back around. 

Yr'Arl was giving Boledo a taste of their own medicine, slamming them through asteroid after asteroid, and unlike Yr'Arl, Boledo didn't have any anti-gravity fields to make use of to stop themselves. Yr'Arl ended the attack by snapping himself out of the binding with a sheer force of will, ripping his arm away from his body so the manna whip literally tore itself into shreds. 

Boledo spun away, straight toward the castle that had been forged as part of Yr'Arl's side of the battlefield, and hit the ground hard. He skidded across the grassy entranceway, and through one of the grand pillars that made up the dining area on the front lawn. 

Yr'Arl had teleported after the alien in an instant and began working runes within moments. 

The runes that blazed into being were bigger than any of the runes that I had seen any alien create so far, spreading out across the whole of the asteroid that the castle was stationed on. While this was still automatic rune casting and nothing manual like we had seen in the previous fight, I could tell that this was going to be one of the strongest abilities that we had seen yet. 

As if it could read my thoughts, the castle itself shifted. 

It was like something out of one of the Transformers movies. The castle was shifting and changing, arms were being forged out of towers, and all of a sudden the great hall of the building moved upward to create a chest that they connected to. Finishing off the ensemble was a gigantic head, made out of an outbuilding that had been jammed onto the top of the construct. 

Somehow Yr'Arl had created a golem out of an entire castle. 

Without moving or saying a word, the mighty hand of the golem came crashing down on Boledo, who was only just getting up. They attempted to dive out of the way with their powerful legs, but they were just too slow, and instead, the alien was swatted out of the air like a fly. 

They cratered into the ground once more, and this time they didn't get up. 

I couldn't help myself. Yr'Arl had won in an incredibly impressive way, and I couldn't stop myself from jumping up out of my chair to whoop and holler like all of the other people who were watching down in the stands. Only to realise that no one else in the room was doing that. With an embarrassed flush on my face I sat back down, just in time for Yr'Arl to arrive back in the medical bay with a flash of light. 

He allowed the bot that peeled itself out of the wall to go over him with its scanners, but the machine didn't do anything other than applying some kind of gel to the wrist of the arm that had been tied to the rest of his body. 

After that had been applied he came back over to the bean bags with a spring in his step. 

Yr'Arl was clearly pretty pleased with his performance, and to be honest he had a right to be. If nothing else, his display had been incredibly cool. 

Maybe I did want him to go easy on me after all.