“If you take any longer, I’m going to kill myself just for something to do,” I told him.
“I don’t want to hear excuses after I beat you, Nate. I want you to understand that I am the better man, that you are beneath me. You need to understand your place.”
“Like Hephaestus did with you?”
“He cheated,” Ares snapped. “We were to fight fair, and he used his ability to trip me. Humiliated me in front of his wife. I murdered his friend to make us even.”
“Yeah, you’re a real stand-up guy. In case you haven’t noticed, I have no powers right now.”
Ares’s smile was wicked and cruel. “Oh, I know.” He bounced from foot to foot while I sighed with impatience. If his game was to keep me here until Gawain arrived, he was doing a good job. I considered just starting the fight, but I needed to keep my head. Allowing my emotions to get the better of me would get me killed. Ares was too dangerous for me to think it would end any other way. I didn’t even know how I was going to beat him when I didn’t have any power. Several thousand extra years of experience of fighting was not something I could take lightly.
Eventually he moved toward me, keeping his hands up and bouncing from foot to foot as he moved. I moved my head from side to side and waited for him. I wasn’t going to go to him; I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making me impatient.
When he was close enough, he threw a jab, which I knocked aside. I moved around him, either avoiding his punches or slapping them away, making him smile every time I had to back away. He feinted with a jab toward my kidney that I just managed to avoid, but I couldn’t avoid the blow to my jaw that knocked me over one of the tables.
“Not so good, after all,” Ares said with a laugh.
I felt like saying, “You see how good you are after someone tortures you for hours on end,” but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Instead, I got back to my feet and blocked a kick to my side, and then another one to my stomach. I brought my elbow down on his knee and punched him in the side. He pushed me away and began to bounce up and down again, shaking his knee as he moved.
“Nice,” he said. “You’ve got some power in your punches. Didn’t expect that.”
I remained silent and breathed out slowly before placing myself in a fighting stance.
“I haven’t seen that style before,” Ares said. “Where did you learn it?”
I remained quiet, and his irrational hatred of being ignored got the better of him. He snapped forward with a hard punch, which I ducked under, and I smashed my elbow into his exposed ribs and slammed my palms into his stomach. He stepped back but grabbed hold of me as he did, lifting me off the ground and flinging me over his head and across the table behind him.
“Finesse is over,” Ares said, throwing the table aside. I pushed up from the floor, kicking at Ares’s head as I spun past him. I stood and smiled as blood trickled down his lip. He licked it and charged me. I moved aside, but he was too fast, and he grabbed my arm, using his momentum to wrench it out of its socket. He kicked me in the chest, and I staggered back against the wall. His fist slammed into the side of my head, knocking me to one knee as stars swam in front of me. I blocked a knee to the head, but he kicked me in the ribs, doing more damage to my earlier injury.
I dropped to all fours, and Ares kicked me in the ribs like he was kicking a football. More of them broke from the impact, and I rolled against the wall, gasping for breath.
Ares reached down, grabbed me by the throat, and lifted me off the ground before slamming the back of my head into the wall.
“You are not my equal!” he shouted in my face. He head-butted me and flung me across the destroyed table, where I hit a chair, gouging my forearm. Blood was soon trickling down toward my hand, and I spotted the bracelet that Ares had been wearing. It was on the floor under a nearby table. I was beaten, hurt, and had been tortured for hours. I couldn’t beat Ares. It wasn’t a matter of how good he was—he was fresh, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure I’d have been able to beat him if I’d been at 100 percent, but I knew in my current state, it would only be a matter of time before he killed me or, worse, knocked me out so that he could finish the job on my mind. Sending me out to kill those people I loved the most.
“You still on the floor, little man?” Ares asked. “I can’t believe how weak Helios must have been to have lost at your hands.”
“I thought this was going to be equal,” I said, using the table to pull myself upright before slamming my shoulder into the wall, putting the dislocated joint back in place. I cried out in pain. “You’re still much stronger than me.”
Ares shrugged. “Can’t do much about that, now can I?”
I shrugged, too. “Guess not. So are we fighting, or are we going to drink tea and eat cake?”
Ares laughed and walked toward me. I blocked a kick and drove my knee into his stomach. I kicked out at his leg, causing it to buckle, and punched him in the jaw, knocking him to the side. As he moved he kicked out, and despite my blocking it, the power behind it lifted me off my feet and dumped me on the nearest table. I rolled over it and crashed to the floor, grabbing the bracelet and clicking it into place a second later. Power flowed through me, but I stayed where I was on the floor, allowing my magic to heal me.
Ares threw the table above me aside and kicked my newly healed ribs. “Is that it? Are you spent?”
He kicked again, and I rolled with it, throwing up shadows all around Ares that dragged him to his knees, pinning him in place.
“Cheat!” Ares screamed at me as he tried to fight against the shadows.
“Yeah, you just caught on to that?” I asked, and wrapped air around my fist, bringing it down onto his jaw and snapping his head aside with incredible force.
Blood splattered across the floor from Ares’s ruined mouth, and I kicked him in the chest, using my shadows to drag him down onto his back.
“You’re undeserving of calling yourself a man,” Ares said.
I rained down punch after punch on his helpless body, allowing the rage and anger to fuel me, until his face was a ruined mess.
“You shouldn’t have put all that hate in me,” I whispered to him. “Maybe I’d have fought fair if you’d just left me alone.”
I placed the tip of my finger against his temple as he muttered something.
“I hope this hurts,” I said, and shot a finger width of lightning magic into his temple.
He screamed in pain and bucked against the shadows. Then I stood up, created a blade of lightning, and slammed it into Ares’s neck over and over again until his head rolled along the floor. The shadows vanished, and I dropped to my knees at the sound of clapping. I turned around to see Deimos and Gawain standing in front of the now-opened door.
Deimos grinned at me. “My turn.”