Chapter 961 - Young Adrian (Patreon)

The sky begins to turn orange with mana radiation rising up quickly. I locate the source of that, spotting a young man in white armor and with blonde hair, holding the Sword of Aeons. He faces another man, this one with long black hair and one wing growing from his left shoulder blade. He holds the same sword, generates the same domain, attempting to negate the one of the young blonde man.

I pick up more speed before coming to a sudden stop, the last bit of momentum causing me to hit the beyond attendee, exploding him and making him lose one of his lives. I barely acknowledge it, looking in a new direction, and for a moment even forgetting about Adrian.

My Mana Cycling begins to change, instead of locking it inside of my body, it begins to expand to the surface and beyond. Like lashes made of plasma, like eruptions of flames on the surface of the sun, it often shoots out. Just highly concentrated mana that cuts through avatars and participants, and the mana radiation itself causes them to drop to their knees and vomit their insides.

I allow my body to tilt and watch the ground approaching, and just before I lose balance and fall, I erupt with another burst of speed. I shoot through one of the monsters that I got used to seeing outside of the outpost of the third beyond floor. I bodyslam a lumoran avatar, sending his broken body flying away.

Before adding more to my speed, I release flames through exhaust nodes on my back, burning to ash everything behind me, and with a screech of jet engines, launching me ahead with a sonic boom and a shockwave shooting outwards.

My body tears through more people, and I launch over the mountain and then boost myself to the ground, slamming there like a meteor and killing many more.

Leaving the tricolored orb behind, I boost forward and run. The massive ball of mana detonates, chasing me down and threatening to engulf my back. I push my speed even higher, barely out-sprinting the explosion. I clear the blast radius by a hair, right before the mana violently implodes, snapping backward to pull everyone else into the center.

I come to a sudden stop, and a black projectile passes just in front of my face, causing me to slowly turn my head in the direction where it came from.

Nathaniel Gwyn, as he was when his third tournament ended, stands there, holding a sword made of black mana and with his Mana Wavelength Iris locked onto me. Near him, there is a Hell Difficulty attendee from Earth, totally broken and close to death, with an avatar showing no damage at all.

There is another beyond attendee jumping from behind to attack him, but he halts in the air, unable to move at all, as the avatar Nathaniel stabs a black sword through his chest without taking his eyes off me.

He tilts his head in slight confusion as he observes my face, and I can't help but to think.

You are an avatar, why the fuck are you locking onto me? Just finish your opponent.

His mana rises up, facing against my pressure, a black halo spins over his head, and in sync with his heartbeats, kinetic energy floods his body as he dashes at me.

The mana moving around me changes, forming circuits so dense and so detailed that both of his eyes explode instantly, unable to endure the overload of information.

Yet he still reaches me even without those eyes, stabbing the black sword against my chest.

It doesn't even pierce my skin, turning into particles of black mana that I take over and make mine. Moving much faster than he, my hand shoots ahead as I place it on his shoulder while at the same time grabbing him in a kinetic hold. Then I use [Jüdrajil] and take all his mana.

And he resists.

He resists more than anyone I ever used the skill against. The skill pulls on his mana, that thread, the tunnel connecting us, stretches as well as that mana, yet it clings to his body. His eyes and mouth begin bleeding as he faces against it all, but in the end he makes all that mana black, turning it into an explosion that he attempts to send through the connection made by [Jüdrajil].

But black mana of this density is not enough to face me. I simply break it all apart and take all this mana, adding it to my reserves.

When I move to finish him, he shows what he was doing and finishes overclocking his mind, teleporting away all his flesh, leaving behind just a skeleton with hearts and his brain. With most of his body missing, my kinetic hold on him weakens, and new flesh starts forming around him at the same time as he takes advantage of that and pushes against me.

I throw a raw mana blast in his direction, drilling a hole through the entirety of the mountain behind him, but at the last moment, he kicks up some black mana, absorbing the attack. He takes a step ahead, his flesh reforming, and his own kinetic blast slams against the defensive layer around my head ten times in a row.

Then his Ignition Heart explodes. I don't mean it generates thermal energy at full throttle. It explodes. He, without any hesitation, destroys it in order to release a huge blast of thermal energy, which he forces in my direction. Like some cosmic beam, it shoots in a straight line, surrounding me and then stretching multiple miles into the distance, cutting through everything in its way and melting the ground.

With the sound of a stone avalanche concentrated into a half-second long noise, that beam explodes, it spreads wide, creating a huge wall of flames from which a stream moves like a giant snake, bending in the air to attack me.

Even now I stand there unharmed after the attack, watching him stand there with barely any restored organs and flesh. He mostly puppets himself through mana to attack me, and his fist slams against my barrier as he, in that moment, attempts to mimic [Jüdrajil]. One of his eyes is restored, the golden circle around the pupil glowing so brightly it must be burning him.

I shake off that attempt and grab the handle of the sword on my back, and my arm moves so quickly it disappears. I swing the sword a hundred times in a split moment he cannot hope to follow.

Before he even realizes what happened, my hand unblurs as I put the sword back on my back, and the avatar disappears in a last spiteful explosion. He uses his Mana Heart as a spark to attempt to trigger a cascading effect to create something akin to a black hole made of black mana that would collapse onto itself after absorbing all mana.

Through the Noumenon pupils, I break even this attack apart, taking all the remaining mana for myself. The flame snake about to attack me halts, and the entire flame wall disappears, pulled to me as if a flame tornado were pulled into a vacuum cleaner. But only for a moment, as I instantly compress it, add to it, and release it in the form of thousands of fireballs exploding from me, each as big as a car as they launch omnidirectionally, and upon touching something explode into flaming spheres the size of a building each.

I launch ahead again, breaking the ground under my feet and then adding a boost of kinetic energy as I launch myself up, towards one of the floating cubes. I weave between the fireballs and avoid projectiles from other people. The sky becomes even more of a darker orange, and from me at the epicentre, my domain spreads wide, fed by the mana I hold. It presses against [Dawn] but gets pushed back near instantly, only for it then to press against it every time its creator is forced to pay attention to Savant facing him.

The cube I land on has its own gravity. Though the side I am on is pointed at the ground, for me it feels like I am standing normally and the ground is my ceiling. Looking up, I watch all that mess and the already so much decreased number of participants.

My sight focuses especially on one point, at an older silver-haired woman in a suit that would rather fit a man. She is tall, simply standing there with such confidence that my brain almost refuses to accept what I see.

I watch as she just, with a wave of her hand and barely any mana, kills thousands, and with a flick of her fingers faces the domain pressing even on her. And even so, she notices me, and looks up, for a moment ignoring an attendee, her opponent she has been rather insulting than facing, destroying whatever sort of confidence he might have had.

Even so much weaker than the version of her I know, she is terrifying. I break the eye contact, hoping that what I can not see is not there, and I continue towards where I sense Adrian.

Easy Difficulty Lissandra is not real, so she cannot hurt me.

My domain presses outward as the pressure generated by [Dawn] is gone, with Champion Tristan defeating Savant and then disappearing as well. I pull my domain back to me, ready to expand it outward as I pull the sword out of its sheath on my back.

"This is our first time meeting, yet I sense some interesting feelings you hold towards me," Adrian says, his avatar sitting on one of the benches of this garden as he lazily waits for me.

He is even younger than I am. Younger than I was when I got into the tutorial. His face is handsome and has that daring confidence as he flashes me a smile. His hair is red, and his face is entirely different, yet his expression is distantly similar to the Adrian I know.

Jumping to his feet, he dusts off his clothes, and I obviously notice the traps he has set for me. Due to reading my emotions, he knew I would come after him, so none of this clashes against his programming as an avatar and my opponent.

And I haven't sensed him touching my emotions, and I do not sense it even now. He is so much better at it than Izzy.

"If you aren't willing to speak, why don't we start then?" A wild grin appears on his face as he lowers himself and boosts himself at me.

One of the mines he has placed previously and that I stand on detonates, but the explosion only passes by me, tempering my defenses instead, and a long crack appears through the entirety of the cube.

Adrian moves to the side and avoids my sword slash, he steps back slightly to avoid another one and steps in to avoid my stab. All three attacks delivered in a fraction of a second at my full speed, yet each of them missing by millimeters.

My arm turns to a blur as my skin cracks, tendons stretch, and I feel my muscles tearing. I move the sword at an even higher speed, the afterimage of the sword trying to catch up with him.

And every time it's just that millimeter missing. Adrian almost playfully weaves between them, and though he could give himself more space, a daring smile remains on his face as he counters my attacks. Even though I'm faster than he is, my attacks aren't connecting at all.

Moreover, he is much more athletically talented and moves to get me where he wanted, in the end putting his hand on mine.

"I've got you," he says.

To that, I tilt my head, leading his gaze towards my left arm that is touching him.

Both of us use our skills at once.

[Mirror] and [Jüdrajil].

All of his mana is torn away from his body, flooding into mine where it drowns in my reserves. And Adrian jumps back, almost playfully, seemingly not bothered by it at all, still smiling confidently.

After a second of delay, his body flashes for a merest moment. His skin seemingly turns to a liquid mirror, and then the stat he mirrored from me rises up over the next second.

I can see it with my eyes, his mana growing and, over one second, surrounding him. Unlike mine that I hold cycling in my body, his method makes him bathe in it as it surrounds him in a pillar of blazing dark blue mana stretching far into the sky.

Adrian endures it. He must have known what he was getting into, yet he threw himself at it in his sheer arrogance and wild confidence, with almost an animalistic hunger to prove himself.

His body gets damaged, he bleeds from tears as he attempts to mold all that mana to stuff it inside his body. But the best he can do is to barely keep it under his control, like holding a hole closed with your hands so the water or pressure of an entire dam doesn't hit you.

"And I thought my [Mana Manipulation] was the highest any tutorial attendee had in millennia, you monster," he pushes through his smile and moves at the same time I do, stepping to the left to avoid my charge and at the same time shooting some of that mana at me. "No taking now," he chuckles. "You won't hide your plans from me."

I easily absorb that mana shot at me and teleport, and he searches for me by scanning dozens of the marks I have placed around. But I appear by his side, putting my hand on his to see his sheer, unbelieving shock. I haven't seen a person so surprised in my life.

"How can you know my plans if even I don't know them? Now give me my mana back, you bitch, it's painful to watch how you handle it." I use [Jüdrajil] once again, and even as that moment of touch is short, it's enough to take it all.

As he steps back after escaping from my grip, I let him, not attempting to push him now and curiously watching him instead, but now with my mana doubled. I force it all into my body, cycling it in that monstrous whirlpool that constantly spins there.

In the distance of the sky, I notice a figure in red armor pierce the sky with the speed of a falling meteor, glowing in superheated air as the red armor breaks away into pieces and Blackie heads towards the ground.

He crashes right against one of the Champion monsters reminiscent of an eldritch version of a crab, and the shockwave from the impact spears through the area. Nearly all of the cubes in the air move like dandelions moving through the wind, and tens of thousands of participants and avatars die.

The entire time Adrian keeps looking at me, and with the shockwave approaching, he doesn't pay it any attention at all. He laughs like a maniac, closing his fingers together as he cuts off his left arm where I placed another mark, which he must have noticed now.

With a bloodied hand and still chuckling, he uses [Mirror] again, and this time a light flashes as a sword appears in his hand that is a perfect copy of mine, yet due to his lack of experience handling it, it cracks the moment he grabs it. It doesn't break, but instead it grows in size, becoming uneven and larger, but still as deadly.

Adrian swings it, pointing the tip of the blade right towards the ground of the cube we stand on.

We wait.

A half second later, the shockwave hits us as well, blowing the cube and cracking it, and that's when we charge each other.

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