by L. M. Kerr
They all expected him to attack the three warriors on the ground. Given that literally everything Micheal had done thus far indicated this, it was hard to fault them for rushing to attack back and save their allies.
If there was one thing that Micheal had learned over the years, it was that the human psyche was ultimately fallible.
When someone unconsciously made an assumption, their mind would hold to that assumption stubbornly, even when faced with confusion and doubt. When that assumption was melded with one’s natural instincts, it became even harder to overturn.
Micheal’s very first ambush on the first Squad he had attacked had been very simple. He hid within the walls of one of the old homes, relying upon the norms of the human psyche to gain a split-second advantage.
A wall is a solid object you can lean against.
It’s a simple thought, a base assumption one makes when they realize a wall exists. If that wall looks solid, is something you’ve touched to confirm is solid, then in one’s mind, it is solid.
When startled and surprised, the human psyche falls back onto assumptions like this.
A roof is a solid object you can stand on.
It might not be a rational assumption, especially in the present era of superhumans, but it was one that was ingrained in humans from the moment of their birth.
These warriors were well-trained elites, enhanced by the Seeds of the Vile King, and could overcome their shock almost instantly. At worse, they would give up a split second in their surprise before recovering, a minute period of time that a lesser warrior wouldn’t even notice, let alone be able to take advantage of…
Unfortunately for them, as previous Squads had swiftly discovered…
Micheal was not a lesser warrior.
His metal threads shot upward, a torrent of steel blazing with Sword Energy.
By the time the agile warriors on the rooftop noticed the attack and began to try to dodge it, activating last-minute Artifacts and Abilities to aid them, it was already too late.
All three of them instantly died.
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—-Points Notification—-
Points Obtained: 28,827
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—-Points Notification—-
Points Obtained: 31,820
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—-Points Notification—-
Points Obtained: 33,283
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The titanium strings split each of the warriors in twain, the deadly force and power behind the surprise attacks overwhelming any defense their armor or Artifacts offered. At roughly the same time, a painful backlash of energy whiplashed down the metal threads as the attack finished, the failed defensive efforts of the now-dead elites causing Micheal to wince.
That backlash broke three of the fingers on his left hand and badly sprained his left wrist. His right hand came away unscathed, but only because he used his left hand to absorb the brunt of the impact.
Micheal ignored the notifications and twisting pain as he severed the threads coming from his gloves, freeing his hands with a thought.
In the same movement, in the midst of this extremely intense moment in the battle, Micheal calmly turned his head to look at the corpses of the two Great Ape users he had killed earlier. He tapped on his Spatial Ring as he did this, pulling out a small bracelet.
The two bodies lay where they had fallen, beheaded corpses that remained still, fully returned to their human state. More blood had pooled around them, combining with the rain to form a large, murky puddle.
Floating above these two bodies, however, was something new.
Two dark, black Seeds that fizzled about in the air ineffectually, just barely visible through the downpour.
‘It blocks the Seeds too!’ Micheal’s gaze sharpened as he reached this conclusion, storing the Signal Seer Bracelet he’d pulled out.
This entire ambush and attack was not only a genuine strike at his enemies, but also intended to buy him enough free time to confirm this.
The signal-blocking Artifacts that weren’t allowing the Farians to call for aid was working in the same way that overloading a Signal Seer Bracelet did. It locked Constantine’s Seeds in, disallowing them from returning and forcing them to dissipate.
That meant he did not need to waste time storing corpses or actively overloading Signal Seer Bracelets to prevent them from returning.
And, even more importantly…
It meant that, as long as those Artifacts kept operating, none of the Seeds present would be able to leak any news to the Vile King.
As long as he killed every one of his enemies here, not even a peep would be able to escape.
Micheal’s eyes glinted as he gazed at the three Blue Tailed Monkey users that were just now reacting, rushing forward to attack him as they registered their mistake. From behind, Micheal could sense the two speed-boosted Great Ape users sprinting at him, only a couple of seconds away.
With six members of the eleven-man team effectively taken out, only these five were left here up top.
All of this came together in Micheal’s mind as he realized a single thing.
He no longer needed to disguise himself.
A mere moment before these elite warriors collided with him, a long, crystalline blade appeared in Micheal’s right hand, glowing with red energy.
Micheal raised this sword ever so slightly. He bent his knees forward and tilted his left hand back. Cool rain dripped down his face, falling to the uncaring ground down below.
His ears were bleeding and ruined, trapping him in a world of silence. His back was burned, making his every movement resonate agony. His left hand was broken, fingers shattered with a wrist that barely functioned. The backlash of energy from his last attack was still running wild in him, giving him a splitting headache and fracturing his focus.
In that last frantic moment, as he stood alone in a battered, broken body, as death came bearing in on all sides…
Micheal began to smile.
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Chapter 48
Sometimes in the midst of battle, there existed moments where time seemed to stand still.
This was not one of those moments.
Instead, in Micheal’s eyes, the next few seconds seemed to both happen all too quickly and yet also stretch out forever.
The sword he’d brought out was a newly purchased one, a Crystal Millennium Sword that cost him 92,900 Points in the Shop. It was an extremely durable weapon that could not only easily bear the brunt of Advanced Tier Sword Energy, but also even handle spurts of Master Tier Sword Energy for brief periods without breaking.
When the red glow of his Sword Energy swept over it, the crystalline weapon darkened and began to look incredibly threatening. The weapon almost fully absorbed the totality of Micheal’s Sword Energy, allowing him to use it to the fullest extent.
Micheal angled the blade off to the left, holding it out in front of his body as if to slash at all three of the Blue Tailed Monkey users that were charging in at him. He acted like he was unaware of the speed-boosted duo less than a dozen meters behind his back, though that wasn’t too far from the truth.
The mix of a lack of hearing, his strained focus, and an injured body came together to mean he could only barely sense the pair of Great Ape users through their killing intent, mainly because of his powerful Soul.
The trio of Blue Tailed Monkey users had fanned out, cutting in towards Micheal from six different ways. Their weapons didn’t take on the glow of any type of Weapon Energy, the only ones so far that lacked that, but instead became covered in a corrosive-feeling black light.
Micheal didn’t quite recognize exactly what this glow was caused by, but guessed it was from either a Byren Martial Art, based in poison, or an Ability from the Shop. Either way, these attacks were more than enough to rend Micheal’s flesh should they make contact, corrosive or not.
It took only a single second for the trio to reach Micheal, slightly faster than the pair of Great Ape warriors from behind.
In t
he single second Micheal had left…
He didn’t try to dodge.
He didn’t try to flee.
He didn’t try to deflect their attacks nor did he try to block them.
Instead, he seemed to accept their attacks as he swiveled his own sword back and, oddly enough to his enemies, pointed it directly at himself.
The final second passed.
Everyone attacked.
The Blue Tailed Monkey users continued with their six-pronged attack. Three blades cut towards Micheal’s right side, while three other blades cut towards his left, all at varying heights. Oddly enough, as they attacked, the warriors slowed down ever so slightly.
While Micheal might be pretending to be unaware of the Great Ape users behind him, these three warriors were under no such illusions. As one, all three began to adjust their movements to avoid colliding with the two warriors, all too aware that they could not compete with the mighty Strength stat Great Ape users were famed for.
They still continued with their attack in lieu of activating their Fast Retreat Ability, committing fully to the strike, to avoid giving Micheal any escape opportunities. However, because their speed lessened, even by just a small amount, their attacks didn’t reach Micheal first.
Instead, it was the two Great Ape users that struck first, despite being farther away.
These two warriors were not happy.
As the direct subordinates of Silverback, the Division Leader of the Ape Division, Silver 1 and Silver 2 were the ones in charge of this defense. Any failure of it would reflect directly on them… and it was already an utter disaster. Half of the remaining Squads had been wiped out only a brief period of time after Silverback had left, leaving them with a magnificent mess that could still get worse.
Micheal’s sneaky bomb tactic had caught them completely off guard, but they had no one to blame but themselves. Like Micheal had guessed, the warriors here had assumed, at first, that he was a Gemless Byren, not a human.
Nothing else made sense.
There had never been a traitor within the Beasts of Providence, and though it was still technically possible he was a Wingstruck, what the Farians called those that had lost their wings, the fact that he did not exert any type of Blood Aura as he fought made that extremely unlikely.
Even now, they were still convinced he was a Gemless Byren.
While the ‘dishonorable’ nature of using sneak attacks or tools like bombs hadn’t changed, Shop-created weapons of this nature had rapidly begun to spread among the darker underbelly of Byren society, especially within the territory of the Divine Might and the Silent Sword Sect. Disgraced warriors that fought only in the shadows, just like how a Gemless Byren might, would have no qualms about using such tactics.
It was something they knew he might use, but hadn’t expected to get hit with in their literal first encounter.
Still, thanks to their unnaturally boosted reaction speed, they were able to shield themselves from the brunt of the explosion, leaving them with only minor burns and temporarily shocked minds from weathering a point-blank eruption of Gnomish force.
The main reason, however, that the warriors of the Beasts of Providence were still convinced that Micheal wasn’t a human, even after all of this, centered around a rather simple fact:
He had not used any Abilities, apart from a showing of Advanced Tier Sword Energy, which any member of the Byrium Race might have.
No Type Ability, no Abilities to give his attacks more power, no obvious boosting Abilities. Nothing Micheal had done indicated he was anything other than a dishonorable Gemless Byren, a dog set to guard the Farian hidden research center by some outside force.
His weird fighting style, including the use of metal threads to attack from a distance, smelled even more like a Byren: warriors in a warrior society that worshiped Martial Arts. While they had never heard of an unorthodox weapon like this, his expert usage of it meant techniques for it must exist. Even his face, which was heavily stained as part of the disguise Micheal had adopted when he first arrived, could be interpreted to be the remnants of someone removing a Byren’s Gem.
This understanding was made quite clear in their actions, where they continued to use a strategy based on assumptions that weren’t quite right.
The last two Great Ape users struck forth with two separate attacks.
The one on Micheal’s right, Silver 1, attacked with a direct stab, using his long spear to get in the first blow. Hammer Energy swarmed over his weapon, giving this strike extremely great weight.
As he attacked, the warrior’s eyes glowed with faint red light. This light seemed to drip out of the warrior’s eyes, falling down almost like tears. When the light particles collided with the rain, the drops of water vaporized into steam.
Micheal couldn’t see this in action, but for a brief instant, could sense a tangible feeling of rage.
It was a feeling he recognized, largely because of how he sensed it. It wasn’t a true Aura of sorts, but a relatively popular Ability known as ‘Asura’s Tears.’ It was an Ability you had to activate, one that transformed its user into the ‘Lesser Asura’ State. With this power active, its user gained a sizable increase in Strength and increased resistances to powers that could distort the mind or Soul, while sizably lowering one’s defensive Endurance.
On the Second Layer, high Endurance had its uses, but was limited in its scope because of the fact that people were unable to progress to the Lord Tier of Ki Cultivation. Lowering one’s Endurance wasn’t ideal, but the negatives weren’t too big of an issue, and wearing strong armor would typically mitigate most of them.
Anything that could break through a set of strong armor, crafted from metal purchased in the Shop or an Artifact outright, was something that would break past basically everyone’s Endurance here on the Second Layer anyway, cutting through even heavily reinforced flesh and bones with ease.
As for the other aspects of Endurance: the Ability only lowered those parts minimally, such that the loss usually didn't matter.
The biggest factor that kept this Ability from being truly common was the fact that it cost 395,252 Points in the Shop, an extremely high number compared to the Points Wall of 100,000 that gated the First Layer. That hefty price came hand-in-hand with a significant opportunity cost.
This was real life, not a video game.
Obtaining Points was dangerous, even if you farmed them slowly, and getting enough Points to purchase this Ability would require a huge amount of time to safely farm. Even then, obtaining a single powerful Ability might not increase your chances of survival more than, say, three other useful Abilities, or multiple expensive Artifacts. Points were typically correlated with power, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be powerful or useful Abilities sold for a lesser price.
Still, for a non-Limited Ability that gave a large increase in raw power that could be sustained for decently long periods, there were few better options here on the Second.
Unsurprisingly, the second Great Ape user, Silver 2, activated the same exact ability as he attacked. Micheal was able to sense the two distinct, but very similar, emanations of rage, picking them out despite the minute differences.
The second warrior, instead of stabbing straight forward, brought his spear smashing down in a brute attack from above. Hammer Energy coated his blow in equally sheer levels, giving his strike enough power to break through Micheal with absolute certainty.
Both of their attacks moved with accelerated speed, their bodies moving in an almost sickening fashion.
It was one thing to see someone move extremely quickly. It was another thing, however, to see them move in a way that shouldn’t be physically possible, where the constraints of gravity and time had been loosened.
A single one of any of these attacks, from the three Blue Tailed Monkey users to the two speed-boosted Great Ape users, was enough to kill Micheal in his current state.
If he just stood there and took them, he would die with certainty.
; In fact, no matter what Micheal did here, he was going to die.
Even if he had an Artifact that could teleport him away, like the Returning Ring Director Prime had used to escape from his battle against Micheal, back on the First Layer, it would’ve been pointless. For, in the last moment before these warriors reached him, Micheal noticed something that had managed to hide away from his keen senses until now.
The backlash he’d received from his attack towards the warriors on the roof seemed to contain, hidden deep within it, some type of magic curse. It was likely induced by one the last-ditch Artifacts or Abilities that had been activated, something that struck forth nefariously at the last moment. This curse had seeped into Micheal’s body without him detecting it, and was gradually beginning to poison him to death, starting with his left hand.
He had already lost most of the feeling in it, the arm reduced to responding sluggishly at best. The moment he noticed this, his forehead crinkled ever so slightly.
If nothing else, the warriors of the Beasts of Providence were quite serious about making him die here.
Still…
While he definitely was going to die here…
When and how he would die was still very much a question.
The two warriors behind Micheal were not the only ones that could stretch the chains of time.
Despite not being able to see or hear their attacks, Micheal’s eyes glowed as he activated his Temporal Bubble Ability with unerring accuracy.
He used this power not once, not twice, but three full times, all simultaneously as he took a single, simple step backwards.
As he took that lightning-fast step, he flicked one of the fingers on his right hand, storing his Aura Nullification Necklace, his Cloud Stepping Shoes, the gold bracelet on his arm, and even his Silk Strider Gloves in the same motion that he used to fling his Mid-Tier Spatial Ring off to the side and out of harm's way.
Right after he activated his Ability, with almost jarring suddenness, three Time Bubbles popped into existence.
