Arum stood up, shaking off the impact as though his impromptu, high-velocity meeting with the turf hadn't occurred at all. He remained completely free of a single scratch. Even the jagged trail his body had carved into the earth wasn't enough to soil his bare skin.
I stood there, feeling thoroughly perplexed. I had distinctly felt my psychic, cart-sized Willpower fist connect solidly with his chest. So the obvious question burning in my mind was: why on earth was this giant of a man completely unharmed?
A closer, more focused observation allowed me to piece it together. The shifting, dark purple aura cladding his muscular frame wasn't merely an aesthetic intimidation factor. It functioned as an active, highly sophisticated armor of sorts. And judging by his completely unblemished state, it was a remarkably effective one.
A walking tank. And not even a slow one, either—a fast tank.
The realization crossed my mind, and I nearly let out an audible groan. It felt like attempting to blast through that dense aura would be an absolute nightmare, assuming it was even possible. Furthermore, there was a strange, organic, 'living' quality to the energy signature that made me strongly suspect it would instantly regenerate the moment any portion of it was dispersed.
"This was unexpectedly thrilling... Hey, Lorn, was that little trick magic? I couldn't quite tell," Arum rumbled, addressing the mage as soon as he brushed himself off.
The mage responded, stepping slightly closer. "I honestly don't think so. It's quite fascinating, to be frank. I only 'sensed' an intangible, brute force suddenly blasting you backward. Beyond that, I couldn't isolate any formal magical resonance." The raw scientific curiosity peeking through his words gave me an involuntary shiver.
I could vividly picture the guy capturing me in some subterranean lab and running deeply questionable, invasive experiments on my immortal anatomy.
"It certainly isn't the specialized power of a psychic either, though it shares certain surface similarities. I've crossed paths with psychics in the past and can readily recognize a distinct psychic signature. He completely lacks one," Lorn continued, seemingly entirely enthralled by his ongoing clinical analysis of my capabilities.
Arum simply shrugged off the academic commentary, his gaze snapping back to lock onto me.
"Quite the neat little trick you pulled there, kid. I suppose you're a bit more resilient than a mere immortal cockroach," Arum said with a rough, teasing edge. I mentally guessed that his aggressive demeanor was heavily amplified while he maintained his Valken-infused battle state, so I chose not to take direct offense.
"Calling someone a cockroach? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. You might want to take a long look in a mirror before throwing around insults," I fired back.
Okay, minor correction—I was definitely a tiny bit offended.
He threw his head back and laughed at the sharp retort, genuinely amused. "Well, you aren't entirely wrong there. The number of living individuals who have managed to genuinely inflict real pain on me over the past few centuries can easily be counted on one hand. Let's see if you manage to earn a permanent spot among their numbers."
The sharp, predatory shift in his gaze signaled that our brief moment of banter was officially over. The spar was resuming.
He lunged forward with the exact same unnatural, explosive speed as before. The dark purple aura cladding his hands suddenly elongated and shifted into razor-sharp, claw-like appendages. Judging by the high-pitched, deadly whistle caused by their friction tearing through the air, they were terrifyingly sharp.
In a single bound, he closed the distance entirely. The added downward momentum of his leap transferred directly into the vicious claw strike he brought crashing down toward the crown of my head.
This time, my reaction time wasn't sluggish. Realizing dodging was entirely out of the question, I raised both forearms in a tight, defensive cross-guard. Those deadly auric claws slammed brutally against my flesh—or rather, they would have sliced me to ribbons had I not instinctively flooded my entire physical exterior with a dense layer of protective Willpower.
A small crater imploded under the heels of my boots, serving as a visceral testament to the sheer violence of his blow. Pushing back with all my explosive might, I capitalized on the momentary vulnerability of his overextended reach to lash out with a fast, spinning roundhouse kick squarely into his chest. The impact lifted him off his feet, sending him hurtling upward before he executed a flawless backflip and landed with surprising grace on the grass.
This is so fundamentally unfair.
He possessed a massive, powerhouse build, yet moved with an unexpectedly fluid, acrobatic grace. What an absolute cheat-code of a combat combination.
We immediately resumed exchanging high-velocity blows, transforming into a blur of motion within our improvised ring. The concussive sound of the surrounding atmosphere being violently compressed to the point of micro-detonation punctuated every single exchange. Even so, as the bruising trade continued, I painfully realized that I lacked the refined martial experience required to cleanly out-fight a veteran like him in hand-to-hand combat.
While I possessed solid fundamentals in close-quarters brawling, he operated with a terrifying depth of technique that could only be forged through centuries of continuous battlefield practice. Still, I refused to feel discouraged; virtually every single supernatural adversary I had crossed paths with since my awakening outclassed me heavily in sheer combat experience.
Deciding to seize the initiative, I pushed onto the offensive. My baseline physical speed was nothing to sneeze at either, and I materialized right in front of him in a fraction of a second, unleashing a rapid flurry of punches and kicks heavily augmented by my Willpower. Every single time my fists connected, however, it felt bizarrely as though I were punching a dense, immovable wall of cotton; the kinetic force behind my strikes was smoothly deflected.
I quickly concluded that my difficulties weren't solely attributable to the widening skill gap. I was failing to make headway primarily because of his impenetrable aura armor.
If direct impact is utterly useless, then I need to change the vector...
I feinted a hard right hook aimed directly at his temple. Midway through the arc, I abruptly flattened my fist into an open palm. I caught the brief flash of puzzlement in his eyes when the anticipated blow failed to materialize.
Instead, I lunged forward and clamped both hands firmly around his shoulders. Judging by his defensive posture, he instantly assumed I was setting up a devastating knee strike straight to his midsection, causing him to instinctively snap his arms upward to guard his chest. He couldn't have been more wildly mistaken.
Using his broad shoulders as a stable pivot point, I drove my feet hard off the turf.
悬Suspended momentarily in a vertical ascent, I gripped both sides of his head and executed a violent, torque-heavy twist with my waist.
The rotational kinetic force naturally transferred straight through my arms, forcing his heavy head to snap sideways in tandem with my grip.
My objective was simple: fracture his cervical vertebrae or wrench his neck entirely off-center. If physically possible, I aimed to sever his head clean from his shoulders.
Deep in the back of my mind, I recalled Chloe casually mentioning a foolproof method for permanently terminating virtually any class of immortal entity short of primordial gods, demons, and angels—something involving the absolute removal of the head.
Though breaking down the sequence takes a moment in narrative description, I executed the entire acrobatic chain of maneuvers with fluid, lethal speed. He completely failed to react before my twisting torque was already fully engaged.
In hindsight, I freely admit I was being excessively lethal, going straight for a fatal execution during what was supposed to be a casual, friendly spar. But I operated under the firm assumption that someone valued so highly by Chloe wouldn't fold that easily; after all, according to her direct assessment, every member of her strike team could independently handle three top-tier supernaturals simultaneously without falling into a disadvantage.
Plus, I can always mentally abort the motion if it genuinely looks like I'm about to accidentally kill the guy.
While my raw physical baseline didn't quite match up to an ancient vampire elder—who sat comfortably at the apex of supernatural might—my Willpower acted as a staggering multiplier, pushing me up into that elite classification. Even so, I had long since accepted that my true competitive edge didn't lie in overwhelming, instantaneous offensive power.
I honestly hate admitting it, but my primary tactical advantages rely almost entirely on sheer endurance and relentless resiliency.
No matter how catastrophic the physical trauma or how prolonged the engagement, I was fundamentally guaranteed to outlast anyone—unless, of course, I was somehow physically immobilized or restrained.
True to Murphy's Law, the exact microsecond that ominous thought crossed my mind, the entire tactical situation flipped violently on its head.
Instead of attempting to physically resist or counter my rotational momentum, Arum simply let his arms drop heavily to his sides and went completely rigid. In that instant, it felt as though the entire world had abruptly ground to a dead stop. More accurately, I had been forced into a state of absolute stasis—or rather, my perception of time had slowed to a crawl so extreme I was moving at an imperceptible crawl.
The deceleration was so profound my conscious thoughts felt as though they were suffocating in thick quicksand. I desperately tried to marshal my Willpower, but found the energy entirely unresponsive; as my cognitive processing slowed, my Will slowed in lockstep.
Before I could process the sudden shift, I was effortlessly plucked off his shoulders like an unruly child caught acting out, and hurled violently down into the ground with such overwhelming force that I felt my internal blood vessels rupture simultaneously, immediately followed by the catastrophic cracking of every bone and organ in my body. Though motor control was entirely locked out, my Willpower managed to capture two chilling details.
First, the impact zone on the earth was glowing with a harsh, vibrant purple hue—the exact same shade as Arum's aura. Second, floating through my failing vision, I 'saw' what I intuitively recognized as the direct culprits behind my sudden, artificial paralysis:
Swirling, multi-armed purple humanoid ghosts.
And then, absolute, heavy darkness crept in and swallowed me whole.