"Well, that was a fun warm-up," the Dou Ling sighed, stretching his neck. He felt slightly tired of the game and decided it was time to dismantle them completely. He raised his hand, gathering a massive, swirling sphere of dark-red fire to incinerate the Enforcers where they lay.
Sun Breathing...
A quiet, raspy whisper suddenly echoed through the clearing.
Instantly, a bizarre, heavy humidity flooded the area. The cool night air vanished, replaced by an oppressive, sweltering heat.
...Second Variant...
The Dou Ling frowned, looking around. The air was physically thickening. A dense, warm, completely opaque white mist suddenly erupted from where Yoriichi was standing, rolling over the clearing like a tidal wave.
In seconds, visibility dropped to absolute zero.
"What trick is this?" the Dou Ling scoffed. He flared his massive Dou Ling aura, attempting to violently blow the mist away.
But the mist wouldn't disperse. It wasn't regular fog; it was a highly condensed, sensory deprivation field. Using his newly formed liquid Dou Qi, Yoriichi had first generated a massive burst of high-pressure water around him, and then instantly injected the absolute, boiling heat of his solar flames to violently vaporize the water and spread it across the entire clearing. It clung to the air, heavy and suffocating.
...Sunken Dawn Mirage.
The Dou Ling suddenly felt a terrifying, phantom chill run down his spine.
SHING!
A blade materialized from the absolute whiteness directly behind him. The Dou Ling screamed, twisting his body violently. He dodged the lethal decapitation by a hairsbreadth, but the scorching blade carved a deep, searing gash across his armored shoulder.
"If you are a man, come out and fight! Do not hide like a rat!" the Dou Ling roared furiously, blasting pillars of fire blindly into the mist.
He hit nothing but empty air. The sensory deprivation was absolute. The sound of the rustling bamboo was magnified a hundredfold by the dense mist, entirely masking the sound of footsteps, while the swirling mixture of vaporized water and solar heat completely scrambled the Dou Ling's spiritual perception. He was fighting blind in a sea of white.
Yoriichi was a ghost. Moving with soundless, frictionless steps, his Transparent World vision allowed him to see the Dou Ling's glowing, raging circulatory system perfectly through the opaque mist.
Yoriichi thrust his blade from the left, then slashed from the right. The Dou Ling, panicking, managed to dodge or deflect the strikes at the last possible millisecond due to his superior reflexes, but he was accumulating numerous, agonizing burns across his body where the frictionless blade slipped past his armor.
Realizing he was being slowly bled to death by an opponent he couldn't see, the Dou Ling's arrogance completely snapped into primal, terrified rage.
"Enough!" the Dou Ling screamed. He planted his feet, drawing every single ounce of Dou Qi from his core, intending to unleash an ultimate, omnidirectional explosion that would incinerate the entire bamboo forest, the mist, and everything in it.
Yoriichi, seeing the massive buildup of energy expanding like a balloon in the man's core, knew the moment had come.
'First Variant..,' Yoriichi whispered.
He funneled his liquid Dou Qi into his fractured katana. The blade groaned audibly, the micro-fractures vibrating as the steel struggled to contain the terrifying fusion once more. It was coated in high-pressure water, with a miniature, absolute solar core trapped within.
At the exact millisecond the Dou Ling opened his mouth to roar and release his omnidirectional blast, Yoriichi stepped into his guard, completely ignoring the blistering heat radiating from the man.
With every single ounce of his remaining physical strength, Yoriichi slashed horizontally.
The Dou Ling sensed the massive spike in lethal intent directly at his throat. He tried to cancel his attack and physically jump backward, his eyes widening in sheer desperation as he tried to run away.
But he was a millisecond too late.
The Eclipsing Torrent bypassed his Dou Ling armor as if it were wet paper.
The Dou Ling suddenly felt his perspective shift violently. His world began to rotate. The mist, the bamboo, and the starry sky tumbled over one another. A fraction of a second later, his severed head hit the soft dirt. As his consciousness faded into absolute darkness, he realized he couldn't scream, because his vocal cords were no longer attached to his lungs.
The exact moment the blade completed its lethal arc, the extreme temperature differential and the sheer kinetic force finally overwhelmed the compromised steel. With a sharp, resounding CRACK, the Sun-Steel Katana violently shattered into dozens of large, glowing pieces that scattered across the misty forest floor.
Yoriichi's momentum carried him forward. His body completely gave out. He slumped down, driving the broken, jagged hilt into the earth to catch himself, ending up on his knees, his head bowed.
Slowly, the Sunken Dawn Mirage lost its Dou Qi supply and began to dissipate into the night breeze.
As the mist cleared, Captain Lin, Vice-Captain Feng, and Xiao Yu managed to push themselves up from the dirt. They looked toward the center of the clearing, fully expecting to see the Dou Ling charging his ultimate attack.
Instead, they all gasped in profound, breathless shock.
The headless corpse of a One-Star Dou Ling was slowly collapsing to the forest floor, completely decapitated by the exhausted, kneeling boy who had somehow just shattered the laws of the cultivation world twice in one night.