The change hit like a freight train.
One second, the martial artists were floating in their weird soul-separation limbo. The next, a black skeleton was latched onto Hart's skull like a lamprey, slurping his aura through every orifice in his head.
Nobody had any memory of the dream. Nobody knew what the hell was happening. But the skeletal thing radiating wrongness was definitely not part of the official tournament curriculum.
Hart screamed for help.
A dozen fighters snapped back to their bodies. Some froze when they saw the thing. Others charged forward without thinking.
Tetsuro was one of the chargers.
Wing got there first.
He condensed his aura into his fist, thick enough to feel solid, and drove it straight into the skeleton's skull with the kind of force that could snap a fifty-meter tree in half.
The punch connected.
The skeleton didn't move.
"What?" Wing's eyes went wide. "That did nothing!"
Gray light flickered in the skull's empty sockets. Its jaw clicked open and shut in what might've been laughter.
The aura from Wing's fist rippled outward, then got sucked straight into those empty eye holes like water down a drain.
"Same type as mine! Tastes good!" The skeleton's teeth clacked together as it spoke, somehow producing sound despite having no lungs or vocal cords or, you know, anything resembling a functioning anatomy.
Before Wing could process that his best punch had just been eaten, the skeleton wrapped both arms around him and started drinking.
"Senior brother..." Hart staggered back, pale and shaking. He'd already been drained half-dry. His total aura capacity was small enough that a few good pulls had nearly bottomed him out.
Wing had more to give. The skeleton kept slurping while Tetsuro and the others finally arrived.
"Monster! Let him go!"
"Take this!"
Fists and feet hammered into the skeleton from all sides. Every impact landed solid, but nothing happened. No recoil. No pain. The attacks just vanished like they'd never existed.
The skeleton ignored them, still attached to Wing like a tick.
"It's not defending!" Wing forced the words through gritted teeth. "It's marking us! Making itself immune to our attacks!"
A fighter near the back, arriving late to the party, charged up his biggest shot. He leaped into the air with a glowing sphere of aura compressed in both hands and brought it down on the skeleton's skull like a meteor.
Everyone saw it clearly this time.
The condensed aura sphere hit the skull dead-on. No impact. No shockwave. The skeleton just opened its jaw and inhaled. The sphere melted like snow in a furnace, dissolving into nothing as it got vacuumed straight into that grinning mouth.
"The peach petal marks!" Wing gasped as the skeleton continued draining him. "Above our heads! Anyone marked by those petals can't hurt this thing!"
"We're on its menu," someone muttered.
"The marked can't fight back," Wing thought desperately, his vision starting to blur at the edges. "Which means the only one who can ignore it right now is..."
An aura bullet the width of an arm punched through the air.
Direct hit. Side of the skull.
The skeleton's head separated from its body and went spinning across the practice ground.
Wing stumbled free, gasping.
The other fighters, who'd been stuck to the skeleton like they were magnetized, suddenly broke loose. Everyone staggered back, confused and shaken.
What the hell just happened?
Tetsuro and the others turned toward the source of the shot.
That bullet had come from Liam.
Liam cracked his knuckles, flexing his fingers.
Shizuku extended both hands. Aura condensed between her palms, manifesting into her vacuum cleaner. The weird appliance-creature thing hummed to life in her grip.
The black skull stopped spinning in midair. The side of its head where Liam's shot had connected was covered in cracks, but they were already sealing themselves shut with disturbing speed.
The gray lights in its sockets fixed on Liam.
"You little brat!" it said, sounding genuinely offended. "Why'd you hit me?!"
Everyone stared.
The audacity of this skeletal parasite asking why someone attacked it was almost impressive.
Click-click-click. The headless skeleton body hopped across the ground like a demented puppet, bouncing toward its missing skull. The marked fighters couldn't stop it. They just had to watch as it leaped up and reconnected with a wet snap.
"Looks like we're the only ones in the game," Liam said, taking a step forward.
His spirit-gun wouldn't work well here. Not flesh and blood meant nothing to kill. Strong regeneration meant his Buy Now, Pay Later debt ball would just heal the damage and leave him paying the price. Star Mark only worked on living things, or cost too much aura to manipulate objects directly. And this thing was clearly either a Nen beast or some kind of construct.
Which left his new on the work technique.
Liam cocked his thumb back, building the charge on his index finger.
Beside him, Shizuku's vacuum cleaner sprouted a ring of spinning teeth from its nozzle. They rotated like a chainsaw blade, roaring loud enough to make Hart flinch.
The skeleton dropped to the ground with a clatter.
Liam fired three quick shots. Each one hit center mass, driving the skeleton backward.
Meanwhile, his other hand was charging a different shot. Building power, letting it accumulate. The aura sphere on that finger spun faster, growing larger by the second.
Shizuku rushed forward, swinging her chainsaw vacuum like a club.
The skeleton, still reeling from Liam's rapid fire, couldn't dodge. The spinning teeth tore into its ribcage, scattering black bone fragments across the dirt.
"Ow! That hurts!" The skeleton sounded genuinely surprised by the concept of pain.
Its palm lashed out at Shizuku. She raised the chainsaw to block, but the force sent her skidding backward across the ground.
"No! You're supposed to be in pain, not me!" The skeleton's ribs and sternum had already regenerated. Its jaw clacked furiously as it turned to chase after Shizuku. "I'm really mad now! Get over here and let me..."
Wing, Tetsuro, and the others moved in from both sides, cutting off its path.
"If our attacks don't work on you," Wing said, joining the others as they converged on the skeleton from multiple angles, "then yours shouldn't work on us either!"
They attacked as one. Dozens of strikes from all directions, fists and feet hammering into the skeleton's form. None of them caused damage, but the impacts stopped its movement, locking it in place.
The skeleton's eye sockets flared with gray light as it started drinking aura from everyone blocking its path. After a few seconds of slurping, it actually sounded annoyed.
"Stop! Stop feeding me! I don't want your aura!" Its jaw clacked in frustration. "I want those two little bastards behind you! Come here and let me hit you!"
Shizuku tilted her head to the side, looked at Liam with a confused expression. Was there something wrong with this skeleton's brain?
Liam held up one hand, made a gesture indicating that the thing's skull was completely empty, so of course there was something wrong with it.
Shizuku nodded like that made perfect sense.
"Move!" Liam called out. "This shot needs more time to develop! I can barely handle it myself..."
Ten thousand aura, concentrated into a single charge.
That was more than half his total capacity, focused into one finger.
"Hold it still!"
Tetsuro and the others wrapped their arms around the skeleton, pinning it in place and leaving its head exposed for Liam's shot.
Wing shouted back, "Don't miss!"
"Screw you!" Liam yelled, lining up his aim. The aura sphere spinning on his fingertip had grown to the size of a coffee mug. This was the longest charge he'd ever built. Hit or miss, firing this thing was going to drain most of his reserves. "You guys hold tight! Don't move around! I'd hate to blow off your heads by accident!"
"Stop saying horrible things!" several voices shouted back in unison.
"Go for it," Shizuku said quietly, standing beside him with her chainsaw at the ready.
"If I go for it, I'm going to be exhausted afterward..." Liam took a deep breath, preparing to release the shot, when the skeleton suddenly roared with absolute fury:
"Absurd! ABSURD! You juniors think you can kill me, the Sky Master?! This is completely absurd!"
Wait. You're Sky Master?
Everyone froze. Even Wing looked stunned.
They could all feel it now. An enormous pressure building inside the skeleton's bones. Dark aura accumulating, ready to explode outward like a bomb.
It was genuinely enraged.
"If this thing has been absorbing aura from every martial artist who's attended the Sensui Mountain conference for years," Wing thought, his mind racing, "and if it releases all of that at once..."
His eyes went wide. "Liam! Stop..."
Liam snapped his fingers.
The bowl-sized aura bullet launched with a sound like a cannon firing.
The skeleton roared. Wing, Tetsuro, and everyone clinging to its body got blown away like leaves in a hurricane. Black aura erupted from the skeleton like lightning, transforming into a tidal wave that surged toward Liam's bullet, trying to swallow it whole.
Shizuku stepped in front of Liam, raising her chainsaw vacuum as a shield.
Then another figure appeared.
The real Sky Master, the one who'd been running the competition this whole time, finally lost his patience. He shouted in rage and swept his sleeve through the air, generating a tsunami of force that tore up the practice ground. Dirt and rocks lifted several inches off the ground. Wing and the others, who'd just been blown backward by the skeleton, got hit by the shockwave mid-flight and went tumbling through the air again in an unintentional double-jump.
Sky Master swooped forward, grabbed Liam's wrist, and redirected the finger-gun shot. The arm-thick aura bullet tore through the black tidal wave, angled upward, and grazed the side of the skeleton's skull, leaving a deep crack.
The wave of black aura washed over them. Sky Master held Liam's wrist and positioned himself as a shield. Liam, Shizuku, and Sky Master stood untouched in the center of the blast.
Thud. Hart hit the ground like a rag doll, crying out in pain.
Wing and the others crashed down around him like dominoes. Nobody was seriously injured, but the rapid series of reversals had left everyone completely disoriented.
Which one was the real Sky Master?
The Sky Master holding Liam's wrist stood with his beard and hair whipping in the wind, trembling with anger as he glared at the black skeleton.
"You... you... who gave you permission to come out?!"
"I'm the Sky Master." The skeleton's teeth clacked together in what sounded like laughter. "Where else would I be on Sensui Mountain? You think you can control me?"
"Ridiculous! I am Sky Master!" The old man was shaking with rage. "You get back where you belong!"
"Make me!"
They started arguing like children.
Liam spoke up, deadpan. "You can keep yelling at each other if you want, but could you please stop crushing my wrist? It's about to snap."
Shizuku, without saying a word, calmly raised her chainsaw vacuum and swung it at the arm gripping Liam.
Sky Master jerked his hand back like he'd touched a hot stove, staring at the black-haired girl in shock.
What the hell was wrong with her?!
"Now that we can actually talk," Liam said with a sigh, "can you explain what's going on? Which one of you is Sky Master, and what exactly is happening here?"
Wing helped Hart to his feet. The other fighters who'd recovered looked back and forth between the two figures claiming the same identity.
"You still need to ask?" The skeleton's teeth clicked. "I'm Sky Master!"
You really don't look like it, everyone thought but didn't say.
"Hmph!" Sky Master rolled up his sleeves and snorted.
Wing looked at Liam. They exchanged a glance. Liam glanced at Tetsuro and the others, then nodded back to Wing.
Everyone else definitely still had peach petals above their heads.
Wing understood. At minimum, the black skeleton had to be connected to the strange dream that had pulled them all in.
Hart spoke up timidly from behind Wing. "Then... then why did you..."
The skeleton's gray eye sockets turned toward him. Hart flinched, nearly hiding again, but forced himself to finish. "Why did you suck our aura?!"
Tetsuro and the others waited for the question to expose the skeleton's lie.
Instead, its jaw clacked open in an unbothered laugh. "Letting you juniors contribute a little aura to help me nurture my strength? What's wrong with that? It's not like I killed anyone!"
"Well, when you put it that way..." Several fighters around Tetsuro actually nodded like that made sense.
Are you people serious? Liam stared at the skeleton. This thing looked about as human as a used mop.
"Who am I?" The skeleton continued, sounding almost bored now. "I'm Sky Master! Come on, isn't this supposed to be a martial arts competition? Let me test you juniors properly! We'll start with a strength evaluation. Who wants to go first?"
Hart, still in a daze, raised his hand. "I'll go first."
The skeleton clacked its teeth dismissively, gesturing at its sternum. "Fine. Come here and punch me right here."
Gray light flickered faintly in its eye sockets.
Hart walked forward like he was hypnotized, pulling back his fist to charge up a strike.
Liam and Shizuku looked at the others. Wing, Tetsuro... everyone seemed to have just accepted the skeleton's story. They'd completely skipped the part where they questioned its identity and moved straight to accepting it as the tournament host.