There were some truths to what Eric had said just now.
For some reason, even when Aurora knew that there was no other way around it, she often found herself very hesitant to kill people.
This was a psychological problem that Aurora couldn't seem to overcome at all whatsoever at the early stages of her regression cycle, no matter how hard she tried.
However, Eric didn't bring this up just because he simply wanted to mock her or anything dumb like that.
No, rather it was because he wanted to destabilize her emotionally and get her to lower her guard for a moment just like what he did with Aria moments ago so that he could actually attempt to get an attack in on her.
After all, Aurora's emotions in the early regressions was extremely unstable, and despite her very advantageous character traits, she still hesitated, second-guessed, overthought, and overanalyzed far too much into things that didn't need much thinking into.
And as expected, the moment Eric had mentioned this, the look in Aurora's eyes shifted, and Eric could see her hands tense up heavily through her coat, almost as if she was struggling to control them.
So without another moment's notice, Eric swiftly dashed towards Aurora at full speed and took out the pocket knife that he had always kept on him ever since he had regained all of his memories yesterday, intending to get a clean hit on her.
The distance between the two wasn't particularly far apart, so it was expected that Eric would be able to close the gap pretty fast and reach her in about a second or two.
But unfortunately, before he could even make it within 5 feet of her, Aurora quickly recovered from her initial shock and surprise, and her hands instantly pulled out a knife that was hidden from within her coat.
Immediately afterwards, Aurora used her knife to deflect Eric's blade and redirected the direction of his knife to the left, causing Eric to leave an opening on his left for a split second.
Taking this opportunity, Aurora then swung her right leg towards Eric's abdomen and kicked him at full force.
However, due to Eric's physique being a bit better than the average male, coupled with the fact that he had been able to block a portion of her kick with his arms, Eric was able to stay on his feet and only ended up taking a couple of steps back.
Aurora didn't even dare to let Eric have time to breathe though, and she quickly overwhelmed him with a series of kicks and slashes.
In response, Eric simply focused all of his attention on blocking and avoiding the knife slashes while not bothering with blocking all of the incoming blows and kicks.
After all, Eric didn't have any combat experience throughout his entire 20 lives whatsoever, and he didn't have a quick enough reaction time to avoid every single attack.
Thus, Eric received a ton of blows and kicks all over his body, and eventually, blood started to slowly flow out from him.
But despite this, Eric's injuries didn't seem to affect him at all, and after a few minutes of relentless attacks from Aurora later, her attacks began to noticeably slow down.
Eventually, Eric noticed a few openings in her movements that he could exploit and decided to act on it.
So right after Aurora swung her knife at his neck again in an attempt to forcefully make Eric retreat a step back and expose another opening, Eric immediately ducked his head down and went underneath the swing of her arm.
Then once he had successfully managed to slip under her arm, Eric swiftly lunged his knife towards Aurora's chest at full force while fully disregarding his own safety and exposing his body completely to her.
He was positive that his blade would land a clean hit anyways, and that it would be foolish for Aurora to attempt to strike his body while he was so close to her.
But unfortunately for Eric, it seemed like his prediction had been a bit off.
Or rather, he didn't take into consideration that Aurora had been purposefully exposing her weak spots to him in order for him to act reckless.
Because right when Eric was about to stab his knife straight into her heart, Aurora quickly sidestepped out of the way, causing Eric's blade to only lightly scratch her body.
Right afterwards, Aurora took advantage of Eric's completely open body and stabbed him right on the side of the abdomen, causing blood to spill out instantly.
Confident that Eric would immediately stop fighting afterwards and react to the major pain and injury that he has just sustained, Aurora then took a couple of steps back to regain some of her energy back and greatly lowered her guard down.
But what she didn't expect however was that Eric didn't even seem to react to the small gaping hole on his body at all and instead continued to lunge forward towards her without even the slightest bit of hesitation.
She was so caught off guard by this in fact that she couldn't react fast enough in time to completely get back into a fighting stance and only managed to deflect Eric's knife slash by a very thin margin.
However, she couldn't defend the other hand that was coming at her at full swing as well and it ended up managing to land a clean hit on her abdomen.
BAM!
Aurora's entire fragile body ended up slamming right into a car that was parked behind her, and she couldn't help but clutch her abdomen in pain as she knelt downwards.
It was only then that Aurora began to realize something had been terribly wrong the entire time she had been fighting Eric, and she looked up at him with horror in her eyes.
Even though Eric had been clearly bleeding profusely for awhile, and even had a decently sized hole on the side of his stomach now, he didn't appear affected by his injuries at all whatsoever.
In fact, he seemed perfectly fine, almost as if his injuries didn't even exist in the first place, and was now staring down at her again with an unbothered look on his face, seemingly waiting for her next move.
But... how?
Although Aurora wouldn't say that she has a ton of combat experience now as a result of having to constantly kill people in order to just not get killed by them again somewhere down the road, she at least knew that everyone reacted to pain in some way.
Whether it be a huge reaction or just a small one, there was always something.
But Eric, the one in this life at least, didn't even show a single hint of pain throughout the entire fight.
No grunts.
No flinches.
No twitches.
Not even a single blink when being hit.
Nothing at all.
It was as if he was a machine that couldn't feel a single thing whatsoever.
Really, it was just too damn weird.
But more than anything else, she was afraid.
Even more now than before.
Because she didn't know what to do next.
Of course, she still had some gadgets currently on her and at her disposal that she could use to deal with him, that much was obvious, but she didn't even know if they would work on him anyways.
After all, what was the use of putting herself in danger if the person, no, monster, that she was trying to kill didn't even react to his injuries whatsoever, and wasn't even tired yet after fighting for so long?
Was there even any point in continuing to try and kill him still?
Although she didn't know the answers to the questions in her mind just yet, she was certain about one thing, and it was the fact that...
'I need to run now.'
She knew that if she continued on fighting him head on like this, she would be ultimately the one to die again.
And she didn't want to experience that at all.
The pain of dying was just too much to bare after all.
As such, with trembling hands and legs, Aurora slowly got up from the car and prepared herself to make a break for it.
But since that one clean hit from Eric had left her dizzy and unable to properly balance herself at the moment, Aurora had to use her hands to grab onto the roof of the car she had crashed into in order to help support herself.
Eric on the other hand, saw the opportunity right away and quickly moved his feet, intending to strike the woman in the head.
Unfortunately though, right as Eric was about to land a hit on the poor girl's head and get this over with, the sound of police sirens rang throughout the air, and both of their heads simultaneously turned towards the direction of where the sound was coming from.
It was only then that they realized that the explosion earlier had probably drawn some attention, and there were cops rushing their way here at this very moment.
With that in mind, Eric decided to quickly finish Aurora off now while he still had the chance to and turned his head back to Aurora.
But somehow, Aurora had managed to silently vanish while he had been distracted by the police sirens, and Eric was left standing there in his spot alone as blood continued to drip down his body.
"..."
"That's just great."