Chapter 646 - Disable that skill

As we leave, I wonder if I’ll see that shameless guy again. At this point, I wouldn’t mind, even if it was only to observe his primordial energy. Even now, there are so many things that make me curious about him, and what his primordial energy might do. My best guess is that the multicolored light he used instead of an arrow that was able to pierce the skull of the Harvester.

There was also something about his movement that felt off, so maybe that as well?

Just more questions to add to the enormous pile of ones that already existed. I wonder if I will still have as many in five, ten, or even a hundred years into the system.

Obviously, that depends on whether I can solve the problem of my body modifications clashing with the system’s given ones. Lissandra estimated a deadline of ten to twenty years, but with three of my new constructs? Probably not as long.

But that is what I will continue to do. I will keep running downhill, increasing my speed so I don’t fall, making sure I won’t stumble along the way.

My first test will be killing Faora before she finishes her tutorial and returns to her planet. Everything I do now, including the custom training and experiments, is in preparation to face her.

Weslin says we should reach the third city in four to seven days if we hurry. He doesn’t seem to worry about the possible dangers of the floor. With him being someone who reached the fifth floor of Beyond, I’m not that surprised.

In the third city, there is a portal that Weslin plans to use to get us to the third floor, where a bigger branch of the Primordial Knights can deal with me. Something tells me he is impatient to get rid of me, like a hot potato he throws to someone else to handle. But Faora is likely on the third floor, so that’s exactly where I want to go. That’s why I follow through and continue with my planning. I will deal with the problem called Primordial Knights later, they are not as important at the moment.

My mental training continues well, and every hour I learn a tiny bit more about my newest skill, and more so than before, I start thinking that even though I’m normally confident, I underestimated myself.

Given a bit more time, I think in this game of rock, paper, scissors, Faora would be the scissors, and I’d be the meteor.

***

During one of our short breaks, Weslin turns to me. “Yo, newbie, I’m getting tired of that bitch face. Just be a man, disable that concentration skill, and talk to me normally.”

I look at him and then around us. The space between cities is huge, and I suspect the second floor might be much, much bigger than the first. Even as fast as we move, there are days left until we reach the second city, and a few days more before the third.

That’s probably why Weslin seems to be getting bored.

I suspect one of the main problems of this floor is crossing these huge distances while avoiding monsters. Here on this floor, they are...

“You bastard, are you thinking of useless stuff again?!”

I look back at him. “Even without my concentration skill, I don’t talk much, especially not with people I barely know.”

“You talked a bit before.”

“You were giving me a lot of information I didn’t know about, but you stopped doing that and started talking about useless stuff most of the time.”

“So my adventures from before the tutorial are useless stuff?”

“Maybe I used the wrong word.” I correct myself a bit.

“You betcha you did, you little shit. Well, I can disable it myself, right?” He takes a step toward me and enters my reach without a speck of worry.

The light of the crystal embedded miles high in the ceiling of this enormous cave shines down and deflects from his bald head.

“You think I can’t do it?” he asks threateningly.

“I think you probably can,” I answer.

“Let’s try then...” he says with a smile, and his primordial void rises around him. Then, in a way I haven’t seen before, it reaches toward me.

Even though I defend and try to stop it, it disables the effect my concentration skill has on my emotions. This happens only in a great display of delicate and precise yet powerful use of void energy.

Weslin smiles brightly while he waits, as if counting down, “You know, I’ve learned how to deal with guys like you. I can pick out concentration type skills because of a unique feeling they give off. Don’t ask me how I do it, maybe I’m truly a genius, but some things I can do with void energy no one in the Primordial Knights can understand.”

As he says that, all my other skills activate, but the part of [Focus] that affects my emotions feels distant and out of reach. It’s unlike anything even Professor Feran could do.

Weslin takes a step closer. “What now? Want to punch me?”

“A bit,” I agree. “But do you think my control over myself is so pathetic that I’d do it right away after you disable my skill?”

I face his eyes until he groans in an annoyed manner and mumbles something about a boring mission while he kicks the rock on the ground.

That’s when I channel and unleash a surge of mana at him. It roars through me, moving so fast it ravages my body as I drive it forward with all my strength, sacrificing control for speed.

Even though there isn’t as much of it as back then, it still explodes in his direction, just like it did against Witherclaw during the tournament.

It tears the area around us apart in one huge blast. Debris rains to the ground as I stand unmoving, and the air is filled with a distant hum and the smell of mana.

In the middle of where the explosion hit, Weslin still stands, completely untouched and still with his back to me. His primordial void flickers across his skin as he turns his head around.

“Stop fucking polishing your head, it blinds me...” I don’t get to finish the sentence because he is suddenly standing in front of me.

I absorb the kinetic energy of his first hit and redirect it through my body, using it to move against his next attack and then reposition. That same feeling of void trying to cut me off from my skill reaches toward me, and I don’t hesitate to compress my mana into the black orb that I place between us.

The surface of the orb wobbles, and the orb itself elongates and stretches. But then it bounces back into the shape of an orb.

It just fully resisted void energy disruption from someone likely close to a hundred levels higher than me.

Staring into Weslin’s eyes, I grab the orb in my hand and squeeze, letting it seep into my body, where it flows through me, feeds on my mana slowly, and compresses it the same way.

I saw him fighting enough, so I don’t even bother with ranged attacks. The best chance I have against Weslin is to fight him at melee range. Or possibly from a distance with matter-based ranged attacks, but there’s no way I would try that now.

With my suppressed emotions slowly rising within me, I reach him. The field around him flickers with void energy and disrupts my kinetic one, but I rely on my body, strengthened by black mana. I’m not the greatest at mana based body reinforcement, but with the amount I currently hold, I don’t have to be.

Weslin blocks my punch with his forearm and punches me, sending me staggering back. The skin on the arm I used to block twists like a whirlpool, and flesh, skin, and blood explode as a hole is pierced through me.

Once again, he is in front of me and delivers another punch I partially block. As another hole appears in me, I throw thermal energy at him. It blazes all around us, catches the grass on fire, heats up the dirt, and rises high into the sky in a golden flame.

And he just swings his arm while primordial energy moves around it. As if blowing out a candle, the flame around me disappears.

A few more exchanges earn me a few more wounds. His body is ridiculously strong and durable, and even the technique he shows is great. But he is holding back, and I use that against him.

I gather kinetic energy again and move. This time, as he sends a wave of void energy at me to disrupt it, I force black mana from my pathways to my skin. His void energy bounces off it and fails to reach the kinetic energy beneath.

Wraith Dance brings me to his side, and I absorb my inertia, causing him to miss. Then I move again, using the kinetic energy the entire time, and bury my fist into his face with all the power I can gather. It sends a shockwave around us, so strong it looks like ripples spreading through the grass.

Slowly, Weslin turns to me, with my fist still against his face. He is smiling.

“I did not expect that,” he says.

I don’t see what happens, but in the next moment, I find myself flying through the air. As if in slow motion, I watch him move toward me.

Not for a moment do I take my eyes off him. I absorb the inertia of my flight while clashing with his new attempts at disruption. I adapt to face them and stop him from interfering with my kinetic energy. I send a pulse upward and push myself toward the ground. As my feet touch the grass, I use Pulsar Stance to avoid three attacks aimed at me.

I release a seal on my heart slightly more and push all that heat into the area. While he deals with it, I push through the golden flames with a Wraith Dance.

Even without [Focus], I feel myself settling into that familiar calm that comes during a fight. I concentrate on all the information I can gather. I keep coming up with ways to fight him. I keep handling the black mana, transferring bits of normal mana that regenerate into kinetic energy before the black mana can take it. I keep cycling thermal energy through my body. I keep observing his void.

As my fist heads for his rib cage, I send ten pulses of kinetic energy at him from the front of my fist. All in a fraction of a second, each with a slightly different frequency.

He uses ten similar pulses of void energy that deal with all of them. My fist hits his chest, and I feel the bones beneath crack, but he doesn’t care at all. His smile grows even brighter.

“How about this?” he says, and before I can even move, he sends a hundred pulses of void energy at me.

They bounce off me. They bounce off each other. Some push away the black mana, some try to contain it. Each of them is different. About half push the black mana barrier away, even the one I’ve been using for reinforcement. The rest bounce inside my body.

When it all stops, the second seal on the Ignition Heart lifts from the strain, and thermal energy floods my body. It forces me to immediately start dealing with it as pain and golden flames fill me.

But Weslin doesn’t give me a pause. He punches the exact spot on my chest that I hit on his, cracking a few of my ribs, then lands another blow in the same place.

I barely absorb bits of kinetic energy and dedicate more of my mind to handling the thermal energy.

As pain fills me, my body starts healing rapidly. The wounds he caused before close in moments, and even the broken bones begin restoring.

To counter Weslin, I let some of the thermal energy reach my skin, forcing him to deal with it constantly. At the same time, I shape black mana into a javelin and hurl it into the distance, because I can’t handle both it and this amount of thermal energy at once.

Weslin swings his arm again, the flames against me die off, he blocks my attack, endures another, then hits my chest again in exactly the same spot, sending more ripples of void energy piercing into my body.

The third seal around the Ignition Heart lifts just a tiny bit.

The flame surrounding me increases tenfold in a blink, causing Weslin to stagger back and cross his arms in front of him to block it. Void energy surges around him, and he takes no damage.

Even now, he moves closer and swings his arm to make the flames die out, and they do. But a moment later, they return, even bigger and more intense than before.

The air crackles with heat, and my skin starts melting and regenerating at an insane speed.

Looking at it, Weslin smiles. “That was almost too easy. I could probably just walk away, and you would die from this, right? Damn, man, I really gotta show you at least a bit of how to deal with void energy.” He shakes his head.

He swings his arm again, and void energy gathers, surrounding us in a huge loop. It spins around both of us, with void energy flowing inside it. The loop keeps shrinking and spinning faster, and the faster it spins, the stronger its disrupting effect becomes. Gradually, the flames around me die off.

Using the small window of time that gives me, I work as quickly as I can on the Ignition Heart, placing the slightly lifted third seal back in place. As I do, I realize it had lifted even less than I thought, just the tiniest bit.

The seal falls back into place. Then the second. The loop of void energy finally disappears.

My normal mana starts filling me again, and my constructs reactivate. I throw myself onto the ground on my back, breathing heavily. My body is perfectly healed, but the pain makes me feel like my head is going to explode and my body is going to melt.

I move a little and let out a long, painful groan as I do. I turn my head to Weslin, who sits nearby and observes me curiously. There is barely any damage on him.

“Is it possible to enter all Beyond floors without even doing quests? Just by buying some stuff or passing through the portals?”

“Holy hell, man.”

“Just answer my question, damn it,” I groan.

“Maybe if you didn’t look like you’re about to die, I would.”

“Fuck you.”

At that, he smiles. “Bitch.”

Only then does he move a bit closer and answer. “It’s only the second and third floors you can enter so easily. Getting to the fourth is much more complicated.”

“Not so fucking difficult to answer, right?” In the middle of that sentence, I groan from the pain again and close my eyes.

He kicks, and bits of dirt and smaller rocks hit my face.

I then spit some grass from my mouth and keep asking more questions to distract myself from the pain.

***

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