The Number Two Shadow Hunter, Phantom Louis, had issued a challenge to Cassius. Cassius’s expressionless face broke into a silent smile as he crumbled a fragment of the silver rapier into strands of iron powder using two fingers of his right hand.
“Alright.” Cassius agreed.
His gaze slowly swept over everyone present, each one wearing different expressions according to their respective statuses. For instance, Number Three Shadow Hunter Jin had stepped forward half a pace, opened his mouth but ultimately remained silent as a trace of reluctance marked his brow. Meanwhile, Phantom Louis was staring oppressively at him, as though he was carefully assessing Cassius’s entire being.
On the far side, the Number One Shadow Hunter and Radiant Hunter Deleshart stood indifferently by, seemingly keen to observe as spectators how many moves Phantom Louis could force Cassius to reveal.
Behind the group of Shadow Hunters stood the three who had lost the competition. Claire looked the most at ease, having mentally prepared herself long ago. Her blue eyes took in the entire scene, showing only a sliver of curiosity. Lion King Soss seemed clearly dejected, as if still trapped by the memory of being defeated in a single blow moments ago. As for Solomon the Thorn, he was the most carefree of them all, dozing leisurely on a boulder some dozens of meters away.
A light breeze stirred, and pebbles tumbled over the ground with a faint rustling sound.
Louis’s black boots crushed the gravel beneath him as he slowly positioned himself squarely before Cassius. His gaze was profound as he spoke, “I’m curious. What was that technique you just used to defeat Aaron? It had quite the range...”
Cassius remained where he stood, not moving an inch. “It wasn’t really a technique, merely an application of energy... You can think of it this way. In that split second, I hurled all my Qi forward. There’s nothing particularly refined about it, so I wouldn’t call it a technique...”
He explained the move with considerable patience. His solidification of Qi was crude and ferocious, devoid of any refinement or any strange fist technique. Yet, the simpler it was, the harder it became to counter.
It depended primarily on both the quality and quantity of Qi, since it overwhelmed everything in an open assault. It was something that one could see coming but struggle to resist. They either had to brace themselves to endure it or attempt to counter with Qi in kind, which would inevitably lead to an intense contest of attrition. The more Cassius deepened his comprehension of the Dominator Fist, the more fond of this brutal style of combat he became.
Louis fell silent for a moment. He, too, was a practitioner of Qi, and he could not fully grasp how one could suddenly blanket more than half the canyon with all their Qi. In his view, Qi was a complex, sophisticated energy. Because it could change shape like water, one could develop all sorts of intricate skills and Secret Techniques.
For instance, Louis’s Half-Body Phantom utilized Qi from his entire being to construct a perfect duplicate of his upper torso that overlapped with his real body. Whenever Louis executed an attack, the Half-Body Phantom replicated the corresponding hand signs, triggering a certain mysterious effect.
Every living being around him would experience dizziness, illusions, stinging sensations, and so forth. It could even inflict a sense of spatial distortion, a sensation of time dilation, or mental confusion upon his opponents, much like a powerful hypnotic effect with remarkable potency.
At this point, the obvious distinction emerged between how a combat artist employed Qi versus how an arcane energy wielder used Qi. A combat artist’s essence, Qi, and spirit fused and converted into one other in an endless cycle. Qi did not exist in isolation but was bolstered by equally powerful physical vitality and mental will. Thus, the more a combat artist advanced, the more their internal Qi swelled like an oceanic abyss.
In contrast, Qi-based arcane energy wielders resembled ordinary people mutated by Qi, and were restricted to practicing it in isolation. Weighed down by the limits of body and mind, their Qi could only reach a certain threshold before their bodies collapsed. Therefore, their cultivation focused on enhancing Qi’s quality.
They refined Qi, developing an array of techniques and secret arts to maximize its efficiency, thereby achieving the greatest possible impact and destructive force with their limited supply of Qi. In summary, both paths seemed to have their pros and cons, but in truth, using Qi as arcane energy was an act of desperation.
It was akin to living frugally. If a Qi-based arcane energy wielder’s body could withstand an explosive increase in Qi without collapsing, they would have followed this path long ago. They would not have painstakingly studied how to convert four dollars into four bags of a hundred cents. One only resorted to that because they couldn’t put a hundred dollars into each bag. If one carried a thousand dollars, they would crush the enemy directly.
Such thoughts flashed through Phantom Louis’s mind, clearly shaken by Cassius’s method of utilizing Qi, which was a radically different path of development. His own approach veered toward small, precise manipulation, whereas Cassius’s was the complete opposite.
The two figures stood over ten meters apart, and their Qi intensified heavily. Gusts swept the ground before they even attacked, blowing away gravel in a circular clearing. One could clearly observe two rings colliding.
The two swells of Qi started to entwine and surge upward, revealing their fierce fighting spirit. Louis raised his hands from his sides, ten fingers tracing a faintly translucent streak through the air. For a brief moment, it was as though there was another figure transposed over him, moving in slow motion.
As his palm swept through the air, a dark translucent palm lagged half a beat, then sped up to catch it, merging back into one before the next movement. Each time Louis moved, another phantom chased after him. Visually, it seemed like he possessed four arms and twenty dancing fingers.
Cassius silently acknowledged how skillfully his opponent wielded Qi. It was like strands of silk dancing among his fingers, reminiscent of butterflies fluttering in a garden. However, admiring it did not mean he would follow suit. Deep down, Cassius firmly believed the path he had walked so far remained the strongest, a flawless combination of technique and raw power.
He had begun to glimpse how to progress along this path, thanks to the undead in Howling Canyon, which offered Cassius ample opportunities to experiment and learn from his mistakes. Each battle allowed him to only improve his own strength but also refine his control, allowing him to seamlessly incorporate various techniques into his combat moves.
The greatly enhanced Scarlet Fang Gun was merely the first step...
Cassius drew his arms back slightly, leaping forward gently with his toes.
Whoosh!
A black spear thrust forward, approaching Louis with unparalleled velocity. The fist that followed tore through layer upon layer of air, leaving a long vacuum in its wake.
Boom, boom, boom, boom...
There was no probing move at all; it was a tyrannical, all-out onslaught!
Louis’s right foot stamped down hard, and he abruptly shifted backward. His right hand unfurled like a flower, forming several hand signs in a split second. The air filled with overlapping finger-print afterimages that seemed to follow some eerie pattern as a bizarre ripple spread from all directions.
Those watching from afar were all impacted, especially the weaker Claire and Soss, who suddenly felt dizzy and disoriented.
Shadow Hunter Jin stepped two paces to the right, quietly blocking their line of sight. “Don’t look directly at Louis’s Half-Body Phantom...”
Swish!
In the center of the field, they saw two silhouettes, one chasing the other, hurtle toward the right side, creating a bizarre moment of relative stillness. Finally, they slammed into the cliff wall with two resounding thuds, causing the ground to quake and dust to billow.
Rumble...
Cassius yanked his arm out of the fractured stone, dislodging a pile of grayish-white powder that scattered everywhere. He raised his brows slightly, showing a hint of surprise. His punch had actually missed at the last second. It had just barely skimmed past Louis’s side and slammed into the cliff at full force. It seemed those finger impressions from before had indeed influenced him...
“How intriguing... So he managed to affect my senses through a special Qi ripple.” Cassius flicked his hand, causing a compressed mass of air to explode outward and instantly clear away the falling dust and debris.
Four meters away, Louis’s figure emerged, his face paler than before, and his right index finger trembling. He had already realized something was off. When he first activated the Half-Body Phantom, he had intended to use his finger impressions’ powerful hypnotic effect to cause Cassius to hallucinate. Yet none of those illusions had worked, even after he switched through seven different types.
Louis had once sparred with the Number One Shadow Hunter, and his hypnotic illusions still worked, though only for a brief instant. However, this was the first time they had found zero purchase. It meant his opponent’s Qi and mental resolve were astonishingly solid and practically immovable. But before he could alter his hand signs, Cassius threw a punch that was so fast that Louis had been forced to use the higher-tier illusions of the Half-Body Phantom to barely induce a sense of spatial distortion in Cassius.
Louis’s Half-Body Phantom allowed him to use both low-level illusions and high-level illusions. The low-level ones covered dizziness, hypnosis, or sometimes even stinging pain in certain body parts. The high-level ones included spatial distortion, time fragmentation, or forcing complete mental blankness. The lower-level illusions did not consume much Qi, so he could use them extensively. However, the high-level illusions demanded huge amounts of Qi. Louis would be hard-pressed to sustain them over a long fight. In particular, Cassius’s punch had come so swiftly that Louis had had to cycle through dense hand signs at rapid speed. However, any slipup would cause backlash to his real body.
Regardless, suffering backlash was still preferable to taking Cassius’s punch head-on. Louis glanced at the cliff wall, which featured a semi-circular depression that was over ten meters wide. There was a deep hole where the fist had landed, a striking mark of devastation.
“He was telling the truth. He genuinely threw all that Qi straight over...” Louis stood speechless in astonishment. He could sense that Cassius’s punch had carried a massive amount of Qi, like an invisible colossal hammer that had blasted right through the cliff. Sёarch* The NovelZone.fun* website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
“Hmm?!” His instincts suddenly screamed as Cassius’s keen gaze landed on him. The ground rumbled, and that grim face appeared only a meter away, savage eyes pinning him down.
Louis knew he could not afford to retreat endlessly, so he swept both hands through the air. In a split second, his twenty fingers rolled inward, resembling a mass of tightly woven thorns, meshing like gears.
A strange ripple of Qi flashed briefly in the air.
Buzz!
As Cassius lunged forward, he abruptly felt a sense of fragmentation, like he had suddenly lost a fraction of a second. Immediately afterward, two overlapping palm strikes hammered him square in the chest, one after the other. He stumbled five or six steps back before stopping.
A curious gleam in his eyes, Cassius briefly touched his chest. First spatial distortion, and now a time fragmentation; he had not encountered such a novelty in a long time. It was truly an interesting, peculiar style of combat.
He looked back up at Louis, whose face had grown paler, with a look of keen interest. Cassius closed in with a sudden whoosh, adopting a stance for savage close-quarters engagement.
The battlefield suddenly seemed to contain eight or nine overlapping silhouettes. Both fighters were ducking and weaving at high speed, exchanging blows multiple times within a single second. Their brief halts left residual images in the observer’s retinas.
Cassius kept pressing, his punches becoming stronger and quicker. Louis’s hand signs were now forming so rapidly they practically ignited the air, but fortunately, the Half-Body Phantom was purely condensed Qi, giving his fingers incredible speed. Even so, his reserves of Qi were draining at a shocking rate.
Louis was forced to employ both spatial distortion and time fragmentation to make Cassius’s strikes repeatedly miss, while he tried to seize each opportunity to counterattack. Yet, none of his efforts seemed to inflict real damage. Louis’s blows felt no stronger than scratches.
I must knock him out momentarily to get him to drop his guard. Otherwise, my attacks are ineffective, and I won’t be able to end this in one hit. Louis danced away from a flying punch. The fist blew a crater two meters wide as it pounded into the ground.
The eruption of dirt and rubble hid the flash of cold light in Louis’s eyes. He unleashed all his Qi, pushing his body to the absolute limit without holding back. He crossed his hands before him while the Half-Body Phantom extended its arms to either side. All twenty fingers activated at once, producing a continuous crackling sound as a flurry of finger shadows flickered densely.
It resembled a dazzling kaleidoscope, instantly covering the entire world.
Cassius glanced over, and his shoulder abruptly shook. His eyelids drooped shut, freezing the panther-like motion he was about to execute.
“Now’s my chance!” Louis let out a shout and lunged at Cassius, quickly closing the gap.
However, just as he was about to breach that final meter, Cassius’s eyes suddenly snapped open to reveal scarlet irises, shimmering like bloody rubies. A savage, brutal aura surged forth!
It was... the Killer Persona.
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