CHAPTER 7.

William.

I stared up at the stunningly beautiful woman staring wolfishly down at me. The last time I saw her beautiful face, she was handing me blunt mining/fighting implements to enter a mine filled to the fucking brim with monsters. I still owed her and the foreman for that piece of hell.

And here she was, bringing herself to me in all her enchanting glory, saving me the trouble of coming after her.

I grimaced at the pain throbbing through my arm, fighting the pain as the implant began to manipulate my pain receptors. I struggled to maintain consciousness as my mind cycled through possible attack scenarios.

While the implant could redirect or dampen information coming from my nerves to my brain. It recommended that totally blocking pain entirely would be detrimental in the long run as the device relied on the accurate information it received from every part of my body to direct all the changes it was making within me.

Still, I was allowed to dull a large measure of the pain blurring my vision. .

How had she moved so fast? One minute she wasn't there, and the next she was rushing in a blur towards him. Even accelerating his thought process didn't help much.

Before attacking, she had yelled some words in common that pulsed in my bones. I could feel the meaning and power of her attack beyond the span of just mere words.

My title acknowledgement protocol activated, and I could feel the weight of her attack in my bones. I already knew that the strange title ability was a function of my awakened soul and not my implant. The implant simply interpreted the information provided by my soul into data I could wrap my head around.

Somehow, even after being slammed into a wall, I was still conscious, cradling my now broken arm. I immediately ordered my implant to analyze my new enemy for any weaknesses which I could exploit, but I was confident in my ability to defeat her in the end. While powerful, I could tell based on essence volume, density and core formation, that she was far weaker than Tinuviel.

I tried to attack with my other arm, throwing a fast and wide haymaker in hopes of catching her off guard, but reacting lightning fast, she repeated her last technique, but this time without screaming the moves name. Even as I felt her fist slam into my stomach, like a sledgehammer to the gut, I could tell there was a marginal difference between this technique and its vocally expressed cousin. While painful, it wasn't nearly as devastating as the one that damaged my right arm. My mind tried to unravel the mystery surrounding this new way of using essence, even as my back made hard contact with the hard rockfall and my breath left me.

I felt my ribs crack and blood poured from my mouth as my implant struggled to fix my many internal injuries. Regardless, I was unwilling to throw in the towel just yet. Gathering my power, I blurred towards her, pushing my physical attributes to their maximum limit in an attempt to overwhelm her with my power, but as soon as I got within striking distance of her fist and legs, I knew I had made a terrible mistake, several to be precise.

My first mistake was underestimating her, assuming because she did not have the muscle bound body of the half-orc guards or the obvious cultivation power of Tinuviel, that she would be weaker. I watched in shocked awe and respect as she deftly dodged my attacks where she could, and redirected my blows where she was unable to dodge, at the same time attacking with a flurry of blows and kicks that staggered me, finishing her combo set with a spinning kick that left me sprawling right where I started my seemingly overpowered attack. I failed to account for the simple fact that all the physical attributes in the world did not immediately translate into the ability to use said attributes effectively. In other words, I was an inexperienced noon, trying to take down a master martial artist with brute force.

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The second mistake I made was assuming that my higher intellect and ability to process information would translate into some form of martial competency, as shown in some movies back on Earth. I imagined myself seeing my enemies move in slow motion and having all the time in the world to counter them. While this was true to an extent with the less skilled half-orcs and humans I had faced so far, it was not as effective against a skilled fighter. While my mind processes information faster, I still had to act and react in real time, fighting an enemy that was also doing the same but with skill and training that I didn't have. I could calculate her moves a thousand ways, but in real time, I could only act once. Another problem about having an overseas brain in a fight is that it makes you stupid. It simply guaranteed that I overanalyzed the entire fight crippling my ability to act in the moment. The ability to think about multiple things at once ensured that my mind could and was on something else, when it should have been grounded in the moment.

All these thoughts flashed through my mind, including the detailed analysis of her counter, attack, and final spinning kick that left my ears ringing and hurled me across the open space. Even as I struggled to recover from the savage beating I had just received, it occurred to me that like always, being the smartest person in the room did not mean much of anything in a fist fight.

My next mistake was assuming that my ability to self repair was limited, when in fact it was very limited to the amount of refined essence I had access to. Due to the voracious nature of my cultivation, there were only so many devastating huts I could endure before I ran out of essence, which I needed to affect any repairs.

Slowly getting back to my feet, I watched my beautiful opponent warily with new respect in my eyes. Despite not being faster or stronger than me, she was still able to kick my ass with ease.

She stood in a relaxed martial stance, waiting for me to recover and stand back up. Continuing to fight the pain, I set myself in a boxer's stance, willing my newly minted core to boost my attributes as much as my strain level would allow. I saw her raise an eyebrow at my display of power. Like me, did she have a way to see or sense essence. It occurred to me, standing in my amateur pose, that Tinuviel had been toying with me, and the only reason why I was still alive was because for some not fully disclosed reasons, she still needed me.

I was forced out of my musings when she changed her fighting stance in a wield mix that would have made me think she was in a dance or was acting out a scene from a bad Chinese cultivation movie, if not for the fact that through my implants ability to process essence, I could discern the essence within and around her follow the pattern of her ever changing stances, altering in shape and density, becoming some more, becoming an effect.

I was immediately on my guard, while at the same time curious as to what knowledge I could also gain from this heretofore unknown way for manipulating essence.

Finishing her short martial dance in a rigid stance, she shouted in a forceful voice.

[Trigram sect striking technique; first stance: falling fist barrage].

Even before the words finished falling from her mouth, she blurred towards me, reaching me in an instant, her fist falling in a rain of barely discernible attacks despite my heightened cognition. I was barely able to counter a single blow, before the rest fell on my already battered body like a machine gun barrage.

My body dug into the already damaged rockfall as she threw several punches per seconds, all but drilling me into the mine wall. I felt my organs scream in agony, dimly aware that unlike her last attack, this one was vocalised. It occurred to me then and there that after all I had survived, all the pain and suffering, this could be the end for me.

Just as I thought the avalanche of lightning fast blows would never end, I heard someone scream in a loud voice.

"Stop, you're killing him."