Ever since Arthur had first laid eyes on Alyssia, he’d wanted to spar her. That wasn’t his irrational half-breed title title talking. At least he hoped not. For as long as he could remember, Arthur had always welcomed a challenge.

That didn’t mean he sought them out. His life was already difficult enough without adding to his troubles. Arthur doubted, however, that fighting Alyssia would add them, and what's more, it would be fun. There was no point in being modest. It was quite literally statistically impossible that anyone on Earth could match his physical stats. The chance of that happening was probably one in a billion or some other absurdly long number. Kazi Alukai might be an incredible mage, but he didn’t hold a candle to Arthur in physical combat.

No one on the planet did.

Which was why fighting an off-worlder, someone from an altogether different dimension like Alyssia was so exciting. Who knew what sort of strange fighting style the Alverin people had created with centuries of experience with ether-enhanced physiques, and how did it compare with the best Earth had to offer. Maybe, no, Arthur was definitely being biased here, but Muay Thai was one of the most complete fighting styles ever developed, at least when it came to striking, honed and perfected into the perfect killing martial art over centuries of refining.

The stuff Arthur had learned was obviously watered down a lot, but it was still deadly stuff, especially when backed by over 1,500 points invested into physical stats. Still, Arthur was aware now how much it limited him. Muay Thai had been created for human beings and Arthur was far from human now. It held him back, the movements designed for bodies far weaker than his own. His palms were clammy with sweat and he could feel some tinkling down his back. He wasn’t scared per se, just cautious and his body was already sweating in preparation to cool it down in the upcoming fight.

He breathed in and out. In and out. In. And. Out. Most fights were lost before they even began when someone lost their cool too early. Preparation was key and the correct mindset made all the difference.

Arthur was basing all of this according to a human's physical capability prior to the arrival of the system, and whilst some of it might not be applicable any more, he was still human enough and so needed oxygen to operate, 555 endurance be damned. Stamina was the first thing to abandon you in a fight, a mixture of adrenalin, anaerobic respiration and physical exertion made the stuff disappear like water down a drain.

Arthur stretched upwards as if reaching for the sky and felt a slight strain in his back muscles as they were elongated. He held the pose for thirty seconds and then moved onto a series of more complicated stretches, each of them more challenging and difficult than the last. Cramps may have now become problems of the past but Arthur wasn't ready to take chances here and nor did he think lactic acid would be any easier to deal with with his inflated stats.

It stood to reason that if his body had been enhanced in the wake of the system's arrival, so too had the things it produced. Maybe he was overthinking things, but it made sense. Arthur couldn’t help but grin as he briefly imagined what a sapient with three hundred levels under their belt would look like if they had diarrhoea. Heck, they’d probably need an epic-ranked toilet to deal with the explosive results and the stuff could be sold as the world's greatest fertiliser. After all, his blood was already so special and he was only at level 71.

Arthur shook his head as he tried to clear it of the strange thoughts that had come to him unbidden. Sometimes his mind scared even him, its potential to generate vivid imagery was far too great to be unchecked.

“What's got you smiling like that?”

Arthur turned to look at Alyssia, who had an inquisitive expression on her face. Like him, she too was preparing herself, though far less thoroughly than himself. Maybe stretches weren’t a thing on the Alverin homeworld or maybe she just didn’t take him seriously. Arthur didn’t care, and he’d find out soon enough if Alyssia had a right to be so confident.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know. I just thought of something… weird.” Arthur said wryly, wisely not going into details.

Alyssia looked more curious after hearing that, but she didn’t press the matter, instead clenching and unclenching her fists to get some blood circulation going. She hadn’t changed her attire for their sparing match, only removing the baggy t-shirt she normally wore. That however left her clothed only in a tight-fitting vest that exposed more than it covered and left little to the imagination. Arthur tried not to stare too much even if Alyssia didn’t seem to shy about exposing so much skin. She was a beautiful woman, after all.

“Are you ready?”

Arthur nodded his head. They were currently standing in one of the rare flat pieces of land that dotted the locus layer they were in. It had taken them a while to find it, but the 200 square meter area was more than enough to suit their purposes.

“Remember Arthur, this is only a spar. No matter what happens, I don’t want you losing your cool and letting that weird title of yours take over,” Alyssia said gravely, “If you go all animal on me, I can’t guarantee your safety.”

“Or my own.”

The last words were spoken quietly but Arthur picked up on it with his enhanced hearing. It was both heartening and disheartening to see that she at least took him seriously, even if it was for the wrong reasons.

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“You remember the rules, right?” She asked.

“Yes. no magic or skills except your passive ones. No groin shots and no eye gauging. Pull your punches if you strike the throat and we stop as soon as one of us says so.”

Arthur quickly recounted the rules they’d agreed upon. They were simple but necessary. In a real fight, a blow to the groin had the potential to incapacitate, even kill your opponent, and neither of them wanted to find out, especially Arthur, if 700 points in constitution were enough to protect his crown jewels.

“When the stick touches the ground, we begin,” Arthur said, lifting an errant twig to shoulder height. Alyssia merely grinned at him. He took it as a sign of her agreement.

He dropped the twig and watched as it hit the ground.

Before he could even get into his stance, his head whiplashed backwards, like he’d just crashed at seventy mph on the highway. One moment he had his eyes trained on the stick, and the next, his gaze was skyward and he was wondering why he’d never realised that there was an ocean above his head at all times.

Getting hit at twice the speed of sound would do strange things to anyone and it took Arthur a half second to get his bearings back. Just in time, in fact, to start to raise his hands to cover the most valuable parts of his body, his head and throat. Arthur didn’t see anything coming, his eyes had instinctively closed a half second after the first strike to his chin, but he did feel something strike his thigh, a probing shot delivered to weaken his stance. Most probably Alyssia’s lower shin, but nothing was certain right now.

Seven-tenths of a second.

That was when his defence was truly put to the test and he felt Alyssia’s intended strike land. An attack that should have hit the side of his neck, a fist or a foot Arthur still couldn’t say, instead struck his raised forearm.

A Muay Thai fighter’s stance, with hands raised and poised for both attack and defence. One designed to protect the most vulnerable parts of the body.

Alyssia’s strike should have hit the side of his shoulder and rolled off with little effect. Instead, it had struck the weak muscles of his forearm. Arthur’s delayed movement and unprepared response meant that he bore the full brunt of Alyssia’s power with a stance that looked like it belonged more in a bar fight than the bout he was currently in, all reaction and desperation with no hint of technique or skill.

Eight-tenths of a second.

A shit-ton of agility vs seven-hundred constitution. The numbers said that Arthur should have won.

He didn’t.

More than a battle of stats, this was a battle of technique and form, and Arthur’s was currently piss-poor. Alyssia’s blow hit with the force of a car, thirty-thousand pounds of power concentrated on an area the size of an apple. It would have disintegrated an ordinary person's flesh and skeleton. The bones in Arthur’s forearm held.

His stance didn’t.

Exactly one second into the fight, Arthur reopened his eyes. Alyssia was crouched low in front of him, her left leg extended out beside her in preparation to strike his lower shin. Intelligence and perception worked in tandem to try and make sense of what was happening in front of him just as his face began to bear the consequences of his lacking defences.

The thirty thousand pounds of force that struck his forearm had been weakened significantly, which meant that when the laws of physics and inertia did their work, his own fist struck his jaw with only a little over a third of the force of Alyssia’s initial blow. Ten thousand pounds was still an absurd amount. The equivalent of four tons hit Arthur like a truck and he saw stars for the briefest moments.

Still, Arthur had always had a strong chin, and it had only gotten stronger in the past weeks. A strike that he’d defended, albeit haphazardly, was far from enough to take him down, and yet Arthur’s brain had already told him that he was about to hit the ground.

Hard.

He would have smiled if he had the time to, but he didn’t and it would have come out looking more like a bloodied grimace of pain anyway. He’d been outclassed and Arthur couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of the martial art that Alyssia fought with. A mixture of Brazilian Capoeira and what looked like a variation of Kung fu, deadly-effective even if the critic in him said that it’s movements were far too telegraphed.

That doesn’t matter if my body can’t even react to them, he thought wryly.

Alyssia truly didn’t need to use any feints or complex manoeuvres to set up her strikes. Not against him at least. She was simply too fast. Exactly one and a half seconds after the twig touched the floor, Alyssia’s four-move combo came to its conclusion.

An uppercut delivered before he could react, followed by a kick to his thigh to weaken his legs and then a truly devastating blow to his throat, whether it had been delivered by a fist or a foot Arthur still wasn’t sure. And then the conclusion came, timed to perfection so that Alyssia’s telegraphed kick hit his ankle from the right whilst the remnants of her previous blow, his own fist, struck his jaw from the left.

Like an axe blow on a dead tree, Arthur’s connection to the ground was cut off and he felt the world tilt sideways. Gravity came into effect, and Arthur hit the ground at over one hundred miles per hour, the impact creating a small crater around him. The wind was knocked out of his chest and he tasted the salty iron taste of blood in his mouth from where his lip had burst.

Arthur chuckled. Two seconds. That was how long it had taken for him to be knocked down, a whopping five times faster than his previous greatest failure when he’d fought someone nearly twice his weight at age fifteen. That had been an experience Arthur would never forget and he’d been unable to move for ten minutes afterwards. There was a reason why weight classes had existed in the pre-system world, and while things may have changed now, numbers still mattered in a fight.

Namely, the total number of stats one possessed and if Arthur could say anything about himself, it was that he was truly a stat monster. It only took a moment for the expected words to reach Arthur’s ears.

“What the fuck is your body made of?!”

Arthur checked his health. 15,710/15,840. Indeed, what the fuck was his body made out of. Even as he lay there on the ground, his health began to tick upwards at a noticeable rate. A regeneration rate of 29 health per minute was truly absurd, and that was without him even using any of his healing-based skills.

Arthur cracked his neck and started to get back to his feet. Alyssia was cradling her left hand, which Arthur could see was bruised quite heavily at the knuckles.

A two-second knockdown. A fighting style similar to the Brazilian art of capoeira enhanced by a truly terrifying movement speed. And a woman who loved fighting. Arthur had analysed Alyssia, not enough to profile her or anything, but enough to know her strengths and perhaps a few of her weaknesses.

Arthur smiled. This wasn’t going to be an easy fight, far from it, actually, and it would take everything he had to win.

But Arthur didn’t think he would lose.