PM attacks first, repeating his previous move and appearing beside Jade. He stabs his finger towards Jade’s face when his hand from the wrist up suddenly disappears, reappearing on the other side of Jade’s face. Jade appears unfazed as he pirouettes, causing the hand to brush by his face. PM presses on with his attack, throwing a punch with his other hand at Jade’s face as his detached hand reappears on his arm. Jade looks at the incoming punch with a slight smile, not bothering to dodge it. Big mistake.
The punch lands squarely on his jaw, throwing him backward as a slightly confused look appears on his face, mirroring my own expression. “Why didn’t he dodge it?” I ask no one in particular.
“Stupidity,” Drew says simply. “Pure, brainless stupidity and pointless overconfidence.” From Drew’s words, it is easy to see that he is not a fan of Jade.
PM disappears, reappearing above him as the purplish glow on his claws suddenly intensifies. He strikes downwards, but this time, the claws leave some black streaks in the air wherever they pass, making it seem like they are tearing apart space. Jade’s face blanched as he stares at those black streaks making their way to him. Without warning, the ground sinks inward, before rapidly rising back up to swallow Jade. The ground then bursts open a few meters away to reveal a changed Jade. The smiles he had started the match with are all gone, replaced with a cold yet blank expression that seems to tell the world that all play ends now.
“Why is he scared of those black streaks.?” I ask.
Drew explains. “PM’s pyli, and by extension, those streaks you just saw are capable of teleporting anything they touch. So if for instance, they touch a part of your arm, they’ll teleport that part of your arm away, effectively crippling you. And it’s not just those streaks that can do that. Everything PM uses the pyli to create can do the same.”
It takes me a moment to digest what Drew just said. “Doesn’t that mean that the moment those …things touch you, you’re done for.”
Drew nods. “If they touch something important like your throat, then yes, you’re done for. But if it’s just something like a finger then it’ll injure you but you can still fight back.”
“That is a terrifying ability,” I say as I turn back to the stage, a bit more understanding of what is going on.
Once again PM disappears but this time Jade doesn’t seem to care. He calmly raises his hand and snaps his fingers. A tint of red covers everything as the space around him seems to warp. PM pops back into view hurriedly just as flames explode outwards from Jade, obscuring him from view. For a moment I am breathless as I stare at the raging flames. The temperature in the arena rises for a brief moment before quickly returning to normal.
PM stares warily at the flames he had just narrowly escaped from, his body tense. The flames disappear as Jade dashes forward. He makes a motion towards PM and a giant flaming palm appears in front of him before it rushes to strike PM. PM swings his arm, his claws ripping the flaming palm apart.
Jade is not done as he aims his palm at PM. Noers appear in a circle around his palm and a golden light appears in the middle of the noers. I instantly recognize the attack. It is the same one Keldin used to finish me off when we fought. I am a bit surprised to see it cast with barely any effort.
PM rips apart the space around him, using the pyli he has left behind to form some sort of barrier between him and Jade. A golden beam flies out from the center of the ring of noers around Jade’s palm and slams into the barrier PM had formed in front of himself. For a moment everything seems to pause as the beam stops. Then a second later it rips apart the darkness and explodes. But PM is long gone, and Jade is left standing with nothing but flames around him.
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For a moment I had thought the pyli barrier PM made would teleport Jade’s attack to his back or something like that, but I am left disappointed. It seems the pyli are not capable of teleporting attacks like that. Most likely they can only teleport matter or maybe there's a limit to how much energy they can handle.
PM appears silently behind Jade, he is crouching slightly and his clawed hand is already striking at Jade’s torso. Jade sneers as PM’s claws rip into his body. A moment later his body warps, turning into a humanoid figure made of flames. “Illusion?” Drew mutters from beside me. “How the hell didn’t he notice that?”
The flaming figure vanishes, leaving PM alone just as a massive, complicated-looking noer appears on the ground beneath him. One of the flames left over from Jade’s attack suddenly flares, rising high into the air as an unharmed Jade walks out of it, a condescending smile on his face. The noer suddenly begins to glow, the glow getting brighter with each passing second, still, PM remains unmoving. It is then I begin to get the feeling that the noer beneath him is somehow preventing him from taking action.
The noer stops getting brighter, seemingly ready for something. Jade raises a hand and snaps his fingers. Then all hell breaks loose as the noer explodes. And not just the noer but random places around the stage similarly explode. For a moment I can see nothing but crimson flames. Then the flames begin to die.
“Why is he wasting his energy blowing up random places?” I criticize Jade’s actions. “Isn’t that just stupid?”
“Actually it’s quite smart,” Lathia disagrees. “PM can teleport, remember. By blowing up random places he’s basically making sure that no matter if PM can teleport from his trap, he’ll still put himself in danger so long as he’s on the stage.”
I keep quiet after that. After all, what she is saying makes sense. I was a bit narrow-minded not to think of that sooner. People begin to murmur around me and I soon see why. PM is completely fine. And not only is he fine, but his power also seems to have risen to another level. Another notable thing is that not just one, but both his eyes are now glowing. Around him are tears in space revealing nothing but blackness. Slowly but surely the tears close back up, gathering back into pyli.
Next, all but a few of the pyli rush to him, sticking and slowly spreading across his skin until the only thing left visible are his two glowing eyes.
“He’s using the Phantom body.” More than a few people say things equivalent to that sentence as an excited glint enters their eyes.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what PM has just done. By using the pyli to cover himself, he’ll be able to teleport away most of the attacks Jade throws at him. But judging by what happened earlier, they probably won’t be able to teleport attacks like that golden beam.
For a moment all is silent on the stage. Then Jade’s eyes begin to glow. At that moment, he seems to undergo the same change in power as PM. He takes off his Wranth robes as his body bursts into flames. For a moment, they stare at each other in silence. Then they both vanish.
Jade reappears first at the center of the stage, the air around his body rippling with great heat. He strikes with his palm towards what seems like an empty part of the stage. A huge palm made of fire appears in front of him at the same time that a purplish inky blackness covers that part of the stage. The fiery palm smashes into the blackness and both are annihilated. The next moment a hand pops out of thin air at the back of Jade’s head. The hand is connected to nothing, just a seemingly inconspicuous completely black hand. At the same time a black leg appears at the back of Jade’s legs and another hand appears in front of him. All of this happens in less than a second before these disconnected limbs strike.
Jade makes a strange movement with his body and somehow all the limbs miss him before disappearing. A second later, PM appears in front of him. His glowing eyes are the only part of him that isn’t black. Jade launches a barrage of flames at PM, who continues moving forward as though the flames were nothing. I soon realize why a second later when the parts of PM’s body that the flames were about to hit vanished into nothing, before reappearing once the flames had gone past him.
It seems I was wrong earlier. The Phantom body doesn’t focus on teleporting attacks, but instead on teleporting PM himself. Though I wonder how he can separate sections of his own body without injuring himself, even going so far as to reattach them without any noticeable adverse effects.
As shocking as that is, the most shocking part of what he just did was the speed with which he did it, and the fact that he could even vanish more than three parts of his body simultaneously before returning it less than a second later. It is at this moment I begin to understand why PM’s Phantom body had yet to be beaten. With it active, he is basically invincible.
At this point, PM is already in front of Jade. He takes a step and vanishes, reappearing behind Jade as he throws a punch. Jade turns around when all of a sudden, PM’s fist disappears before reappearing behind Jade head. Jade’s eyes flash, becoming brighter for a split second as a familiar-looking barrier appears between his face and PM’s fist. Hilla’s Barrier. PM’s fist hits the barrier and pauses for a moment before it shatters the barrier. But that moment is enough for Jade who throws his own punch at PM. His fists were covered in raging flames.
PM flashes away from the attack, stopping his own in the process.