“Luo Jin…” Salrak whispered in my ear. “Be careful… he’s a high ranking fighter.”

“Ah!” Luo Jin exclaimed, his arms spread to the side. “It seems one of our guests has arrived… And it’s someone that turned into the S ranks not too long ago too, Althea!”

“How do you know my name?” I asked back with a frown.

There was some silence inside the large hall. I could see from my right side the lights of the city, while on the left side there were all sorts of decorations, as well as a large bar, full of chairs, tables, colorful lights, and all kinds of drinks. Behind the army, I could see there was a large door; likely the place where I was supposed to find some of the most important leaders of the Followers of Leyfall and the ones responsible for all the weapons they had.

Lou Jin lowered his arms and chuckled while shaking his head. “I know all of the important people in the ranking system. I am, after all, ranked twenty sixth of the top S ranks.” He gave me a sharp look. “Too bad you’ve walked into our base. You could’ve gone even higher than me otherwise as one of the few people able to use darkness and hellfire… A shame that your career has to end here in such a foolish mission.”

Right after he said that, metallic scales started forming on his arms, going from his forearms and eventually covering his hands. They glowed momentarily with a golden light, after which he smirked and took a step forward, stomping the ground hard and lifting pieces of rock from the floor. A powerful blue aura followed up, which pushed the people around him back, and even causing a few of them to go down. But the pressure from the aura was completely falling down on me. He was trying to intimidate me with his power alone… but I wasn’t going to let him.

I covered myself in a dark shroud which pushed back his aura away from me, causing him to smile even wider. “Haha! Of course you wouldn’t allow this to keep you down… but what you—”

Without ending his sentence, he disappeared from his spot, showing up right in front of me with the same wide smile on his face and his right fist ready to hit me. I quickly reacted by lifting my left arm and bracing for the hit, but he punched with his left arm instead, catching a bit by surprise, and sending me back to the doors that I just walked in from, causing me to hit the wall of the stairs that I used. A barrier protecting the walls activated and quickly shattered from the speed of my body, after which I got stuck inside the hard walls.

“Did you die?” Luo Jin asked from the place I was standing on a second ago. “Come on, you couldn’t have died from that, right?”

I grasped the edge of the hole that I was thrown into, and burst ahead, directly at the man. He didn’t look surprised at all as he received me with the same smirk from before. I punched down with a first full of hellfire, but he easily dodged it by taking a step back, causing me to hit the floor, which cracked and broke just as the wall did.

He lifted a foot and quickly dropped it on top of me. But just as he did before to me, I sidestepped and charged a darkness blow from the side as soon as he hit the floor with the foot. With a pivot from the foot that hit the floor he avoided my fist, and I simply caused the darkness in my fist to explode, forcing him to jump backwards and away from it.

He stood back frowning at the black mark on his metallic fist. “That’s odd… this darkness doesn’t feel the same as—”

I denied him the chance to reflect on the damage that I caused as I quickly created a gravity field on top of him. A dark pillar appeared where he stood, and the ground under him collapsed, taking him down a floor with all the ruble that followed after him. Without wasting a beat, I jumped soon after him, attuning the gravity field to my advantage so I could fall harder on him.

“Gravity magic, huh, too bad that I—”

I took my blade and swiped it in a wide arc as I was falling, creating a wave of darkness and hellfire was from it. The wave hit him, followed by an explosion of both powers. However, right after being hit, the gravity field was suddenly reversed, and all the rubble stopped mid air.

From beyond the curtain of darkness and hellfire, Luo Jin popped out. There wasn’t a scratch on him, but his smirk wasn’t there anymore. He sped up to me, who was suspended in the air like all the rubble, and with a fist covered in golden lightning, he attacked.

With the flat side of my large black blade, I stopped the fist, while at the same time, I used flying magic to stop myself from flying away from the impact, which was pretty strong, as I could feel the magic power traveling all over the blade and even jump from it to my body.

Still, it wasn’t enough to pierce my shroud of darkness, so I simply did the same thing he did to my gravity field and reversed the lightning back to him, while adding some of my power to it. The lightning turned red from the hellfire, and from the blade, it traveled back to Luo Jin’s fist.

“Ugh!” he exclaimed, the metallic fist turning just as red as the lightning that traveled through it.

And yet, the man didn’t appear to be wounded by it. With his other fist covered in a golden light, he punched upwards at the air, where the light exploded. He didn’t manage to blind me, but that explosion shattered the dark gravity field we were still stuck in, and caused us to fall upwards.

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He had replaced my gravity field with his own, so we quickly popped out of the hole that I created before, and while doing so, he did a full body turn to kick me. A metallic sound came out of my blade when his foot touched it, and I suspended myself with flying magic.

Luo Jin used that blow to get distance from me, landing outside of the hole while frowning in my direction. “What’s with your magic…?”

I refused to answer his question as I simply looked down on him, creating a few darkness spears in the air that were quickly covered by hellfire. They immediately flew in his direction, but his speed was simply far too high. It could even be faster than coach Reeta, so the spears landed in an afterimage of where he was a moment ago, exploding with a mix of darkness and hellfire, and even hitting some of the White Knights, who were vaporized as soon as they were hit.

Tracking his movements wasn’t an issue for me, so I was easily able to see him snapping from one side to the other, stepping on the edge of the destroyed hole, then a wall, then a few of the ruble rocks that were in the air, until eventually, he came directly at me.

He had both his fists winded back, and fire charged on them. As soon as he was in reach to me, he punched with both fists forward, sending a fiery torrent covered in golden sparks. I reacted by creating a darkness barrier at my front and summoning more hellfire-covered spears around Luo Jin.

The torrent crashed with my shield, sending the fire away in every direction, while at the same time I pushed the spears on him by clenching my fist. There was another explosion of powers, followed by my darkness barrier cracking. He was likely right behind the barrier, so I burst ahead in the air, and with my blade I pierced the place where the barrier was a moment ago.

My sword met with his fist, and a shockwave followed. The White Knights that so far had only bothered to look, were pushed away, and I even managed to notice a few of them were fleeing from the place.

Luo Jin was unharmed by the few spears I sent him, but I did notice that there were a couple of marks on his elegant clothes. And… It also seemed like I wasn’t pushing him hard enough as he turned a glare at the people that were running away, pointing a finger with his other hand.

“I didn’t give an order to flee!” he shouted, and a small blue beam fired from his finger, instantly piercing the few knights that were running away on the back, killing them in an instant.

I didn’t bother to stop him, since they were my enemies anyway, but I wasn’t sure if the ones that he killed deserved to die or not…

Regardless, there was no time to ponder about that. I concentrated hellfire in front of my forehead, where a small ball of red fire formed, and with a quick tilt forward, I fired a beam at the man. He quickly snapped his head to look my way as soon as the beam was fired, and with a look of surprise, the beam was stopped by a blue barrier that appeared close to his face.

The beam was sustained for a moment, and I leaned myself forward, trying to push both the beam and my sword into the man, but his fist kept my sword at bay, and the barrier held the beam… for only a moment, as it eventually started cracking.

When Luo Jin realized that the barrier was about to break, he kicked with his left leg. His leg shifted shape at the same time as he kicked, where a metallic blade pierced his pants, and went straight to my side. In response, I raised my leg as well and blocked it with my darkness covered armor.

He used the rebound from the hit to continuously kick me, his leg going up and down, while I matched his movements to make sure that he didn’t directly hit me, all while his blue barrier cracked under my beam. While doing so, he grabbed the blade that he had been struggling with so far, and pulled me closer.

Or tried to, as I simply used his move to push the blade into him. Instead of allowing himself to be pierced, he simply pulled me along, and we fell from the air to the side of the hole, causing my hellfire beam to lose its target and just burn away at different places of the hall until it disappeared.

If he wanted to have the blade, then I was going to let him have it, so with a new darkness gravity field covering us both, I dropped the blade on top of him. He looked surprised as he gripped the weapon, and I pointed a finger at it, focusing the field on the weapon. The darkness field turned into a thin line of darkness, and the blade fell down on top of him.

“Urgh!” He exclaimed as he struggled to keep the weapon away from him.

While focusing my darkness field, I also dropped on top of him; the heels of the Darkest Knight Armor pointed at his chest. Like a lightning, I fell, but while doing so, he managed to lift up the weapon enough for him to move away from it, letting the weapon fall to the ground, where it pierced it and fell deeper and deeper into another floor, falling ever downwards.

I stomped the ground right next to him soon after, and then quickly turned to look at him as I activated my weapon retrieval. I noticed that his metallic right arm had a dark streak on it, right in the place where my sword likely hit him.

He was taking in air with a slight agitation, like someone that just did a short jog. “That’s odd. Someone of your rank shouldn’t have such powerful spells…”

I used that short opportunity that he gave me as he stopped to talk to retrieve the weapon from below. It quickly returned to my hand and I grasped it firmly. Without stopping to answer back to him, I dashed over to him, slashing my weapon at the same time.

He wasn’t surprised, as he simply waved his hand to his right side, where the metallic fist had turned into a blade, parrying my blow with that movement. It was then that I noticed his other metallic fist had turned into a blade and that his feet, from about the knee, were like pointy spears.

Using his whole body, he started a barrage of attacks. I tried to block with my blade but I quickly realized that he was much faster than before, so a few of his blades were passing by the sword and directly hitting my darkness-covered armor. Since I couldn’t keep up with him, I decided to create distance by exploding the shroud of darkness that enveloped me.

With a dark shockwave that spread all over the hall, I managed to push back Luo Jin, but only a little bit, as he still resisted the wave. Using that opportunity, I focused the exploded shroud into him, creating a torrent of pure darkness. Soon after, I summoned a dense amount of hellfire, mixing it with the torrent of darkness to create a beam of both powers.

Luo Jin was forced back, crashing with the rest of the army, where the few knights that were around him were instantly vaporized by my power, and the ones that weren’t quite so close were sent flying to the side. My beam left nothing under it as even the ground around it bent and flew away in a mess of rocks and melting metal.

I sustained that dense torrent of Darkness and Hellfire until I felt that I couldn’t keep it up, eventually letting go of it to leave just a small streak in the air that quickly disappeared. With heaving breath, I stood with my blade ready as I looked ahead at the mess that was left behind by my power… Hoping that that would be enough to deal with that man.