Benton hated that he would have to risk everything in a fight that he wasn’t assured of winning. What was the saying? It was something like, if the outcome of a fight is in question before you start, you’ve already messed up.
Well, he’d definitely messed up.
The cyclops was shaking with barely contained rage. It could burst forward with an attack at any moment.
The beast’s aura was screwing up all his techniques, making them cost more and be less effective. Even with Time Manipulation and Quickstep, the cyclops was simply faster than him, and he doubted that a gravity field would make much difference.
He needed another technique, one he hadn’t bothered with previously because it had felt superfluous. To buy it, though, he had to find a way to stall the beast.
“Fine,” Benton said. “Since you refuse to accept that I have an aura until I reveal it, I guess that’s what I’ll have to do. You’ve not going to like it, though.”
The beast didn’t believe him, obviously, but that was okay. He didn’t need to stop it, just make it hesitate. Which was just what the cyclops did as it waited to see the demonstration of Benton’s nonexistent aura.
As soon as the words left his mouth, he said internally, “System, I want a movement technique based on my Concept of Speed. Confirm purchase to Mastery for me.”
Technique creation confirmed.
Host has learned technique, Absolute Speed Enhancement – Mastery.
Host has 846 Sect Points available.
Yes! Every little bit of speed should help.
With his other techniques active, Benton was only a little slower than the cyclops, and hopefully, the new technique would be enough to even out that imbalance or even give him the advantage.
Actually, speed wasn’t enough. Every bit of anything and everything should help, and his Body Cultivation was currently still sitting at Gold minor realm one, meaning he had room to improve.
A Body Cultivator at the peak of Diamond, the next major realm up, was no match for the equivalent spiritual cultivator, a Nascent Soul cultivator, but he’d take any increased attributes he could get. Besides, a peak Golden Core cultivator at peak Diamond was a lot different than just a peak Diamond. Maybe it would be enough to give him a physical advantage.
If the System let him buy what he wanted, that was.
“System, please take me to the peak of Diamond Body Cultivation.”
Host has not met the following requirements to ascend to Diamond Body Cultivation:
Has more than fifty percent of sect members living on the sect grounds.
Has more than 1,000 sect members.
It was as he had feared. There were criteria limiting his advancement just like with Spiritual Cultivation. Still, there was something he could do that might help, however little.
“System, please take me to the peak of Gold Body Cultivation.”
Host advancement to Gold – Minor Realm Nine confirmed.
Host has 814 Sect Points available.
Every little bit…
Time to simulate that aura. Though he doubted what he was about to do would fool the beast, there was no harm in trying. If it worked, he might just be able to get through the situation without a fight.
He immediately used his gravity burst to enhance the planet’s pull on the cyclops and triggered his Area Temperature Manipulation. Since his spiritual sense registered that the beast used Fire aspected qi, he hoped that removing heat from it would hurt it or, at least, hamper it somehow.
The beast snarled. “An aura? Or not an aura. Aura strange. Human aura weak! Human weak!”
Well, that was about the reaction Benton had expected. He triggered his Time Manipulation, effectively accelerating his movements. Triggering his new Speed Enhancement made himself faster still.
The cyclops roared and charged at him.
At the last instant, Benton twisted to the side, letting the beast move right past him.
Man, that thing was fast. Even being constrained by gravity and with Benton having two separate enhancements making him move faster, there wasn’t much difference between their combat speeds. He’d barely been able to dodge in time.
With the beast’s back to him, it was the perfect opportunity to attack. He was too close for the bow to be effective, so he threw a metal sphere.
He charged the projectile with ten thousand units of Earth qi to counter the beast’s aspect in addition to an equal amount of the Void finisher.
As the sphere struck the cyclops, Benton tensed. Even though he was at the peak of Golden Core and the beast was in the low stage of Nascent Soul, they were still a major realm apart. Combined with the deleterious effect of the aura, it was very possible that the sphere would just bounce off the qi shield.
If his main attack proved ineffective even charged with a comparatively massive amount of qi, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to survive the battle, much less win.
Thankfully, the first part of his plan went well. Kind of.
The Earth qi, strong against Fire, penetrated the cyclops’ shield, allowing the Void qi to do its job. The problem was that the huge spherical gouge Benton had seen when his attack hit any other living tissue was instead much diminished. A small amount of the beast’s mass, maybe an inch or inch and a half in diameter, disappeared from the gray muscled back.
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Far from a devastating blow, Benton had given the beast an ouchy.
Even worse, he was burning through qi with so many techniques active. On the plus side, he had done some damage, and a death by a thousand cuts was still death. And he had a lot of qi to burn through, over five and a half million in fact, and a good regeneration rate of over two hundred eighty thousand an hour. That wasn’t even mentioning the buttload of spirit coins stored in his ring.
To quote a particularly patriotic captain, he could do this all day.
Well, not all day, but for a while. A few hours? Maybe. After all, ten thousand here and ten thousand there used almost continuously added up fast, but it all depended on exactly how much he used and how quickly.
The beast stumbled, obviously not expecting either to miss or to be injured.
Benton took the opportunity to hit it with another sphere, charging it with twice as much Void qi as the previous one and triggering Chain Lightning to hit it at the same time.
The cyclops roared as it regained its footing. It spun and charged.
For the next several exchanges, Benton didn’t even get a hit in. It was all he could do to avoid getting hit. Which was important. Because the cyclops was even stronger than it was fast. If it landed one of its colossal blows on him, the fight would be over.
He’d need to strike the beast dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The beast would need to strike him once. Seemed fair.
Benton dodged a charge, catching sight of the cyclops’ back again, though it turned before he had time to launch another sphere. The wounds were at least not healing. He’d half feared that it would have Wolverine-esq healing factor to go with its incredible strength and speed.
The fight went on for a while with neither making contact and neither growing tired. With high ranked and high realmed individuals, stamina just wasn’t much of an issue, so Benton couldn’t even count on the beast making a mistake due to fatigue.
If he was going to get an opening to attack, he would have to make it himself.
Partially due to the flow of the fight and partially as a tactic, he’d avoided using Quickstep after that first time. He hoped the cyclops either forgot about it or hadn’t quite realized what he’d done. After all, not many people could use such a technique, so the beast might not have ever seen anything like it.
Finally, the two ended up facing each other from several steps away, and the beast charged. Its arms and shoulders were spread wide, clearly ready for him to try to dodge.
Instead, at the last instant, he Quickstepped, passing through the beast and ending up dozens of feet behind it. He spun using every bit of speed his Time Manipulation and Enhanced Speed could give him.
The cyclops was already facing him, but Benton had summoned a handful of spheres midturn. He threw them all.
They exploded with Earth and then Void qi as they slammed into the cyclops. Each did a bit of damage, which was helpful, but that wasn’t the interesting thing about the attack. The beast’s reaction to one that happened to be aimed toward its eye was quite fascinating.
While it ignored the other spheres, letting them detonate on its body wherever they happened to land, it frantically swiped at the one closing in on its face.
Its eye.
Benton was an idiot. That was the cyclops’ big weakness, that oversized, single eye.
Unfortunately, he’d taken just a fraction of a second too long in making that astute deduction. The beast closed on him and swung.
Benton leaped to the side, perpendicular to the cyclops’ motion, and tried to Quickstep away. A fist connected with his back.
The damage was mitigated by a number of factors. One, Benton was moving in the direction of the blow, so some of the force was transferred to speeding him on his way. Two, his automatic shield flared Earth qi to counter the beasts Fire qi, absorbing a great deal of the energy. Three, peak Gold Body Cultivation wasn’t just a line on his status screen. It hardened his skin and muscles and organs, making them much tougher than they otherwise would have been.
Without all three of those factors working together, Benton was positive his back would have been broken. As it was, he suffered an intense, shooting pain throughout the area, and his legs went numb, not responding to his directions nearly as well or as quickly as they should.
The only thing that saved him was that the hit had propelled him forward away from the beast, and he was able to, in desperation, do something he’d never even thought to try—chaining a second Quickstep right after the first.
He even had the presence of mind to remove a trio of FEDs from his ring, activate them, and toss them behind him.
A series of three very satisfying explosions sounded behind him. Not that they’d do much damage to the cyclops, but hopefully, the light and sound would slow the beast down for a moment.
Not knowing how bad the damage to his back was and needing quick regeneration to avoid death by massive hammering fists, Benton popped a Major Healing Pill before performing another Quickstep, unsure of whether the beast was about to crush his skull at any instant.
He couldn’t say enough good things about anything supplied by the System, especially pills. They both worked extremely fast and were extraordinarily effective. By the time he turned around to face the beast again, he was fully healed.
Benton was panting, though, well aware that he’d almost lost the fight, and with it, his life. Another mistake like that one might be the end of him and his sect. He couldn’t let that happen.
Surprisingly, the cyclops was looking none too good. Several chunks had been blown out of various portions of its body by Void qi, and the explosions had left it charred.
It did not look happy.
“Human! Cyclops kill human!”
If Benton could just gain enough distance, he could shoot arrow after arrow at that eye. It would surely deflect most of them, but one had to hit eventually. But he just couldn’t get far enough away to set up a shot.
If only—
He truly was a moron. It occurred to him that there was one surefire way to gain distance from the beast. Flight.
Since advancing to Golden Core, he hadn’t once let himself think about the possibility because flight in his realm required a flying sword. Considering how many Shop Points regular weapons cost, he didn’t want to be tempted to spend such a precious resource on what he considered to be a frivolous luxury. Much better to wait until his next visit to Sixth Flawless Flowing City and spend easily attainable spirit coins.
Not trusting himself, he’d literally banished the thought from his mind.
Now, though, he needed height, not flight. And he didn’t need a sword to achieve that objective. There was no freaking reason he couldn’t use his gravity burst on himself. He’d even experimented with that when he’d first bought the skill and learned that using gravity to tug him in the direction he wanted to go just wasn’t the same as flying through the air like a superhero in a comic book.
Id. I. Ot. Idiot.
The cyclops charged at him.
Benton activated a gravity burst, propelling himself several dozen yards into the air and hovering there.
The beast roared in fury.
“Cyclops so small down there,” Benton said in his best imitation of the creature. “Cyclops can’t fly. Cyclops weak.”
It began uprooting trees and finding rocks to chunk at him, but without qi coating the projectiles, mundane objects, even thrown by a Nascent Soul cultivator equivalent, bounced harmlessly off his shield.
Benton calmly pulled his bow from his ring, nocked an arrow, pulled back the bowstring, and loosed. He wasn’t quite the artist with the bow that Yang Xiu was, but he had Mastery of an archery technique. Any arrow he used went pretty much exactly where he wanted it to.
Which was the cyclops’ eye.
The beast blocked the first one of course, but that was okay. Benton had more arrows. A lot more arrows.
If Yang Xiu had been in the same realm as Benton and had the same techniques available, her talent for the bow would probably have made her rate of fire exceed his, but as things stood in reality, he could fire two to three arrows for every one of hers, and she was fast. Darn fast.
Like the first he’d shot, the beast was able to swat away most of the arrows, almost all of them in fact. Almost all were not all, however. One finally landed.
Earth qi and Void qi exploded. The eye was gone. In its place was a gaping hole in the beast’s forehead. It was blind.
After that, it had a much tougher time blocking the rain of arrows, and soon, one wedged itself deeply enough for the Void burst to take out a portion of the beast’s brain.
The cyclops’ knees folded, and it collapsed to the ground, dead.
Or presumably dead. He wasn’t about to get any closer to the thing without confirmation of it. Too many movies where the bad guy came back to life at the last second had taught him that lesson.
Suddenly, he practically shot up into the air, and it took him a moment to understand that his gravity technique’s effectiveness was no longer being suppressed. With that realized, he was able to easily re-gain control and hover.
A box popped up.
The Quest, Survive, has been completed. Host has a choice of rewards, one based on the System’s grading of the completion and another based on the percentage of sect members and villagers that survived.
Would Host like to choose rewards now?