The drunk man stood up with some difficulty. A few metallic spikes were visible around the area Peter kicked earlier. They were probably meant to stab any attackers but due to the man's current condition they appeared a bit too late.

Unfortunately, despite almost everything about the circumstances being in his favour, Peter didn't really have a lot of options to work with. A class seven defensive ability, no matter how misused, made all of his bare handed attacks meaningless.

He did try to hit the man again to see if he could avoid his hardening ability by being faster than what he could react to, but it seemed to activate automatically because his attack ended up hurting himself, despite the opponent being completely off-guard. The good news was that the spikes continued to be late and Peter could avoid being noticed if he moved slowly enough.

[Health: 81%]

[Stamina: 64%]

So far he only lost a single percentage point of health by hitting hard metal with his hand, but his stamina was another matter entirely. The prolonged usage of the shadow body before the fight ended up being more tiring than he expected and his still damaged lungs were not too happy with being overworked.

To avoid further problems, Peter started looking around for a weapon, while his target was desperately trying to find the source of the attacks. His first idea was to use a piece of glass from one of the broken car windows but the shards were so small that they would be better used as sand than as a stabbing weapon.

He threw a handful of them into the flailing man's eyes regardless, but he was confronted by the fact that the eyes were also metallic, making his half-hearted attack just as ineffectual as the rest.

While all of this was happening, James stopped lying around and was preparing to jump in to end the fight. From his perspective things could only end badly.

Peter did try to find a tree branch just to see how effective it would be, but not only were there no trees around, the entire street was exceptionally clean so there wasn't anything he could pick up and fight with. With few other options, he tried to look over the gangster's car to hopefully find a weapon-like object.

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Which was significantly harder to do, since unlike Peter's movements, the man could see the doors of his car opening but he did manage to evade him. Eventually he found an ornamental knife in the trunk which he was all too happy to try out.

Upon contact, the tip of the knife broke off immediately flying backwards and almost hitting Peter in the face. The shock this caused slowed down his reaction speed enough so one of the emerging spikes scratched his hand.

[Health: 79%]

[Stamina: 57%]

He was seriously struggling by this point so he had to find a solution quickly. The only lead he got was that his last, more committed, strike did seem to cause pain to the man despite not penetrating his skin. He came to the conclusion that the iron skin acted more like proper armour than the increase in endurance he was used to, and thus would be less effective against blunt force.

Peter walked behind the man and kicked his legs out from under him and used his hands to push him in the direction he was falling, towards the ground and into the concrete.

The man hit his head hard on the road and the air was knocked out of his lungs. In spite of the success of the new strategy, Peter's hand ended up being impaled on the man's chest. James rushed over to quickly end the fight, but there was no one to fight, as the man on the ground had already passed out. However, he was still angry and started his lecture while trying to free the kid with a hole in his hand.

"I swear one of you will kill yourselves doing this. I don't care what Anthony says, you'll be staying home until you recover."

He continued to complain as he slowly inspected the injury. His solution was to break the spike off, while it was still in Peter's hand, then take the kid to the hospital and let the professionals remove the foreign object.

Before leaving, Peter did get the ability he came for.

[Successfully absorbed class 7 thorns blessing.]

[Result: STR +0.15, END +0.2, MGC +0.07, EXP +70]

While being treated at the hospital, Peter had time to think about the fight. He was still far away from fighting anyone actually strong on fair grounds, but he was slowly getting there. He felt great, knowing that he took out someone much stronger than himself basically alone, even if it was an unfair fight.

After getting home, true to James's words, Peter had to stay home for the rest of the week while the others continued to take out Firefly members. With nothing better to do, he spent the week either recovering in bed or working out. But he did manage to sneak out of the house to watch the last day's big event. The final showdown between the Green Dragons and the Fireflies.