Second Genesis

Chapter 571: Genius [900 GT Bonus]

Grey felt like his entire body was being torn apart, but most of that sensation was an illusion created by something arguably worse.

When he had activated The Virtueless earlier, the strain hadn’t simply come from forcing his body to expand and imitate whatever monstrous state Atlas had once possessed, because Grey had also been reshaping his Neural Frame to mirror the effects the weapon demanded.

His Frame hadn’t been allowed to function according to its natural structure, and forcing it into patterns it had never been designed to maintain had left behind countless microscopic fissures that still hadn’t properly recovered.

Now Grey was doing the same thing again, only this time he was forcing the Last Paladin Frame into alignment with the others and rebuilding his Quasi Dominion before his Neural Frame had recovered from the first abuse.

The moment he did, those tiny fissures began tearing wider, sending pain through every pathway connecting his mind and body until it genuinely felt as though invisible hands were ripping him apart one nerve at a time.

His flesh wasn’t actually splitting open, which was technically good news, but the sensation was almost identical because his nervous system itself was taking the punishment.

"Fantastic," Grey growled, genuine irritation bleeding through his voice as white-gold light began rolling from his body. "You’re gonna pay for this."

It wasn’t entirely clear whether he was talking to Xerchen, who had managed to create this problem by getting himself impaled, or The Immovable, who had actually done the impaling, but Grey didn’t particularly care enough to clarify.

He moved before either of them could respond, white-gold power exploding around him as he tore through The Immovable’s Dominion almost as though it wasn’t there.

The Virtueless swept horizontally toward her body, and she barely managed to raise her ink-black spear in time, but blocking the strike did little to help her when the impact still sent her flying backward.

Grey disappeared before she could even finish moving through the air, shadows flickering beneath his Black Forces before he reappeared behind her and swung again.

The Immovable reacted strangely. Rather than turn to meet him, she slashed her spear downward through empty air in front of herself, and for the smallest fraction of a second Grey thought she had simply misjudged his position.

Then the space directly in front of him hardened, an invisible attack suddenly taking shape along the exact same path as the spear she had swung nowhere near him.

BOOM.

The Virtueless collided with the unseen strike in empty air, white-gold light and darkness bursting outward while the space around the impact twisted violently.

Grey immediately noticed something even stranger, because rather than The Immovable being sent farther away by the exchange, the force seemed to gather around in front of her and accelerate her toward him even faster.

Grey understood the basic idea almost instantly. The Immovable was using her Dominion to project attacks from positions her physical body didn’t occupy, which meant the movements of her spear no longer dictated where the actual force would appear.

She could slash in one direction and have the attack manifest in another, or use the pressure of the Dominion itself to redirect momentum and turn being knocked backward into another attack.

Understanding what she was doing was easy enough, but reacting to it while his Neural Frame was screaming at him was another problem entirely. A spike of pain ran through Grey’s senses and delayed him for only a fraction of a second, yet that was enough for The Immovable’s back to slam directly into his chest with enough weight that it felt as though a mountain had been dropped onto him.

Blood sprayed from Grey’s mouth as he slid backward across the broken stone, while The Immovable landed lightly and pivoted almost immediately.

She closed the distance again, but this time her steps themselves felt wrong. The first footfall seemed to press directly across Grey’s chest, the second increased the pressure, almost like a meteor was crashing into him headlong, and by the third it felt as though she would bury him beneath the ground beneath his feet, placing a mountain of mass right across his heart.

Grey was forced backward again and then again, his eyes flickering as irritation gradually gave way to understanding.

The Immovable had stopped trying to fight him conventionally.

Grey’s combat abilities were exceptional when dealing with physical motion because Last Paladin Spirit, Center of Spirit, and every similar ability layered through his instincts allowed him to read the smallest signs of an attack before it happened.

Muscle tension, shifts in balance, eye movement, breathing, the angle of a shoulder or the rotation of a hip, all of those details were enough for Grey to predict what someone wanted to do before they actually committed to doing it.

The problem was that none of those abilities allowed him to look directly into The Immovable’s body and see the exact path her energy would take.

She had realized that weakness and was deliberately building her attacks around it, using her Dominion to create forces that weren’t directly tied to the motions Grey could read.

An ordinary spear thrust could carry invisible pressure from several directions, a step could become an attack against his balance, and a retreat could suddenly accelerate into an offensive movement without any of the normal physical preparation.

Grey’s eyes narrowed further when he noticed another change. The Immovable had also compressed her Dominion considerably, drawing the darkness that had once spread through the entire Church into a much tighter region around her body. That made the pressure surrounding her much denser and also made it harder for Grey’s white-gold tendrils to directly interfere with the Holy Energy powering her techniques.

He could still reach it if he focused, but by the time he identified the exact pathway and tried to suppress it, she had already redirected the energy somewhere else.

It seemed she truly was a combat genius.

The Immovable flickered forward again, thrusting her spear toward Grey’s throat, but the attack no longer felt like a single thrust. Pressure condensed near his ribs, something sharp formed behind his knee, weight gathered across his shoulders, and another invisible slash seemed ready to appear near the side of his head.

One movement had somehow become a dozen attacks arriving from completely different directions, and for the first time since Grey had returned from the Culling, someone was forcing him to think before every exchange instead of simply running them over.

Grey’s lips slowly curled upward.

Unfortunately for her, being a genius wasn’t enough when the person standing across from you was capital H Him.