Monarch of Profound Toxin

Chapter 335 - 335: Totally Friendly, Right?

Eik couldn't help but grunt with exertion as he received the absurdly heavy edge of Chop's blade with his own crystalline katana.This wrinkly old bastard was a total monster.

They had only been fighting for a few seconds at this point but the Pristine Blade Saint had already rained down countless blows upon Eik. For the first few exchanges Eik had tried to gauge the old man's power by taking his strikes with shield-like shells of blue, but had been forced to give it up almost immediately when they proved absolutely incapable of withstanding the Pristine Blade of Toxin, shattering against a single impact.

The katana wasn't faring much better, to be honest, but at the very least it was small and handy and thus easier to maneuver into a deflection rather than a block. Unfortunately, even with that, each of Chop's ridiculously swift attack landed with a force and precision that sent jolts of pain up through Eik's body via the katana and hurt him regardless. Whether that was due to technique or a system-granted skill was impossible to tell at present.

With every three or four blows, Eik's weapon shattered under the crushing weight of Chop's. Each time, he was forced to recreate the katana over and over again and completely ruin his momentum and defensive rhythm.

It wasn't exactly a surprise, but this X-ranked multi-centenarian was simply many heads and many shoulders above Eik when it came to weapon skill. It wasn't like he was faster than Eik. As a matter of fact, with all of his buffs active, Eik was pretty sure that he was the faster of the two of them.

The problem, however, was that any attempt at a counter attack was met with cool prediction and easy shutdowns, while defense was bypassed as if it wasn't even there. Any even fairly successful deflections or blocks Eik managed to get up in time felt more like Chop testing his new sword.

This simply wasn't going to cut it.

After the hundredth blade broke against Chop's, Eik suddenly conjured up an umbrella of crystal wide enough to obscure him completely from Chop's eyes. Even as it appeared, he could see the old man realize that the flow of the battle was going to change, but he still went in for a slash.

When the shell shattered, instead of simply falling apart, it burst into thick mist that scattered outward as if buffeted by the output from the engine of a jet. And with it, Eik was gone.

Chop's eyes flitted around as his hyper heightened senses extended into the opaque, toxic mist. His eyes revealed nothing and everything else came up short as well. For all intents and purposes, Eik Magnasen was gone.

But Chop was aware of the man's ability to turn into and mix himself into the toxin seamlessly and completely. Against a fellow X-ranker, Chop just didn't have the ability to track him through that. He could be anywhere.

He didn't dare enter the mist either. Not only would that grant Eik the freedom to reappear and attack from any direction he wanted, but he also highly doubted that his official elevation to Pristine Blade Saint of the Supreme Divinity of Toxin came with absolute immunity to the most potent toxin in the Unified Mass. It seemed pretty likely that if Eik wanted to poison someone, regardless of how powerful they were, he could.

No, despite his preference for close-quarter combat, now was the time to create distance. With a simultaneous, omnidirectional blast of cutting aura, he leaped backward and sent slashes through the toxic mist in the hope of somehow hitting Eik, but it simply kept expanding and pressed him further and further out.

At their level of power, sound didn't travel quickly enough to provide warning of an incoming attack, so when the projectile came, only his eyes and aura sense let Chop react.

With the base of his crystalline blade, he only just barely managed to catch the small, ultra reinforced projectile before it took him in the shoulder. Nearly losing his firm grip on the weapon, it was his turn to grunt at the force of an attack.

The next one he caught a glimpse of as well, but not in time to handle it as successfully as the first. It tore through the softer flesh in his side and grazed his rib cage. He groaned.

That hurt. How long had it been since he had last been injured. How long had it been since he had felt pain? A hundred years? No, definitely longer than that.

Anything that could hurt him in the Unified Mass usually didn't have any real interest in pointless squabbles.

At once, he shifted his stance into defense, going low and tight as the sword was held protectively across his body. Now ready, he deflected several more bullets, sending them ricocheting into the distance where they devastated the landscape like ballistic missiles.

There was no doubt that Chop was magnitudes more experienced in combat than Eik, but the fact remained that it had been a long time since he had fought an opponent who was his equal in raw power. On the other hand, that was basically all Eik had been doing.

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Or rather, Eik had built his Awakened combat career almost exclusively upon the corpses of his superiors.

Where Chop was entirely unused to being on the back foot, that was all Eik had ever been.

Chop clicked his tongue through gritted teeth. This wasn't sustainable.

Not only was the mist impossible to see into, but it was literally made up of Eik's own aura signature, so even attempting to track him through it was as futile as could be.

Abandoning his suppressive assault, Chop went into a full retreat. The Profound Toxic mist was certainly swift but it was nothing next to the max speed of the Pristine Blade Saint and the distance between them was immediately doubled ten times over.

Precision now thrown away in favor of blast splash, Eik launched missile after missile at Chop's fleeing back and showering him in debris. The most important thing was to prevent the old fart from vanishing.

Unfortunately, that was exactly what happened when he crossed a large mountain. Eik obliterated it in its entirety less than a second later but it was already too late. Chop had disappeared from sight.

Concealed within the multi kilometer cloud of Profound Toxic mist, Eik roamed the land for a couple of minutes, sending out countless Living Manifestations to scout the region for any hint of Chop's presence, but with not luck. The fact of the matter was that both of them were better at hiding their presence than the other was at tracking, and that made it difficult to break a standstill like this.

For a moment, Eik considered just going with the simplest and likely most effective solution—a good ol' Death Star carpet bombing. That could probably get anybody to come out of their hole.

Well, if they survived, of course, which even Chop might not be capable of.

And therein lay the issue. Eik's most potent offensive moves were extremely deadly. To the point where their uses just couldn't be justified in a sparring match like this. He lacked any control that could have made it possible.

Chop, on the other hand, was all control. Even now, after witnessing it a few times, Eik just couldn't believe how skilled Chop truly was. When the old sages in the stories spoke of being one with the sword, Eik imagined this was what they meant.

Fine. If that was how it was going to be, then he wasn't going to make it easy for Chop. If the wrinkly old sock wanted to run away, then Eik would simply have to make it so that there were no more places left to hide.

With a mental command, he redoubled his efforts to spread the mist, pushing it further and further at speed. It soon covered all of the area that had already been cleared of miasma, continuing its permeation into the miasma. There was something that felt like resistance to his advance but it lacked both consciousness and power, leaving it with little to fight back with.

Compared to the explosive efficiency of a Death Star, it was slow but it got the job done.

By now, Chop would be crawling around in the miasma, unable to see properly while having to avoid hundreds of thousands of monsters skulking through the darkness. And while it was true that they were magnitudes weaker than him, anything he did to kill any of them would be sensed by Eik and put a target on the swordsman's back.

It was a matter of time. It would take a long time, but at some point, Eik would have the entire world covered in Profound Toxic mist.

And although the world was huge at a size only slightly smaller than Earth, there was another factor that would soon push Chop into his lethal embrace.

A few kilometers outside of the current range of Eik's ever-expanding field of death, Chop the Blade sat crouched behind a boulder halfway up the side of a mountain that would have pierced through the clouds if they hadn't been dispersed by the miasma.

Kept hidden by a combination of expert aura manipulation, the single ability he had that had a secondary effect that helped him conceal his presence, and an item that added onto that effect, he was trying desperately to pick up even the tiniest hint about Eik's whereabouts.

He cursed under his breath. So long as the mist existed, Eik would be impossible to locate, but any action to clear it would only reveal him long before it revealed Eik. And it just kept spreading.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

With a finger, he poked at the wound in his side where Eik's second bullet hand struck him. It wasn't healing. He was X-rank. It was supposed to have healed.

The problem was obvious. Profound Toxin. It had invaded his system. If it hadn't already been obvious, the sickly color of the skin around the wound left no doubt. And it would only get worse. Eik should have been able to track him through the infection but the stacked concealment buffs combined with the miasma all around must have provided sufficient interference of the connection.

If Eik was currently in a gaseous form, his only idea wouldn't work, but if he was himself somewhere in there, Chop might just have a chance to gain the upper hand.

One more time he moved to a different position before settling into a low position, primed for explosive acceleration. His sword was held loosely in one hand, the blade behind a shoulder and down against his spine.

There he waited, a breathing technique priming his mind.

Eik's mist approached. Chop could feel it. While Eik's own position was utterly obscured, the potent mist was so overwhelmingly clear to his senses that it was easily discernible even through the miasma.

When it was one kilometer away from his position, jolts ran along his nervous system as his muscles twitched into readiness.

Five hundred meters away and he did his final exhalation before the moment to go.

A hundred meters—the final inhalation. All systems ready.

Fifty meters and his fingers tightened around the tattered handle of the sword, the tensing of his muscles vibrating the air like the frequencies produced by a subwoofer.

Ten meters. Acceleration. Every movement was simultaneous, timed to perfection, and performed without a single flaw. With the engagement of every fiber of his body from fingertip to the tips of his toes, he brought the blade around in a sharp arch while he bent at the hips.

The resulting slash split the world by a perfect, horizontal line.

Reality shrieked as if cut and the regional cover of azure mist was blasted away, leaving the area completely clear once more. Vegetation, rock, and anything else were severed at the molecular level.

The few spawn that had been outside Eik's mist but inside the range of Chop's blade fell apart in silence, not even realizing that their lives had already come to an end.

And then, finally, there, only a few hundred meters from Chop's position, stood Eik staring. His face was a mask of shock. The Pristine Blade Saint readied his weapon for another strike as he watched the Supreme Divinity of Toxin.

Slowly and unbelievingly, Eik's gaze moved from Chop's figure and down to his stomach. Blood was pouring out like a fountain, staining his pants and shoes as it formed a pool by his feet.