Chapter 197 | Attack!

Chapter 197: 197 | Attack!

The middle aged man’s body expanded outward in every direction simultaneously.

His shoulders broadened until they were wider than the doorway behind him. His chest deepened until it was deeper than Dexter’s entire torso. His arms thickened, the muscles swelling to proportions that no human skeleton should have been able to support, each one larger than Dexter’s waist.

Four meters.

The old man had been slightly under two meters tall. Now he was four. His head nearly touched the cracked ceiling of the ruined office.

His face had changed too. The aristocratic features, the neat white beard, all of it was gone

His jaw had extended, his brow had thickened and his teeth, visible behind lips that no longer closed properly, had become pronounced.

He looked down at Dexter.

Licked his lips.

His dark eyes burned with a violent, predatory hunger.

He chuckled.

"Do you think you’re the only one hiding your strength?"

Dexter’s violet eyes narrowed.

The transformed man’s power had exploded upward. Stage Two Ultra Realm had been his baseline. The transformation had pushed him past Stage Three. Past Stage Three’s peak. All the way to Stage Four Ultra Realm.

Stage Four Ultra Realm meant an additional two hundred attribute points across every stat compared to a Stage Two. Strength. Agility. Physique. Mana. All of them had surged far beyond anything Dexter’s Tenth Stage Superhuman cultivation could match through raw numbers alone.

Dexter’s gaze turned serious.

But he didn’t care.

He activated Flame Burst Step.

The air ignited.m as he vanished. A crater appeared in the floor where he had been standing, the marble vaporized by the force of his launch.

He materialized directly beside the transformed man.

He punched out once more.

Amplified by Scorching Fury, powered by every ounce of physical strength his Ancient Flame Demon Bloodline and Extreme Slaughtering Demon Body could produce.

The man reacted as he also punched out with his massive trunk-sized fist that moved with a speed that should have been impossible for something that large.

"BOOM!"

Their fists collided.

The shockwave was unlike anything the building had experienced so far. It didn’t just shatter windows or crack walls. It tore through the office like a bomb detonating.

The floor between them disintegrated. The ceiling above them collapsed inward, raining concrete and rebar. The entire corner of the twenty-fourth floor opened to the sky.

The transformed man turned his head slowly toward the point of impact to Dexter.

His massive lips curled.

"As expected," he rumbled. "You’re quite weak now, aren’t you?"

Dexter said nothing but his arm trembled slightly.

But Dexter didn’t retreat.

He flipped his right hand.

The Void Star Saber materialized in his grip. The blade was dark.

The transformed man’s eyes tracked the weapon.

Then he vanished.

Dexter’s Enhanced Hearing screamed.

’Above!’

He swung upward. A desperate, full-power vertical slash that channeled every passive effect the Void Star Saber possessed.

DING!

The collision was sharp. Piercing. The sound of two relic-grade weapons meeting at maximum speed. A point of light appeared at the contact point, so bright it burned afterimages into the retina.

The transformed man had appeared directly above Dexter. Descending. His massive body casting a shadow that blocked the sunlight streaming through the destroyed ceiling. His sword, the same silver blade he had been carrying before the transformation but now enlarged to match his four-meter frame, was aimed straight down. A killing strike. Intended to split Dexter from crown to groin.

The Void Star Saber caught it.

The force of the impact drove Dexter downward. His feet punched through the marble floor. Then through the concrete beneath. He sank to his ankles, his knees absorbing the impact, his entire body compressing under the weight of a four-meter Ultra-Rank combatant bearing down from above.

The ground beneath him exploded. Cracked. Shattered. A crater formed, spreading outward, the floor giving way under the combined pressure of two fighters who had long since exceeded the structural capacity of the building.

Dexter didn’t care.

He countered.

His blade twisted, deflecting the massive sword to the side. He stepped forward, out of the crater, and slashed. A horizontal cut aimed at the transformed man’s midsection.

DING!

The man’s sword came down, blocking.

Dexter reversed the blade and slashed again.

DING!

It was once again blocked m.

Another slash!

DING!

Dexter pressed forward. His blade became a blur. Slash after slash after slash, each one flowing into the next without pause, without hesitation, without the briefest fraction of a second’s recovery between strikes.

The Void Star Saber’s Star Velocity passive increased his attack speed by thirty percent.

The Void Edge doubled his attack power. Armor Break ignored twenty percent of the man’s physical defense.

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!

The collisions came so fast they merged into a continuous scream of metal against metal.

Sparks flew in every direction as white-hot fragments of displaced mana ignited the air, creating brief, violent flares of light that strobed across the ruined office like lightning.

The transformed man matched his every strik, deflecting each of Dexter’s strikes with accuracy.

The office was being destroyed around them.

The room was being dismantled. The walls were gone. The ceiling was gone. The floor was a landscape of craters and cracks. What had once been a corner office on the twenty-fourth floor of a luxury building was now an open-air platform, exposed to the sky and the wind and the distant sounds of the city below.

Marcus had been crawling toward the corner when the first shockwave hit.

He was no longer crawling on the ground but was flattened, pressed down against the floor by the combined atmospheric pressure of two fighters exchanging blows at a rate that turned the air itself into a weapon.

Marcus pressed his face against the floor, covered his head with his hands, and prayed to every deity he had ever heard of.

He was not a fighter and was just a businessman. He had never even been in a real fight in his life.