My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 490 Demolished Matt

Chapter 490  Demolished Matt

Liam moved again, and this time Matt was ready—or at least, he thought he was ready.

His enhanced perception caught the initial movement, his brain processing the blur of motion approaching from his right side. His body responded with the exosuit amplifying his reflexes, his arms coming up in a guard position, his stance shifting to brace for the impact he knew was coming.

The problem was that being ready and being fast enough were two entirely different things.

Liam’s fist drove into Matt’s guard with surgical precision, hitting exactly where his forearms crossed in what should have been a solid defensive position.

The force transferred through Matt’s arms, through the exosuit’s reinforced frame, and into his torso.

Matt’s guard held structurally, but the kinetic energy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was his entire body being launched backward once again.

He flew through the air, his flight systems desperately trying to engage, to arrest his momentum, to give him some measure of control. But the impact had scrambled his neural inputs, his panicked attempts to stabilize translating into erratic thruster firing that made his trajectory even more chaotic.

This time he hit the ice at an angle, skipping across the frozen surface like a stone across water, each impact creating small craters before his momentum finally bled away and he tumbled to a stop perhaps seventy meters from where he’d started.

“Thirty seconds,” Liam’s voice was still perfectly calm. “Four minutes and thirty seconds remaining. Your guard was good, but you’re thinking two-dimensionally. In three-dimensional combat, blocking doesn’t work the same way. I can hit you from any angle, and your static guard position only protects a fraction of the vectors I can attack from.”

Matt groaned and pushed himself up, his exosuit’s diagnostics showing increased stress on the arm sections where he’d attempted to block. The suit was holding, but the cumulative damage was beginning to register.

He activated his flight systems, rising into the air this time rather than staying grounded. If Liam was right about three-dimensional combat, whuch of course he is , then staying on the ground just made him an easier target.

“Better,” Liam observed, watching Matt hover perhaps twenty meters up. “Using vertical space. Now let’s see if you can maintain it.”

Matt didn’t wait for Liam to come to him. He dove forward, using the exosuit’s full propulsion to close the distance, his fist extending in a punch that carried all his enhanced strength and momentum behind it.

It was a good attack. Fast, direct, properly executed with the kind of technique that would have been devastating against a normal opponent.

Liam sidestepped with minimal movement, his body shifting just enough that Matt’s punch passed through empty air centimeters from his face. Before Matt could even register the miss, Liam’s palm pressed against his back. It was a gentle, almost casual contact that shouldn’t have meant anything.

But the timing was perfect, hitting exactly when Matt’s momentum was fully committed forward and his body position made course correction impossible. That gentle push became a catastrophic disruption to his flight path, sending him tumbling through the air completely out of control.

Matt’s flight systems screamed warnings as he tried to recover, his body spinning, the horizon rotating around him in dizzying circles. He managed to arrest the spin after what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few seconds, pulling himself back into stable hover, his breathing harsh inside his helmet.

“One minute fifteen seconds,” Liam said. “Three minutes forty-five remaining. You’re attacking now, which is good. But you’re still thinking in terms of landing hits rather than creating opportunities. Against someone faster than you, direct attacks won’t work. You need to feint, to make me commit to a defensive response, then exploit the opening that creates.”

Matt’s brain processed this feedback while his body tried to remember what stable flight felt like. Feints. Create openings. Make Liam commit first.

He could do that. Probably.

Matt launched himself forward again, but this time he curved his approach, spiraling in from the side in the same corkscrew pattern he’d used during the formation training. Halfway through the approach, he suddenly changed direction, his flight path shifting ninety degrees as though he’d hit an invisible wall, redirecting toward where Liam was beginning to move.

The feint was good. The execution was solid. For perhaps half a second, Matt thought it might actually work.

Then Liam simply wasn’t there.

He’d moved backward so fast that Matt’s enhanced perception barely caught it, creating distance that made Matt’s redirected attack pass through empty space. Before Matt could adjust again, Liam closed the distance he’d just created, appearing directly in Matt’s path with a speed that made their earlier supersonic flight seem pedestrian.

His fist drove into Matt’s stomach with precise, controlled force.

The impact drove all the air from Matt’s lungs despite the exosuit’s support systems. He folded around the punch involuntarily, his body’s autonomic response overriding any conscious control, and then he was falling, his flight systems offline or simply unable to respond to the contradictory neural signals his scrambled brain was sending.

He hit the ice hard, the impact creating another crater, ice fragments spraying outward in a perfect radial pattern. Matt lay there, his exosuit’s systems running emergency diagnostics, his own lungs trying to remember how to pull in air.

“Two minutes,” Liam’s voice drifted down to him. “Three minutes remaining. Your feint was good. You’re learning. But you’re still operating within the same speed framework I am, which means I can track your movements and counter them. To create a genuine opening, you’d need to do something I can’t predict or respond to, which is difficult when I’m faster, stronger, and more experienced.”

Matt managed to pull in a breath, then another. The exosuit’s medical systems confirmed he wasn’t actually injured—the suit had absorbed the impact, his organs were intact, his spine hadn’t shattered. But his body felt like it had been put through a industrial press.

He forced himself up one more time, his movements slower now, fatigue setting in despite the exosuit handling all physical demands. The exhaustion was mental, the strain of trying to process combat at speeds his brain wasn’t designed for while being systematically dismantled by someone operating on a completely different level.

Matt activated his flight systems and rose into the air again, but this time he didn’t attack immediately. Instead, he created distance, rising higher and pulling back, putting perhaps fifty meters between himself and Liam.

“Running away won’t help the time pass faster,” Liam observed, though there was no mockery in his tone. “But tactical repositioning is smart. Catching your breath, reassessing the situation. That shows you’re thinking rather than just reacting to my instructions.”

Matt’s brain was working furiously despite the fog of repeated impacts. He couldn’t hit Liam directly—that was clear. The speed gap was too vast. He couldn’t create openings with feints because Liam could track and counter them faster than Matt could exploit them. Direct attacks failed. Defensive positioning failed. Three-dimensional movement helped but wasn’t sufficient.

What he needed was something genuinely unpredictable. Something Liam couldn’t track because it wasn’t a direct attack. Something that created an opening not through speed or technique but through environmental manipulation.

His eyes tracked across the Antarctic landscape, taking in the endless expanse of ice, the pale sky, the absolute emptiness of their surroundings. No cover. No obstacles. No environmental features to exploit except—

The ice itself.