SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!

Evan had spent a good while trying to come up with a reliable way to kill an Advanced-stage B-rank Forsaken, and had come up completely empty.

In the end, he decided to bring his clones to the peak of D-Rank first and worry about the rest afterward.

Now that he had done exactly that, and seen their advancement mission requirements, he had finally found a way to deal with the final requirement of his own.

’Well, if their advancement missions are that easy, might as well level them up first and then go after one of those,’ he reasoned, turning it over for a moment before nodding to himself.

It was a good call. In two days he had made enormous progress, there was no reason to stop now.

He had every intention of getting out of this place eventually, but now that he had seen just how much ESS these creatures dropped, he wasn’t in any rush. The ESS would accumulate, and once he broke through to the next rank, he would be able to make a tremendous leap forward all at once.

With that in mind, he didn’t waste a second. The hunt resumed immediately, both clones already summoned and in good shape.

He put out slightly more mana than usual, and the Forsaken began appearing one by one.

Thanks to all the strange energy he had absorbed recently, Evan could now get a rough read on their strength at a glance. Most were D-rank, with a good number of C-ranks in the mix, and two at B-rank, early-stage.

"Gentlemen," he said, "don’t hold back. Kill at will."

He launched forward, his two clones right behind him, their domains activating as they threw themselves into the fight.

Seraphine, who had spent the last two days watching Evan level his clones at a borderline absurd pace, couldn’t help but slowly shake her head at the sight.

"How cruel..." she said, with the voice of someone who had been gravely wronged. "Now that you’ve found a new toy to play with, you’ve tossed me aside like I’m nothing."

Evan, who was mid-combat at a decent distance, caught that and almost lost his footing, very nearly going straight into the jaws of a waiting Forsaken. He recovered quickly.

’This shameless woman is seriously going to get me killed one of these days.’ he thought, redirecting his frustration onto the nearest Forsaken, which was just beginning to realize that it was the prey and not the hunter.

Beyond serving as what could generously be called his moral support, Seraphine had done little besides filling his days with endless frustration.

From the moment he went to sleep until the moment he woke up, the beautiful goddess always had another teasing remark waiting for him.

Her words...

Her expressions...

Even her actions...

None of them could be described as proper.

For the first time since his reincarnation, Evan found himself dealing with a kind of frustration he had never imagined he’d experience.

Not in a world as cruel as this one, where people like him barely had the luxury of wasting time on such things.

He had endured it until now.

But she wasn’t making it easy.

He was even beginning to wonder whether the goddess had genuinely fallen for him...

Or whether she simply enjoyed tormenting an innocent man of good principles like himself.

’Focus, Evan. Women are nothing but a distraction. Nowadays, men have to know how to protect themselves from demonesses like her.’

With his mind firmly anchored to that thought, he continued massacring Forsaken until he finally turned to face the two B-rank ones.

’Alright... let’s get this over with.’

His clones had already torn through dozens of D-rank and several C-rank Forsaken in this battle, at this rate, they’d complete their advancement missions in an hour or two at most.

Evan helped them mop up the Advanced-Atage C-ranks, then left the rest to them and turned his full attention to the two stronger opponents in front of him.

’Let’s see how you hold up against this,’ he thought, his grip on the sword tightening slightly.

The space around him began to vibrate.

He had decided to use the Law of Space.

Watching from a distance, Seraphine’s expression shifted into something faintly closer to concern.

Evan had already reached an initial level of control over the Law of Space, still far from what he’d need to get them out of here, but enough to apply in combat, at least in a limited sense.

The problem was that even if it wasn’t her first time seeing him use it, she still felt he was far too inexperienced with it.

Laws such as Space weren’t powers one could casually experiment with.

One tiny mistake could cost him his life.

She had warned him not to use it unless absolutely necessary.

Apparently...

He had decided to ignore that advice.

Evan’s understanding of the Law was still extremely shallow, leaving him with only a handful of crude ways to apply it,

Still, for what he intended to do...

It should be enough.

He wanted to see what the Law of Space was truly capable of.

He settled into his attack stance, sword already angled to cut. The two early-stage B-rank Forsaken sensed something wrong in the space around them and hesitated, uncertain whether to press the attack, but that wasn’t their decision to make.

Evan stepped forward and closed ten meters of distance in an instant, arriving right in front of them. The two Forsaken saw him coming and were already moving to intercept, but he didn’t pull back. He answered with his blade, sweeping it horizontally in a single arc aimed at catching both of them in one stroke.

The moment the blade met one of the Forsaken’s claws...

The surrounding space violently trembled.

For the briefest instant everything fell silent.

Then, Reality distorted.

The space extending from the blade abruptly twisted inward before expanding again in an unstable ripple.

It lasted less than a heartbeat.

Then...

Everything returned to normal.

The only difference from before was that the upper halves of the two Forsaken were gone. Not severed cleanly. Not cut. Space itself had displaced them, tearing them away from their bodies entirely, leaving behind only their lower halves, which ended in grotesque masses of shredded flesh, as though reality itself had ripped them apart.

Evan stared at the scene with an expression somewhere between disbelief and unease.

He hadn’t been sure what to expect from using a trace of the Law of Space in combat. Maybe an explosion. Maybe the two creatures getting violently knocked back.

Anything but what he was looking at right now.

One slash, and two Early Stage B-Rank Forsaken were dead.

Under normal circumstances he would have been pleased, maybe even excited. Instead, he was sweating.

Because he had understood one thing immediately. The attack hadn’t been powerful because he had made it powerful. It had been powerful because the space around him had gone out of control.

Out of his control.

And the Forsaken had simply been the ones to bear the consequences.

He hadn’t used the law. He had provoked it. Much like what happened when mana was used near that strange snow.

The only difference was that he had managed to direct the resulting spatial phenomenon at the two Forsaken rather than at himself.

’Sht... I almost killed myself just now.’