Chapter 88: Guardian Duel Stage (9)

"Round one taught me that I cannot out-speed your base attributes," Leon spoke aloud, his voice carrying easily across the silent, frictionless expanse. "Round two taught me that relying on static area-denial simply gives your kinematic algorithm a reliable environmental hazard to exploit. Round three taught me that if I try to predict your logic, you will simply rewrite the rules of the engagement."

Leon held the Blade of the Dragon God in his right hand. The ethereal golden flames roared to life, casting dancing shadows against the polished black stone.

"You are a perfect algorithm," Leon stated, his dual-colored eyes, one icy blue, the other burning gold, locking onto the featureless stone helm of the Guardian. "You calculate every vector. You optimize every trade. You predict the future based on the most mathematically efficient paths."

Leon lowered his greatsword, letting the tip drag against the floor, the faint screech of metal on stone the only sound in the silent arena, a small, almost lazy gesture that belied the calculation racing beneath it.

"But an algorithm can only adapt to patterns," Leon whispered, a slow, dangerous grin spreading across his face. "A perfect logic engine expects its opponent to fight to win. It expects self-preservation. It expects martial arts. So, for round four, I am throwing away the manual."

Leon didn’t just suppress his standard combat training; he actively turned it off. He engaged his SSS-Rank Infinite Growth to dynamically rewire his own neural pathways on the fly, forcing his brain to bypass logical sequence planning. He partially suppressed his SSS-Rank Supreme Comprehension. He didn’t want to calculate the optimal route. If he didn’t know what he was about to do next, there was absolutely no way the Level 245 Guardian could predict it.

He was going to become a glitch in the system. Absolute, unmitigated chaos.

The golden numbers above them ticked down.

[BEGIN]

Leon didn’t dash forward. He didn’t cast a defensive tempest or a blinding domain.

He gripped the Blade of the Dragon God with both hands, channeled his absurd 230 Strength, and violently threw the Mythic greatsword directly into the air, aiming completely backward, entirely away from the Guardian.

The Level 245 algorithm immediately registered the action. For a fraction of a microsecond, the Silent Aegis paused, its stone frame rigid with the barest flicker of algorithmic hesitation. Throwing a primary weapon away from the target at the start of a duel held zero tactical value. It was a mathematical anomaly.

In that microsecond of algorithmic hesitation, Leon acted.

He didn’t run toward the Guardian, refusing to give the logic engine a single conventional vector to latch onto. He triggered Arcane Requiem (Mythril), but he deliberately inverted the mana flow. He didn’t project the beam of decay and lightning outward. He compressed it into his own hands and detonated the spell point-blank against his own chest.

Because of the arena’s absolute safety protocol, the lethal magical damage was entirely nullified, resulting in zero HP loss. But the kinetic shockwave of the point-blank detonation remained. The explosion violently launched Leon backward, hurtling him through the air at supersonic speeds directly toward his own falling greatsword, the wind tearing at his sleeves as the arena blurred past him.

He grabbed the hilt of the falling blade mid-air, utilizing the erratic, tumbling momentum of his self-inflicted explosion to trigger Abyssal Stride (Divine).

He didn’t target the Guardian’s front, back, or flanks. He targeted the exact spatial coordinates perfectly between the knight’s heavy stone boots.

Leon materialized upside down, inches from the black stone floor, spinning wildly from the residual momentum of the explosion. He didn’t swing the sword; he let the chaotic, spinning momentum drag the flat of the blazing golden blade across the Guardian’s inner shins in a completely erratic, uncoordinated flail.

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 3]

[The Silent Aegis: 0]

The Guardian immediately attempted a retaliatory downward plunge with its massive stone greatsword, aiming to pin Leon to the floor. The algorithmic prediction mapped Leon’s momentum, anticipating a standard evasive roll to the left or right.

Leon didn’t roll. He didn’t use Phantom Shift.

He cast Aegis of the Void (Divine), but he didn’t angle the shield to block the incoming strike. He summoned the Diamond-Rank spatial rift directly beneath his own back.

The Guardian’s blade struck the black stone floor exactly where Leon would have been if he had dodged logically, the impact cracking the polished obsidian into a spiderweb of fractures. Instead, Leon had intentionally fallen backward into his own defensive rift, letting the localized gravity of the shadow plane violently suck him downward, entirely out of the physical hit-box of the arena for a fraction of a second, before the skill violently spat him back out fifty feet into the air.

He was airborne, disoriented, and entirely off-balance, his stomach lurching as the arena spun sickeningly beneath him. It was a terrible tactical position.

Which meant it was perfect.

"Grave-Crusher!" Leon roared, channeling the A-Rank kinetic mass multiplier into his left boot instead of a weapon.

He didn’t aim at the Guardian. He aimed at empty air and kicked violently. The exponential multiplication of his mass against the ambient atmospheric pressure created a localized sonic boom that forcefully propelled him laterally across the sky, completely breaking the standard laws of parabolic descent, the shockwave rattling loose fragments of stone from the distant arena walls.

The Silent Aegis leaped to intercept, calculating the new, erratic trajectory. The knight swung its greatsword in a wide, horizontal arc to swat Leon out of the sky, the sheer weight of the blade carving a visible pressure wave through the air ahead of it.

Leon saw the blade coming, a wall of grey stone eclipsing the arena’s pale light. He didn’t try to block it. He triggered Dimensional Severance (Divine), but he didn’t apply the spatial tear to his weapon. He channeled the raw spatial energy directly into his empty left hand and threw a punch at the incoming stone greatsword, his knuckles crackling with a faint, tearing distortion of space itself.