Chapter 89: Guardian Duel Stage (10)

Leon saw the blade coming. 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.

The true-damage spatial rift violently clashed with the indestructible stone weapon. Because it was a hit-count match, the weapons didn’t shatter. The conflicting physics created a violent, repulsive shockwave.

Leon used the shockwave to aggressively bounce himself directly into the Guardian’s chestplate.

He didn’t swing his sword. He simply collided with the Level 245 entity, wrapping his arms around the knight’s neck in a completely undisciplined, desperate grapple, abandoning all pretense of armed martial arts.

He unleashed a flurry of chaotic, rapid-fire headbutts against the featureless stone helm.

Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 8]

[The Silent Aegis: 0]

The Guardian’s logic engine was actively stalling. It was a combat algorithm designed to perfectly counter optimal martial techniques, weapon arts, and calculated magical bombardments. It was not programmed to process an opponent who intentionally blew himself up to generate movement, threw punches at broadswords, and initiated zero-gravity headbutting grapples.

Leon’s absolute, unmitigated chaos was creating micro-stutters in the Level 245 entity’s processing frames.

The knight reached up, its stone hands moving with a blur of speed, and violently peeled Leon off its chest, tossing him toward the floor.

Leon didn’t try to land gracefully. He let himself hit the polished black stone, bouncing once before triggering Phantom Shift (A). He dropped his physical mass to zero, sinking halfway through the indestructible floor of the arena, entirely breaking the system’s Z-axis rendering for a split second.

The Guardian landed, instantly executing a rapid flurry of downward stabs, attempting to hit the intangible Vanguard.

Leon canceled the Phantom Shift early, solidifying his body halfway out of the floor. He swept his right leg, completely ignoring the massive stone blade plunging toward his face, and aggressively kicked the Guardian’s ankle.

Clack!

Ding!

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 9]

[The Silent Aegis: 4]

Four of the Guardian’s downward stabs had connected with Leon’s chest before he completed the sweep. Leon ignored the phantom impacts. He was trading hits, but the ratio was entirely in his favor because the Guardian’s perfect accuracy was being ruined by Leon’s nonsensical hit-box manipulation.

For the next three minutes, the two-hundred-yard silver ring became a theater of absolute madness.

Leon fought like a feral beast equipped with the powers of a god. He utilized his SSS-Rank Eternal Mana to animation-cancel his own highest-tier spells. He would begin channeling Sovereign’s Eclipse, causing the Guardian to instantly initiate a counter-domain protocol, only for Leon to abruptly cancel the cast, instantly transitioning into a chaotic, tumbling sprint.

He used Aegis of the Tempest (A) in reverse, creating the localized hurricane around himself but actively altering the wind currents to pull the Guardian toward him instead of pushing it away. The Level 245 algorithm, expecting to be repelled, would compensate by leaning forward, only to be violently sucked into Leon’s guard.

Leon would exploit the momentary imbalance to score three or four rapid, sloppy hits with the pommel of his sword, his elbows, or his knees, before utilizing Abyssal Stride to randomly teleport three feet to the left, purely to break the visual lock.

His SSS+ Aura of the Undying was burning brightly, conceptually tethering him to the world and preventing the sheer physical whiplash of his own erratic movements from tearing his muscles off his skeleton. His Origin Eyes were wide open, tracking the pulsing mana core of the Silent Aegis.

He could literally see the Guardian’s logic engine struggling. The entity’s movements, usually a seamless, flowing river of perfect kinematic efficiency, became subtly disjointed. It was hesitating for milliseconds at a time, its predictive models constantly failing because Leon’s actions possessed zero logical precedent.

"You can’t predict a dice roll!" Leon laughed, the thrill of the chaos completely overriding his cognitive exhaustion.

He threw his void-daggers into the air, cast Dimensional Severance to create a spatial rift in front of the Guardian, and then used Storm-Strider to blast the falling daggers through the portal, turning them into unpredictable, ricocheting projectiles that scored grazing hits against the knight’s back.

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 114]

[The Silent Aegis: 98]

Leon was winning. He was actually out-scoring a Level 245 Dimensional Guardian by actively fighting like an amateur brawler with an infinite mana pool.

But as the timer crossed the halfway mark, the fundamental reality of the system reasserted itself.

A perfect algorithm does not suffer from frustration. It does not feel humiliated by being headbutted or tripped. When a logic engine encounters a variable it cannot predict, it eventually stops trying to predict it.

The Silent Aegis stopped reacting to Leon’s feints. It stopped trying to calculate the optimal parry for an attack that might be canceled. It completely abandoned the concept of predictive defense.

If it could not predict where Leon was going to be, it would simply occupy all available space simultaneously.

The Guardian dropped its massive stone greatsword. The weapon hit the black stone floor with a heavy thud.

The entity lowered its stance, raising its empty stone hands. The pale gray armor began to vibrate, a low, humming frequency that violently distorted the air around it.

"It’s abandoning the algorithm," Leon noted, his chaotic sprint coming to a halt as his Origin Eyes registered the massive, terrifying spike in the Guardian’s ambient kinetic output. "It’s transitioning to pure, unmitigated brute force."

The Silent Aegis moved.

It didn’t dash toward Leon. It simply exploded into motion, utilizing its astronomical base Agility to execute a rapid-fire sequence of unarmed strikes against the empty air. It moved so fast that it generated a literal dome of kinetic force—a tornado of afterimages and stone fists that expanded outward in a thirty-foot radius.

It was a moving blender of hit-boxes. There was no pattern to predict, no logic to exploit. It was just a wall of pure speed.

The kinetic dome closed the distance to Leon in a fraction of a second.

Leon tried to trigger Phantom Shift, but the sheer density of the overlapping strikes meant that the millisecond his intangibility ended, he was instantly struck by a dozen afterimages.

Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

The golden scoreboard began to spin like a slot machine. The Guardian’s score skyrocketed, jumping by twenties and thirties in the span of seconds.

Leon gritted his teeth, refusing to back down. He summoned the Blade of the Dragon God, wrapped himself in the Aegis of the Tempest, and charged directly into the kinetic dome, screaming in pure defiance.

"Reaper’s Resonance!" Leon roared, swinging the massive Mythic greatsword in wide, chaotic arcs, desperately trying to trade hits inside the tornado of fists.