Chapter 191: Look Closer

"Funny how I am going to do the exact opposite... I will show you what a bad morning looks like, Rose."

"I am eager to see," Rose replied with a light scoff.

The moment the words left her mouth, she vanished into thin air.

The air in the hallway cracked with displaced pressure as Rose’s figure blurred out of existence.

Once again, her obsidian claws were bared and gleaming, ready to slice through Sophia’s flesh without hesitation. Instead of a direct head-on clash, Rose circled at terrifying speed, exploiting Sophia’s blind spot to strike savagely from behind.

But this time, Sophia wasn’t caught off guard.

Her mystical blue eyes snapped toward the shift in wind before Rose even attacked.

With an instinct honed from life-or-death scrapes, Sophia spun her torso. The thick, twisting branches and dense ironwood bark overlapping her arms moved in perfect unison, crossing together to form a solid barricade just in time to catch the vicious slash.

CLANG!

A sound like two iron anvils crashing together echoed down the corridor, rattling the surviving glass fixtures along the ceiling. The reinforced branches easily managed to withstand the razor-sharp edge of the demonic claws, but the pure kinetic force behind the attack was still a monstrous force to be reckoned with.

The sheer shockwave traveled right through Sophia’s skeletal frame. To dissipate the violent momentum, her sneakers skidded across the blood-stained carpet, forcing her back a couple of heavy steps.

And that slight loss of footing was all the opening Rose needed.

A cruel, wicked smirk touched Rose’s lips. Capitalizing on the stagger, the demoness darted inside the guard in a heartbeat.

She dropped low to the floorboards, lunging upward to swing her right set of claws in a vicious, tearing uppercut aimed straight for Sophia’s jaw.

’Fuck, she’s inhumanly strong,’ Sophia gritted her teeth in frustration.

There was no time to counter or sidestep. Sophia was forced into a desperate defensive maneuver once again, snapping both forearms downward to smother the rising strike before it could take her chin off.

CRACK!

The impact splintered wood in every direction. Each vicious slice of Rose’s claws took a physical toll, chipping away multiple thick branches and tearing chunks out of Sophia’s protective botanical armor.

Every time a gouge was carved into the bark, Sophia had to channel a steady stream of her own internal mana to regenerate the shattered exterior and mend the wood.

Individually, each mend wasn’t a massive drain. But feeling the relentless, hydraulic rhythm of Rose’s claws hammering against her guard made Sophia confront a brutal, cold reality.

If this clash degraded into an extended war of attrition, Rose was going to win. Hands down.

The demoness fought with zero signs of fatigue. She could keep darting in, keep attacking relentlessly, and keep chipping away at Sophia’s layers until the green-haired girl completely burned through her finite mana pool and couldn’t manifest a single twig of defense.

It wasn’t going to happen immediately, nor within the next few exchanges... but the outcome in an endurance match was mathematically certain.

’I can’t let her draw this fight out,’ Sophia realized instantly, her jaw setting firmly as she absorbed the impact of the uppercut.

Just like the previous strike, the heavy shock of the blow rattled through her forearms and transferred directly into her core.

This time, however, Sophia refused to yield ground. She dug her heels into the floor, using the recoil to fuel a sudden counter.

Instead of stepping back to dissipate the force, she pivoted on her left foot and lashed out with her right leg, executing a ferocious roundhouse kick aimed squarely at Rose’s ribs!

As the leg cut through the air, mana flared along her denim pants, rapidly wrapping the limb in a protective botanical shell.

Yet the wood encasing her leg was visibly different from the rugged brown bark on her arms. It possessed an eerie, luminous sheen of deep blue and bruised purple.

Stranger still, the bark didn’t form a smooth shield; it bristled with needle-sharp spikes and jagged, serrated ridges that protruded outward like barbed wire, specifically engineered to shred flesh and inject venom upon impact.

Rose’s sharp eyes tracked the shimmering purple spikes slicing toward her flank.

She instantly registered that taking a clean hit from that specialized limb could prove genuinely harmful, even to a demon’s resilient physiology.

Yet there wasn’t a single flicker of caution, hesitation, or fear across her soft, plump lips.

Instead, her grin stretched wider.

With the supernatural agility and weightless grace of a predatory feline, Rose bent her spine, kicking off the floorboards to effortlessly leap straight over the deadly purple sweep. The jagged thorns whistled through empty air mere inches beneath her bare midriff.

Rose touched down lightly several feet away, executing a single fluid roll across the dusty carpet before springing back to her feet in a balanced, ready stance. She was entirely unscathed by Sophia’s lethal counterattack.

To the onlookers standing frozen near the stairwell, it might have seemed like Rose’s aggressive flurry had failed to yield any tangible result. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sophia’s awakened abilities were completely foreign, specialized, and unique—something neither Fredrinn nor Rose knew about.

Charging headfirst into the unknown with reckless abandon was a blunder reserved only for amateur fools.

Rose was deliberately maintaining high-intensity pressure to force Sophia into unveiling her hidden hand.

She wanted the green-haired girl to bring out her trump cards, reveal her unique mechanics, and display her elemental affinities early on.

That way, when the final, decisive blow was struck... Rose wouldn’t be caught off guard by a nasty surprise.

"Tsk. Keeping your distance already, huh? I thought you actually wanted to fight me," Sophia grumbled, lowering her leg back to the floor with a dull thud.

Her chest heaved with a sharp breath. She couldn’t help but notice that Rose’s footwork and balance were far more fluid, agile, and swift than her own.

It was an inevitable trade-off; Sophia was currently encasing her limbs in dense, fortified layers of living wood.

How was she supposed to match the blistering movement speed and grace of a demoness who was carrying virtually zero dead weight?

Rose’s lips curved into a smooth, sultry smile, her posture relaxing just enough to appear completely unbothered.

"I am fighting, sweetheart..." Rose purred, her crimson irises beginning to swirl with a mesmerizing, deep pink radiance. "Look closer into my eyes, Sophia~"