Chapter 52: Shrouded in smoke

The thick, unnatural grey plume erupted from the red haired girl’s shoulders, blinding the sightlines of the stone vault in a single microsecond. Thomas didn’t waste a single breath posturing. Utilizing the fifteen percent data influx from his uploaded combat archive, he seamlessly transitioned into Raymond’s fluid agility form. He launched a rapid, low angle sweep to break her positioning, his boot cutting through the empty air currents with a sharp whistle.

But the moment his foot made direct contact with her shins, her lower limbs completely dissolved into a harmless, swirling cloud of dense white smoke.

SHH.

Thomas’s foot passed straight through the gaseous mist without registering a single ounce of kinetic feedback. Before he could even force his center of gravity to realign, the white cloud drifted effortlessly past his guard, instantly reforming into a heavy, solid boot right beside his flank. The red haired girl delivered a brutal, lightning fast roundhouse kick that caught Thomas square in his unhealed ribs, the sheer force of the impact launching him five meters backward across the wet grit of the floorboards.

Thomas skidded on his heels, his teeth grinding together as a sharp wave of heat radiated from his chest. He reset his stance, but the girl didn’t offer a single second of respite. She used a violent rocket blast of heavy smoke from her elbows to rapidly alter her physical velocity mid air, shooting forward like an arrow. What followed was a spectacular, one sided onslaught where she thoroughly bested him, combining her gaseous talent with top notch hand to hand combat skills that left his newly integrated forms completely out-manoeuvred.

Every time Thomas used Gerald’s heavy palm strike to counter, her upper body would shift back into an intangible drift, rendering his blunt trauma entirely useless. A fraction of a second later, she would solidify her fist, unleashing a precise, continuous combination of palm strikes and dagger slashes that systematically tore through his silver trimmed jacket. Her martial training from the preawakened academy was immaculate, her fluid hand to hand discipline allowing her to comfortably control the rhythm of the duel.

Realizing his current muscle memory loops were insufficient to bypass her density shifts, Thomas steeled his resolve. He forced his right eye wide open beneath his eyelids, activating his premier tracking skill.

Eye of Khepri, initialize decoding sequence,

Thomas commanded mentally.Through his crimson tinted vision, the microscopic particulate structure of her smoke began to slowly illuminate. The system interface flared to life against the dark of his mind, the scanning lines moving like absolute molasses as it began the grueling process of breaking down her mana loops. Upon closer inspection, Thomas noted that her talent wasn’t an offensive combat type at all. It was an advanced utility talent, using density manipulation and propulsion vectors to systematically manufacture a physical advantage. Yet, her raw execution was so exceptionally high that she didn’t even require a destructive core to keep him pinned against the wet stones.

Across the dark, smoke shrouded reservoir floor, the heavy air pressure violently spiked as Julian stepped deep into the fog to face the mastermind.

"Are you prepared to die, your lordship?!" Darian Calagher’s voice yelled out from the deep darkness of the rear tunnels, his sky blue eyes completely wild with an unadulterated, venomous fury as his own utility mana began to thrum aggressively.

Thomas couldn’t see the two noble titans through the suffocating white plume, but Julian’s elegant voice cleanly sliced through the noise of the battlefield, carrying an icy, terrifying authority that gave the entire vault actual chills.

"How dare you even allow your feeble little mind to even dream of killing me," Julian said, his cold words dripping with supreme, absolute contempt.

"Rei."

Hearing that specific name resonate through the quiet space, there was a sudden, distinct pause in the center of the grey smog. The air currents near the upper iron ceiling grates violently fractured like brittle glass, a familiar, sharp crack echoing in the reservoir as a beautiful, sharp voice cut through the dark.

"I’m right here, Julie," the voice carried that exact same sharp, rhythmic melody that Thomas had filed away in his mind back in the market alleyway. "Let’s f**k him up."

A dark, dangerous smile temporarily broke through Thomas’s mask as he heard the violet haired year two senior join the fray, the chessboard of the upper spires completely collapsing Darian’s calculations.

BOOM!

But before Thomas could even track the sudden spatial distortion, a solid, smoke propelled fist caught him square in the chest, the sheer kinetic velocity slamming his spine directly against a massive iron drainage pipe. The red haired girl with the freckles stood over him, her deep red eyes flashing with an absolute, playful cruelty as she rotated her silver dagger.

"Focus on your own battle, Vermin," the girl said, her beautiful voice dropping into a malicious whisper as she closed the distance. "You might die out here tonight without even seeing how it happened."

The red haired girl did not pause to let him breathe. Before Thomas could even shift his weight away from the massive iron drainage pipe, she violently thrust her left hand forward. The thick plume of white smoke billowing from her sleeves did not scatter, it instantly condensed into a dense, solid loop that wrapped around his torso like an absolute vice. The heavy compression pinned his arms flush against his ribs, the sheer tightening force threatening to fracture his newly adapted bone density as the solid smoke locked him directly against the iron wall.

"You’re done," the girl whispered, her deep red eyes flashing as she brought her silver dagger down in a lethal, vertical arc aimed straight for his shoulder.

But Thomas did not close his eyes. Pinned against the cold pipe, he forced his right eye wide open beneath his eyelids, driving his premier tracking skill to its absolute processing limits. The crimson tinted vision of the Eye of Khepri violently flared to life. Back during his match with Victor, the system had used this exact same eye to decode the transparent spools and tracing patterns of the hidden grid. Now, the crimson lens methodically traced the microscopic, glowing mana circuits flowing directly inside the white cloud.

He didn’t just see the smoke, he saw the exact coordinates where the gaseous particles were about to solidify into a physical strike a microsecond before they even took form.Guided perfectly by the tracking data, Thomas violently wrenched his neck sideways. The silver blade whistled past his ear, cutting a clean line through the grey smog and chipping a chunk of solid rust off the drainage pipe. The girl scowled, instantly dissolving her arm back into an intangible drift to pull back, but Thomas used the split second gap to adjust his low pivot, working relentlessly to duck, slip, and evade her continuous follow up cuts by the absolute split of a hair.

"Why are you doing this?" Thomas asked, his flat voice carrying a firm, unrefined grit that cut through the continuous clanking of the iron machinery. He ducked beneath a horizontal slash, his tattered jacket grazing the blade.

The red haired girl with the freckles let out a sharp, mocking laugh as her boots propelled her sideways. "Why not? You’re a lesser who forgot his place. Erasing you from our board doesn’t require a thesis."

Thomas pivoted on his heels, utilizing Raymond’s fluid agility form to slip past a sudden, smoke propelled palm strike. "If you manage to kill me out here tonight, what then? Will you finally have peace? Will your houses finally feel secure?"

"Shut up!" she hissed, her martial form tightening as she unleashed a rapid hand to hand combination.

"Why is it that you hate your fellow humans so much?" Thomas continued, his dark eyes wide open and unblinking as he tracked her movements through the crimson haze. "Why go as far as labelling us lesser? What the hell is so lesser about us? Don’t we bleed blood just like you do? Don’t we have feelings? What is it that truly determines a person’s worth in this world? A piece of quartz in the center of an arena?!"

The raw, unfiltered questions violently struck a nerve, her aristocratic pride thoroughly stung by the commoner’s defiance. The freckles across her sharp nose tightened in absolute, unyielding rage, her face twisting into a furious scowl.

"I told you to shut your pathetic mouth and die!" the senior girl screamed, her beautiful voice cracking with pure fury.

She abandoned her economic utility movements entirely, unleashing a relentless, frantic barrage of dagger slashes and solid smoke thrusts that tore through the remaining air currents. Thomas was pushed to his absolute limits, his body buckling under the intense physical shock as he was forced into a desperate, continuous defensive retreat, evading the lethal edges but barely surviving as the white fog grew thicker around his face, starving his lungs of oxygen.

He couldn’t break her utility density shifts alone while pinned inside the vault, but Thomas didn’t need to. He had people he could count on.

He looked past her shoulder toward the upper platform where the wind currents were still swirling wildly, his dark focus locking onto his firend’s position.

"Ryan!" Thomas shouted, his voice level and steady despite the blood trickling from his jaw. "Clear the smoke!"

Across the dark reservoir floor, Ryan’s eyes violently flashed with an absolute, volatile green glare, his fully healed wind core drawing an immense amount of ambient mana from the upper conduits.

"On it, Tom!" Ryan yelled back, his voice carrying a fierce, unyielding grit as he violently raised both hands toward the vaulted stone ceiling.

The entire subterranean grid violently convulsed as the air currents answered his call, the pressure inside the reservoir cavern multiplying by three hundred percent in a single millisecond. A massive, roaring vortex of green gale force winds began to rapidly gather above the classmates’ heads, forming a majestic, ancient silhouette that shook the very stone pillars of the vault.

"Wind God: Shu’s Scepter!" Ryan roared.