Chapter 81: Guardian Duel Stage (2)

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 0]

[The Silent Aegis: 12]

Leon let out a slow, controlled breath. He wasn’t frustrated. He was entirely, utterly fascinated. This was what the absolute apex of martial perfection looked like. No wasted energy. No arrogant posturing. Just mathematical inevitability.

"Raw speed and area denial won’t work," Leon projected his voice across the arena. He knew the Guardian couldn’t speak, but he felt compelled to acknowledge the martial supremacy before him. "You read the cast animations of my magic before the spell even forms. So, let’s remove the visual cues."

Leon didn’t teleport. He sprinted forward, triggering Phantom Shift.

His physical mass and density dropped to zero. He became a translucent, ghostly silhouette rapidly closing the distance. The Guardian raised its stone greatsword, assuming a defensive guard.

Leon didn’t aim for the chest. He dropped low, sliding across the frictionless black stone, aiming a sweeping slash at the knight’s ankles.

The Guardian swung the greatsword downward in a perfect, crushing vertical parry.

The massive stone blade passed completely through Leon’s intangible shoulder. The Phantom Shift flawlessly negated the physical interaction.

Leon capitalized on the microsecond of intangibility. The moment the greatsword passed through him, he forcibly dropped the Phantom Shift, solidifying his mass directly inside the Guardian’s guard.

He thrust his left dagger upward, grazing the stone plating of the knight’s ribcage.

Ding!

[Leon Wes: 1]

A hit. He had successfully manipulated the system’s hit-box physics to score a single point.

But the victory lasted for exactly one-tenth of a second.

The Guardian didn’t recoil. It didn’t stagger. The moment it registered that Leon had dropped his intangibility, the entity abandoned its heavy greatsword entirely, letting the massive weapon fall to the floor.

The knight’s empty stone hands blurred.

Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack!

Leon felt a flurry of rapid-fire strikes hammer against his chest, shoulders, and ribs. The Guardian was utilizing an unarmed martial arts sequence that delivered kinetic strikes with the speed of a machine gun.

Leon tried to trigger Phantom Shift again, but the talent had a brief internal cooldown. He was locked in the physical plane, completely exposed to the barrage.

His SSS+ Aura of the Undying and his Perfect Body kept his biological structure from turning to paste under the G-forces of the rapid strikes, but he couldn’t escape the sheer volume of hits being registered against him.

He gritted his teeth, abandoning defense entirely. If he was going to take hits, he was going to trade them.

Leon unleashed a flurry of rapid dagger slashes, aiming wildly at the blur of stone fists. He triggered Reaper’s Resonance, hoping the psychic shockwaves emitted by his weapons would disrupt the Guardian’s rhythm.

The daggers sparked against the pale stone armor, scoring a few grazing hits. But the psychic shockwaves washed over the Guardian harmlessly. The entity had no mind to fear, no soul to disrupt. It was a purely mechanical construct bound by the system.

Leon finally managed to trigger Storm-Strider, blasting a concentrated burst of air directly into the Guardian’s chest to physically push himself backward, breaking the close-quarters lock.

He skidded to a halt thirty yards away, breathing heavily, his nervous system completely fried from the sensory overload of trying to process the exchange.

He glanced at the glowing golden scoreboard.

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 6]

[The Silent Aegis: 84]

The gap was astronomical. The Guardian had registered over seventy hits in a three-second exchange.

"You bait the intangibility," Leon breathed, his Origin Eyes analyzing the fallen stone greatsword. "You knew I was going to phase through the parry. You intentionally threw a heavy, committal strike just to force me to solidify inside your guard, and then you dropped the weapon to maximize your hand-to-hand hit rate."

The Silent Aegis slowly walked over to its fallen greatsword. It reached down and casually lifted the massive stone weapon with one hand, returning to its flawless, neutral stance.

It was a terrifying realization. The Guardian wasn’t just faster than him; it was tactically superior. It possessed a combat algorithm that instantly adapted to, and exploited, Leon’s highest-tier defensive mechanics.

"Fine," Leon said, his heterochromia burning as he gripped his void-daggers. "If I can’t outsmart your algorithm in close quarters, I’ll overwhelm your processing capacity."

Leon raised his left hand, pointing it directly at the Guardian.

He didn’t cast Arcane Requiem. A concentrated beam was too easy to dodge. He tapped into the elemental talents he had hoarded and refined.

"Hellfire Howl!"

Leon inhaled deeply and unleashed a massive, sweeping cone of superheated, toxic ash and corrupted fire. He didn’t aim directly at the knight; he aimed at the polished black floor in front of it, intentionally creating a massive, blinding smokescreen of thick, dark ash that rapidly filled the center of the arena.

The Guardian’s visual sensors were immediately obstructed.

Leon didn’t hesitate. He dove directly into his own smokescreen. Because the talent belonged to him, his Origin Eyes could perfectly pierce the visual obstruction, seeing the glowing mana signature of the knight standing within the ash.

Leon approached from the Guardian’s blind spot, moving entirely silently. He aimed a rapid succession of strikes at the back of the knight’s knee joints.

But as Leon’s dagger swung through the ash, the Guardian pivoted with terrifying precision.

It didn’t need to see him. It was tracking him through the micro-fluctuations in the air pressure caused by his movement within the smokescreen.

The flat of the greatsword slammed into Leon’s chest, a perfect, intercepting strike that registered a hit and sent him tumbling backward through the ash.

Before Leon could recover his footing, the Guardian was upon him. The Level 245 entity utilized the smokescreen to its own advantage, moving seamlessly through the blinding ash.

The final two minutes of the match became a systematic, one-sided deconstruction of the Vanguard’s martial arts.

Leon threw everything he had at the entity. He used Dimensional Severance not to hit the Guardian, but to cut localized rifts in the arena to restrict its movement. The Guardian simply vaulted over the rifts. He chained Phantom Shift with Abyssal Stride to create unpredictable, phasing teleportation strikes. The Guardian calculated the exit trajectories and tapped him the moment he materialized.

Every time Leon managed to score a single, grazing hit with his daggers, the Silent Aegis responded with a flurry of five perfectly placed, mathematically flawless counter-strikes.

Leon felt his stamina reserves dipping, not from physical exertion—his SSS+ Aura of the Undying prevented that—but from absolute cognitive exhaustion. His Supreme Comprehension was overheating, desperately trying to map and predict the movements of a being that existed on a fundamentally different plane of system logic.

"Just one clean combo," Leon gritted his teeth, refusing to stop moving.

He triggered Abyssal Stride for the fiftieth time, appearing directly above the knight. He aimed a dual-dagger plunging strike directly at the helm.

The Guardian simply raised its stone greatsword horizontally above its head, casually blocking both daggers. It then smoothly rotated its wrists, sweeping the heavy pommel of the sword across Leon’s ribs three times before gravity pulled him to the floor.

[MATCH CONCLUDED]

The massive, iridescent gold interface flashed brilliantly. A shockwave of pure, non-lethal system magic erupted from the center of the ring, gently but forcefully pushing both combatants apart, forcibly separating them by fifty yards.

Leon hit the polished black stone and stayed there for a moment, resting on one knee. He let the void-daggers dissipate from his hands. He was gasping for air, the cognitive strain making his vision blur momentarily before his Perfect Body flushed his nervous system and stabilized his optics.

He looked across the arena.

The Silent Aegis had already returned to the exact center of the silver ring. It rested its massive stone greatsword on the floor, assuming the exact same perfectly neutral, flawless guard stance it had held before the match began. It showed absolutely zero signs of exertion.

The golden holographic interface above the Guardian shifted, displaying the final hit comparison.

Ding!

[Guardian Duel Stage: Round 1 Completed]

[Hit Comparison]

[Leon Wes: 34 Hits]

[The Silent Aegis: 312 Hits]

[Result: Challenger Defeated. Guardian Claim Failed.]

Leon stared at the scoreboard. Three hundred and twelve to thirty-four. It wasn’t just a loss; it was a mathematical slaughter.

He slowly stood up, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. He felt no physical pain, no lingering injuries. The system had enforced the absolute safety protocol flawlessly.

Leon didn’t feel defeated. He felt invigorated. The Level 245 Guardian wasn’t an insurmountable wall; it was a puzzle. A highly complex, incredibly lethal puzzle.

"Raw speed and reaction time are useless against you," Leon said aloud, pacing slowly along the edge of the silver runes. "You process kinematic data faster than my physical body can execute the commands. If I fight you on your terms, I will lose a thousand times out of a thousand."

Leon summoned the Blade of the Dragon God back into his right hand, the heavy weight of the Mythic greatsword providing a comforting anchor to reality.

"I cannot out-speed your algorithm," Leon smiled, his dual-colored eyes locking onto the pale stone knight. "Which means, for the next round... I am going to have to break the algorithm entirely."