Chapter 82: Guardian Duel Stage (3)

The golden holographic interface above the center of the ring pulsed, resetting the massive digital timer with a sharp, echoing chime.

Leon stood at the southern edge of the arena, his posture fundamentally altered from the previous exchange. He had dismissed the lightweight, ethereal void-daggers.

In a contest of pure speed against a Level 245 entity, trying to out-strike an algorithm built on kinematic perfection was an exercise in futility. The Guardian, the Silent Aegis, processed movement frames faster than Leon’s physical synapses could fire. Trying to play the assassin against a god of war had resulted in a mathematical slaughter.

So, Leon decided to abandon the role of the assassin entirely.

He reached into his spatial inventory and drew the Blade of the Dragon God. The heavy, imposing weight of the Mythic greatsword settled into his grip, the ethereal golden flames roaring to life along the dark metal edge. If he couldn’t catch the Guardian by moving faster, he would force the Guardian to come to him. He would turn himself into an impenetrable fortress, an area-denial hazard that punished the entity for entering his space.

"Auris, maintain your distance," Leon commanded, his voice steady, projecting across the polished black stone of the arena. "I am changing the parameters of the engagement. If I cannot outrun the storm, I will become the mountain."

The Glacial Sovereign let out a low, rumbling growl of acknowledgment, recognizing the shift in his master’s aura.

Leon planted his boots firmly into the indestructible floor of the ring. He did not drop into a sprinter’s crouch. He squared his shoulders, holding the massive greatsword in a two-handed, defensive guard directly in front of his chest.

He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, tapping into the newly fused talents residing within his core.

"Aegis of the Tempest," Leon whispered.

Instantly, a localized, highly pressurized storm-front erupted around his physical form. It wasn’t a simple gust of wind; it was a violent, swirling hurricane of razor-sharp gale forces that aggressively pulled the surrounding air into a tightly coiled vortex. The wind screamed, kicking up the residual ash from outside the ring and pulling it into the cyclone, creating a visible, violently rotating sphere of defense around the Vanguard.

The golden numbers above them shifted with absolute finality.

[BEGIN]

Leon didn’t take a single step forward. He anchored himself to the black stone, his SSS-Rank Origin Eyes burning with golden light as he stared through the violently swirling winds of his own tempest.

The Silent Aegis did not hesitate. The pale stone knight vanished from the center of the ring, leaving behind a localized vacuum that popped audibly as the air rushed in to fill the empty space.

Leon’s Supreme Comprehension talent, pushed to its absolute cognitive limits, mapped the incoming kinetic vector. The Guardian wasn’t approaching from the front; it was executing a flawless, high-speed flanking maneuver, banking sharply to Leon’s right side to avoid the immediate visual line of sight.

"Gorgon’s Decree!" Leon shouted, triggering the B-Rank petrification talent without breaking his stance.

He didn’t aim the pale gray light of deathless petrification at a specific target. He dumped a massive surge of mana from his Eternal Mana reserves into the skill, projecting it outward in a full, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radial shockwave. The gray light expanded instantly, designed to calcify and slow anything caught within its blast radius.

The Guardian was already inside the effective range.

But the Level 245 entity did not freeze. It didn’t even slow down. The Silent Aegis perceived the expanding wave of petrification magic and instantly calculated the microscopic gaps in the magical frequency.

With a terrifying display of spatial awareness, the stone knight contorted its body mid-sprint, physically weaving its limbs between the pulses of the expanding gray light. It bypassed the area-of-effect crowd control by simply existing in the fractions of an inch where the magic was weakest.

"Incredible," Leon noted, his tactical mind recording the data in real-time. "You process the structural density of magic as if it were a physical object."

The Guardian breached the outer edge of the Aegis of the Tempest.

This was the trap Leon had laid. The tempest was a violently rotating hit-box. Any physical entity attempting to pass through the hurricane would be battered by hundreds of micro-lacerations from the pressurized wind, which the system would register as hits for Leon.

The Guardian stepped into the storm.

The razor-sharp wind immediately lashed against the pale stone armor, scoring a rapid succession of microscopic impacts.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 3]

Leon scored three hits instantly just from his passive defense. But the Guardian’s algorithm instantly adapted to the new environmental hazard.

The knight didn’t try to push through the wind with raw strength. It relaxed its posture, perfectly aligning the aerodynamic contours of its heavy stone armor with the rotational flow of the cyclone. It stopped fighting the storm and allowed the wind currents to violently accelerate its own movement, surfing the inner wall of the tempest directly into Leon’s guard.

The Guardian materialized directly in front of Leon, utilizing the speed of Leon’s own defensive spell to execute a devastating, horizontal sweep with its stone greatsword.

Leon was ready. He didn’t try to dodge.

"Chronos Shift," Leon commanded, channeling mana into the pitch-black metal of the Mythic ring on his right index finger.

The Band of the Chronos Lord flared with brilliant, iridescent starlight.

The world instantly lost all color, washed in a heavy, absolute monochrome gray. The violent, screaming winds of the Aegis of the Tempest froze perfectly still in the air. The falling ash suspended itself like a photograph.

And the Silent Aegis, the Level 245 god of speed, froze mid-swing, its massive stone blade halted mere inches from Leon’s ribcage.

Zero point five seconds.

To a normal human, half a second was the time it took to blink. But with 235 Agility and the SSS-Rank Perfect Body ensuring his muscle fibers could handle extreme, instantaneous acceleration without tearing, Leon lived an eternity in those five hundred milliseconds.

He didn’t waste time marveling at the frozen world. He shifted his weight, pivoting on his back foot, and swung the Blade of the Dragon God in a rapid, controlled sequence of tight, lateral strikes. He aimed exclusively for the broad surface area of the knight’s chest plate to ensure the weapon’s hit-box registered perfectly.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

He tapped the flat of his blazing golden greatsword against the frozen stone armor five consecutive times, pushing his physical speed to its absolute, agonizing maximum. As he pulled the blade back for a sixth strike, the iridescent starlight on his ring fractured.

The monochrome gray shattered. Color and sound violently slammed back into reality.

The world resumed.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 8]

[The Silent Aegis: 0]