Chapter 83: Guardian Duel Stage (4)

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 8]

[The Silent Aegis: 0]

Leon took the lead. But the absolute terror of a Level 245 Guardian was not its speed; it was its flawless, instantaneous ability to recalibrate.

The Guardian’s internal logic registered that it had just received five physical impacts without perceiving the kinematic motion that caused them. It deduced the temporal anomaly in zero point zero one seconds.

The stone knight did not flinch from the sudden, inexplicable hits. It didn’t pause in confusion. It simply continued the horizontal sweep it had initiated before the time-stop, but it dynamically altered the angle of the blade by three degrees to account for Leon’s new physical positioning.

Leon brought the Blade of the Dragon God down to parry the incoming strike.

The two massive greatswords collided. Because it was a hit-count match, there was no deafening shockwave of kinetic force, no cratering of the black stone floor. The system perfectly absorbed the momentum, turning the catastrophic collision into a dull, hollow clack.

"Reaper’s Resonance!" Leon shouted, triggering his newly fused A-Rank talent.

The moment the blades connected, a low-frequency psychic shockwave violently emitted from the Blade of the Dragon God, passing directly through the Guardian’s weapon and washing over its stone body. The resonance was designed to inflict micro-fractures on a target’s mana core and apply a stacking fear debuff.

The Guardian’s eyes did not glow. It did not hesitate. The psychic attack hit the entity and dissipated completely. It was a construct bound by system logic; it possessed no organic soul to fear, and its mana core was heavily insulated by its Level 245 density.

The Guardian utilized the brief weapon lock to its absolute advantage. It didn’t try to overpower Leon’s 230 Strength. It simply let go of its greatsword with its left hand, using its right hand to maintain the lock, and delivered a rapid, blinding sequence of open-palm strikes directly against Leon’s Obsidian Carapace.

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

Six hits registered against Leon’s chest in the span of a single heartbeat.

Leon immediately broke the weapon lock, utilizing Storm-Strider to blast himself backward, sliding twenty yards across the polished floor to re-establish his zoning perimeter.

[Current Score]

[Leon Wes: 8]

[The Silent Aegis: 6]

Leon still held the lead, but the gap was closing instantly.

"You adapt too fast," Leon breathed, his chest heaving slightly as his SSS+ Aura of the Undying effortlessly flushed the fatigue toxins from his muscles. "A localized time-stop guarantees me five free hits every hour. But I can’t survive the remaining six minutes and fifty-nine seconds if you simply punish my recovery frames."

Leon needed to deny the Guardian the ability to close the distance without paying a massive toll in points.

He planted his greatsword point-down into the black stone. He raised both hands, his dual-colored eyes burning as he tapped into the infinite, bottomless well of his Eternal Mana.

"Arcane Requiem!" Leon roared, his voice echoing across the vast, empty expanse of the Battlefield Realm.

He didn’t cast the Gold-Rank spell at the Guardian. He cast it directly into the floor surrounding his own position. He swept his hands in a continuous, perfect circle, unleashing a massive, sustained torrent of poison, black decay, and erratic blue lightning.

He chained the casts together, utilizing the zero-cooldown capability of his overwhelming Intelligence stat and his SSS-rank processing speed. Within seconds, he had carved a thirty-foot-wide moat of absolute, roiling magical destruction entirely around his position.

The black decay ate away at the air itself, the blue lightning creating a dense, strobing web of electrical hit-boxes. Combined with his Aegis of the Tempest still swirling around his physical body, Leon had successfully created a layered, multi-stage fortress of area-denial magic.

"Come on, then," Leon challenged, gripping his Mythic greatsword once more. "If you want to score, you have to cross the moat. And every microsecond you spend inside the Requiem is going to register as a hit for me."

The Silent Aegis stood perfectly still on the opposite side of the magical moat. Its stone face was completely unreadable, but Leon’s Supreme Comprehension could practically feel the Guardian’s algorithm analyzing the density, timing, and hit-box parameters of the overlapping spells.

The Guardian did not attempt to run through the decay. It recognized that the sustained damage-over-time hit-boxes would mathematically skew the score in Leon’s favor.

Instead, the Level 245 entity did something that completely defied Leon’s tactical expectations.

The Guardian took a single step back, gripped its massive stone greatsword with both hands, and violently thrust the tip of the blade into the indestructible black stone of the arena floor. The blade didn’t pierce the floor; it caught perfectly against the frictionless surface.

Using the greatsword as a pole-vault, the Guardian channeled a massive surge of kinetic energy into its legs and vaulted itself directly into the air.

It soared in a massive, flawless arc, completely clearing the thirty-foot moat of Arcane Requiem.

"It bypassed the horizontal plane entirely," Leon realized, his eyes tracking the knight as it reached the apex of its vault directly above him.

The Guardian wasn’t just falling. It oriented its body to dive perfectly straight down, aiming directly for the narrow, vertical eye of Leon’s Aegis of the Tempest.

The hurricane of wind was violently rotating, but the direct center—the space immediately above Leon’s head—was the eye of the storm, a narrow cylinder of calm air. The Guardian threaded the needle with terrifying, millimeter-perfect precision, dropping straight down the center of the cyclone.

Leon raised the Blade of the Dragon God horizontally, bracing for the plunging strike.

The Guardian didn’t strike with its weapon. It had left its greatsword embedded in the floor outside the moat.

As the knight dropped perfectly into Leon’s guard, it used its heavy stone boots. It didn’t try to crush Leon; it executed a rapid, alternating sequence of stomping strikes against the flat of Leon’s greatsword, using the weapon as a springboard to bounce repeatedly within the eye of the storm.

Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!