The Innkeeper

The moment Lex set his first step onto the second floor a couple of things happened. First, some esoteric knowledge about how using appropriate forms while punching produced different results appeared in his head. Second, his intuition started blaring about incoming danger. 𝑜𝒱𝐿xt.𝒞𝚘𝑀

But by now Lex had become fairly used to emergencies. His reaction was quick yet smooth, and lacked the jerkiness that came with dodging an unexpected attack.

He leaned forward just enough to dodge a paper thin blade that had aimed to slice through the back of his neck. The fact that Lex felt the need to dodge meant that the blade was sharp enough to cut through his defenses.

Calmly he moved his hand forward and transitioned from leaning forward into a single-armed handstand, allowing him to look back. A strange looking creature had attacked him, and was preparing to attack again after its ambush failed. It was bipedal but with four arms, two coming out from its shoulders but two coming out from its back.

The arms attached to its shoulders were longer and had eight fingers, each with a long and sharp nail that ended at an impossibly small point. The arms coming out of the back, while shorter, had four fingers and a thumb, and each held a weapon. One held the sword with which Lex had been attacked while the other looked like some kind of gun.

The creature also had a long and thick tail dragging behind, in the shape of a lizard’s tail. While the tail did not look too flexible, the sheer size of it told of the immense strength it probably had.

Not that it mattered. Lex had been wanting to try something for a while now, and this was the perfect opportunity. Using his left eye, he used Evisceration. His left eye was special, he already knew that. Evisceration was an incredibly strong soul based attack, he also knew that. What he didn’t know is if the result would be greater than expected if he combined the two.

The result… uhh, he didn’t know how to gauge the result. Despite his promotion, the difficulty of using Evicersation had not reduced. In fact, the reason he avoided using it frequently was because he feared hurting himself in the process. Even now, despite his growth, he wasn’t completely confident in his perfect implementation of it.

Yet he did not know if he was just better than he assumed, or it was the result of using his left eye, but he did not get hurt. Other than that, nothing much seemed to change. The strange creature directly died as a result of his attack and fell forward. Perhaps he would need to find a creature capable of surviving his attack to determine if there was a difference.

That might be more difficult than it seemed, for soul attacks were always extremely lethal.

Lex allowed his body to fall backwards, but quickly yet elegantly moved his feet, making it seem as if he had completed a cartwheel. It just so happened, his move had allowed him to dodge a projectile.

Though he didn’t want to admit it, the quick and easy defeat of his own clone had given him certain insight into his own weakness. Though the projectile was weaker than the blade and would not have broken through Lex’s defense, there was no real reason to allow contact. Who said he should blindly rely on his defense just because it was strong? Instead, the protective measures he took needed to encapsulate multiple different strategies.

His sharp intuition and perfect control of his body allowed him to dodge most attacks, suddenly creating a new layer of difficulty his attackers needed to overcome.

This might seem like it was no different from what he did earlier, since he was always dodging attacks in his previous fights as well, but there was a fundamental difference. Earlier he dodged because all his opponents were usually stronger than him, and capable of harming him to some degree. But in the instances where he could get away with it, he took full advantage of his defense. It was the difference between strategically allowing an attack to land on his body, and allowing an attack to land because he was too lazy to dodge a weak attack.

He created a small challenge for himself in addition to anything the pagoda might throw at him. He decided to see how many floors he could overcome without allowing a single rip in his clothes. After all, unlike him, they had no substantial defense at all.

Lex walked forward, only glancing at his enemy long enough to kill him with a shot of evisceration.

The speed at which he walked seemed completely ordinary, yet each and every move he performed allowed him to dodge an enemy attack which had started increasing. He seemed completely at ease as countless blades fell in his path and endless bullets chased him. Of course, he did not walk in a straight line, as that would be too predictable.

Instead, it seemed like he was slowly warming up for a dance. There was a rhythm that his body adopted that seemed to resonate with some unseen force. He moved his head to dodge a close shave, yet if someone saw him from a distance, it would seem he was bobbing his head to a song.

All the while, the number of enemies around him kept increasing, as well as bodies. He started picking up speed, but the elegance of his moves did not diminish in the slightest and soon it was like he was on a stage giving a performance.

For some reason, an image flashed in his mind of a ballet performance he saw long ago during the Midnight Games. But the image disappeared just as quickly as it came, and Lex did not really think about why he suddenly recalled it. Instead, as he made his way through this trial, and his gaze that heralded death washed over his enemies, Lex realized something else.

Although the resonance was not reaching a point significant enough to produce a result yet, whatever unseen force his body was connecting to reminded him of the effect of array characters.