The shadow man quickly got up.

Kael watched him rise from the rubble through the hole in the warehouse wall as dark energy writhed around his form like angry serpents, knitting together the superficial damage, patching the cracks in his shadow armor.

Kael raised both blades and poured mana into them. Lightning crackled with blue-white arcs dancing along the shadow-steel.

"Lightning Fang."

Seven bolts of condensed lightning erupted from his blades in rapid succession, screaming through the hole in the wall toward the shadow man like the finger-lights of an angry deity having a very bad day.

ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!

The shadow man moved.

He was good—Kael would give him that. The first three bolts missed by inches, the shadow man weaving between them with serpentine grace, darkness trailing behind him like a cloak. The fourth bolt grazed his shoulder—he grunted, dark energy flaring to absorb most of the damage. The fifth and sixth he deflected with sweeps of his black spear, each deflection sending sparks showering across the slum.

The seventh caught him in the side.

"GAHH—!"

The shadow man had twisted at the last second, turning a direct impact into a glancing blow. But it still sent him stumbling, as a burned ugly line across his ribs, still disrupted the darkness coiling around his body.

Kael didn’t give him the time to recover.

The shadow man pointed his spear forward as darkness surged with his legs pumping with rank 9 speed that ate the distance between them in a heartbeat. He crossed the rubble field, clearing the warehouse wall, and was inside with his spear tip aimed at Kael’s throat—before the last lightning echo had faded.

"Dark Aegis!"

The darkness around him didn’t form a dome this time. It shaped itself. Molded. Condensed into something with wings, with talons, with a beak that gleamed like obsidian.

A roc.

A massive bird of shadow and malice, three meters across, screaming silently as it lunged toward Kael on a wave of dark energy. The spear was hidden inside it—the roc was the attack, the spear was the killing blow.

Kael’s response was simpler.

"Dark Slash."

He swung his right blade. Shadow energy—the same element he’d been developing quietly, the one connected to that mysterious purple flame in his core—coated the edge and extended outward into an elongated slash of concentrated darkness that met the shadow roc head-on.

BOOM!

The collision sent shockwaves through the warehouse. Crates exploded. The floor cracked. Kael’s boots left furrows in the stone as he was pushed backward seven meters—before he managed to anchor himself with a gravity spike driven into the ground.

A reminder he was still Foundation Establishment Rank 5 while the man before him was Rank 9 with four full ranks above him. In a straight contest of power, he should have been paste.

But he wasn’t paste.

He was standing.

Because rank gaps weren’t absolute. They were probabilities. Grellik had been Rank 7, and Kael had killed him at Rank 4. The difference was technique, efficiency, and the willingness to do things that sane cultivators wouldn’t.

The shadow roc dissipated. The spear emerged from the fading darkness with the shadow man.

Kael pointed his left hand with his index finger and middle finger crossed together towards the sky.

The sky rumbled.

Not metaphorically—the actual sky above the warehouse, visible through the massive holes in the roof, began to darken. Clouds swirled. Lightning danced between them.

The shadow man looked up sensing danger.

His eyes widened.

"SILENCE."

A pillar of lightning tore through the sky and the warehouse roof like the wrath of something ancient and very, very angry. It hit the shadow man dead center with direct impact and blinding speed.

The shadow man’s barrier snapped up. A dome of darkness, denser than before, reinforced with everything he had left.

CRACK.

The barrier held.

CRACK. CRACK.

It was fracturing.

BOOM.

It shattered.

Lightning flooded through the gaps, engulfing the shadow man in a cage of blue-white fury. His scream was barely audible over the thunder—high-pitched, agonized, the sound of a man being cooked from the outside in.

Kael didn’t stop.

His hands were already moving. The gravity in the warehouse shifted—compressing, condensing, focusing into a single point between his crossed fingers as a purple-black energy spiraled inward, dense and heavy and like a piece of the void had been pulled into reality and given form.

The orb grew. Golf ball size. Tennis ball. Softball.

Kael lowered his fingers.

The orb hung in the air between him and the shadow man—spinning slowly, radiating gravitational distortion that made the air around it shimmer like a heat mirage. The shadow man’s lightning-battered body was still twitching, as he was trying to raise his spear with arms that didn’t want to respond.

His black eyes went wide seeing the orb in Kael’s hand wondering how this kid had so much mana to be spamming AOE attacks in succession.

"What—"

"PULSAR."

Kael flicked his wrist.

"EXPLODE."

The orb detonated.

The gravitational energy compressed to a single point and then released in every direction simultaneously. A sphere of pure destructive force expanded from the orb’s position, warping space, cracking reality, turning everything it touched into debris and dust.

The shadow man caught the full force.

"AAAAAAGHHHH—!"

His body rocketed backward—through the warehouse wall, through the alley beyond, through two more slum buildings that exploded into clouds of brick and plaster. He disappeared into the distance like a dark comet, trailing smoke and dark energy and what might have been screams.

The shockwave dissipated as dust finally settled and silence fell.

Kael stood in the cratered remains of the warehouse with hands at his sides, breathing slightly harder than normal.

Pulsar. Even the explosion variant burned through his mana like kindling. He was down to maybe twenty percent. Enough for a few more techniques, but not enough for another sustained exchange.

Good thing the shadow man had been launched into the next timezone.

Kael walked toward the hole in the wall, stepping over rubble and unconscious operatives. He emerged into the slum alley, scanning for the shadow man’s signature.

There.

And sitting on a pile of rubble between Kael and the crater, in a comfortable chair, with a bag of popcorn in his lap—

Cassian.

"Bravo, bravo!" He wiped fake tears from his eyes, dabbing delicately at his cheeks with an imaginary handkerchief. "What a beautiful show! The drama! The explosions! The complete and utter disregard for structural integrity!"

He crunched a kernel.

"I give it a solid eight out of ten. Would have been nine, but your form on the Pulsar was sloppy. You telegraphed the detonation by a full half-second."

Kael stared at him.

"Does the guy have a loose screw or something?" Kael murmured.

Cassian tilted his head. "Which guy? The shadow bastard you just yeeted through three buildings? Or me?"

"Yes."

Cassian crunched another kernel and smiled.

"Probably both."

/A.N: 😒 😒 😒, Seriously, this guy should be investigated. Watching and sitting in the middle of such a fight. The main character might actually be right about this guy having a loose screw in his head.

Well, not like anything can touch him since he can just create a zone around himself where everything is slowed down.