Path to Transcendence

Chapter 714: How Adorable...

He took down three more Obsidian Horrors within the next ten minutes. He didn’t know if they could communicate with each other, but for some reason, they were running away the moment they saw him.

He scoffed at their audacity.

Not that it mattered. He chased each one down and, without mercy, ripped them to shreds, leaving nothing but their destroyed corpse rotting in the ground.

However, while he was hunting down another Obsidian Horror, he came across his first participant in this trial. The biggest clue was that they were human, and there were no other humans inside this city, or at least from what he’d gathered from his investigation beforehand. Secondly, there was a very subtle glow around their bodies, almost as if the trial were tagging them as participants so others would know.

He ignored the person for the time being; the Obsidian Horror was going on a frenzy and tearing apart any innocent civilians it could reach. Julius dropped from the sky, directly on top of the creature.

He slammed his heel down and used [Void Strike] on the creature’s shoulder. The viscous strike, combined with the enormous amount of kinetic energy, ripped off the entire shoulder from the creatureʼs body. The body it had been chewing on fell to the ground alongside it. Then Julius punched it in the chest, sending it through a building and out to the other side of the street.

He climbed through the hole and spotted that the Obsidian Horror was already trying to escape him. It was clawing backward as he advanced. Julius wasn’t about to, and with brutal savagery, he dropped his aura and kinetic energy from all sides.

It screeched in pain, but he put a stop to that. He stepped on its face, smothering its cries with his boot. He let his ruinous aura do its work. It had a powerful aura of its own, but it was no match for his powerful and well-trained aura. He crushed all of its resistance and watched coldly as his aura slowly killed it from the outside in.

It was only once its aura looked like a wrung-out, moldy dishrag that he finally relented. He had crushed it so badly that it barely felt like the same foul creature. It came off as a weak puppy, pleading for its life.

Julius didn’t so much as blink, though. He simply stared at the suffering creature impassively, and with a twist of his kinetic energy, he ripped the creature into several pieces. Once he was satisfied that it was dead, he finally looked over at the snooping human girl who was staring at him with wide eyes.

He recognized the girl, too. She was the same one who had been with that loud boy from the Thundering Heavens Sect. Analia was her name, if he recalled correctly.

She seemed a bit scared of him for some reason. He could feel a slight trembling in her aura as she stared at him.

He also took this time to examine her and noticed that she looked quite haggard. Her sect robes were all messed up, and she had several wounds all over her body. It was clear that whatever she and her team had been doing, it had been a rough road.

Speaking of her team, where were they? He didn’t sense them in any of the nearby buildings. Was she scouting or something? He shrugged; it didn’t really matter to him. There was still more time, and he wanted to kill a few more Obsidian Horrors while he could.

However, just as he turned away and started to walk in the opposite direction, she called out to him.

“How did you do that?” she asked him with a hesitant tone.

He stared at her for a few seconds before ultimately deciding to ignore her and continued to walk away, throwing out his senses as far as possible. Heʼd cleared out this area and wasnʼt able to sense any of the monsters around.

The girl chased after him, though. ”Hey, donʼt just ignore me like that!”

He thought he sensed something, and so he closed his eyes, narrowing his focus. But then it was gone, and he was left with nothing.

“How did you take it down so easily? We’ve only been able to take down one of them, and we’ve been waiting for this one to get tired.”

“You were waiting for it to get tired?” he finally halted and turned around. Why would they do something like that? That seemed like a silly idea. They should just pummel it like he was doing.

“Yes, that was the only way we were able to take care of the other one. Please, is there a trick to beating them? Something that we haven’t figured out yet?” she asked with pleading eyes.

He scratched his head awkwardly. “You do realize that we’re technically considered competitors, maybe even enemies?”

“Competitors, sure. But I don’t see a reason why we would be enemies,” she argued.

He thought about her words and shrugged. She did have a point; he didn’t see a reason why they would be enemies. Though that didn’t mean he wanted to help them either. The trial had said that they would be competing to see who’d defeat the most Obsidian Horrors.

Then again, he didn’t think they would be able to catch up with him anyway. He was already quite a far way ahead of them, and he wasn’t planning on slowing down either.

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“If you have a skill that can penetrate thick armor, try to utilize that. You might have to play around with it to work against these things, but aura also helps. They seem very resilient to physical and mana-based attacks, but aura or a mixture of all three seems to work well,” he said, and before she could respond to him, he was already dashing away, sensing another creature not too far away from their location.

However, to his surprise and to his slight annoyance, the girl was following right behind him. Though he had to admit, he was quite impressed by her speed. He was moving pretty quickly, and she didn’t seem to have any issues following him. If anything, it looked like she could go faster, and this was when she looked as haggard as she did.

Then again, people who used lightning magic were always fast. Just look at Derek, the guy was extremely quick, and he didn’t even specialize in speed as others did.

He didn’t sense any malice from her, though, and so he left her be. He didn’t know if there would be any consequences for attacking her, and he didn’t really want to find out. The faint glow around her body seemed to hint at something more. He did try to fly away, but that didn’t work either, because she could fly too. Not to mention, her movement speed was just as quick, if not more so, in the air.

Her body was glowing with lightning mana, and she resembled a lightning bolt more than anything else. However impressive it was, he still didn’t like it. He didn’t like being followed, regardless of whether or not she had bad intentions.

“Why are you following me?” he turned around and finally asked her after a minute of this.

“Because I want to learn how you managed to kill one of these things so easily. You made it look effortless,” she said calmly and without shame.

“And what if I attack you?”

She looked at him with a nervous smile. “I don’t think you will?” she said, sounding more like it was a question than an answer.

He rolled his eyes, and when he felt the approach of the other creature he’d sensed, he came up with a small plan to get away from her.

He didn’t think she was able to sense them as accurately as he was. And he was able to prove his theory when he changed directions slightly, and she didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. So he continued to lead her away and placed a mark on the top of a building.

Once he went a fair amount of distance away from the mark, he activated [Void Step], and instead of teleporting away, he simply stayed inside the void. He also activated his mark during this time, releasing a large pulse of spatial energy from it. He waited for a few moments and finally reappeared from the void. Thankfully, his plan worked, and she must have believed the mark was him teleporting elsewhere.

Unfortunately for her, that wasn’t the case, and now that she was away from him, he shrouded his aura and masked any hint of his presence. In hindsight, he should have done so before, but then she would have known he could do something like that.

He wasn’t trying to run away from her because she seemed like a bad person. On the contrary, she seemed like a nice person; her aura radiated kindness and simple curiosity, but he wanted to go a little wild, and her being around would only keep him from doing that. He was also worried that her teammates would come and cherry-pick his kill. While he didn’t get that feeling from her, the loud boy from earlier certainly seemed like the sort to do that.

Once he was completely shrouded, he quickly flew back to the Obsidian Horror he had sensed earlier. The moment he got close to the creature, he felt that same revolving feeling emanating from its aura. The hatred that had been simmering in his soul resurfaced. He divebombed this creature and came crashing down from the sky.

It reacted fairly well and must have sensed him at the last moment. But there was only so much it could do. He moved so quickly that by the time the foul creature reacted, the damage was already done. The first strike obliterated half of its torso. The second strike was so full of his aura that it crushed any of its resistance before delivering one last strike, removing its head, and exploding it like a watermelon.

However, he couldn’t relax. In fact, he turned around to stare at the shadows and barked out a laugh. Out of the shadows emerged three of these creatures. And these ones were different. They didn’t have the same madness quality to them. They seemed a lot calmer and more focused. Though that was only in comparison to the other ones. They were still feral and disgusting beasts.

“You really think that numbers will be enough?” he asked with a chuckle, staring at the creatures who had orchestrated this little ambush.

Honestly, he found it adorable that such sickening monsters were able to create such a plan. He didn’t know how they did it, but they managed to hide away from his perception skill, albeit for a few moments.

These horrors rushed him simultaneously and just as he was reacting to this little surprise, the air shifted and suddenly he felt the world coming down on him. As if gravity had quintupled and the mana was trying to kill him.

He had no warning, and it was just like the pressure from the first floor. Only this time, it was even more oppressive, and he was receiving all its attention rather than being shared among hundreds of people.

Then he was blasted by tightly packed psychic energy attacks. It wasn’t like any of the other mental attacks from the creatures he’d killed. This was different, and his instincts screamed at him about the danger it presented.

His mind was decently protected, but the pure force behind the attack caught him off guard. It shattered the initial barrier as if it weren’t there at all. His secondary defensive measure reacted automatically, and even that was barely able to delay it.

But they did their job. It gave him just enough time to react accordingly. He was able to halt it in its place. The concussive mental bomb wasn’t able to blow up inside his delicate skull, but that didn’t mean the other parts of him were as safe.

With so much concentration on the mental attack and the oppressive domain-like containment field, he was unable to evade the swarming Obsidian Horrors as well as he could have.

He got a little unlucky and found himself backed against a huge stone wall. He got nicked by one of their claws, and each attempt at weaving together was interrupted by another mental attack or a strong increase in gravity.

He didn’t want to admit it, but he was impressed. Nothing from his previous encounters with the monsters indicated they could behave in such a way. That they could fight with this much cohesion.

So when he felt one of the thin, sharpened limbs spear him through the gut, instead of being upset, he looked up and laughed in the creature’s face while he ripped the limb out of his body and kicked it away.

His healing skill was already healing the damage, and before it was even fully removed from his stomach, he was as good as new.

He stared at these monsters with a more calculated glare. He supposed he would need to take this a little more seriously and cracked his knuckles in anticipation.