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Chapter 154: Reaching the Limit
🕑 Added 2023-04-02 16:36:00 +0000 UTCHis arms was leaden, his body coal. Weakness suffused him, but his Indomitable Body pressed on, guided forward like a precise blade. He was only fighting two robots now—one attacking, one buried under his onslaught of strikes.
He feinted an attack to the right. The defending robot didn’t fall for it, but the attacking one did, swinging where he pretended to go. He moved the other way, dodging the attack, and kept laying on the defender.
His fists erupted with the power of falling meteors, every hit shaking the entire cavern. The robot resisted, its metal feet digging trenches into the stone, but it was forced back, struggling to defend. Its grip faltered with every block, and Jack’s strikes kept coming, roaring forth with overwhelming intensity.
The other robot’s curved sword was imbued with rising panic. It swung widely, rushing to save its comrade and exploit Jack’s insistence on attacking—
—and Jack ghost-stepped behind it. The bending of space was exhausting, his temples drumming with blood, his own heartbeat thundering like the hooves of a horse, but he was in a good position. The robot had already committed to an attack, and its sword was too long, too slow to retreat.
It twisted blindly to the side, again dodging one of Jack’s strikes, but he simply threw another, his fist clashing against hard metal and denting it, venting power inside it, rummaging its interior, and cracking the robot sideways down the middle.
It disintegrated.
The final robot fell on him, exploiting his exhaustion to push on with a fierce offensive. Strikes rained faster than Jack could counterattack, the robot pushed into a frenzy by the loss of all its comrades. Jack struggled to fight back, his body and mind heavy, but his will pushed through.
For all the robot’s tactical understanding and brilliant maneuvering, its actual skill with the blade was lacking. Finally, one strike went wide. Jack spotted it in a haze of gray, stepped into the missed attack and slapped the blade near the handle, sending it completely off-position.
His slapping arm then formed a fist and backfisted the robot in the side, making it bend, while Jack followed his momentum to smash his other fist into the side of the robot’s head. A Meteor Punch erupted. The head flew back, the metal neck groaning under the strain, and Jack planted another fist straight into its chest, just to be sure.
The robot flew back, exploding mid-flight and bursting into blue light before it even reached the wall.
Jack put his hands on his knees, panting. His previous wounds had reopened. He was losing blood quickly, he was exhausted, his eyes were wavering, and his head was ringing.
But he had succeeded. Fierce joy flooded his heart, overshadowing the pain, filling him with the satisfaction of a hard-earned victory.
He would have cheered if he wasn’t trying to catch his breath, still afraid that more enemies would come, that an even harder battle would rear its head, that the trial would be cruel to the point of disgust.
A few moments passed, enough to make him think it was over.
Then, the voice said, “Adjusting difficulty due to barely passing the mental trial,” and light flashed again, revealing eight robots holding wicked curved swords.
Jack felt despair wash through him. He couldn’t handle this battle. It was beyond his skills.
At the same time, intense resolve accompanied the upcoming death. His world sharpened to a point. Time slowed down. All thoughts disappeared, leaving only the bitter desire to take as many enemies as he could with him. He didn’t even care that the robots were clearly not living beings. He just wanted to destroy them.
As the blue light receded, Jack flowed into the robots that had just spawned. They raised their swords, already ready to meet him. Brutalizing Aura swept out, fueled by Jack’s awareness of his own death. The robots froze for just a second.
In that time, Jack smashed one in the midsection, and another in the head. Both robots dispersed, leaving him with six. More than enough to destroy him.
He didn’t think about that. His only thought was to optimize his battle, to survive for as long as possible, to deal as much damage as he could. The robots fell on him, one formation of four and one of two. He whirled around them, placing one formation before the other so they couldn’t all attack him at the same time.
In his mind, damp exhaustion and intense resolve went hand in hand.
I have to disrupt the formations. He registered the thought like it was not his own. I have to save my power, use my skills sparingly.
His wounds were leaking blood, but he no longer felt the pain or numbness. He pressed on. The swords turned into blurs. He moved more on instinct than decision, surrendering himself to his Iron Fist Style and fighting experience. He ducked, sidestepped, bobbed, and weaved. He let the wicked blades sunder the air around him, carve and toil it like a fertile field, while he remained unhurt in the very center.
The Dao of the Fist roared inside him, lending him all its power. His two Dao Roots did the same.
There was no sudden power-up, no miraculous breakthrough at the last moment. He could only depend on himself. His strength was what it was. So were his skills. In this sealed-off cavern, nobody would arrive to save him. There was no way out.
At this moment of death, all Jack discovered was a profound sense of going all-out. There was nothing to conserve anymore, no thoughts to make. Regrets would come at his final moment. Now, all he could do, all he wanted to do, was devote his entire being to battle, punch with every iota of his soul.
He dodged the blades, punched back. His brain was filled with calculations. He could see the swings before they came, move around them, punch in the gaps. His entire brain was laid bare, revealing depths that the conscious mind could never touch, and it was all devoted to battle. He even thought that his heart would forget to beat. Perhaps it did.
Metal crumpled under his knuckles. The distant sound of an explosion reached his ears, and its glaring heat seared his eyes. He slapped a strike away, the movement almost impossibly precise, and let another flow before his eyes as he stepped in to punch a robot with all his strength. The impact was distant, dull as it traveled up his arm and down his torso. The robot still exploded.
But there were more. There were always more.
He danced with the blades, no longer clear on his position, riding the swings as a leaf would ride the wind. He felt pain. His blood was lessening, he knew. He felt burn, cold, and the air touching places in his body that it shouldn’t be able to. He wasn’t clear what had happened, but he knew his injuries were deadly.
So what?
In one fluid motion, he ducked under a blade, leaned past another, and drove his fist into a robot’s jaw. He ghost-stepped behind himself, blindly—and luckily—dodging two attacks, then buried his knuckles in a metal armpit, tearing an arm free.
He turned around, swinging his other fist in a wide arc, only to realize there was no fist there. No hand. No arm.
Huh.
He followed the momentum, spinning low and then high, jumping and somersaulting to crash his one remaining fist into a robot, smashing its head into the ground. Something caressed his chest like a light, stinging veil. He saw more blood fly out. His vision was bleary, unfocused.
The attacks came slower now, but he was already dead. Even as he landed, he pressed on, ignoring the rapidly growing weakness in his limbs, the soreness of breath in his punctured lungs.
He fought and fought, dodged and attacked. The battle was a stream of indecipherable colors, his moves only on instinct. If not for his Indomitable Body, he would already be lying on the ground, unable to move. He could no longer use any skills, nor did his mind work enough to remember he had them.
Only the Dao remained, a burning, roaring lump in his chest, a core of power that fueled him to keep going, like a clenched fist, like a punch shot out, like the force of life carving through the world.
Everything became one, until he realized he had stopped punching. He could no longer move his body. He was alive in dead flesh, only his will persisting, a guttering flame whose candle had expired.
He used the last of his tenacity to look around, to admire the devastation he had wreaked, his parting tribute to the world. He saw blue motes of light, robotic parts twitching on the ground, disintegrating swords glinting in the light, a human arm lying in a puddle of red blood.
He saw no standing robots.
At some point, he had won. Too bad he died in the process.
Pressure reached his ears. A faraway voice, like someone was speaking to him. He couldn’t remember who it was. It didn’t matter.
At least, he’d fought well.
Comments
Valerios
Hah. Fun fact, I actually thought this was yesterday's chapter, which is part of the reason why I missed April's Fools :P
IndyBart
Great chapter, too bad it didn’t come out yesterday with an ending that said Jack died and that you were burned out from writing so you’re moving to something else… followed by an April’s Fools Day message. :)
Jumping Flounder
this was fantastic. i wonder what his reward will be
