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Chapter 274: Iron Will, Mind of Steel
🕑 Added 2023-09-30 17:36:00 +0000 UTCI'll make up for the shortness of this chapter next week -- though hopefully its content makes up just as well.
Enjoy!
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Jack stood in the sky, bloody and very heavily injured, but his eyes spat fire. The two enemy cultivators approached, with the third following far behind. He needed to hold on until they were all together, then use the storage bead to—hopefully—destroy them.
“Oh? The cub is looking for a fight?” the canine asked, his lips curving to reveal two rows of sharp teeth. Foam dripped off them, falling into the forest below. He laughed. “Fine! Let’s see what you got!”
He and the sharken suddenly broke off to flank Jack. He instantly panicked. This was terrible. He needed them all clustered together.
“Wait!” he shouted, but they ignored him. The canine flew at him from the side. None of them unleashed any domain or suppressive skill; they didn’t need to.
With less than a second to think, Jack braced himself. All he could do was wait and hope for an opportunity.
The canine appeared at his side and slapped him. Jack did his best to defend. He held his remaining hand before his face, but he might as well have been sitting still. The deacon’s power was overwhelming. Jack was flung away with the sound of cracking bones, and that was only because the canine held back.
He wasn’t trying to kill Jack, but simply toying with him.
Before Jack could recover, the flat of a fin-blade struck the back of his head. His world went white for a moment. His rotation in mid-air was reversed, sending him flying back at the canine, who brought the heel of his foot down on Jack’s chest, nailing him into the ground hundreds of feet below.
Jack didn’t feel the rocks breaking under his back. He was on the verge of passing out, yet he persisted. The enemies were toying with him. As bitter as that made him feel, it was a good thing. The more he delayed, the higher his chances of finding an opportunity.
He planned to lay down there and make them approach him, but a foreign power surrounded his body and made it fly up against his will, emerging into the sky again. It was the sharken’s mastery over momentum.
“What’s wrong, kid?” the canine asked, his eyes flashing with satisfaction. “I thought you were hot shit.”
“I—”
Before Jack could reply, another slap came at him out of nowhere. The powers of momentum released him then, sending him spinning through the air. His world was white pain.
“Did you really think you just could enter this place and kill our disciples, kid?” the canine said, flashing before Jack and kicking his broken leg. “Did you think we would stand by and watch? That you were smart and were useless? Is that what you thought?”
He flashed ahead of Jack again, slapping him so hard that a few more teeth went flying. Jack did his best not to scream.
“Don’t kill him, senior brother,” the sharken said. “The master wants him alive.”
“Oh, he’ll be alive alright, but does the master need all of his limbs as well?”
Before Jack could react, the canine flashed over him and delivered a bone-breaking stomp into his good leg. The knee bent backward. Jack screamed. “There,” the canine said, “now he can’t run. This is good, right?”
The sharken looked on coldly, while Jack experienced the world through a prism of pain.
However, even now, the canine wasn't done. “And is this the arm that killed our little inner disciples?” he asked with a wicked laugh. “Guess he won’t be needing it anymore.”
Jack’s mind was still present, clouded with pain, bitterness, and anger. He really pondered detonating the orb in his robes right now, shattering these enemies along with his own body. The temptation was immense. In fact, he almost did it.
At the last moment, however, he remembered who he was. He was Jack Rust. He walked the path of the Fist. He was power, and iron will, and perseverance. He was triumph in the face of adversity, an unstoppable fist rolling ever forward.
Jack Rust could break, but he would never bend.
The enemy could have his arm. He didn’t need it. It would regenerate if he survived, and he could move and activate the bead with just the force of his Dao.
He watched coldly as the canine slashed his claws at Jack’s shoulder, ripping off the flesh and reaching to the bone. “Shit, kid,” he exclaimed, brows raised in surprise, “what are you made of? Sheer stubbornness?” A second swipe later, Jack’s arm went flying. A stump under the shoulder was all that remained.
But this time, Jack did not scream. His expression didn’t change in the slightest. His eyes were ice as he stared at the hateful canine, and somehow, that made him uncomfortable.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked. “I just took your arm. Why don’t you scream a bit, make me feel like I accomplished something? You don’t have to be rude about it.”
Jack did not reply. His focus was razor-sharp and aimed at the canine’s death. Nothing else mattered.
“Sir,” the sharken said again, referring to the canine with deference, “please hold back. The master wants him alive.”
A shadow passed through the canine’s eyes. For a moment, Jack thought he was about to die, and his awareness closed over the bead—if he was going to die, he was taking all these fuckers with him.
Eventually, however, the shadow disappeared, and the canine only tsked.
“Fine,” he replied, looking away. “This guy is no fun anyway. He doesn’t scream. Take him away.”
The Dao of Momentum holding Jack in place moved, transporting him far to the side of the two cultivators. The turtler had just arrived then, panting a bit as he approached the other two. “My apologies, sir,” he told the canine. “I—”
He did not manage to finish his sentence. A bead was flying between them and Jack. A bead carrying the full power of an early C-Grade cultivator. It unraveled.
Jack’s gaze remained icy, but his lips curved upward. So long, fuckers.
The three deacons felt the disturbance in the Dao at the same time. Their eyes widened, and to their credit, they reacted instantly. Three powerful Dao Domains erupted, shielding them all. Their arms blurred as they tried to unleash their strongest skills.
Unfortunately for them, the orb’s activation was pretty instant too.
Jack was not clear on what exactly happened next. It felt like the sky itself exploded, every cloud and air particle. The world was covered in a blinding white which robbed him of both sight and hearing. All he managed to see was the three domains collapsing. The canine reacted the fastest of the three, rushing behind his two companions while they still tried to muster their skills.
The sharken practically evaporated. The turtler lasted an instant longer, his shell glowing with arcane runes which absorbed part of the energy before he, too, was completely obliterated. The canine was struck last, and reality warped around him again and again. His body was continuously broken down and restored as he flew backward at many times the speed of sound.
When he left Jack’s range, he was still whole, though screaming at the top of his lungs. The forest in a large cone had evaporated.
Jack himself was unharmed. The bead had released the entirety of its energy in the direction of his choosing, so that right after the explosion, half the sky was white and the other half undisturbed. There wasn’t even any recoil on Jack’s side.
In the next moment, however, the heat and light spilled into his side of the sky, robbing him of both sight and hearing. His skin boiled and reddened. Air became fire. Everything was fire, actually, and this was just a limited aftermath of the explosion. He couldn’t imagine the power that assaulted the deacons.
Jack’s world turned completely white with a hint of green emanating from his body. Under the combined weight of all his injuries, as well as the present explosion, he was finally unable to hold on to that final shred of consciousness.
He fainted.
