63. Seeing Through His Trick

Seeing Through His Trick

This time, my punches and kicks against his back did little more than make his body sway.

It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing silently.

The bastard was laughing at me.

He stood and shook me off as if I weighed nothing, which, at our level of strength, was almost true.

He tried to grab me again.

I teleported beside him and avoided it.

He reached again.

I jumped away again.

Again and again, with shorter and shorter intervals.

My body might have been battered, and I might not have recovered to full strength, but I was not only brute force.

In and out of battle, power and mobility had far more uses than simple trading of blows.

This time?

I was only returning his mockery with interest.

In my current condition, I might not be able to seriously injure him.

But he?

Without an ambush, he could not lay a finger on me.

He understood my meaning. He tried to move faster, his angry roar growing louder, every motion turning more and more ragged as he lost patience and the control he had always loved imposing on others.

Neither of us spoke.

In a real fight, talking was a waste of time and attention when you could make your contempt clear with action…

Or simply ignore the other person completely.

I chose the latter.

My smile grew wider as I watched his scowl deepen.

Not only because it felt wonderful.

Also because it bought me time.

With every passing second, my regeneration worked faster than his.

And I became a little stronger, a little faster, my powers operating better and more efficiently.

After I knocked the gun-shaped weapon from his hand and it remained lost through a full minute of the following melee, the axe reappeared.

He had only one good arm to wield it with, which slowed him somewhat.

He also attacked with the side of the axe and its haft instead of cutting with the blade, presumably to evade my Focused Invulnerability.

But that made the axe an awkward weapon, especially given our difference in reach.

I exploited Spatial Distortion ruthlessly, changing the distance between us second by second.

Most of his swings missed. The ones that connected were not pleasant, but as the fight continued, Enhanced Regeneration kept up better and better.

Then, suddenly, I stumbled in flight.

The rhythm of the battle slowed at a moment I had not expected.

I had planned to slip past his backhanded axe swing, but instead I failed to dodge and struck the old man’s chest because I had overcommitted.

I ran straight into the edge of the blade.

The blade actually bit into my side.

That was the second surprise.

It pierced my suit and skin, cutting painfully, shallowly into muscle.

Then the axe rose again, almost maddeningly slow, hanging above me like a twisted sword of Damocles.

It came down.

Spatial Jump… failed.

At the last instant, I barely twisted aside, saving my head from actually being cut off.

I paid for it.

The axe struck my collarbone with the force of a tank cannon, carried me backward until my back slammed into the ground, and pinned me between bedrock and sharpened steel.

Superpowered metal forged by superpower and driven by superpower cut into bone…

Then stopped.

Somehow, I was not split in half.

I frowned, shaking off the mismatch between reality and expectation just as the bastard erupted again in red fury.

I crossed my arms to block his downward strike.

The axe bit into me painfully again, but not nearly as deep as I had expected.

Temporal Jump failed too.

By the time I thought to simply roll away, a huge boot crashed onto my leg with a final-sounding crack, pinning it in place.

Have you ever been in a car crash?

One of those fast accidents that could have ended very badly, but somehow you walk away with nothing worse than bruises?

I know how psychologically unpleasant that can be, even when you are lucky enough not to be badly hurt.

Adrenaline floods you, not in the Hollywood “my life flashed before my eyes” way, but in the sense that…