Chapter 1087: Receding Tides(2)
[Come on ya old wanker! Thought you were made of sterner stuff than that! Wait…when did I start speaking with British vernacular?,] Springerdermain taunted while bouncing between his feet.
[Gah! You annoying you little snake!,] Gao Dau cursed while picking himself out of a hole he was recently smacked into. [Why don’t you stay still long enough to see how strong I really am?!]
[No.]
[Bah!]
For the past few minutes or so, Springerdermain had been treating Gao Dau like a living practice dummy for all of his new tricks.
Thanks to his new core, [Core of Wonder], and new formula, [Magician’s Wonder Spring], Springerdermain’s fighting system took on a whole new style that drove Gao Dau insane.
Before, he fought like a mix between an acrobat and a boxer.
He would use his springy body in order to attack at weird angles, avoid hits and then punch forward as hard as he could.
But now, he threw on characteristics that were associated with magicians.
Illusions, misdirection, the occasional trick of pulling items out of places where they should never fit.
More than once during this fight, Springerdermain had managed to trick Gao Dau into overcomitting for an attack, leading to the latter getting caught in the middle of an array of manifested swords that threatened to turn him into a knife block. Unfortunately, this attack didn’t work.
It did, however, have Springerdermain the chance to land cheap shots at the man’s back with a well-placed kick.
As to how he was able to do all this Gao Dau, a man who had a specially installed Kaijin eye that made him able to predict movements and caused his brain to become significantly more powerful, was due to the fact that he overloaded the man’s senses.
It doesn’t matter how acute one senses may be or how great their calculative ability is, everyone has a limit to how much information they can process at any given time.
And magicians always seek to push that limit whenever they performed their tricks.
Alas, all good things had to come to an end and every show had to come to terms with the curtain.
[Alright you springy bastard!,] Gao Dau shouted with rage. [I’m going to end this fight, now!]
[Funny, I was thinking the same thing.]
Ignoring Springerdermain’s remarks, Gao Dau began to charge himself up with all the [Chaos] he could and concentrate it into the grafted kaijin eye in his forehead. As he did, the area around the aforementioned eye began to pulsate and develop noticeable veins that seemed to suggest that the eye in his head was growing stronger and was about to try and take over his brain.
At the same time, Springerdermain began to circulate [Chaos] as well, but in a manner that was rather unexpected.
Instead of concentrating his [Chaos] to any particular part of his body, he began to condense it around the area where his old arms used to be.
As he continued to do so, multiple sets of phantasmal, spring-like arms began to form on the sides of his torso.
However, unlike his old pair of arms that were oversized and clearly designed for punching, these new arms were a lot more slender, had clear serpentine themed gauntlets and began to sway like serpents.
Any outside observer would draw the comparison that Springerdermain’s arms were strangely reminiscent to that of a Hydra.
Granted, the person that was about to be on the receiving end of this attack didn’t really care about this comparison. He was too busy getting ready to kill the guy.
[Chaos Art: Albtraum!]
With a roar, Gao Dau released a surge of energy from his third eye that took on the form of a horde of wildly different looking phantoms.
Some of the phantoms appeared to be emaciated corpses, others like stitched together horrors with varying degrees of mutilation while even more appeared to be skeletal beings with fury in their eyes.
[Die screaming for me!]
Any normal aether warrior facing such an unrelenting horde of horrors would’ve buckled under the pressure and terror.
That’s because the attack Gao Dau used was one that ignored the regular mental defenses of most aether warriors in order to attack the soul directly.
Minds can be tricked, senses can be fooled, but the soul can never lie.
Springerdermain, however, didn’t care. In fact, he spat at the horde of horrors.
Literally.
[PTOOIE!]
[What the fuck?!]
He spat out a shower of playing cards in the direction of the horde.
Needless to say, Gao Dau was confused as fuck in regards to this strange action.
[What the fuck is the point of-wait a minute.]
But then he noticed that a similar cloud of cards had just appeared all around him. Before he could do anything with this information though, Springerdermain struck.
[Chaos Art: Wonder Barrage!]
After making this declaration, Springerdermain sent forth his phantasmal limbs, punching right through the horde and into the cards he had just spat into existence.
The moment his fists entered those cards, they exited through the cards that were near Gao Dau’s position.
What followed was a symphony of blows.
Needless to say, the sudden and rapid delivery of several dozen punches that each had the strength to blow through a steel door coming in one after the other was enough to cause Gao Dau to lose the ability to focus.
The horde of nightmarish phantoms ended up disappearing, which was quickly followed by Gao Day passing out.
With his foe now defeated, Springerdermain let out a sigh of relief as he dismissed his phantasmal limbs.
[Not a bad debut, if I say so. Pity no one was around to watch it.]
Little did he know, there were people who saw this happened.
…
“Matriarch, the Torture Elder was just defeated.”
“Well, shit. At least I’ll be able to bury his enemies with him as a funerary gift. How much longer until we can fire?”
“About…”
…Meanwhile…
“Oi. Oi. Oi!,” Zhen Xun Tian kept saying as she attempted to wake up the leader of the Undertow Council by lightly smacking his face.
“I thought you said this antidote neutralized the poison in his veins,” Zhen Xun Tian complained to Cornileus.
“Give me a break here, the medicines in here is older than, well, him.”
Shortly after Zhen Xun Tian sensed something was weird in regards to the environment, she had forced Cornileus and Zhen Xun Po to take her and Jinju Ren to take them where they left the Undertow Council.
Technically speaking, Jinju Ren didn’t have to come along, but having a Imperial Princess present was going to be, to quote Zhen Xun Tian, absolutely hilarious.
Granted, all this would be for naught unless they managed to wake the aforementioned councillors.
“Alright, his face is starting to look red and puffy at this point,” Zhen Xun Tian observed as she stopped smacking the head councillor’s face. “Time to go for extreme measures.”
“Extreme measures?”
Without explaining anything further, Zhen Xun Tian simply stuck a finger in her mouth and began to slobber on it.
This action confused Cornileus and Jinju Ren, but absolutely disgusted Zhen Xun Po. Because he knew exactly where this was going.
“Mother, you are too old to do things like that.”
“Oh hush,” Zhen Xun Tian retorted while removing her now ink covered finger from her mouth. “You’re just upset that this works for some reason.”
“That what works?”
“This.”
Squish
“Oh, ew!”
“Gross!”
“BAHAHAAAAAAH!”
Zhen Xun Tian proceeded to stick her now ink covered finger directly into the head councillor’s ear, causing reactions of disgust to occur in everyone present.
Granted, no one was more disgusted than the guy who was on the receiving end of this ink based wet willy.
“By the powers that be! Why on Valresta did you just-wait…are we in the Queen’s Inner Sanctum? Is that an Imperial Princess? What the fuck is going-?!”
“Ahabababab, shush. Shush,” Zhen Xun Tian said as she grabbed his lips in order to get him to stop talking. “I need to ask you something very important and you need to answer as succinctly and calmly as possible. Understood?”
Surprised at the sheer seriousness in Zhen Xun Tian’s voice, despite the ridiculousness of the situation, the head councilor couldn’t help but to actually nod.
“Good.”
Having gained his consent, Zhen Xun Tian removed her hand so that he could answer.
“Now then, earlier, I heard a strange rumbling coming from the ground. The only times I’ve heard that rumbling was when tsunamis threatened to impact the coastal towns. So, I need to know, do you guys have any-”
“Wait, wait, wait!,” the head councillor interjected the moment his mind registered what Zhen Xun Tian had just say. “Did you just say…tsunami? Are you certain about that?”
“Yes…,” Zhen Xun Tian nodded, getting the feeling there was a very dark reason for this reaction.
“Oh no…”
Evidently, she wasn’t wrong.
“It has returned. The reason why we lost our queen and guardians ahs returned.”
“Wait, what?”
