Chapter 215: In lieu of cleverness, violence works wonders
‘Damnit, damnit, damnit! Is that Zhen Liu kid a fucking genius or something?! How come I can’t seem to land a fucking hit on this puppet?!,” Gregory cursed as he tried to direct his meteor hammer to smash Nepherage into pieces. He hadn’t realized yet that Nepherage wasn’t really puppet and that Zhen Liu wasn’t an aether puppet genius, it was just that Nepherage had really, really good battle sense.
[He’s about to bounce it off of that pillar and…to the left!]
*BANG!*
“Stop dodging!”
“No, fuck you,” Nepherage retorted in Zhen Liu’s voice.
“RARGH!”
After Gregory had activated his art, a strange weapon art that was supposed to make it so he could easily track and hit their opponents because of fine tuned control and wolf like hunting instincts, he hadn’t been able to land a single hit.
Before, when he was using just brute force and acceleration, the iron ball would at least get close enough to the hateful red puppet to force it to block, but now it just kept dodging like it was nothing. As if it could predict his movement, but that shouldn’t have been possible since puppets can’t think ergo not able to make predictions! This was especially infuriating to him because, technically speaking, this should have been the exact opposite development of when he did this before.
[Bounce, left. Bounce, right. Bounce…below? Trying to change the pattern but you still do a bounce, why?,] Nepherage observed.
Normally, Gregory would put on the front of being a wild brute who swung his weapon around with no rhyme or reason, just pure destruction. This would either kill his opponents outright or force them to think that the only way to beat him was to match violence with violence. At which point, he would switch tactics and use surprisingly clever methods of manipulating the chain component with the hammer component of his weapon to incapacitate his enemies. The sudden one-eighty turn from pure violence to clever tactics was usually fatal to his opponents who did the exact opposite turn…not this time.
In a twist of irony, the aether puppet that was normally characterized by the use of Ignati arts, was acting surprisingly cool headed.
‘Gaaah! Fucking fine then! If being clever is not going to work, I’ll use violence!,’ Gregory conceded.
As Nepherage was all set to dodge Gregory’s wolf hammer again, she ended up stumbling a touch once the latter had suddenly retracted it chain and all.
[Huh?]
Her confusion was soon cleared up once Gregory began to swing the meteor hammer over his head to build up momentum, mixing in his own aether to increase its power. Oddly enough, Nepherage could vaguely see the shadow of a giant mammoth forming around Gregory as he swung his hammer around.
“Fucking cowardly crippled son of a bitch! If you’re not going to keep your little toy still for me to break, then I’ll just smash it to pieces in one blow,” Gregory shouted in rage.
Nepherage twitched a bit the moment she heard those words, but stopped herself from retorting.
Instead, she decided to meet violence, with violence.
Nepherage took on a horse stance and began to charge her entire body with a mix of Ignati and Terraqi aether. The illusion of the ground beneath her feet melting into lava began to spread until it surrounded her like a circular platform. Smoke began to rise from her crouched form, condensing into the shape of a wild looking demoness with embers for eyes.
‘Wait a minute… that’s an [Expression]! Puppets definitely shouldn’t be able to do any of that unless…no…even if that Zhen Liu brat broke through, the puppet shouldn’t be able to do anything like that,’ Gregory soon realized when he saw Nepherage’s action. He wasn’t fighting some aether puppet that was being controlled or running on set group of commands, he was fighting a thinking, breathing opponent!
‘That look and that power clearly isn’t human, but what is she then? No bloodliner or even an aetherii naturally looks like something straight out of a painting from hell like that!,’ Gregory guessed.
Gregory thought of calling out to this presumed Grandmaster, maybe try to convince them to switch over to their side, but the moment he saw the pure and unrelenting bloodlust in her eyes, he nipped that idea in the bud.
‘Fuck it! I’ll figure it out after poking through her corpse…assume I manage to leave one.’
With his attack now fully charged, Gregory launched it straight at Nepherage, swinging his hammer down at Nepherage’s charging form. The mammoth shadow behind him matched the swinging motion, bringing its trunk down along with the hammer.
[Megaton Mammoth Swing!]
The hammer glowed with power as it came crashing down onto Nepherage’s position like a meteorite, the wind tearing and whistling as it did. Gregory assumed that this was the end, that the moment his hammer impacted on Nepherage’s head the fight would end. It was moving too fast to dodge and was coming down with too much power to block. With victory assured in his mind, Gregory smiled.
“You’re dead meat, monster bitch!,” he shouted.
“No,” Nepherage suddenly said in her own voice just as the hammer was about to make impact, “That’d be you.”
In the blink of an eye, even faster then the hammer, Nepherage suddenly surged forward and gut punched Gregory with enough force to suddenly cancel out the art he had just fired off. An explosion of Ignati and Terraqi aether went off at the point of impact where her fist met his gut. Surprisingly there was no blood or gore when her attack hit, just a surprisingly clean and neat hole of burnt flesh and charcoal.
[Eruption Knuckle: Pele’s Fury]
Gregory’s victorious smile turned strange and crooked as he looked to stare Nepherage in the eyes. Seconds passed with no words exchanged, the only sound being the dropping of an iron ball to the ground and rolling away.
“What…are you?,” he asked as the shock of being punched through by what was essentially a palm sized volcano hadn’t fully hit him yet.
“You guessed it just moments ago,” Nepherage answered, “a monster bitch, who just so happens to be the loyal sword of one you dared to call a cowardly, crippled, son of a bitch.”
Gregory couldn’t even respond to that revelation at this point, as the life in his eyes floated away and his body fell backwards to the ground.
Staring at Gregory’s body, Nepherage raised up an arm and was just about to cut off the dead man’s head, another trophy to present to her lord, but paused about halfway through. She thought about it for a moment before putting her arm back down.
Nepherage was about to just turn and walk away from her kill, but decided to first spit on the man’s corpse. Evidently, she mixed in a bit of Iganti aether into it, as the spit soon caused Gregory’s entire body to ignite.
“Normally, I’d take your head as a trophy for milord. But for the crime of insulting him and my honor, I leave your body to burn and the memories of your time as warrior with it.”
With her piece said, Nepherage decided to finally leave the battleground.
