Chapter 288: …stab them in the face!
[What you think of my clawspin, director? A bit more efficient than a headspin, no?]
‘I will admit, it’s a bigger impression than your standard headspin…does that hurt your fingers though?’
[Not really, I have knives for finger nails and no nerves in my body, remember? Also, no skeletal system or organs… I’m not sure on that last one though.]
‘Oh right.’
[And no bones mean I can do this!]
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‘Spinning top? No problem, I just need to duck and sidestep and-,GAH! What the fuck?!’
Zhen Li had managed to sidestep the initial spinning attack, despite the extended reach, however, he did not expect the Razor Maiden puppet to suddenly stick out her arm and slash at his retreating leg from the opposite direction of her spinning legs.
The absurd part however, he almost applied human logic to it.
‘How the hell did she pull that off?! Wait…it’s a puppet. It has no bones…also, why did I apply reasoning and a gender to an inanimate object?’
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=Well I’ll be. It looks like Razor Maiden’s development is coming along quite nicely.=
=Right…did you have anything to do with that?=
=Really? Fascinating…=
=Oh?=
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‘What the fuck kind of crazy aether puppet is this damn thing?!,’ Zhen Li cursed as the Razor Maiden’s top-like attack came spinning towards him again.
Zhen Li had seen unusual battle puppets before, but nothing that moved in the same manner as this bladed ballerina.
It was wild yet deliberate, controlled yet unhinged and overall just incredibly aggressive.
But above all that, he couldn’t keep his eyes off of it.
‘I know I’m focusing on it because I’m in the middle of fighting it, but why does it feel like it’s robbing my attention completely?’
The protocol for fighting puppet masters was pretty straight forward: keep your eye on the puppeteer.
Aether puppets can only move under the directions of their controllers and can only undergo complicated and strange movements if the controller moves in particular ways as well. While such movements were unnecessary for true masters of the art, it would apply to youngsters and disciples like those of Zhen Liu’s age. The funny thing was, Zhen Li was pretty sure that Zhen Liu didn’t make a single fucking move this whole time.
When the battle started, Zhen Li had his attention focused on Zhen Liu completely, but the moment the latter summoned the Razor Maiden, it felt like his attention was forcibly and inexplicably grabbed by this weird puppet.
Was it really just a Bronze grade custom job?
Was it made with inexplicably powerful material?
Was it all just Zhen Liu being an anomaly of a cripple?
He didn’t know the answer to any of this, but he was pretty certain that he had to get out of the way.
‘If I sidestep again, it’ll just reach out and cut me in the opposite direction at the ankles again…but what if I go over it instead?’
With that Razor Maiden coming towards him, Zhen Li only had a split second to decide whether or not it was a good idea to leap over the attack.
‘Fuck it!,’ he decided after realizing stand still was worst.
Zhen Li concentrated his aether into the soles of his feet once more, but instead of causing the surrounding area of his foot to freeze over, it began to bubble and steam.
[Geyser Step!]
*FWOOSH!*
“Damn, look at that airtime!”
A powerful stream of boiling water ejected from Zhen Li’s feet, allowing him to leap over the encroaching spinning ballerina of doom and land safely behind her-it…or so he thought.
‘Cool, now all I have to do is wait for her to go over the edge of the ring and-what’s that grinding noise?’
“Whoa! Check out what she’s doing!”
“The sheer amount of fine control one would need to get a puppet to do something like that is just…absurd!”
“Oh right. I forgot it was a puppet for a moment…”
Even with the opposing spins, Zhen Li assumed that the Razor Maiden’s attack would work like a normal top. Namely, spin in a specific direction until running out of energy, crashing into something that would stop the spin or fall over the edge of something and topple over. He did not expect the puppet to suddenly stop its forward momentum by jamming a claw into the ground, using said claw and the force of the spin to cut into the stone floor of the training arena, and then have the puppet suddenly stop spinning, jam it’s feet into the ground and then throw the stone projectile it had just made, directly at him.
“Futile! [Erosion Fist!]”
Zhen Li coated his hand in a thick layer of Aquarii aether and smashed it into the incoming projectile, deflecting it to the side.
As his fist made contact made with the stone projectile, the flowing force of the Aquarii aether eroded away a chunk of the stone’s surface and became a fine sediment that swirled around his hand.
As the name implies, [Erosion Fist] was highly effective against practioners of Terraqi aether and aether beasts made of stone, as the flowing Aquarii aether moved in such a way that it shredded away defenses that relied on the dense aether and use the resulting particles to counter attack.
If Zhen Li were to follow up this moment with an attack, the damage of his [Erosion Fist] would have increased by twenty percent.
Unfortunately for him, he wouldn’t have a chance to do so.
Just as he was about to even think of counterattacking, the sight of a giant sword barreling towards him immediately cut that thought short!
‘How the fuck did she get this close?!’
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What happened in the exact same moment as Zhen Li used [Erosion Fist] to block the projectile…
Razor Maiden didn’t sit still after launching the stone projectile, instead she used that opportunity to launch her true attack.
[Keep your eyes on me, everybody! You won’t believe what happens next!]
Razor Maiden had done a double overhead toss of the stone projectile, a rather inelegant way of throwing an object, but it did force her to use enough strength to propel herself forward into a roll, into a coffee grinder and then a propelling handstand that saw her lunch a forward stabbing kick towards Zhen Li, who at this point just deflected the stone projectile.
The on-lookers couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
“What the hell kind of fighting style is that?! I’ve never seen such wild movements!”
“I don’t know, but the sheer amount of rolling and ground based movement is making it look like a flowing dance moreso than a combination move!”
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[Wait a minute…director, real quick, was I supposed to merk this guy or not?]
‘Seeing at this is technically a sparring match… please do not kill him and/or horribly maim.’
[As you wish, director…what about mild maiming?]
‘Razor…’
[Fine…]
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‘Shit! I need to raise my aether to max circulation to block this, but if I do that, these outcasts will realize I’ve been faking it in order to kick their asses for the fun of it Fuck!,’ Zhen Li thought to himself as he saw the blade about to pierce his face.
During this fight, Zhen Li had gauged that the aether puppet before him was at peak Aether Acolyte strength with maybe a half step into Aether Master territory.
If Zhen Li had been fighting at full strength, with all the power of a five ring Aether Master, he could easily blow this ballerina away and end this duel before it even got to this point.
But because he wanted to beat on the disciples of this branch family, without attracting the ire of the so-called elders, he limited his power to at least half and pretended to be an Aether Acolyte.
And now he was about to take a sword through the face…or so he thought.
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*SCHNK!*
“Gasp!”
“First blood!”
“Damn! If the Razor Maiden kicked a few inches to the left, the main branch guy would have been shishkebab!”
“I think you mean decapitated.”
Razor Maiden’s rolling kick did not go straight through Zhen Li’s face as many had expected. Instead, her kick had missed by a couple inches and had left a long superficial scratch alongside his cheek. It would heal in time and with medicine, but right now, it looked surprisingly bloody.
“Seeing how this is a simple sparring match, let’s end it here before actual blood gets spilled. Kay?,” Zhen Liu said with a smile.
With a wave of his hand, Razor Maiden retracted her leg and began to walk back to Zhen Liu’s side.
‘Good job, Razor Maiden. That was one hell of a performance.’
[Twas nothing director. Just wait until you put me in a real production.]
