Chapter 1553: Finding A Way
Vasilissa slipped past Nyar’s endless flood of slashes like a leaf that refused to get slashed. She was fast, nimble, precise, but still hit harder than a freight train.
Arad might’ve been as aggressive as a rabid honey badger, but his mother was a whole other monster of madness. The way she moved, the relentless viciousness of her attacks, and the cold indifference in her purple eyes spoke volumes.
She was the kind of woman who would not give a damn about anyone or anything. It didn’t matter to her what Nyar thought or planned; she couldn’t even give a damn about Amaterasu or anyone else here. She wasn’t fighting Nyar; he was the one fighting her. He had to play by her rules because she would never play by his.
Nyar tried to slash her head, and she didn’t even bother looking at his attack. She charged forth as if he wasn’t attacking at all, let the attack hit her, and the blade slipped through her neck like she was a ghost.
The blade passed through her; it should’ve hit her, but it didn’t. Because she had shifted her location through space, not where her body was, but how the fabric of space integrated her into reality.
If the world were a game, she would be removing her hitbox to avoid getting hit instead of trying to dodge with her model.
Nyar, of course, didn’t understand a lick of what witchery she was doing. Vasilissa had erased her own existence so many times that even he couldn’t remember many of his fights with her.
And it was weird, because Vasilissa’s attacks still hit him. Her obsidian claws moved like snakes and cut his flesh with ease, carving away as if all of his defenses didn’t exist.
The only method Nyar had of forcing her to block or take a hit was to aim for her only weakness, Arad. But that was easier said than done.
If Nyar tried to attack Arad, he would be giving Vasilissa an opening to attack him first. That almost always ended with her hitting him and preventing him from getting closer to Arad.
This had also prevented Arad from attacking, because the skill ceiling of those two was far above him to the point he couldn’t just advance. Each time he tried to attack, he would end up almost killed and saved at the last moment by his mother.
The more Arad tried to help, the worse and harder he was making it for his mother. Nyar figured that out and started playing on it.
He can’t attack Vasilissa directly because she doesn’t want to be attacked.
He can’t attack Arad because she doesn’t want him to attack Arad.
Then, he has to find a way to make Arad move first. To win, Nyar has to taunt Arad to join the fight, trick him into trying to help, and force Vasilissa to drop her guard.
Arad watched the fight, holding his sword and running around in circles, looking for any opening to attack, but he couldn’t find any. Not even the fabric of space and time could hold around them, which made it nearly impossible to jump in.
To be honest with himself, Arad didn’t even know if his black hole sword could scratch Nyar or not. He was able to damage the tentacles, but those weren’t the heavily protected main body.
Watching his mother fight, Arad figured out two techniques that she was using. First, when Nyar’s scythe hits her, she turns the part of her body that got hit into a void and allows it to slip by.
Vasilissa wasn’t removing her hitbox whole. That was a waste of energy and would make it harder for her to hit Nyar back.
Arad just understood that his mother’s favorite dodging method is self-bisection. He couldn’t fathom how she could do it so precisely. But that didn’t matter now; the only things that mattered were what he could achieve.
That was to try and protect her from the tentacles as much as he could, because even here in the center, the tentacles still assailed them from each and every direction like an endless tide.
Nyar swung his scythe at Vasilissa, and she smacked it away with her claws and went in for a stab, only to get dodged and then be under another rapid attack. Each clash between them produced a massive shockwave that rattled the fabric of space and time, but that didn’t stop Arad, who flew above them, swinging his sword with harrowing force, slashing as much of the rushing tentacles as he could.
Each time he cut a tentacle in two, he could feel his arms rattle and shudder in pain. It was like trying to slash logs with a sword, painful on the bones.
He cut more, then some more, only to find himself having not dented the tentacles’ numbers at all. Now, many of them were flying straight at his mother, and that pissed him off.
Arad lunged forward, throwing his fist with all of his might, and punched the one tentacle that seemed the most likely to hit his mother. His knuckles shattered, but he couldn’t care less. Fueled by rage, he opened his mouth and spat a massive cone of blinding energy, wiping tens of tentacles all at once as he tried to heal his knuckles in time to keep fighting.
Arad wanted to summon all of his incarnations at once, but trying to focus on multiple things now was a death sentence. He needed to thin down the tentacles as much as he could. One body was enough, so he kept slicing, dicing, and blasting everything around his mother.
He wanted to be actually blasting everything, but in reality, Arad could barely deal with just half of the tentacles rushing at them. Many slipped past him, and Vasilissa had to deal with them herself.
Arad was barely a support to his mother in this fight; he couldn’t even get close to Nyar to land a hit. Feeling like a mundane man stuck in a fight against a monster, Arad started changing his way of thinking, looking deeper and deeper into his own mind, trying to find the best way to deal with someone far stronger than him.
Looking deep, he reached Alcott’s fighting style, then went deeper and reached Dalla’s slaps, but that wasn’t enough. He can’t even reach Nyar to slap him; he must look for a fighting style that allows him to deal damage from afar and use his full power at the same time.
Soon, he found it, one of the earliest fighters he had met, one that was far more talented than anyone else in the mortal world. A weak mundane human who fought harrowing monsters beside him, a man of flesh and bone that refused to lose.
Arad’s free hand reached forward and grabbed the threads of space, pulling them into his palm. His stance changed, and his eyes flashed purple as he dodged the rushing tentacles, allowing them all to assault his mother for a while.
He needed the time, and she had to survive on her own for a while.
Then, after just a couple of seconds, it finally happened. Vasilissa’s claws managed to hit Nyar on the chest, digging a gaping wound across his whole torso.
It shouldn’t have happened; he had dodged that attack whole. Vasilissa was now dealing with all the tentacles on her own without Arad’s help, so she should be weaker.
Why did he get hit?
Before Nyar could know it, he got hit again, and then the number of his tentacles coming here was strangely a bit lower than it should have been; many of them just fell into pieces on their own.
STAB!
Both Nyar and Vasilissa froze for a second. Nyar had just jumped back to dodge one of her attacks and ended up impaling himself on Arad’s sword. Was it a mistake on his part? No, he can’t make a mistake.
Nyar growled and spun around, swinging his scythe and cleaving Arad’s left arm. "Bastard!"
Arad was already retreating, so Nyar only needed one other swing to finish him off and save himself a lot of future headaches. But that was also a trap. It allowed Vasilissa a chance to attack him from behind.
The fighting style Arad chose was that of Jack, using the very threads of space to lay his nets.