Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

Both appeared at the midpoint between where they had each been standing, their right fists already moving at a speed that distorted the air around them, and both carried Null pressure built around those fists.

The monster’s Null was mixed with Spirit, which was still enough to warp the air around its knuckles to a visible degree, but the space around Atlas’s right hand — Reiden — was doing something different, a SCREECH sound tearing through the very space around it as it moved, though the fist’s speed had already surpassed sound to a extent that Atlas himself couldn’t hear it.

The technique Atlas had used to close the distance was called Mu-ho, a derivative movement from his Zero Inscription — Rei-Kokuin, not an Active Vector like Kankon-Rei but a movement technique that came from the same source of knowledge, one that used Null pressure to erase the distance between coordinate point A and coordinate point B entirely, bypassing travel rather than crossing it. Atlas didn’t know terms like coordinate though, he had understood it by seeing it as a Distance erasing technique.

The limitation was only how much Null pressure Atlas could produce, which at this point was not a real limitation since he could increase the Null attribute through the Codex and eventually there would be a time when he would have no limitation to the distance or coordinate point he wanted to arrive at.

And in the moment both fists were closing in on each other, Atlas had also attempted something Reiden itself had suggested in that brief exchange just before — using Kankon-Rei not as a full technique but...as a partial imprint, pressing that Inscription into the fist through Reiden and turning the technique into a concentrated punch rather than a full cross slash, not certain it would work but trusting Reiden’s read on the situation.

Both fists connected.

BOOOOOM!

CRACK!

The ground under their feet split apart and in the next moment... a massive crater formed as the earth beneath them was driven deep, the impact spreading outward in all directions from the point of contact.

Reiden glowed on contact, all the carved lines across Atlas’s arm lightened up together and as it glowed - the Null pressure acting both as shield and offensive force pushed back against the monster’s deep red fist, the one carrying mixed Null and Spirit... it didn’t just push back, the monster’s knuckles began to crack, the fractures spreading from the point of impact up through the whole arm.

The monster’s Instincts kicked in but it didn’t jump back, instead it read the situation faster than that and identified the hand as the specific danger rather than Atlas’s body as a whole, so it dropped its weight in that same speed it had moved before, twisted its right leg beneath itself, put both palms flat on the crater floor and used that angle to launch both feet up into Atlas’s chest with the full force of its physical strength behind the impact.

Atlas coughed blood, ”Khh—!” his eyes went wide as he couldn’t believe the speed of those transitions, from the fist clash to the crouch to the double kick, had taken less than a single second and he was not able to track any of it.

He didn’t fly back this time, he drove his legs into the ground and forced all his strength downward through them, his body skidded backward across the crater floor rather than leaving it, the resistance held him in place enough that he came to a stop a few meters back unlike crashing through trees he had previously been.

Regenerative Hide activated on the chest impact before any crack could form in the ribcage, the internal damage repaired itself ahead of the structural failure, which was the level his trait activation had reached now that his Control had grown alongside his Attributes.

He lifted his head and looked at the monster.

Its right hand, the one he had punched at, was crumbling from the knuckles outward, the deep red skin and the dense muscle beneath it breaking apart piece by piece, which confirmed that the partial Kankon-Rei imprint had worked the way Reiden suggested it would.

An S-rank monster’s hand was coming apart in front of him, and he was the one who had done it.

Two thoughts came in sequence as he watched, the first came from the memory of Velgrath the Crowbeast, the first S-rank he had ever encountered, ’I have come a long way...’ and then immediately after it, without pause, ’But it’s still not enough,’ the second thought came from the incident he in the Rosaria household and most of all...the Patriarch and Matriarch of that House and connecting their level to the Human Continent.

The monster reached up, closed its other hand around its own crumbling arm at the elbow joint, and... pulled.

CHKKK.

The arm came free, dark red blood coming out in a thick flow that hit the crater floor and spread, Splurt...Splurt, pooling fast in the broken ground.

Atlas watched as the stump began to close and rebuild, the regeneration was even faster than his own Regenerative Hide, which made sense after all...it was an S-rank Monster.

Within moments the arm was fully reformed, the monster’s Spirit reserve got reduced yes...but it was insignificant to what it still had.

’Another trait is regeneration then,’ Atlas concluded.

He also concluded something else — he couldn’t drag this out, every exchange gave the monster time to recover while his own Spirit, even at the level it was now, could not match what an S-rank carried across a long fight, the gap in reserves was simply too large to outlast, which meant he needed to end it with a complete Fuzai-jū, the full technique rather than the imprint version, but that required distance and time to form the cross.

Why? It was simply because of two reasons - the focus needed was too much to maintain while also moving or worse... being struck at that moment.

Now one would ask why not use Mu-ho to create space while forming the cross simultaneously, and the answer was straightforward — the focus required for the + sign formation and the focus required for Mu-ho could not be done at the same moment, and the Null required to execute both at the same time? It was not even close.

So...the only option was to put distance between himself and the monster.

He activated the trait - Crowbeast’s Wings.

The black phantom wings spread from his back and the monster, which had been walking toward him with its attention fixed on Reiden, stopped as its hollow red eyes went wide for the first time in the entire fight, a visible reaction it hadn’t produced once before that moment.

Atlas beat the wings once and went straight up, it was so fast that the monster’s frame shrank below him within seconds, and he climbed until he was roughly two hundred meters above the crater, then stopped and looked down.

He measured the distance and the monster’s likely speed from what he had seen, and estimated three seconds minimum for it to reach here even with it’s ridiculous speed if it somehow could fly upward.

He raised his right hand.

Reiden lifted toward the monster below, and this time Atlas extended only his index finger and began to form the + sign with that single top of the finger...yes he was only using a finger to form the Sign.

He...He was trying to kill an S-rank with only a finger?!