Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

Atlas lifted his index finger and pointed it toward the monster, he had no time to waste, there was no way of knowing if it could fly using some other trait or reach him some other way, so he moved immediately.

This wasn’t underestimation, he would never underestimate an S-rank Monster, not after Velgrath, and not after what this one had already shown him in the short time, it was intelligent on top of being physically stronger than anything he had faced before, a combination that was worse than either quality alone, the assassins had been intelligent but their physical strength had a ceiling he could work around, monsters in ruins had physical strength but their intelligence was limited, this thing seemed to possess both at once.

Atlas started building Null pressure around his index finger as he thought, ’That punch it landed on Reiden, its physical strength surpasses even mine...if I delay any further I don’t know what it will do next.’

He drew the sign, the horizontal line first this time, small, roughly the size of his own palm, then moved smoothly into the vertical line to complete it.

Small as it was, the Null pressure condensed inside it was a different matter entirely, it was so dense that even two hundred meters below it, the monster went completely still as the danger signal it was getting from above began to override everything else it was processing.

And feeling that chill crawling it’s spine - it moved.

It blurred the same way it had moved in front of Yussac and Gidion, the same technique, and because the distance was two hundred meters rather than a few it had to execute the move twice to close it, which was its limitation with this technique, and each use pulled a large chunk of its Spirit, though even after both uses the Spirit it had remaining would still be enough to match an A-rank head on without any difficulty.

It appeared in the sky a hundred meters below Atlas.

Atlas had already expected something like this and had narrowed his eyes when he saw it, he was just about to form the vertical line and complete Kankon-Rei, when the question arrived on its own, ’How is it flying?’

No wings, no visible means of staying airborne, which meant only one thing, ’It has a flying trait as well?’

He thought about Velgrath, who had two traits that he knew of, and then looked at this monster in front of him and considered that S-ranks might carry more than two traits in general, Velgrath might have simply been on the lower end of that, because this monster’s physical strength had already surpassed the Crowbeast by a margin he could feel clearly, so more traits tracking alongside that made sense.

He dismissed those questions and focused, ’It’s planning to come from behind, same movement it used to hit me from the side before, but now it’s doing it in the air.’

He activated Spirit Instinct and Sense Nullification at the same time.

He knew it couldn’t maintain the concealment for long but he only needed a single second from it, because when he had first entered the area using both traits while it was eating that Angel it hadn’t sensed him at all, meaning the traits worked on it, and even if it eventually detected him again through Spirit fluctuations or some other means, one second was enough.

A surge of pain shot through his brain the moment both activated.

It was far worse than when he had first attempted Fuzai-jū alone, his left hand clenched hard, knuckles going white, teeth locked together, but he made no sound...he kept his eyes fixed on the monster below as it prepared to move for the second jump.

The reason for the pain was something he already understood, he was running Spirit and Null at the same time and Null...cancelled Spirit, which meant he was forcing two contradicting energies to operate simultaneously inside him.

Although he was using them separately from each other, the contradiction of both existing at once was still producing that splitting pressure in his skull, the same contradiction that existed in the monster below him, which ran both as well.

Within that one second the monster appeared behind where Atlas had been floating in the air, its hand driving forward in a straight line toward his back with the speed and force that had sent him through multiple trees earlier, it had lost track of him in that instant but it committed to the strike anyway, calculating that even with the concealment the speed behind the hand would connect with anything in that space.

What it didn’t know was that Atlas had already moved...

He had not moved far, just one foot...one foot to the left using Mu-ho, just enough to be beside the incoming hand rather than in front of it, and the price of that small movement landed on him immediately... his head felt like it was being pulled apart from the inside, his Null had dropped significantly from the combined drain of the contradiction and the technique, and he genuinely doubted for a moment whether what remained was enough to execute Fuzai-jū at the level needed to finish this.

He didn’t move from that spot.

WHOOOOSH

The monster’s hand passed through empty air, the force of it producing a hollow sound as the wind behind the strike pushed outward.

Then it sensed him, just to its left... at almost no distance at all, and its hollow red eyes went wide as it felt something it had not felt once since emerging out of the Crucible.

Death.

Atlas had kept the + sign formed through all of it, through the Mu-ho, through the brain splitting pain, through the doubt about whether he had enough Null left, he had held the formation and not let it collapse because collapsing it meant dying a different way.

He pressed the completed sign forward with a small deliberate push of his index finger.

The small sign tore through space at point blank range and struck the monster directly.

ZZTTZZZZ ZTZZZZ

The sound that came out of that contact was nothing like any impact sound from the whole fight before it, not a BOOM or a CRACK but something that sounded like space itself being disrupted, stuttering and wrong, spreading outward from the point of contact in every direction.

Then the shockwave hit Atlas.

It came back at him from the same point of impact and the force of it was something he had no way to brace against, his head snapped backward, his body pushed away from the point of detonation, and somewhere inside his chest and abdomen he felt things that shouldn’t move beginning to move, organs shifting under a pressure that his Regenerative Hide was already trying to respond to but couldn’t outpace in that first moment.

Blood came from his mouth and his nose.

His eyes closed.

The last thought that formed before everything went dark was quiet and unfinished, ’A-Am...I dying again...? B-But...I haven’t gotten...my revenge...yet...’

Atlas fell from the sky.