System Change

Vendra blurred, and in the next instant, she was ten feet away from the man. Not even a second later, Aria appeared behind him and stabbed out with her daggers. Unsurprisingly, to Vendra, she watched with a gloating expression as her sister’s magical daggers found their way into the weak points of the man’s armor. She almost laughed as her sister pulled them out and saw the explosion of blood that came with them.

“Ow!” the man half-shouted. He looked under his arm where Aria’s daggers had been and frowned. “Interesting!” His eyes brightened to Vendra’s shock. “I don’t think I’ve fought anything that doesn’t let blood clot before. That might have been dangerous half an hour ago…” Still, as the man spoke, the flow of blood stopped almost as quickly as it had appeared.

“Impossible…” Aria muttered, and Vendra couldn’t help but agree. “That…”

“Oh,” the freshly shaven, bald-headed man started. “Just so you know, you don’t have to worry about hitting the weak spots in my armor. It’s regular leather… nothing special. I just use it because it’s one of the few things I can repair with a basic skill. It’s easy to buy when it’s completely destroyed, and it’s easier to get things done when you’re wearing clothes.”

“You…” Vendra said, but she really couldn’t think of anything else to say. Her sister’s skills were some of the most deadly she knew of. One simple cut would leave a normal person bleeding for days and unable to be healed by a potion. Sure, the potion would bring their health back up, but the wound would not close. Only the richest would be able to survive a nick from her sister’s skills.

And Aria had not just nicked the man… she had stabbed both her blades into his body. Sure, she hadn’t aimed for any vital areas, but that was because it had never mattered before. With Aria’s blood loss skills, any place on a person that was cut was a vital area. But the man before her… he’d just shrugged it off.

“Who… are you?” Vendra asked with a gulp.

“Me? I’m Jace,” the man answered. “I’d ask who you are, but I really don’t care. If you’re not going to give me any information about Derek, then you two and that little army behind you can at least give me a good fight, right? If it’s good enough, I may not kill you.”

“Derek? I do not know that name,” Vendra answered instinctively. She had a bad feeling about everything. She and her sister hadn’t made it so far as assassins without trusting their instincts, and right now, hers were screaming at her to be careful.

“Shame…” the man said. “I thought he’d be well known. He better be here. If he’s not…” The man’s eyes narrowed, and he muttered something under his breath that Vendra couldn’t hear. “Oh well…” His demeanor completely changed, and an evil grin formed on his face. “We’ve talked long enough. Show me what you’ve got. It’s been a while since I fought anything other than monsters.”With that, Jace rushed in. Vendra blurred once again, but he appeared right behind her before she even knew it. Aria appeared behind Jace, then stabbed out again. The next moment, the man disappeared, and Aria tried to redirect her attack to avoid hitting her sister. However, she had put everything into the attack in the hopes that the man would be distracted long enough while attacking Vendra, so even while she tried to stop, one of the daggers was going to find Vendra’s back.

Suddenly, two blades fell on Aria’s daggers, and to the woman’s shock and horror, they cut through them like butter. “Can’t have you killing each other when we’ve only just started the fun, can we?” he asked, then disappeared again.

Both Aria and Vendra looked at each other with wide eyes and fear. They frantically searched around themselves, but they couldn’t find a trace of the man. “We need to run,” Vendra said, and Aria nodded. However, before they could do anything, they heard a cacophony of screams coming from the army behind them.

When they glanced in that direction, all they could see were soldiers flying through the air and crashing to the ground. Some were knocked out, others were missing limbs. Sometimes, a leg would fly in one direction and an arm in the other. The problem was… those soldiers were not pushovers, but the man was cutting them down like grass. Even with the sisters’ combined strength, it wasn’t something they could do without proper planning.

So, without another moment of hesitation, the two women blurred in an attempt to escape. Unfortunately for them, that wasn’t something that Jace seemed to like. Before either of them even knew what hit them, they were both flipping through the air after being clotheslined by the man.

“Those guys aren’t worth my time,” Jace said as he watched the two women scramble back to their feet. “But the two of you have the potential to give me a good fight. If you try to leave again, I may just take it personally, and you don’t want that. But if you give me all you’ve got, we can even go back and fight inside that little army to give you a bit of cover. The two of you seem like you may be sneaky. Who knows? You may make it out of this just fine.”

Without another thought, both Aria and Vendra made the same decision to take the man’s advice and try to use the army as a distraction while they attempted to kill Jace. They both disappeared at the same time.

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Jace’s smile grew wider, and he muttered, “That’s more like it.” He waited for the two women to blend into the army, then he turned and slowly walked toward them. Blood dripped down his blades as he held them out to the side. Jace let his Battle Instincts take over, and the full power of his buffed aura exploded from his body.

A collective gasp came from the army, and even more of them either fell to a knee or fell completely unconscious. None of that mattered to Jace. In fact, it was both his and their good luck that they wouldn’t be part of the battle. He didn’t have time to fight with weaklings, and as long as they stayed on the ground, he wouldn’t bother cutting them down.

Soon enough, Jace reached the army and began his slow, methodical destruction of the entire thing. Jace didn’t exactly like killing, but he couldn’t get enough of the battle that came before it. That was why he loved fighting the strong. If they survived the battle, then there was a chance that they could come back even stronger and give him an even better fight.

He didn’t feel the same way when it came to monsters. Whatever battle they could give him was the best they ever would. His strength just grew too quickly to even bother with them. However, he’d met people who could grow as quickly as he could. After all, though he was ranked high on Earth’s leaderboard during the tutorial, he wasn’t in first place. His friend Derek was also another example.

Derek never actually beat Jace in a fight, but every time Jace showed up, he was much stronger than he had been the previous time. He didn’t even feel like the man tried all that hard to gain the strength he had, so if he ever did, then the fights the two of them could have would be phenomenal. And after all that time away, Jace salivated at the thought of how strong the man might have become.

With those thoughts in his mind, Jace found one of the dagger-wielding women inside the crowd of soldiers and directed his next series of attacks toward her. Throughout his attack on the woman, multiple blades fell on him and shredded his armor, but few were able to leave more than a white mark on his skin. There were a couple of surprisingly strong attacks that did land on him and cut into his muscles.

Every time an attack pierced his defenses, his lust for battle increased, and so too did the strength he gained from his Battlelust. Soon, the ground was littered with incapacitated soldiers, with only a few left standing. One of the women was fighting with a single arm, while the other hadn’t made much of an appearance during the fight—she hadn’t run, but she had disappeared.

Jace licked his lips as he locked eyes with the one-armed woman. “It looks like this is as far as the battle is going to go,” he said through his smile.

“That does seem to be the case,” the woman said as she smiled back. A gleam appeared in her eyes as she spoke.

Jace tilted his head in confusion. The woman had been fighting the entire time with a look of shock and fear in her eyes. She had barely been on the attack and was mostly on the back foot, trying to defend against Jace’s flurry of attacks. Now, however, the woman was smiling like she had some trick up her sleeve. Jace’s smile only increased as he saw it. If she had some last-ditch attack for him, he welcomed it.

Sure enough, it came in the form of a soldier appearing behind Jace once more. Both of the soldier’s hands connected with his back—his leather armor already long gone. To his surprise, the soldier’s fingers were actually so sharp that his hands pierced into his back.

Jace turned to look behind him at the soldier, only to see the man’s face shift back into that of the other woman. “So that’s where you went,” Jace said as he felt the same anti-coagulant get pumped through his entire system at a much faster rate than before. Sensing a small amount of actual danger—something that he hadn’t sensed in a long time—Jace’s instincts took over once again, and he spun so fast that nobody was even able to see him.

The woman’s claws, as sharp as her blades, ripped through the muscles in his back as they left his body. Moments later, the woman’s head went flying through the air—a look of shock on her face as she blinked a few more times in her last moments.

“Aria!” Vendra shouted and rushed forward, only for Jace to turn back to her and raise his blades. Vendra stopped all her momentum and slid to a halt. As Jace made to lower his kukri onto her, she yelled, “I give up!”

Just as the blades were about to bite into the woman’s shoulder and midsection, they instead passed through completely. A bright blue light shone, then the woman disappeared. Jace clicked his tongue, but wasn’t actually angry. He didn’t mind at all that the woman escaped. That just made it possible for her to come back stronger next time.

He even felt a little bad about killing her sister, who was also a promising opponent. Jace reached down and looked over the fallen woman’s body. He saw a few rings on her fingers and took them before injecting his mana into them. “They are storage devices,” he said as he noticed some weapons and other items inside.

He didn’t bother looking inside them much and instead tried to store them inside his bracelet—which surprisingly worked. He hadn’t actually expected it to work since he was unable to store other bracelets inside his own, but it did. “Different systems, I guess,” he muttered. After that, he looked around the battlefield and withdrew his aura.

Nothing but crying, groaning soldiers were left. He actually killed fewer than he thought he would in his Battlelust. “Is there anyone else strong around here?” he shouted.

“N-n-no… sir!” one of the soldiers who was able to get back up to his knee replied.

“Don’t call me sir!” he shouted. He then closed his eyes and tried to sense the next Guardian. He felt a pull in two different directions. One of the pulls was far stronger than the other, and he could also feel the pull of a Stronghold along with it. I guess that way’s the best, he thought as his eyes trailed over the notifications he’d received.

Congratulations!

You are the first person to defeat a Guardian during the System Invasion. At the end of the invasion, you will be rewarded greatly.

“Stupid notification,” he muttered and moved on to the other.

Congratulations!

You have conquered a Stronghold. You have made great contributions to your side of the conflict and will be rewarded at the end of the invasion if you survive.

“I couldn’t care less,” Jace said and dismissed the notification. He glanced at the Stronghold, which now had a red mana circle around it. During the fight, he’d pushed the army and the two Guardians inside the blue circle, so he could only guess that was why he technically ‘conquered’ the Stronghold.

With nothing left to do in the area, Jace turned toward the strong pull and then left.