"If anything..." he said, eyes narrowing, "you should worry about yourself."
Sylva’s smile flattened. "Trying to fight in hand to hand combat? How useless." She sighed, almost disappointed. "Well then... ti for you to sleep."
Her finger snapped.
The air exploded.
The instant her hand moved, the hovering arsenal obeyed hundreds of elental projectiles scread toward him in a single overwhelming wave. The sound barrier cracked, the pressure alone enough to make the air tremble.
Razeal’s grin widened.
This was nothing.
He had trained under the simultaneous assault of tens of thousands of fighters, all of them at A-rank or higher, each one striking with their full skill. He had endured far worse storms than this, and he had done so for decades in the relentless, tiless grind of the training space. This just a few hundred attacks at once was almost leisurely in comparison.
His stance shifted.
Sound Flow.
The technique he developed. Through long experintation, Razeal had discovered that switching between different "flows" combat rhythms and energies at the right monts was the most efficient way to fight. And of all of them, Sound Flow was his fastest.
Where other speed techniques pushed the body to its limits, Sound Flow surpassed them by riding the shockwaves of generated sound. By producing sharp, controlled bursts a clap, a tap, a stomp he could create flow and just ride kt force to propel himself far faster than muscle and body alone would allow.
In this mode, his body could reach 100 to 200 ters per second with ease, and, when perfectly concentrated, even 300. Most importantly, it did not harm him unlike so other flows that tore muscle and spegitify his body.
And he had refined it to perfection. After decades of practice, he no longer needed to rely on environntal sounds well that was wrong way to use it he ca to know later. why use other complicated ones when he van generated his own, precisely calibrated for distance and direction. Every movent, every tap of his foot against the ground, was a asured burst of flow just enough where he wants to pinpoint it, carrying him exactly where he needed to be.
The first barrage hit.
Or rather, it missed.
Razeal moved. His foot tapped the ground once, and in the next instant, his body blurred, vanishing from where he had been. A flaming arrow split the air where his head had been a heartbeat earlier. A wind slash ripped through his afterimage.
To the untrained eye, it looked like teleportation. One mont he was there the next, he was across the field, already slipping between a spear of lightning and a spinning blade of water.
His movents were sharp, precise, and continuous, like the rhythm of a drumbeat too fast to follow. Each dodge was no more than inches from disaster, yet his expression remained calm, almost playful.
Sylva’s gaze tracked him, her smile fading as the barrage continued. Elental weapons streaked past him, detonating against the ground and sending plus of fire, shards of ice, and gusts of cutting wind into the air. The battlefield beca chaos but in that chaos, Razeal danced.
Tap. Move. Slip past. Tap again. Change angle. Vanish.
It was like watching a shadow in a thunderstorm impossible to pin down, impossible to corner.
And as Sylva’s storm of attacks continued, he began doing sothing that made even the most battle-hardened spectators blink in disbelief. It wasn’t enough that his body blurred between the incoming projectiles he was also eting so of them head-on... with his bare hands.
At first, it looked reckless. Insane, even stupid.
But then they noticed what was actually happening.
When a wooden spike, thick as a man’s arm and sharp enough to punch through steel, ca screaming toward his chest at near-sonic speed, Razeal simply angled his palm toward it. There was no block. No brute-force clash. Instead, his hand guided it a subtle push, almost like brushing away an annoying fly. The spike’s path twisted in an instant, veering harmlessly past him, embedding itself into the ground yards away.
Then ca the vines, snaking toward him with crushing force. A twist of his wrist, a shift of his stance, and they slid past as if they had lost interest in their prey.
The absurdity didn’t stop there.
Wind slashes invisible blades that could cleave stone were deflected with a casual sweep of his fingers. Lightning spears, deadly enough to vaporize flesh, were touched and redirected mid-flight. Blades of water, moving with such speed that the air scread around them, were brushed aside like falling leaves.
It looked impossible. Well It almost was impossible. And yet it happened over and over again in front of thousands of witnesses.
From her vantage point above the arena, Selphira adjusted her glasses and focused on the fighter below.
Razeal’s speed was difficult to follow even for her. His movents blurred between positions, not just evading Sylva’s barrage but interacting with it in ways she had never seen. He wasn’t blocking or overpowering the attack he was redirecting them, with the smallest motions of his hands or arms, as if turning the course of a river.
Her brows drew together. Elental projectiles wind slashes, lightning spears, blades of water did not behave like solid weapons. Even if one possessed the strength and speed to intercept them, physical contact without proper barriers or enchantnts should have been catastrophic. Yet Razeal made contact without harm, shifting their trajectories with precision, often sending them back toward their origin at full force.
She activated the runes in her lenses, letting the enchantnts slow and break down the movents for closer study.
The detail only deepened the mystery. His timing was exact, down to the fraction of a heartbeat. He t each attack at an angle that caused it to veer aside, rather than clash directly. The deflections were efficient, almost economical no wasted motion, no unnecessary force.
But the question remained: how was he doing it at all? There was no visible magic field, no reinforcent spells, no artifact to channel elental resistance. And yet he was making contact with forces that should have been impossible to touch barehanded.
Selphira’s mind sifted through every known discipline weapon techniques, elental counter-thods, manipulation arts and found no match.
It was not luck. It was not reflex. It was deliberate, controlled, and repeatable.
She was deep in thought.
And as for the spectators? They were simply lost.
Gasps and shouts echoed through the arena as the reality set in. Many of them had assud Razeal would die before he could even react to Sylva’s overwhelming barrage. Ofcourse they had heard the rumors about famous him talentless, powerless, a man with nothing but stubbornness diagust and curses to his na. They were just waiting for execution to co.
But now...
They were watching him survive. He was able to fight.
Each redirection sent Sylva’s own attacks crashing into the ground, the protective shield, so even colliding with each other mid-air. Explosions of lightning clashed with bursts of fire. Water slashes hissed into steam against burning arrows. A spear of lightning embedded into the ground, crackling wildly, while the earth itself split where redirected wind blades struck.
Spectators turned looking at each other faces. Utterly confused
"What... is happening right now?" one whispered.
"Wasn’t he supposed to be useless?" another muttered.
"I thought this was over in the first minute!"
The crowd had Obviously co expecting an execution.
At least, that’s what they told themselves on the way here an overwhelming display of power, a foregone conclusion, Areon wiping away this disgusting thing before he could even raise his head.
But now...
Now the murmurs were changing. The roars of early excitent had faded into sothing quieter sharper. At first, they mourned the fact that this man had already been declared the victor, which ant the Holy Promise was his by right. Now, all their prayers funneled into one desperate hope: that Lady Sylva would kill him. For if she failed, they would lose even the right to curse him, to whisper prayers for his destruction and that was unbearable, considering what he had done to her Holy Saintess.
Desperation rippled through the stands. The audience shifted in their seats, their spines straightening, hands tightening on the railings, eyes narrowing as the truth settled into their bones.
This wasn’t an execution.
This was a duel.
A real, genuine fight.
On the elevated spectator seat, Maria’s mother sat with her arms folded across her chest, her gaze fixed on the arena floor. Her expression was unreadable, but her tone was serious when she spoke.
"He’s keeping up with that Faerelith girl," she said, her voice low but firm.
Maria’s hands curled into fists at her sides. She didn’t lift her eyes from the floor below, but her jaw tightened. She couldn’t deny what she was seeing and yet, she couldn’t quite accept it either.
Was he hiding this all along?
"You would’ve lost," her mother continued, her gaze still locked on the fight. "You’ve got no chance against him. Now tell what bet did you make with him?" She turned her head toward Maria, her tone shifting from observational to interrogative.
Maria’s head snapped up, her eyes flashing with defiance. "No, I wouldn’t have. It’s just... physics. Strength. Nothing much." She lifted her chin slightly, as if that alone could make her words true. "I have affinity. I have mana. It’s not possible for soone to defeat a high-ranking affinity user."
Even as she said it, a small part of her the part she was trying to silence knew the truth. If he landed a blow with that kind of force... if he moved at that kind of speed... she might not even be able to react at all. But she wasn’t about to admit that, least of all to her mother.
Her mother’s stare didn’t waver. "I asked what bet you made."
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