Pain.
Not the manageable, familiar pain Leon had grown accustod to throughout the entire fight. This was different—sharp, imdiate, and deeply invasive as the creature’s magma-armored fist connected fully with his chest.
His holy armor exploded off his torso with a sound like shattering crystal. The skin beneath burned away in an instant from the intense heat, raw flesh exposed to those terrible purple nails that continued driving inward with relentless force.
His ribcage trembled from the impact, then began to crack—dense bones that had resisted everything thrown at them throughout the entire battle finally began to fracture under force applied at their absolute limits.
The creature felt it too.
This human’s body is even tougher than mine.
The realization struck it with genuine disbelief as it pushed harder, forcing its strength to its absolute ceiling just to achieve what should have been trivially easy. Breaking through this human’s ribcage felt like drilling through layered stone rather than flesh and bone.
Calling this thing human is an understatent. This is so high-tier species rely wearing a human’s appearance.
It recalled with growing bewildernt how, throughout the entire fight, it had never once managed to cleanly break a single one of this human’s bones despite landing repeated devastating blows. It had assud the apparent injuries were simply flesh—that the force was dissipating across the surface. But now, with its arm buried deep and pushing with everything it had, it understood the truth.
Those bones are simply too hard and too dense. I was barely scratching the surface before.
The nails pressed deeper, milliters from the beating heart it had been savoring.
Then sothing changed.
Leon’s expression shifted completely—the look of a man in genuine pain becoming the look of a man who had been waiting for precisely this mont.
With everything he possessed, Leon simultaneously began flooding his body with holy energy while his bloody, trembling hand shot up and seized the creature’s wrist in a grip like a closing vice.
His fingers locked around the magma-coated arm with fierce, unyielding intensity.
Got you.
Then he let go of every last shred of control over his holy energy reserves.
Not a careful application. Not asured, efficient deploynt. Pure, unrestricted release—like a dam giving way all at once.
For Leon, the sensation was like standing at the epicenter of a crashing wave, the kind that picks entire ships off the ocean surface and reduces them to splinters. Overwhelming, consuming, almost too much even for him to bear.
For the creature, it was catastrophically worse.
The holy energy flooded into it simultaneously from two directions—radiating outward from Leon’s entire body like a furnace blazing at full intensity, and injecting directly through the contact point of their locked hands, bypassing every external defense and pouring straight into flesh and bone.
This was about endurance, now about who could outlast the other.
Leon was confident in his pain tolerance. Confident in his stamina. Confident in the vast accumulated reserves he carried.
The creature had no such confidence—because it had never experienced anything like this.
AHHHHHHH!
The scream that tore from the creature’s throat was unlike any sound it had produced during the entire fight—raw, involuntary, the pure vocal expression of sothing being destroyed from the inside.
It felt as though it were burning on a stake, but the fire was one thousand tis hotter and more agonizing than any fla should produce. Both its exterior flesh and its internal core felt the devastation simultaneously—no part of it was untouched.
Now it is understood.
This is why. This is why that energy gave that heart-clenching feeling of dread the very mont I first sensed this human standing in the arena.
This is my nesis. The nesis of my abyssal energy and of my very existence.
The understanding brought no comfort.
The creature’s flesh began to sizzle audibly—a wet, horrifying sound like at on a heated surface—as the holy energy worked its way through tissue and bone with complete, indiscriminate thoroughness. Its thoughts, usually sharp and calculating, began to fragnt under the overwhelming assault. Its mind was approaching its limit.
It wanted nothing more than to be anywhere else in the universe.
Under normal circumstances, if an opponent had hurt it even a fraction of this amount, it would have been furious and creative in devising ways to return that pain one hundred tis over. Rage was its natural response to damage.
But with this consuming agony and its very essence being burned from within, fury was simply unavailable. There was only the desperate, singular need to escape.
It tried the obvious solution first—blasting its own stuck arm free using mana and abyssal energy to forcefully break Leon’s grip and create separation.
The holy energy flooding through the contact point imdiately neutralized the attempt. The abyssal energy dissolved before it could form into anything usable.
Then I have no choice.
The decision was made in an instant.
A sharp, wet crunch as the creature severed its own arm at the shoulder—a sound it felt more than heard—and it launched itself backward at maximum speed, crossing tens of ters of arena space in a single millisecond.
What remained of it looked grueso. Bones visible through torn, still-sizzling flesh where the arm had been removed. The holy energy it had absorbed during the contact wasn’t simply stopping at the point of separation—it continued working inside the creature’s remaining body, and it was desperately throwing everything it had at eliminating every trace before the damage beca irreversible.
anwhile, the severed arm remained embedded in Leon’s chest—a grotesque detail he barely registered through the fog of his own pain.
Leon was not unscathed from those couple of seconds of mutual destruction.
His blood vessels had burst multiple tis throughout his torso, the pressure of channeling that much energy while simultaneously sustaining that level of physical damage, creating internal chaos that his healing was racing to address. The pain was real and present. Without the accumulation of every trial he’d survived before this one, without the absolute threshold his body had been pushed past repeatedly over subjective years of training, he called training, or it would more like beating, or else he simply would not have been able to hold on through those monts.
But he’d held.
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