Lin Yi looked at the three new cuts, the shoulder cut, the chest cut, and the accumulated absorption cost across all his passives, and made the calculation that his body was making independently of any tactical assessnt.
He was losing.
Not slowly. The gap between level 230 and level 240 in a Deity class was not a gap that combat technique and skill diversity could bridge at his current state.
Because every exchange was costing him more than it was costing Cang Yutian. The watcher’s counters were the product of a perception and execution that operated faster than Lin Yi could generate approaches, which ant the combat was not a contest of capability but a contest of attrition that had one outco if it continued.
Cang Yutian stepped forward.
"You have ability," he said. "More than I anticipated when you first moved. You have acquired skills that should not be available to a hunter at your level, and your attribute values are operating in a range that the entity your world calls a standard hunter is not designed to reach." He raised his sword. "None of it is sufficient."
Lin Yi activated Boundless Step.
All movent techniques simultaneously. Phantom Void Step’s spatial distortion, Heaven Step’s Spirit-converted montum, Chain Void Step’s consecutive activation window, all three in a single layered execution directed not toward Cang Yutian but away, the displacent carrying him across the upper atmospheric layer in the longest single movent output his skill set could produce.
He was running, and he covered a significant distance doing so.
He activated again. And again. The Chain Void Step component extending the consecutive window, each step carrying him further from the watcher’s last position, the spatial transitions blurring the upper atmospheric layer into a continuous stream of movent.
He needed to find the Greater Qilin. The qilin had been positioned during the engagent at the boundary of the engagent space, reading the combat without entering it, the evolved awareness registering the exchange and the outcos in the way it read everything. He activated Predatory Instinct’s directional sensing and found the qilin’s position through the ambient awareness the skill provided.
He activated Heaven Step toward it.
He had covered perhaps forty percent of the distance when the space in front of him compressed.
Then, Cang Yutian appeared.
Not through a spatial transition Lin Yi recognized. The watcher was simply not in front of him and then was, the arrival producing no spatial distortion residue, no transition signature, no vibration or displacent or any of the markers that movent techniques left in the environnts they operated through. The ten Buddha wheels were present behind him, their golden pulse cycling at the sa rate they had maintained throughout.
[Buddha Step.]
The na surfaced from sowhere in Lin Yi’s mory, but he had never encountered that skill na before, but it seed as if he had known about it since.
He now understood it to be described as a movent technique associated with celestial appointnt at the Deity tier, a technique that did not move through space but moved through the observer’s perception of space, arriving at any location the user had observed without occupying the distance between.
He’s putting things in my mind, Lin Yi speculated, the only reasonable explanation to why he had a perfect description to the movent skill the watcher used.
But there was no counter to a technique that did not use distance.
Lin Yi raised the Celestial Lord Blade.
Then the Greater Qilin appeared.
Heaven Step. The qilin’s optimized version, the lower-cost higher-range spatial transition it had developed through observation and comprehension, carrying it from its position to the space between Lin Yi and Cang Yutian in the sa instant the watcher had materialized.
Cang Yutian stopped.
His dragon eyes moved from Lin Yi to the Greater Qilin. The sword in his hand did not lower. But his movent stopped, the pursuit interrupted by the interposition of sothing his assessnt was reading and updating in real ti. The ten Buddha wheels behind him shifted their cycling rhythm slightly, a change so small it would have been invisible to anyone whose perception was not at the level his was.
He was looking at the Greater Qilin the way he had looked at Lin Yi when the engagent began.
"A Greater Qilin," he said. "That has developed Heaven Step through comprehension rather than acquisition." He paused. "That is not sothing this expanse produces commonly."
Lin Yi used the fifteen seconds.
The fifteen seconds the appearance of the Greater Qilin created by appearing in the space between him and Cang Yutian.
He activated Boundless Step again, the consecutive Heaven Step component of the chain carrying him across the maximum distance the technique could cover in the window available, moving through the upper atmospheric layer away from the watcher’s position as fast as the layered movent output could sustain.
He was moving through the second Heaven Step of the chain when the sound ca from behind him.
He did not look back. He knew what it was. The specific quality of impact force produced when sothing at Cang Yutian’s level contacted a target, the sound that the engagent had been generating for the entire fight but different now because the target was different and the exchange was shorter than any of the exchanges with Lin Yi had been.
Much shorter.
The chain continued. He kept moving.
Then the connection he had built with the Greater Qilin, the ambient awareness that had developed between them over weeks of working together, the specific presence at the edge of his perception that had been constant since the evolution, was gone.
He stopped.
He was in the mid-tier atmospheric layer now, the upper layer above him, the thunder dragon and Cang Yutian and the space where the engagent had happened sowhere above the cloud of ambient energy that separated the two layers.
The connection to the Greater Qilin, which had been present every mont since the day he had first approached it was absent.
Not faint. Not reduced. Absent.
He stood in the mid-atmospheric layer and held the Celestial Lord Blade at his side.
He was bleeding from the chest, from the shoulder, from the three cuts across his torso. The passives were running below capacity. Second Wind was still on cooldown. The accumulated combat cost of the entire engagent was present in every physical appearance simultaneously.
He looked at his hand.
Then he looked upward at the upper atmospheric layer.
A single thing moved down his face, one tear, simply produced by the body in response to a loss that was real and complete and not recoverable.
He had acquired the qilin, and it had chosen to stay after the fight that introduced them, not because of a system contract or a skill binding, but because it had seen sothing in him that was worth following.
And now Cang Yutian’s voice ca from above, the watcher’s tone carrying downward through the atmospheric layers with the projection of sothing that did not need to raise its volu to be heard across any distance.
"The Qilin bought you ti," Cang Yutian said. "I will grant that. What it did was worthy of the creature it had beco." A pause. "But you accessed the Thunder Dragon God’s territory without authorization. You engaged a Watcher of celestial appointnt in combat. The consequences of these actions are not suspended because you have retreated."
Another pause.
"Lin Yi," the watcher said.
"You must be killed."
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