“Your master should have sent someone stronger,” Sam said, teleporting next to the woman.
She smiled. “Oh, but he did.”
An ax impacted Sam’s neck, only his quick reaction preventing it from cutting through. He snapped his head to the side so quickly that he would have killed himself, had he still been a mere mortal. The ax screeched as it cut through the metal of his armor, slicing off a slab of flesh from his side of his face. The strength contained within it was truly immense. Had it hit him straight on, it would have cut his head off.
He cartwheeled away, the wind whistling between his teeth though the hole in his mouth. A slight man, wielding an ax almost as tall as he was, stood before him, still holding his weapon out, blood dripping from its blade.
Sam snorted, the noise warped by the ruin of his face. It was already beginning to heal over, but before the bleeding could stop, he felt a foreign Dao take root among the shreds of his flesh. It was just as strong as his own, and Sam found himself unable to fully banish it.
The ax wielding man teleported, swinging his ax as he went. Sam’s hammer hissed up to meet it, the shockwave from their clash blasting dust across the street. Both were evenly matched in terms of strength, meaning that there was little collateral damage.
“Damn, you really are a little monster,” the newcomer said. “You’re seventy levels weaker than me, but can keep up. I can see why your death is so desired.”
Sam grinned, causing his exposed teeth to glint in the light. “I’m glad I match up to your image of me. But I assure you, I can do more than keep up.”
Bolts of golden light shot through Sam’s body, and he let out a roar as the power of the cosmos filled his form. His strength erupted, and with a sonic boom, he drove his hammer into his foe, too fast for the man to dodge. His cheek began to heal over as he forced the other man’s Dao out of his body.
“What-” the ax wielder began before a punch whipped his head back, tearing his flesh apart. Sam grimaced at the pain of Dao Juggernaut, but he plowed through regardless, using every ounce of strength. The fire mage looked like she was moving in slow motion at this point, as her stat distribution was hardly conducive to fighting on par with those built for speed.
Another bulb of fire built on the end of her wand, but Sam teleported next to her, slicing it apart with an application of his Dao. Teleportation was only as fast as the mind of the user, and under the effects of Dao Juggernaut, his speed was immense. He could teleport multiple times for every one of his opponents’, and as he saw the ax wielder emerge from a rift in space, he teleported again, into position to strike.
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His hammer blasted into the back of the man’s neck, sending him into the sky so quickly that his passage created a momentary vacuum. Sam found it strange that at his level of power, he tended to use more of his physical abilities and raw energy manipulation rather than concrete System skills to fight. For the most part, there was no need, as he could synthesize the outcomes to anything that he wanted, within reason. He could easily instill a Common Rarity projectile skill with enough power to destroy small cities, or use his Primal Skill with so little invested power that it would barely scratch a mortal. There was a good chance that by the time he reached the higher ranks, his skills would be entirely under his control. In fact, perhaps reality itself would be. A Rankers were literal gods, capable of destroying universes, or even creating them. Even lower Ranked beings were still immensely potent.
Sam turned to see the fire mage’s body bursting into flame, her flesh vanishing into an elemental form that seemed similar to his own Earth related transformation. Only, this one contained far deeper levels of mastery.
The woman shifted, her body warping through the air as she became fire itself. A flower of heat bloomed around her, melting the pavements. That was only the small byproduct of her power that she could not avoid, while the vast majority was sealed in preparation for her attack.
Sam’s teleportation seemed slow in comparison, as the mage transformed into an avatar of conceptual fire itself. Her body was no longer under the control of the laws of nature, and her maximum speed was nearly instantaneous. The only weakness was that she had almost no control. Her mind was eaten away by the technique, or at least, Sam assumed so, given the sudden extinction of nuance in her Daos, replaced by an aspect of all consuming fire.
It was something he had never seen before, given his lack of time to explore any major aspects of power save for leveling and the Dao. Elementalism was measured on an exponential scale, and the power increased dramatically the more one mastered it. After all, a hundred percent mastery meant full control over the entirety of an element. How that worked in practice, Sam didn't know, but he assumed that it was comparable to having a fully mastered Dao of that element.
He responded with a shell of Dao energy, completely coating his body. Making a version of his original energy shield, he simply empowered it to new heights with his E Rank might. An opalescent bubble of intertwined red and blue formed around him, transparent from the inside, but inscrutable from the outside.
A moment later, it began to deform, energy running like wax as a conceptual level of heat began to melt through it. Sam raised an eyebrow and reinforced the shield again, refusing to be overcome. Then he gathered a spike of power at the centerpoint of the melting, and thrust it out, into the body of his assailant.
