Chapter 245: Test Subject
[QUEST GENERATED] ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY
Objective: Defeat the Shadows challenging your new rank (2/2)
Current Progress: 0/2
Rewards:
- 5,000 Shadow Points
- Gravity Manipulation: Expert III → Master I
- Soul Spike upgraded to Soul Spike Barrage (Sky Grade)
Penalty for Failure: Public humiliation, challenges will continue indefinitely
Kael dismissed the notification without breaking eye contact with Valen.
Valen’s daggers appeared in his hands—Twin Tier 1 blades with serrated edges designed to tear flesh and spread poison. A sickly green coating dripped from the metal, hissing faintly where droplets hit the stone platform.
Kael drew the Shadow Slayer blades.
The moment the black metal left his storage ring, a ripple of recognition passed through the observers. Several elders leaned forward, their carefully neutral expressions cracking. Special Grade weapons were not common. They were not cheap. A young Shadow—regardless of rank—regardless of ties to the main family—possessing a pair was almost unprecedented.
"Where the fuck did you get those?" Valen hissed, his sneer wavering for the first time.
Kael said nothing.
"Doesn’t matter." Valen’s composure returned. "I’ll take them off your corpse after I—"
He moved.
Poison cultivators were not known for direct combat. Their strength lay in attrition—toxins that weakened, debilitated, killed slowly. But Valen had clearly trained to compensate for this weakness. His opening strike was fast, precise, both daggers coming from different angles in a pincer attack designed to force a block or dodge.
Kael blocked both.
CLANG. CLANG.
The impact sent shockwaves through the platform. Valen’s eyes widened.
What the fuck?
Kael’s arms hadn’t budged. The Shadow Slayer blades absorbed the kinetic energy of the clash and dispersed it harmlessly. Valen’s Tier 1 daggers might as well have been hitting a wall.
He pushed forward, forcing Valen back with a series of rapid strikes. The clash of weapons filled the arena with metallic song—slash, parry, slash, dodge, counter—Valen retreating step by step, his expression shifting from confidence to confusion to growing fear.
Kael’s soul sense was active. Every movement Valen made registered in his perception before it fully formed—muscle twitches, weight shifts, the faint tension in his shoulders that telegraphed his next strike. It was like fighting someone moving in slow motion.
Valen attacked him from behind with a poison slash but Kael sidestepped as Valen was about to attack again, Kael raised his palm.
Schlick.
A Soul Spike—pure soul force compressed into a needle-thin projectile—fired from Kael’s palm.
Valen didn’t see it coming. The spike struck his shoulder and punched through his Tier 1 armor like paper, disrupting the mana flow in his entire left arm.
"GAHH—!"
Kael’s foot connected with Valen’s chest before he could recover.
CRACK.
Valen flew backward, crashing through the platform’s edge and tumbling across the courtyard. He spat blood, his left arm hanging limp, his eyes wide with shock.
What the fuck was that? That’s definitely a soul attack. When did he get the technique for soul cultivation? Was it his mission to the Gra-Khazul tribe?
Soul attacks. Valen had heard of them but never experienced one. The sensation was like having his arm set on fire from the inside.
Kael walked to the edge of the platform and raised his right blade.
"Sky Rending Technique, First Form: Falling Star."
A cross-pattern slash of darkness and lightning erupted outward, carving a trench through the courtyard toward Valen.
Valen barely dodged—the attack missed his torso but caught his right leg, leaving a shallow gash that burned with residual energy. He screamed and retaliated with his own technique.
"Venom Crescent!"
A wave of concentrated poison energy swept toward Kael in a crescent arc—green and sickly, eating through the stone where it passed.
Kael stepped through it with Lightning Body, reappearing behind Valen. Lightning fangs fired from his fingertips. Valen twisted, his poison-coated daggers deflecting one but taking the second on his shoulder guard. The Tier 1 armor held, but the impact sent him stumbling.
The fight became a blur of motion.
Kael pressed his advantage relentlessly—Lightning Body for speed, darkness attacks for unpredictability, soul spikes to keep Valen off-balance.
Valen was still able to keep up. Afterall, Valen was a Vorn. A Rank 7 Mana Heart soldier with full body Tier 1 armor and years of combat experience.
But he was fighting someone who had survived Cassius Draven. A prodigy of the main Draven family.
SLASH. PAM. BOOM.
Valen’s poison techniques filled the air—Venom Crescent, Toxic Miasma, Serpent’s Fang—each one a cloud of deadly particles that would kill a normal cultivator through prolonged exposure. Kael’s Void Body resisted the ambient poison, and his Soul Sense let him track the toxic clouds as easily as physical objects.
But Valen was adapting. His poison was getting denser, more concentrated. The miasma was starting to affect even Kael’s enhanced physiology—minor irritation, but growing.
Then Valen committed everything to a single attack.
"VENOM AVALANCHE!"
A massive wave of poison energy—concentrated, pressurized, moving fast enough to warp the air around it—surged toward Kael. Getting caught in it would mean death even for someone with his body cultivation.
Kael didn’t dodge.
He raised his hand, and gravity answered.
A field of warped space materialized around his body—microscopic, localized, perfectly contoured to his skin. Not a barrier in the traditional sense, but something far more fundamental.
Gravity didn’t just pull things down. It bent the fabric of space itself. When an object approached a massive gravitational body at an angle, its trajectory curved—deflected away, slung around, never permitted to make contact.
Kael had taken this principle and compressed it to an extreme.
A micro-layer of intense lateral gravitational rotation wrapped around his body like a second skin. A conveyor belt of warped space, millimeters thick, bending the trajectory of everything that approached.
The Venom Avalanche reached him—
And flowed around him.
Not blocked. Not deflected. The attack literally couldn’t find a path to his skin. The gravitational vectors forced it to curve away, sliding off an invisible, frictionless sphere that existed in the space immediately surrounding his body.
To Valen, it looked like his most powerful technique had simply slipped off Kael without touching him.
[TECHNIQUE LEARNED]
Gravitational Paradox: Chapter 4 — Orbital Deflection
Origin Grade Defensive Technique
Creates a micro-layer of lateral gravitational rotation around the user’s body, bending all incoming attacks away from the skin through spatial warping.
Valen stared, mouth open, poison dripping from his daggers.
"What the heck? How? You’re just an early mana heart cultivator."