Chapter 70: The Nuke, the Gun and the Blade
A nuclear punch hit her in the chest at lightning speed.
Arc would have been more than fast enough to dodge in her heyday, but she had grown rusty and was too close to Zoa to dodge properly. A fist imbued with radiation melted the outer surface of her iron belly and threw her back. She landed on a field of lead summoned by her own Authority and followed through with a Recoil Blast.
Czar Zoa was already healing from his wounds, with his jaw reforming itself from raw nuclear radiation surging from the rest of his body. Arc studied the way his qi traveled through his body in an attempt to find his core. Zoa was too good to give its location away, but at least she prevented him from casting his Authority.
“I am fighting for the sake of your immortal soul too, Arc,” his half-formed mouth spoke while his legs avoided the blast with graceful dancing moves. “Rudra Tandava.”
Zoa’s steps carried the strength of thunder as he danced forward, his hands and feet following a complex mudra sequence as nuclear light imbued his limbs with power. By the time he closed the gap between Arc and him in a bright flash of light, his face had already put itself back together… only for his regeneration to abruptly stop afterward.
Arc found herself taken aback when her enemy charged at her with the back of his skull missing. Zoa knew that her Headshot Forge would automatically target anyone with a brain… so the clever bastard interrupted his regeneration before he could regrow one.
Arc wished she could say she could heal so easily. Her flesh regrew ammo-muscles to fill the wound Zoa left in her stomach, but the radiation imbuing it slowed down the process. A vile force caused her very atoms to decay into nothingness.
So long as the tumor that grants him his half-life remains untouched, he’ll eventually recover from anything. Arc thought their Authority clash had cracked and destroyed Czar Zoa’s core during their last battle, but apparently not. He must have used a qi Barrier to hide it after nearly perishing at her hands. I’ll thoroughly clean up the shitstain this time. Leave not a speck of dust behind.
Czar Zoa wasn’t the nuclear cultivator who put her in the ground—that honor belonged to another she had slain decades ago and forced her to shoot herself rather than suffer a cruel death by radiation cancer—but he was by far the most dangerous. She couldn’t allow him to escape again.