Too Stubborn to Die

As the dust settled, and Aaron looked up to the crackling sky, then to J’kayden, he smiled. “So, just how many chances do I have at this?”

“As many as you need,” J’kayden said.

That was all the reassurance Aaron needed to throw himself against this new obstacle.

He eyed the assistants as they descended upon him. They were incredibly strong, and he couldn’t even inspect them. But that only served to excite him even further.

“Well, good thing I’ve got some Skills to test.”

His first attempt was rather straightforward. He wanted to test his new Skill, and so, he started by firing his [ Bombardier Fist ] from afar.

That attempt was short-lived. He hadn’t put too much thought into it, and the moment he attacked his enemy, they shot forward with so much speed they’d have made the simian reaver look slow.

He couldn’t see fate, and he hadn’t prepared for the attack, and the moment they reached him, his entrails were splattered across the ground.

However, no death was without reward. It was then that Aaron confirmed that he couldn’t resurrect in this battle. Whatever J’kayden was doing, it seemed to trigger on his death. He tested this theory over his next couple of deaths, and confirmed that no matter how fast he tried to activate his aether, it wasn’t fast enough to intercept the time rewind.

He couldn’t exactly complain. J’kayden’s time meddling gave him not just a chance to win this seemingly impossible fight, but an opportunity to test out his newly evolved Class. Though it would have been nice if it had allowed him to resurrect until he ran out of aether to make the most of each attempt.

“Alright, alright. Now that we’ve got that figured out, let’s have some fun,” Aaron muttered as he limbered up.

But by fun, what he really meant was to test out a bunch of Skills while dying many gruesome deaths. He was an odd man.

Wanting to get a better handle on [ Bombardier Fist ], he kept testing the new Skill. Drawing energy into it and firing it at his enemies. There was no doubt that the explosion was bigger, the more energy he put into the attack.

There was a problem, though. He was, ultimately, a melee combatant. It's what he knew, and it was what he was good at. His stats were high enough to make a decent ranged combatant, but that wasn’t what he had been training to do ever since the integration and meeting Yendal.

There needed to be a way around this, one that didn’t include not using his new, and obviously powerful attack.

His attempts started to flick by, and before long, he had thrown himself at them over a dozen times, not once landing properly with his explosive fist.

This was starting to get frustrating. And so, he decided it was about time he started to think outside the box.

After resurrecting, he could stuff his mouth as quickly as possible, gaining some size before the fight without worrying about running low on food. This allowed him to test out how much power he could push into his fist, making it expand until he looked more like a mallet at the end of his forearm. And it worked. The explosive power it contained when fully charged was nothing short of incredible.

But it wasn’t winning this fight.

On his fifteenth attempt, he created an explosion that lit up the sky and shook the ground. It was a real pity that it missed. Still, it was nice to know just how much power he could flood into an attack if necessary.

If he were able to land multiple attacks on the incredibly fast assistants, he figured that he might actually be able to finish them. Perhaps a [ Soul Shattering Strike ] followed up by his [ Bombardier Fist ] would be all it would take.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible unless he changed something.

And he had just the idea of where to start. He hadn’t really had too much time to play around with his second newest Skill, and he was excited to find out just how he could bend [ Soul, Body, and Mind ] to his needs.

And while it was a passive Skill, he knew that to truly test its capabilities, he needed to push himself into the spirit plane.

It turned out to be quite an interesting twist on fighting over the next few attempts. Once in the spirit plane, he was far less vulnerable to physical attacks; however, despite the fact that he had dragged his body along for the ride, his ability to access regular energy types was still limited.

This meant that when in the spirit plane, he was essentially restricting himself to the use of aether. And for someone with such stupidly abundant energy resources as himself, that was rather limiting. Nonetheless, being able to phase straight through physical attacks, and then land his own, was without a doubt, useful.

This led him to his next thought.

How can I use this to make [ Spectral Rush ] stronger?

Hanging out in the spirit plane had its uses, but it wasn’t an ace that could solve all problems. Not only was it a little clunky, but the limitations it had made him doubt its direct usefulness in combat. However, he already had Skills that utilized the spirit plane, and if they could be used to enhance one another, then perhaps that was the path forward.

Aaron activated [ Spectral Rush ] several times in a row during his next attempt. The Skill itself wasn’t any different off the bat. But Aaron had never been someone to only use his Skills with their off-the-shelf capabilities.

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But since he was unsure how exactly he would make use of this Skill, he decided to just spam [ Spectral Rush ] like crazy, and hope for the best.

This did make him harder to kill, for a moment. But without an offense to go with it, his enemy quickly pieced him apart, regardless of how many times he phased through the battlefield.

The reality was that these assistants were no joke, and a few cheap tricks weren’t going to trip them up. Nonetheless, he was a stubborn bastard, and he tried this at least a dozen times before getting frustrated and using a full-powered pulse energy from his core.

He had been passively using more energy from his core since evolving his Class, and he could feel the difference. But he was still low D-grade, and that meant he couldn’t yet make the most of the new core without burden.

And so when he pulled a full-powered pulse of energy, which had actually allowed him to keep up with the assistants for several seconds, he felt the cracks.

Worried about what might happen, he restrained himself from using it again, and shortly after, the assistants got the upperhand, and killed him.

Several seconds later, he was once more looking across at J’kayden and the stormy clouds above. But he also felt a slight weakness. It wasn’t enough to get too concerned over, but he knew to be careful. Straining his soul had been a bad idea; all he needed was time to beat these guys, and weakening his soul was probably the only way he truly failed.

Looks like I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way, Aaron cracked his neck.

As he watched the assistants descending again, he got a rush of energy. It was kind of refreshing to fight like this. It was how Yendal would have wanted it, without all of his gimmicks. And while he was determined to be his own man, he had to admit that at the end of the day, raw skill was superior to anything else and was the ultimate deciding factor in most of his battles.

But he also knew that he had to mix things up. And so, he activated [ Gorgon’s Soul Vortex ], slowing time down enough that he could mentally keep up with the assistants.

Unfortunately, physically, he was still far too slow for them. But this was Aaron Dober, and he had ascended beyond just the physical realm, and he was going to use every ounce of his spiritual side to overcome this towering obstacle.

He watched as a blinding array of attacks came for him, and with care, he activated [ Spectral Rush ] at the last moment, and phasing straight through a head-on attack.

To an onlooker, it might have seemed like he was just mindlessly bashing his head against the wall. But all that countless spamming of [ Spectral Rush ] had counted for something, and as he phased through, he passed partially out of the spiritual realm.

He had less than a second, as the two other assistants were charging at his sides, and he struck with his fist that had remained in the spirit plane, and the moment it passed through the assistant’s chest, it returned to the physical.

He had only just learned such control, and he was going to make the most of it. With his fist embedded in the assistant's chest, he activated [ Bombardier Fist ].

The truth was, no amount of toughness could prepare somebody for an explosive going off inside their chest cavity, and just like that, the incredibly powerful assistant exploded like meat confetti.

Unfortunately, the remaining assistants slammed into him from both sides, oozing out his insides like a toasted cheese in a sandwich press.

But a little pain wasn’t enough to wipe the smirk off his face when he resurrected.

“Not bad,” he muttered to himself. “I think I like this new Skill.”

This was an acceptable method for using his [ Bombardier Fist ] in melee range.

Still, as strong as his new attack was, he still needed to figure out how on earth he was going to keep up with the ridiculous speed of the three powerful assistants.

Also, even though he could phase through physical attacks, mana based attacks, and no doubt aether based ones, could still harm him in the spirit plane.

And so, as the fight continued over another dozen attempts, Aaron entered his flow state, heavily relying on [ Spectral Rush ], as his ability to phase between spirit and physical increased further and further. And it became increasingly easy to partially dip his body into the spirit plane.

Being able to turn his chest into spirit form, while keeping his fists physical and punishing his enemies, was a considerable improvement. And while he still barely lasted a second or two, this feat was gradually getting better and better.

Attacks flew back and forth, thousands of strikes every few seconds, and he phased in and out of the physical. It wasn’t just that, either. He was working it into his feints, and fighting Aaron was becoming an increasingly confusing affair.

As his deaths mounted up, his ability to survive the onslaught gradually improved, moving from two seconds to three, four, five, and six, and so on.

That all said, he had died over sixty times just to achieve that. But if there were one person in the multiverse who could make the most of this situation, it was Aaron Dober.

And he began to laugh manically as he passed from one attempt to the other, not losing a second. And with each attempt, he looked increasingly insane as he entered his trance state, and his eyes filled with white.

Once more, he embraced madness. Perhaps it was a precondition. An aspect required for anyone faced with as much pain and suffering as he was. For it was no easy task to embrace dying, and the pain that came with it. And he did it with a smile, dying literally dozens of times just to increase the time he could survive the onslaught by a single second.

Luckily, that was exactly who he was, and he met the challenge head on with an ever wider smile after each attempt.

And he wasn’t the only one. J’kayden too looked all too pleased with himself. They almost looked like two sides of the same coin. The fate seeing old man seemed increasingly gleeful after each attempt, despite the fact that to onlooking eyes, Aaron seemed very far from overcoming this incredible wall he was faced against.

And over the following attempts, he turned into a blur of spiritual energy, phasing in and out of reality at an ever faster speed every time he attempted the fight.

Fists and kicks flew through him, met by his own counters, and occasionally, a well-placed explosive.

Guts and gore blasted across the battlefield as the spectacle grew increasingly fierce with each attempt.

But the assistants also had extra cards up their sleeves, and he realized that whenever he managed to kill one of them, beams of light shot down from above, encapsulating the two surviving assistants, and boosting them with additional power.

He wasn’t sure if this was the actual System or something else, but he knew that he was going to have to dig deeper than ever to overcome it.

Luckily, he also felt something within himself. Like he was growing closer to something. A realization, perhaps. Or a truth. And it drove him wild with excitement.

Bits of body flew as he slammed into the impossible battle, a sense of something important nearing.

That’s it, I’m almost there!

His spiritual side was so close. It had become like an extension of himself, and he found himself phasing through attacks without even thinking about it, making it impossibly hard to hit him with pure physical damage.

Still, between the three of them and the additional power that energized the assistants, he realized that he might just have to push beyond even that.

What an enjoyable start to this dungeon, he thought.