Chapter 464: Cool
The man with the pipe looked towards Nero once more. He was crawling on the ground, his ears and eyes bleeding, his body covered in his signature blue flames. This was the worst he’d been wounded since arriving in KMA, yet there was a mad grin on his face.
It was not because he was a masochist - no, Nero was indifferent to pain. He was grinning because this is what let him know the true level of KMA. Simple, hand-to-hand fights without innate abilities or cards was very deceptive about the true combat quality of the cadets. Only in a genuine fight, without anything held back, would he come to know just how much he could improve here, and how skilled the cadets were.
The fact that Nero had been nearly crippled in the very first encounter against that white-gowned girl revealed just how devastatingly lethal her strength was. That lethality reassured him that, indeed, he was in the right place.
When he reached outside the house, he felt tremors in the ground, causing him to quickly look around. He could not hear, but the sight of a massive, red fire in the distance erupting into the dark sky, as well as numerous fights going on, let him know the situation. Well, it was more or less impossible to avoid punishment now.
In that case...
Nero grabbed onto a street light and used its aid to lift himself upright, revealing just how gravely wounded he was. His clothes were covered in blood, meaning that even his extremely durable body had suffered countless ruptures just from the sound of that woman’s screams.
He turned around and looked back at the house, taking mental notes about just how debilitating deafness could be in combat. Unless he laid eyes on a target, he would never know it was coming. Only sight, and the faint tremors in the ground beneath his feet, could let him know what was happening around him.
Within that house, he could sense that his flames were still burning, but they were being weakened at a drastic pace, despite the fact that he kept supplying them with aether. Only a few seconds later, the flames went out entirely. Nero didn’t react - he only waited.
Five seconds, ten, thirty...