Chapter 228: Triple Pounce—True Form!
Damien let out a choked grunt, his knees visibly buckling as the weight doubled.
Several students who had reached the base immediately hit the dirt, their foreheads slamming into the rock under the sudden, brutal spike in downward force.
Ahead, Emerald had already begun climbing. She moved like a spider, jamming her slender fingers into hairline fractures in the obsidian, her lithe body snapping upward with rhythmic, explosive pull-ups.
Nicholas was right beneath her, using broad, sweeping leaps from ledge to ledge, relying on momentum so the weight wouldn’t have time to crush him against a single hold.
Creed strapped his dimensional spear securely across his back, securing the leather harness across his chest.
He grabbed the first jagged outcropping. The stone was slick with freezing condensation.
Pull.
His lats flared, his knuckles turning white as he hoisted his frame up the rock face.
Ten meters. Twenty meters. Thirty meters.
CLINK.
Eighty kilograms!
Boom!
The air was violently driven from Creed’s lungs. The collar sank into the meat of his trapezius muscles. It felt as if a full-grown, armored man had suddenly dropped onto his neck from a second-story window.
Beneath him, the ranks were being decimated.
"Shit! Release the collar!" someone screamed from below. A student had lost his grip, slipping twenty feet before a safety drone caught him by the waist, his collar flashing bright red to signal disqualification.
Creed ignored the screaming.
His vision narrowed to the grey stone inches from his nose. His forearms burned, the lactic acid pooling like boiling oil.
His raw physical stats kept his bones from snapping, but pure strength wasn’t enough anymore. The sheer physics of the climb were working against them.
CLINK.
One hundred and sixty kilograms.
At fifty meters high, the mountain became a butcher’s block.
Damien Blackthorne let out an animalistic roar. Veins bulged across his forehead like thick earthworms.
Showing why he was considered a Tier 1 family genius, he abandoned standard technique entirely.
Using sheer, terrifying willpower, he dug his bare, bloody fingers straight into solid rock, tearing chunks of stone out of the cliffside as he dragged his massive frame upward through pure, unadulterated brute force.
Emerald was slowing down. Her light, agile frame, which had danced across the mud, was now a severe disadvantage.
She didn’t possess the raw muscle mass to easily heave a hundred and sixty kilograms of artificial weight.
Her slender arms were trembling violently, her teeth clenched so hard blood trickled from the corner of her lip.
Nicholas, meanwhile, had reached an impasse. Directly above them hung the Widow’s Lip—a brutal, three-meter horizontal stone roof that jutted out from the cliff face, forcing climbers to hang completely horizontal over the abyss to bypass it.
Nicholas hung from two fingers on a narrow crimp, his silver hair plastered to his pale face with sweat.
His analytical gaze flicked rapidly across the ceiling. "There are no footholds," Nicholas muttered, his voice cracking from strain. "The torque required to swing past that lip with this weight will rip shoulder tendons from their sockets."
"Then don’t hang, Grey," Creed’s voice rasped from directly below him.
Nicholas looked down, his eyes wide.
Creed climbed onto the narrow ledge beside him.
Creed’s uniform was soaked through, the black headband dripping sweat into his eyes. The skin around his neck where the collar rested was bruised purple, bleeding from the intense friction.
Yet, as Creed looked up at the ceiling, there was no fear in his eyes. There was only a terrifying, feral focus.
CLINK.
Three hundred and twenty kilograms!
Bam!
The sound was like a death knell.
The weight crashed down. Creed’s knees slammed into the stone ledge with a sickening crack.
Nicholas dropped to both hands, gasping for air like a fish thrown onto dry land, his ribs heaving frantically. Damien, ten meters to their left, was pinned flat against a slab of rock, screaming curses as his fingers slowly slipped from a chalky hold.
Over seven hundred pounds of localized, crushing gravity bearing down solely on their upper spines.
Even Creed’s Peak Stage 5 Physique groaned under the load. His spine felt like an accordion being crushed under a steamroller. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps.
’I can’t use Force to push. I can’t use Aura to reinforce my tendons. I can’t summon Lilith to pull me up.’
Creed looked at his trembling, bloodied hands.
’So what?’
In his mind, the memory of the Old Monk flashed with sudden, blinding clarity. Sitting before baskets of blue yarn, forcing his clumsy, violent energy into liquid threads. Energy Knitting.
The lesson wasn’t about the thread. It was about alignment. It was about finding the exact vector of force where opposing pressures canceled each other out.
You don’t fight the mountain with brute strength; you become part of its geometry.
Creed didn’t look at the summit. He unclipped his dimensional spear from his back.
Nicholas stared at him in utter curiosity. "Walden... just what are you doing?"
"I told you," Creed hissed through clenched teeth, his eyes burning with an unholy blue light. "I won’t drop my spear."
Creed didn’t reach for a handhold on the overhang. He wedged the hardened shaft of his black-and-gold spear horizontally into a deep, natural fissure in the rock ledge beneath them.
He used it as a fulcrum.
Stepping onto the spear shaft with both feet, Creed coiled his body downward, collapsing his frame into an extreme, agonizing crouch.
Three hundred and twenty kilograms pressed down on his thighs, his quad muscles tearing microscopically, screaming in protest.
"He’s insane," Damien choked out from the rock face, staring with bloodshot eyes. "He’s going to snap his own femur!"
Creed ignored him.
He didn’t have his Wings of Freedom art. But he had the concept. He had spent hours meditating on the absolute refusal to be bound by chains, gravity, or limits.
He breathed in, centering his entire body’s mass over the spear shaft.
Triple Pounce—True Form!
Without a drop of Aura, Creed unleashed the pure, biomechanical kinetic spring of his legs!
BOOM!