Chapter 1467: Dancing to the Beat
After several minutes of contentious fighting, Arad finally found himself managing to match Core’s fighting style and speed. But even with that, it was extremely hard to keep up with Core’s weird moves.
While Core seemed to be able to morph his body effortlessly, Arad, on the other hand, struggled to maintain his sense of self while constantly changing shape.
You’d think that only making his limbs longer wouldn’t affect his mind, but it did, and it had quite the impact. His mind was already used to piloting either a draconic body or a humanoid shape; anything outside that range was quite hard to get used to on the fly.
To add to Arad’s problem, he was forced to be in his void form to be able to match Core’s moves, which only increased the stress on his mind.
But even through all of the mental load, Arad had still managed to hold his own against Core’s dance and masterfully dodged most of the attacks while giving several punches of his own.
Arad then realised that just making his body extremely flexible wasn’t enough; he needed to extend his senses as well. Core seemed to have a way to see through the walls and ground, which allowed him to perfectly control his hands and legs even when they were out of his field of vision. In fact, Arad sometimes found it harder to deal with Core’s punches when Core himself wasn’t looking, because he couldn’t see Core’s eyes and predict his moves.
To compensate for his lack of senses, Arad used his elemental expansion to engulf the area in his magic and perceive the world in that way. That seemed to work, but Arad knew it wasn’t enough. Just because Core was holding back and not move at the speed of light, which he proved that he can do, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. The speed of mana was capped at a third of the speed of light, which meant that perceiving something with magic was effectively three times slower than just seeing it.
That lag is usually unnoticeable in most fights, but Arad was already feeling it here. Core was intentionally slowing down and holding his attacks to throw Arad’s parries and counters out, which only added another layer to their convoluted dance.
Arad wasn’t going to lose, so he started doing the same and tried to throw Core off by changing his speed with each attack, and he even tried to mix in some void steps and time slow spell in his moves, which gave him an advantage for a while.
Core wasn’t struggling that much to keep up with Arad, but he was slowly finding it harder and harder to adjust himself to Arad’s rapid learning speed without releasing all of his power at once.
Core wasn’t here to win or prove anything; he just needed Arad to learn his dance and understand it, and he was trying to achieve that in the fastest way possible, putting Arad in a fight that forced him to learn.
Core was quite thrilled to meet his grandfather for the first time in several thousand years. He would’ve loved to sit and talk with him about everything that had happened, catch up, but neither of them was that lucky to have such a luxury. Especially Core.