Instantly reacting, Leila raised her spear to block the attack, and by doing so, she inadvertently exposed its true location.
"So your weapon is actually here!" Said Lorien teasingly the moment their weapons made contact; to which Leila responded with a counterattack and replied.
"Who knows!"
*Swish*
*Slash*
*Ding*
*Ding*
With their weapons colliding, the two entered high-speed close-range combat.
From an outsider's point of view, all that can be seen is two shadows clashing at incredible speeds with the noise of weapons colliding echoing everywhere.
At first, both of them looked approximately equal with Leila even having a bit of an edge over Lorien despite him having a much higher level of martial arts.
This is mainly because she kept doing tricks and disrupting Lorien's senses, from slightly shifting the true location of the weapon, making it seems shorter than it actually is, delaying the noise of their collision, increasing or decreasing the brightness, or even totally shifting her location.
All of this made it hard for Lorien to fight properly.
In the demon slayer world, Lorien reached the [Extraordinary] level in swordsmanship with his body even responding instinctively to attack and reacting in the most optimal way.
This may be great in normal situations, but now, this is actually a handicap for him, after all, to react, there needs to be an input which may be visual, auditory, tactile, or any other sense.
But what happens if this input is flawed?
Obviously, the output would also be flawed!
And this is exactly what is happening here as Lorien's five senses are telling him something while the reality is an entirely different thing.
It's just that thankfully, this state didn't last long as after figuring this out, Lorien started quickly adapting making those responses much more controlled.
This caused the scales of battle to shift with Lorien gaining more and more advantage.
Moreover, in this battle, Lorien started developing a 'new sense' that he never knew existed before.
This sense is actually linked to the [Reality] part in Lorien's power, and more specifically, it is his 'sense' of Reality.
'To think I'd be forced to actually improve in such a battle, life is really full of variables and unknowns...'
'Really, One may find in the river what he may not be able to find in the sea...'
*Swish*
*Ding*
*Slash*
As the battle continued, Lorien visibly became more and more comfortable as he discarded his normal senses and even no longer relied on his clairvoyance as he now started perceiving 'reality' itself.
After all, even when he used clairvoyance to fight her, he was still finding trouble with it as it only allows him to see a couple of seconds into the future.
And we have to put an emphasis on 'see' here!
By using [Clairvoyance], Lorien observes the world from his future first-person perspective, but no matter what 'period of time it is', he is still watching the world with his own eyes.
Clairvoyance holds the power of [Time] not [Truth] so it can't be used to see through such illusions and deceptions.
So what Lorien has been doing all this time with Clairvoyance is focusing on the position of wounds he'll receive in the future and making a prediction based on that.
And as this may sound, it is very complex and inefficient for battle; It may allow him to be unbeatable, but it still can't make him fight comfortably.
That is at least if he keeps using the same level of physical strength and not using his ability as he is doing now.
Looking back at it, Lorien feels grateful for his choice of handicapping himself in this battle, otherwise, he would not have been put in such a situation and would not have been able to develop this new 'sense'.
Feeling more and more comfortable as his 'senses' expanded and became clearer and clearer, Lorien couldn't help but joke around.
"Your ability is really annoying, you know that right?"
Hearing this, Leila whose situation was becoming worse by the second was pissed off.
'Me? My ability is annoying??'
'Shameless! this guy is completely shameless!!!!!'
'My ability only disrupts and deceives things! but what about you asshole??!!'
'You keep miraculously predicting my attacks which means that you have some sort of ability that allows you to look into the future, and combined with that annoying ability to phase through things it is simply invincible in normal combat!'
'There are also the abilities you haven't used yet like the one you applied on my companions which causes their cursed techniques to become unusable and made them not able to move.'
'God knows how many abilities you have!'
'When colliding I can also feel that you are restricting your physical strength to fight me! is bullying a girl so enjoyable to you?'
The more she thought about it, the angrier Leila became, she wanted to scream at him and make his shamelessness known to the world, it's just that it's a pity she couldn't speak now as she is too busy defending herself.
This continued for a while until Lorien felt completely comfortable with this new sense and got fully used to it.
'I can now freely use it in combat, I just need to make it instinctive later.'
'Oh! there is also the need to make my swordsmanship and martial arts react based on it, not on normal senses, those are easy to deceive.'
'Tsk, some new thing to do, they never end do they.'
Even though Lorien was thinking so, one couldn't see any negative emotions on his face, rather, the smile that silently appeared on his countenance revealed his real feelings.
It's just that this smile was perceived as a mocking smile by Leila who was currently battling him.
'Asshole! You are even mocking me now!'
But just then, as she was internally ranting, something happened that almost caused her to curse out loud.
"Your ability is truly annoying, but I have to admit that it is truly useful!"
Saying this, a wicked smile appeared on Lorien's face as he then declared.
"I'll be taking it!"
---Note---
You can find the Next Chapter '121' free on - P a t r e o n - Go check it out there!
---Author---
P a t r e o n . c o m /AuthorHoussem (Support me there and get to read up to 15 advanced chapters or more)
You can also find me now by simply typing: 'Houssem'