PoV Chris
"Are you sure of this?" Kane asked while getting into his weird stance.
When he's about to use his lightning to make a quick leap, he usually gets down on all fours in a predator-like stance rather than a runner-like stance.
"I got rusty, so go a bit easy on me; the kids will also be able to use this as a learning experience."
"Will they?"
"Have a bit of trust in their potential; they're cursed just like us." I said while placing my hand on my chest.
"Anyway, do you really need to start this practice with lightning?"
"Don't worry."
'I should probably close the distance to avoid letting him get too much speed.'
He probably guessed what I was thinking, and as soon as I made the first sneaky step to get closer, he jumped using a combination of his empowered body and the flash fire technique.
'Ok, first let's see how much I can handle without slowing time.'
I created a special water coating around my hands and blocked his flying knee with it. He then applied the flash fire on his knee to rotate mid-hair, trying to deliver a fast spinning kick from above. I backstepped to avoid getting hit, and he also took his distance as soon as he landed.
'He probably wanted to show them how to think outside the box.'
We had set up a bunch of cameras around us that were live streaming our spar to Nina and John.
He put his hands on the ground, and then once he got back up, the earth around him started floating. It then formed a serpentine figure and kept following the movements of his right hand.
With a big swing of his arm, he threw that dirt at me.
'Another cheap gimmick, that is just a petty distraction; the real attack usually comes from...'
I jumped and then used the flash fire on the floating dirt. He immediately created a thick wall of ice between us, so I put a little more aura to boost me towards the left side, and once I surpassed the wall, I noticed that Kane was no longer there.
'That's right, beneath.'
Many giant spikes appeared, trying to impale me. I managed to use the flash fire to dodge them, but the barrage of attacks was never ending. First he tried to impale me, then he started shooting many rocks at me as fast as projectiles, and then the serpentine figures appeared again. As soon as my feet touched the ground, they sank in, and he quickly tried to bury me alive.
'Your specialty is not earth; why are you hiding like a fucking mole now?'
I started charging the aura in my hands. When four pillars appeared around me, I was about to freeze the entire ground around me. From each pillar, many spikes appeared again, so I decided to use my aura to freeze them instead.
Then I started to feel the area around me heat up, so I jumped as high as I could, and surely enough, he blew up those four pillars.
Then three snakes appeared from the ground and started flying towards me.
'Fine if you want to play like this, then I'll also start using aura.'
I launched myself towards the ground with an explosion while also preparing the frost aura in my hands. He responded by creating a massive pillar to push me away, I used the wind aura to evade it, but just as I managed to barely dodge the pillar, a leg came out of it, hitting me in the stomach.
'I should've frozen the pillar instead of dodging it, dammit!'
After his leg had sunk a couple of centimeters deep inside my stomach, he created an explosion that separated us.
He came out of that pillar, and as soon as he came out, all the other flying pieces of earth fell down.
"Are you tired of hiding all the time?" I asked, perhaps a little too confidently, given what he said next.
"Phase 2."
I was still in pain from the kick he delivered earlier, and I was already about to call it quits when Kane changed stances; this time he took a more orthodox stance.
Kane this time was exuding flames directly from his body; he was not using the flash fire anymore.
He looked like one of those angry demons I often saw in the paintings in my house.
He maximized the output of the flames and created three human figures made out of flames.
'So you're going to use the four-style heavenly formation for phase two.'
The name of the technique sounds so pretentious, but that is because it was invented by the sword emperor himself. It is a technique that creates clones of fire that can utilize one of the following elements: wind, ground, or water. It's a technique that not many can use due to the amount of concentration it requires, and it's not that practical to use in a normal battle.
It was one of the other ways the sword emperor flexed his absurd concentration skills as well as his control over aura.
'Ideally the formation requires him to surround me; let's see if you're capable of that.'
So I used my time ability to rewind my body to heal the wound.
He made the clones charge first.
'No way in hell I'm fighting a 4 vs. 1. You'll have to think of something else to get me.'
As I was about to propel myself in the air, one of the clones started making a dome of ice around us.
As soon as my feet left the dragons, one of the copies decided to also start flying towards me, while the other instead put its hands on the ground and started to manipulate the ground around it. Kane was nowhere to be seen.
I had no time to think about him because his copy was already in my striking range.
"You think this useless gimmick will work on me?" I said this as I landed a roundhouse kick on the clone's head.
The clone then grabbed my leg and threw me back to the ground. The fall didn't hurt, but it helped him gain the advantage he needed; now the dome was complete and I had nowhere to escape. If I tried to break free from the arena, I would most likely fail, as my aura is weaker than Kane's.
The ground around me turned into sand and started wrapping itself around my wrists and ankles.
"No you don't!" I said this while freezing the part that was directly in contact with my wrist and then brute-forcing my way out of it.
By the time I freed myself, the flying clone fell on me, hitting me directly in the stomach with a kick.
'Okay, I'll admit, this situation probably needs a reset or else I'm just going to be on the receiving end of the beating.'
So I started rewinding time till the moment Kane said, "Phase two!"
'Attempt #2 let's go.'
I already saw what would've happened if I remained on the defensive, so this time I would've been the one attacking.
I charged directly at him while he was still forming the clones; it took him a while to notice, and by the time he noticed I was there, I had already landed the first blow, a right uppercut directly to the chin.
I tried to use the flash fire to quickly reposition myself to his right side since I saw him trying to throw a left counter, but I was abruptly stopped midway through the process because he had grabbed my leg.
'No way, but that was a direct hit!'
He lifted my body, ready to slam it as hard as he could into the ground, and I retaliated by materializing as many ice blades as I could and attempting to cut off his arm, but the flames he exuded earlier covered his arm and shielded him from my attack.
'The flash fire was a mistake. Time for reset # 2'
And so, moments before my head hit the ground, I started rewinding once more.
"Two times already?" He said smiling, this time he wasn't exuding the fire aura
I probably had a confused look on my face, and he pointed at my left shoulder.
"Every time you reset, you have this weird flinch at your left shoulder; this is the second time you did it."
'Really?'
I noticed his eyes changing from dark brown to a golden light at that moment.
"Wait, you still haven't recovered from back-"
In a flash, he managed to teleport himself in front of me and land a powerful liver shot that paralyzed me completely. I fell down in one hit and immediately turned to my right side to avoid him stomping on my liver.
As I predicted, he immediately started stomping on me with enough force to crack my ribs, so I rewinded time once more.
'Fuck you, man, you could've gone a bit easy on me there.'
A satisfied smugness appeared on his face as he took a completely relaxed position.
"Your turn." He said while stretching his neck.
"What?"
"You either attack now or we'll go straight to phase three." he repeated, creating some electric sparks around his body.
"Don't go down on me then." Before slowing down time, I said.
This wasn't something I enjoyed doing because I lose all sense of pain while doing it; I'm not sure what causes this, but I haven't been able to fix it, which frequently led to situations where I almost died because I couldn't feel the amount of damage my body was sustaining.
He activated the golden eye again. The full name of that technique doesn't exist, as it was created by Kane, who never bothered giving it a name. In its complete form, it uses a combination of four different types of energy. It's not something that the current Kane can hold, as he lacks one of the four fundamentals to make that technique complete.
It uses both the mana circuits to boost the elasticity and mana to improve the durability of the skin; whatever excess mana it produces becomes fuel for his aura enhancements. Without the draconic energy, this process only ends up creating clogs of aura in his body, leading to severe internal injuries.
I also had to start enhancing my body, as it wasn't moving as fast as I wanted.
'Since it's my time to attack, I might as well show something worthy of the fourth strongest.'
Firstly, I started running circles around Kane, then I started throwing some fireballs at him, to test him out a bit.
He easily blocked them with the backs of his hands.While I was running in circles, I started freezing the ground beneath us.
I also started to form some weapons made out of ice aura. I made them float around me while I was preparing the next attack. I started preparing the fire aura.
Then I finally charged at him, throwing all the flying weapons at once (Hammer, spear, greatsword, trident, and an alberd). As a response, he took a deep breath, then opened his mouth, and whatever he did caused a shockwave to hit me and all of my weapons.
'What was that?'
He then began his attack.
He launched a bunch of fireballs, and I made the flying weapon intercept them. When the fire balls came into contact with my aura weapons, they began to shrink before exploding.
The first thing I did immediately after was check the state of the weapons by pulling them back.
Apart from the weapon, every other weapon was still perfectly fine.
When a massive ice blade flew towards me, it was too large to intercept with my weapons, so I decided to jump over it.
I tried to search for Kane, but he had disappeared yet again.
Human-like figures made out of dirt appeared from the ground and threw flame chains at me. I dodged them with ease, only to find Kane's hand protruding from my chest.
'Did you really manage to make a clean hole through my body without the slightest hint of hesitation? I thought we were friends.'
I rewinded time once more.
"Ok I think we're done here. This is like the fourth time you reset, maybe even more. At this point, we know what's the most you can handle in your current state."
"What? No I can definitely do more."
"Wanna try phase 3?"
"Give me the best you got."
"One blow, simply dodge or tank it; if you can take it without needing a reset, we can try to figure out why phase 2 is so difficult for you."
"What?"
He immediately started emitting many electric sparks around his body, and slowly he started to shift all the energy towards his hands.
"Here it comes!" He shouted moments before he attacked.
It's his favorite attack to use, a technique his father invented and passed down to him. Once he claps the hands charged with that much aura, it will disperse in the environment, hitting everything around him in a radius of 2 meters and unleashing a storm of lightning in a cone in front of him.
To dodge, I had to stop time, and once time was stopped, I simply walked behind him, outside his range of effectiveness.
The intention was to dodge the first ranged attack and block the second. What I didn't take into account was the bear-like strength Kane has.
I dodged the first lightning strike, and immediately after, Kane's body teletransported to one of the ends of a nearby spark, his leg in front of my face, ready to land a devastating spinning high kick at lightning speed.
I used every method I knew to boost my arms' durability and used it to block his kick. Time moved as slowly as my ability allowed, so I had all the time in the world to watch his blow bend my arms in an unnatural way, as if they weren't even there in the first place.
Getting hit by that in the face would've probably killed me on the spot, so I reset the time once more.
"You've gotten pretty weak in the last few years... no... you just reverted to your old ways." He said this while getting into another fighting stance.
"What do you mean?" I asked while ignoring him.
"You're too reliant on your time ability; as a hunter, your ability to gather aura is worse than a beginner, and although you are pretty good at enhancing your body, that alone isn't enough in most fights." He said this while making flowers out of his fire aura all over his body.
'I don't like where this is going.'
"You should probably return under me; I'll make sure to teach you well one more time."
"I'll gladly pass."