Monarch of Profound Toxin

Chapter 336 - 336: All In

Eik coughed as blood poured from his mouth.What the fuck was this supposed to be? Why was he bleeding?

He felt dizzy. Light-headed. It was honestly difficult to tell what had just happened but Chop had suddenly appeared in his range, and then, a fragment of a moment later, his vision had gone pitch black, if only for a split second.

And now his stomach was all bloody.

Well, any idiot could tell what had happened. He had been cut by Chop, but… how? At the time, True Toxic Harmony had been active.

Despite what he had expected before, X-rank didn't actually turn him into a person with a body made of Profound Toxin, which was a fact that he was rather happy about. The prospect of losing his corporeal humanity had honestly filled him with malaise and apprehension.

No, the transformation still only happened when True Toxic Harmony had been triggered. So why the hell was he bleeding? There was absolutely no doubt that it had been active.

And by the way, wasn't this supposed to be a fucking sparring match?

It stuttered a bit during reactivation, but the ability came back online without a problem as Panacean Quintessence flowed through and across his body. The blood stopped flowing pretty quickly, but the damage was done. At something as far above common mortality as X-rank, it wasn't necessarily the individual injury that decided the fight.

Even most injuries that should have been fatal could be recovered from in a matter of moments. But both the infliction of harm and the subsequent healing drained one's energy. Even at X-rank, action required energy.

And without action there was no survival.

This blow hadn't just been some random attack. It had been deliberate and prepared, and it had hit like an absolute truck. He had to get away and regain his advantage.

Eyes leveled on Chop's, Eik crouched and released more mist. Above, the concealing haze that had been scattered by the Pristine Blade Saint churned thickly, obscuring the sky completely. The dispersion had only been a temporary setback for the willful substance.

Seeing the mist descend again at speed while a rapidly recovering Eik was preparing to disappear once more, Chop rushed back into action, his already prepared sword coming around for another decisive cut.

"Don't tell me you think I', just going to let you esca—"

Chop was abruptly interrupted as a pillar of blue, kilometers around, crushed him into the earth. Legging it in the opposite direction, Eik cackled as a tidal wave of soil, rock, and other debris pursued him.

"You're not the only one with a trick or two up your sleeve, you wrinkly, old raccoon!" he shouted although it was doubtful that Chop could hear him at the moment. By now, he would probably be at least a few hundred meters inside the ground and still continuing downward. "You didn't say we couldn't get help from our pets, and I just so happened to have forgotten to walk Spaghetti Jones today!"

As Spaghetti Jones pummeled Chop down and down, Eik made sure the serpent was continuously melting and reforming the tip of his snout so the toxin could invade the swordsman's system while he was distracted by the onslaught.

Even the smallest amount of extra poison could be the factor that turned the tide in his favor. Normally, Profound Toxin would naturally permeate the body but Eik had ordered it to stay just inside the wound to prevent it from healing and closing up.

It would not be long before Chop regained his bearings, however.

Due to the mist still filling the air above them, Spaghetti Jones had been able to conceal both his aura signature and his titanic size within just long enough to take Chop by surprise. But they hadn't won yet.

Without the miasma in the way, Eik could finally track Chop through his infection. So when the old X-ranker broke away from the world serpent and started back toward the surface again, Eik rushed into motion in preparation to welcome him.

There would be a little present waiting for him when he broke through.

Back when he had still been an A-ranker, during the fight that had finally brought him to S-rank, he had done something similar against the Brood Mother when she had returned to her burrow.

The difference was in the scale of what he could do now compared to back then.

With a sweep of his arm and a twirl of his fingers, Eik summoned a colossal blob of toxin and dumped it right there on the ground on top of where Chop seemed to be aiming for an exit. However, the swordsman clearly sensed that through the earth somehow, because he immediately corrected his course diagonally and away.

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A mental command moved the blob through the ashy soil, following the mole and began to work its way downward.

When Chop approached the surface, the blob began to send solid spikes of crystal jetting into the ground, both in pursuit of Chop as he drilled his way through the ground but also in an attempt to predict and intercept him in his tracks.

Eik felt one of them connect and deliver a load of toxin into Chop's system before he broke free and rocketed upward in a sudden burst of acceleration. It would appear that he had given up one the evasive maneuvers and was now coming directly for the surface, damned be whatever it was that was waiting for him.

Leaping into the air and hiding in the mist above, Eik ordered the spikes to continue, but any of them that managed to make contact were instantly shattered. Chop was ascending quickly.

The moment he erupted through the earth, he found himself stuck inside the blob. In a moment, it shrunk and tightened around him like an oil barrel at the bottom of the ocean and crushed him in its center as it crystallized into a hyper dense substance.

Almost on instinct, he flowed through the motions to Accelerate the chunk of super potent toxin but just barely got a hold of himself before the blood thirsty side of him triggered the reaction. And that moment of hesitation was all Chop the Blade needed.

Spider web cracks preceded Chop's violent destruction of the crystalline mass, shards flying outward in all directions and creating deep grooves in the ground wherever they impacted. Caught up in his own momentum, Chop sent hundreds of cuts blindly into Eik's mist above, forcing the earthling to dodge a few of them.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, you dastardly piece of shit?" Chop snarled with genuine anger, his razor-sharp eyes scanning the blue haze like a hawk, looking for the slightest hint of Eik's presence. "You're withholding your strength against me? Just how worthless am I to you?"

Another barrage of blade energy penetrated the azure veil, sending it whirling but failing to disperse it meaningfully.

Worthless? Was that the sentiment with which Chop thought Eik had hesitated to Accelerate the crystal prison just moments before? Where was the judgment of worthlessness in the unwillingness to risk the death of an ally and a friend?

"Fight… properly!" the Pristine Blade Saint roared as the blind assault continued with seemingly no sign of ending. "I thought we were friends!"

That was the exact, gosh darned reason why he wasn't trying to kill Chop, for goodness sake! Who would try to kill their friends? It had been clear from the beginning that the two of them had their differences, but Eik hadn't realized just how wildly different they were on a fundamental level.

A person didn't just live for hundreds of years in isolation without losing some of their humanity. Or perhaps, this was just how Chop had always been. Unfortunately, nobody was alive today to tell him whether or not that was the case.

One of Chop's many crescents sliced through Eik's leg before he could avoid it properly, severing it just below the knee. He caught the leg before it could fall down below the boundary of the mist and reveal his position to the other X-ranker.

And with this, Eik was convinced that Chop's charged attack that had struck him in the stomach had possessed special properties that disrupted the use of skills, or something similar, because this time, True Toxic Harmony wasn't disturbed like back then. He lost the leg, but it was a bloodless injury that didn't cause him nearly as much damage as the stomach wound, and Panacean Quintessence was already growing him a new limb.

Chop was serious about this.

But Eik would have been lying if he pretended not to be thirsting for a more authentic taste of X-ranked combat. The primal desire, planted in him by Profound Toxin, had practically been demanding it from the moment their spar had begun. And now, simply by considering it, that part of him seemed to scream ten times louder. It was becoming difficult not to get pulled along.

Actually, now that they were on the topic, why shouldn't they go at it a bit more seriously? For Chop, this might well just be a way for him to sate his hunger for battle—and the Earthling couldn't deny that he felt that same hunger—but for Eik, it really was a way to test himself.

They were rapidly approaching a true fight for their lives. A fight where knowing both his own strengths and his limits was imperative in order to prevent his own death as well as the deaths of others. If he thought about it for a bit, this was an opportunity to get to know his new self that would be foolish to let pass by.

Yeah, definitely. He basically had to fight harder. They were X-rankers, after all. It's not like they would die, right?

Judging by the way the mist flowed around his attacks, Chop felt confident that he was starting to narrow down the possible area where Eik might be concealing himself. It was a matter of time now.

Abruptly, his eyes snapped to a point within that specific area when a sudden, violently ferocious aura pressure erupted like a super volcano.

A bestial grin crept onto his lips as he abandoned the blade volley and leaped into the air with all haste. "That's more like it!" he howled with glee as the Death Star descended like a divine sun from the heavens.

The detonation was immediate and violent—a no holds barred escalation of the fight—just like Chop had asked for. He was giddy with the rush of adrenaline as his foot left the ground in another gigantic leap.

Turning in the air, he held his sword, point down, in front of his body, supporting the flat of the blade with his palm. With a breath, it projected outward in a semi-transparent image, growing to a hundred times its actual size.

When the wave of azure light from the Death Star slammed into the projection, rather than shattering, it withstood the blow as Chop was sent rocketing backward by the destructive force of Eik's skill. And the insane old man was cackling maniacally all the while.

This was exactly what he had been hoping for.

The opportunity to fight to his heart's content for the first time in more than a hundred years.

Numerous kilometers above the impact site, Eik hung freely in the upper layers of the stratosphere, watching the ruinous power of his ability. He, too, felt glee well up in his chest.

This would be something to remember.

The Profound Toxin in his system allowed for precise tracking of the Pristine Blade Saint, since the wave of the Death Star continued to push away the interfering miasma. That meant he could aim perfectly, even without visual contact.

Guided by his hand, a rod of dense crystal more than a kilometer in length began its quiet descend toward the planet below.