Chương 423: Chapter 411 - After the Edge Beyond Perfection

Alonso leaned back just enough for the chained pendant to rip past his throat, the iron weight shrieking as it carved through a stone pillar behind him. BAM! The impact shattered masonry into a spray of fragments that rattled across the courtyard. His eyes were closed. Across from him, the Ashen Abbott stood with robes snapping in violent arcs, three heavy pendants uncoiling from beneath layered sleeves.

Each chain expanded and retracted mid-flight, thick iron links flexing with unnatural elasticity as Will pressure rolled outward in suffocating waves that fractured tiles beneath their feet. Another pendant shot forward. Alonso shifted half a step to the side, spine angling just enough for the iron mass to graze past his jaw and pulverise a stone lantern in an eruption of sparks and dust.

A second chain swept low toward his knees while a third curved inward from above, their timing staggered to trap him between trajectories. He lifted his heel, rotated his hips, and let the first skim beneath him. His right blade rose in a smooth arc, edge kissing the second chain at precisely the point of expansion, redirecting its mass into the descending third. Iron collided midair with a concussive clang that split the courtyard floor and sent fractures racing outward like lightning through stone.

The Abbott stepped forward, closing distance with startling speed as the pendants retracted and shortened, transforming into weighted extensions of his arms. His foot struck the ground and the courtyard buckled, dust spiralling upward as a knee drove toward Alonso's ribs and a chained elbow spun toward his temple, Will pressure compressing the air around each strike.

Alonso flowed around the sequence with minimal motion, one blade tilting to deflect the elbow's arc while his shoulder rolled past the knee by a hair's breadth. The Abbot's palm thrust slammed against crossed steel, the force sending Alonso sliding back several metres, twin grooves carved beneath his boots. Alonso steadied himself, exhaled, and withdrew sound from his perception. The world fell silent. The next assault came in layered arcs.

Four pendants expanded simultaneously, their shadows sweeping through dust-filled air as the Abbott advanced with fluid martial precision. Without sight or sound to anchor him, Alonso read pressure through the skin of his body, shifting inches at a time so that iron passed close enough to stir his hair yet failed to touch flesh.

He stepped inside one expanding arc before it reached full mass, pivoted on his heel, and drove his elbow into the Abbott's ribs with a controlled burst that dented reinforced muscle beneath cloth. Chains snapped upward like rising pillars. Alonso sprang lightly and crossed both blades midair, spinning once to guide two pendants into each other while kicking a third downward so its weight shattered the courtyard at the Abbott's feet.

He landed in a low stance as Will pressure surged again, thick and oppressive, bending the air itself into a crushing tide. Then he removed EM perception. Sight gone. Sound gone. Waves gone. Only contact and Will remained. Five pendants launched in overlapping spirals, expanding and contracting in erratic pulses designed to overwhelm instinct. The Abbott blurred between them, strikes interwoven with chained arcs so seamlessly that iron and limb became one relentless storm.

Alonso shifted through it with economy of motion, predicting entire sequences before the first link reached full extension. His left blade rose to guide one chain across his shoulder line while his body rotated beneath a second. His foot caught a third mid-swing and redirected its momentum into a fourth, iron shrieking as it tore through a courtyard wall. Dust swallowed both fighters.

Within the storm, Alonso stepped into the pocket between two converging weights and used their expanding force to vault upward, flipping over the Abbott's shoulder and striking the back of his neck with a descending heel. The impact cracked stone and sent debris raining outward in concentric rings. The Abbott roared and unleashed every chain at once, iron masses swelling into boulder-sized pendants that crashed inward from all directions like collapsing towers. Alonso inhaled. The world sharpened.

All motion slowed in his perception. He vanished from the convergence point and reappeared within the narrowing lattice of chains, blades flashing in a controlled storm of precision. Cuts landed at the tension nodes along each link, severing the expansion points so the massive weights lost cohesion and collapsed around him in fractured heaps of iron. Silence followed, broken only by settling rubble and the heavy thuds of iron crashing into the ground.

Alonso stood behind the Ashen Abbott, one blade resting lightly against the back of his neck while the other hovered near the chain-bearing wrist. The courtyard lay in ruins, walls split open, tiles cratered, pillars reduced to jagged stumps. He withdrew both blades and stepped back, breath steady, pulse calm. As he moved, fourteen straight, thin lines remained carved behind the Abbott's neck. Fourteen clean spars. Fourteen victories etched into flesh. Alonso sighed as he opened his eyes.

The creature roared once more and turned toward him. Its form blurred, Will flaring as every remaining chain shot forward at supersonic speed, iron shrieking through torn air. Alonso did not move. He did not even look at it. A heartbeat later, just as the Abbott surged within striking range, its body split apart. Invisible blades carved through it in a single, decisive sequence, skull severed into fragments, torso divided, chains crashing uselessly to the ground.

Before the remnants could stain his coat, they dissolved into fleeting motes, leaving only orbs and scattered gear clattering against broken stone. Alonso stood in silence, letting the moment settle into him. There were only so many places and opponents that could truly threaten his life right now. Some existed within the mid-tier Dungeons, yet even those came with limits: a 14-day cooldown between entries, and the Dungeons themselves scattered across vast distances, often a day or two apart.

Every encounter had to count. So he had devised a method. He would handicap himself by choice. Remove sight. Remove sound. Strip away EM perception. Fight under restriction and sharpen instinct under pressure, tempering himself against blades of danger without relying on the full breadth of his power. Even so… it fell short. The first boss was simply too weak. Alonso had defeated it fourteen times in a row without resorting to his set's regeneration skill or invoking Path of Shards.

The sequences shifted slightly with each attempt, yet the outcome remained unchanged. The gap between them was too wide. Still… it was not entirely useless. He believed this method had value. Inspired by Maerwyn's curse, which had once taken both his physical and EM senses and forced him to fight with Will alone, he had realised that stripping away certain senses strengthened the rest. When one vanished, the others had to work harder after all. So he began to recreate that pressure on purpose.

When he removed sight, his hearing grew sharper. When he removed sound, his body started reading the ground, the air, the small shifts in weight around him. When he stripped away EM perception as well, he had to rely on something even simpler. Instinct. Movement before thought. Each sense he took away forced the rest to improve. He did not know if this would lead to the next breakthrough in his Combat Realms, yet he could feel the change building slowly.

If combat was broken down to its basics, it came down to a few things. Distance. Every weapon had a reach. Step too close at the wrong time and you paid for it. Stay too far and your own blade became useless. The space between two fighters was always shifting. Whoever managed that space controlled the exchange. Stolen novel; please report. Timing. Every strike had a start, a peak, and a moment after. The openings were always in between. Intent. The body showed it before the weapon moved. A shift of weight.

A tightening shoulder. A change in breathing. If you read that early, you did not react to the strike, you moved before it fully formed. Balance. A fighter who lost structure became predictable. A stable one could change direction at any moment. And pressure. Fear changed how people fought. The calmer one saw more options. The one who panicked narrowed their own choices. Alonso knew he was strong in all of these areas, and that was not arrogance.

Compared to every opponent he had faced so far, he believed himself to be the better fighter if only technique were measured. Perhaps someone like Gregor had deeper experience and a more refined form, yet even then, Alonso felt the difference had come from raw stats rather than skill. If those had been equal or even similar, the result would probably have been very different. If measured against his fellow Climbers, that gap in combat understanding was simply huge. He could see their mistakes as they formed.

He could spot the slight shift of weight before a strike, the small tension before a feint, the hesitation before commitment. And it came naturally to him. After what amounted to hundreds of thousands of spars with Darius, endless combat simulations, and countless near-death experiences in reality, his skill had been honed to a level normal humans could probably no longer understand. In chess terms, he was not just the best player, even the best engine could no longer comprehend his moves.

That might have sounded impressive to some. For him, it had become a ceiling. When you reached a level others called perfection, progress stopped feeling like ascent and started feeling like repetition. He could sharpen edges, refine angles, reduce waste, but the foundation beneath it remained unchanged. Improvement demanded something different—something that did not belong to the same line of growth. He had outgrown human standards of combat long ago.

The fundamentals that once defined mastery had become tools he could use without thought. They no longer challenged him. They no longer shaped him. Instincts? He had driven them to their limit, then fused them with reason until there was barely any space between sensing and acting. Every response came as fast as his biology allowed, and always as the optimal choice within that instant. Distance? He understood it deeply. Intent? He read it as clearly as breath before speech. Timing? It unfolded before him in layers.

Even reduced to Will alone, stripped of sight, sound, and sensation, he could still hold his ground and press the fight. He had mastered it all. What he needed now… was something new. Something beyond combat as humans understood it. Alonso let the tension leave him in a long, measured exhale. Only then did he move. He sheathed his blades, stepped forward to gather the scattered loot, and finally absorbed one of the red orbs. Stage 1 – 41. 850% ➤ 41. 940% The gains were shrinking.

Compared to the previous orb, this one barely moved his progress. He knew there was a soft cap at 42%, so he did not dwell on it. Once everything was packed, he moved on. He did not rush. He advanced through the corridors of the Monastery of Silent Bells at a steady pace, boots echoing softly against cold marble. When mobs rushed him, he cut them down without breaking stride. Blades of Will formed and dissolved in rhythm with his steps, carving through bone and cloth as though clearing tall grass.

He did not even turn fully toward them. His mind was elsewhere. He had spoken about it all with Darius and Houston. Both had simply shrugged in their own way and played the same card as always. We are just the car. You choose the road… we follow. So fair enough… it was on him. He was not even certain this search for a new Combat Realm would work, much less whether it would help him reach the Fourth State.

There was a real chance he was chasing fragments of improvement while the others prepared to step into the next State and nearly double their power. Still… he would not retreat from this approach. There was always a simple answer to a bottleneck. If something did not work, raise the stakes. With that thought, he reached the next boss chamber. Seven figures stood before him, each bound in chains, hoods covering small, frail frames. Bare feet rested on polished marble. Their posture was calm.

Above them, a single prompt shimmered. Choir of the Blinded Power Index: 15, 400 He could not see their faces beneath the hoods. Their bodies looked thin, almost fragile. A blinded choir, huh. Alonso did not slow. He walked toward them, unsheathing his blades in one smooth motion. If they fought without sight… Then the field should be even. He closed his eyes as his Will Manifest rose behind him, the human-shaped void unfolding like a second silhouette cast in reverse light.

The air around him dimmed as though space itself bent inward toward that hollow outline, and power threaded through his body in cold, steady currents. Ahead of him, as he stepped past the threshold— They moved. The chains binding their wrists snapped free in unison. The first sound came as a low vibration, felt through the floor before it ever touched the ear.

Then seven voices rose together, their resonance pressing against stone and marrow alike, the chamber tightening as if drawn into the throat of a single unseen bell. The marble beneath his boots cracked as compressed sound waves detonated outward in perfect synchrony. The air itself bent and struck like a hammer. Pillars split. The ceiling trembled. Alonso moved before the shockwave peaked.

He slid to the side, blades crossing to disperse the densest line of pressure while a second wave tore through the chamber wall behind him in a spray of shattered stone. They advanced as one. Chains lashed outward, linking the seven figures into a rotating formation. One lunged low, two high, two circled wide while the remaining pair stayed at the centre, voices rising and falling in coordinated pulses that distorted space around them. A hand strike came from his left.

He stepped inside the arc and cut across the attacker's forearm, but another body replaced it instantly. A heel smashed toward his ribs, followed by a chain wrapping around his ankle while a concussive scream detonated at chest level. He twisted free, carving through the chain, ducking beneath a second strike as his shoulder clipped marble and rolled. The floor cratered where he had stood a heartbeat earlier. They did not fight as individuals. They fought as one organism.

A palm strike landed against his guard and the sound behind it exploded outward, shattering stained glass windows in a rain of razor shards. Blood streaked his cheek as fragments sliced past. He cut through one of them cleanly across the torso. The body collapsed. The remaining six screamed. The chamber shifted. The fallen figure rose again, Will condensing around all of them as their voices deepened into something far heavier. Alonso's focus narrowed. The second phase.

Their Will did not take the form of a visual manifestation. It dissolved into vibration, spreading through the chamber like a pressure system with no centre and no edge. It became sound. Yet it was nothing like Ayu's fire and rhythm. This was heavy, distorted, the toll of bells dragged through something rotten, thick waves rolling across the chamber as though iron were being pulled over stone inside a cathedral carved from bone.

A second resonance rose above the first, thinner and sharper, cutting through the low toll and layering over it until the air began to quiver. The marble beneath his boots answered with faint fractures, dust lifting in trembling halos. His eardrums burst within moments. Warm blood slid down his neck and soaked into his collar. He had already cast hearing aside, yet the vibration travelled through Will itself, rippling across his perception like a stone thrown into still water.

The world bent and twisted through pressure alone. Every toll redrew the space around him. They moved as one. Chains whipped forward in intersecting arcs while bodies shifted in tight formation, each member stepping into the other's rhythm. One struck high, another low, a third pivoted to catch any retreat. Sonic bursts detonated at arm's length, short violent pulses that hammered ribs and shook balance. A fist cracked against his cheek. A chain coiled around his calf and tore him sideways.

The chamber erupted in another toll and the shockwave hurled him through a marble pillar, stone exploding around his back in a spray of dust and fragments. He rose through falling debris, blood running from his temple, coat torn and streaked dark. His blades shifted. Two remained solid in his hands. Two more formed at his flanks, thin edges of Will flickering in and out of shape like heat above a forge with each No-Strike. He stepped forward.

Four arcs cut through the vibrating air in crossing patterns, steel and Will moving in perfect timing. Chains split along their tension points. Sleeves tore. Flesh opened in shallow, controlled lines. The chamber became a storm of intersecting cuts and ringing chords, marble cracking under repeated waves of sound as fragments rained from above. The Choir pressed harder. Their formation tightened, the outlines of the bells manifesting behind them, tolling in staggered cadence that disrupted his rhythm.

Pressure slammed into his ribs and crawled along his spine. Microfractures spidered through bone. Blood seeped from his nose and traced down to his lips. Shards of marble sliced his arms as he turned through narrow gaps measured in inches and instinct. He moved on angles thinner than breath. A half-step drew two bodies into each other's path. A pivot redirected a chain into its partner. A low sweep opened a window beneath a rising elbow, and No-Strike flashed through it before the gap closed.

They surged together for the end. Seven bodies converged. Every bell rang at once, a catastrophic chord that crushed the air and shattered what remained of the ceiling in a cascading collapse. The pressure folded inward toward him, a killing tide meant to erase everything at its centre. Alonso stepped into it. Four blades crossed in a single fluid motion. Dozens of lines carved outward, each strike placed with surgical control. The fatal cut lay open, yet— He altered the final millimetre.

Edges passed through chain, flesh, and muscle, halting a breath away from the vital points that would have ended them. The Choir collapsed across the broken marble, bodies slamming down in uneven rhythm as their bells fractured into fading tremors that rolled across the ruined chamber, just shy from completely dissolving. Alonso landed at the far end, boots grinding over shattered stone. Blood ran freely from his ears and shallow cuts across his body.

His breathing came heavier now, shoulders rising and falling beneath a coat torn in several places. He remained with his eyes closed. The chamber groaned around him, cracked walls settling, dust drifting through the air. Behind him, the Choir slowly restored itself, wounds knitting shut as their formation rose again, voices gathering strength and pressure returning to its peak. Alonso turned toward them once more, blades lifting with steady intent. That was good… let's move to the next round.