A thin stream of lifeforce burst out from behind him, adding a small jolt of acceleration as Lukas minimized the distance between himself and his opponent. His right foot jammed itself into the ground as he twisted his torso, bringing his left leg in a complete sweep against her.

Inanna effortlessly blocked the kick with one arm, grabbing at his toes with another. Lukas allowed himself a single moment to be distracted by the utter feline grace with which she’d outmaneuvered him. Her touch was feather-light, yet strong enough a grip that he couldn’t pull his leg back without losing his own balance.

“Uncomfortable, is it not?” the goddess asked, a smile on her face. “To master this art, you must learn to be comfortable with the state of being uncomfortable.”

She dropped his leg, but before he could gain proper footing, she smacked his knee with an open palm. His leg bent to the left, destroying his coordination, and Lukas dropped to the ground like a puppet with severed strings as he landed on his left arm. Ignoring the pain, he immediately rolled over and scooted back, escaping her vicinity.

“Inadequate,” Inanna sighed. “You must come at me with the intent to kill. Anything less will net you no results, mortal.”

“As the lady commands,” Lukas gasped, slowly pushing himself off the ground. Pammachon, as was made clear to him by Inanna’s tutelage, was an extreme, violent mix of boxing and wrestling, with plenty of lifeforce thrown around for good measure. So far, he’d seen demonstrations of highly skilled grappling techniques, takedowns, chokes, joint locks— all of them created to take down opponents of superior size and skill by using their own power against them.

The larger they were, the louder they fell. At least that was how Inanna had put it.

Incidentally, every single one of his attained skills thus far were fundamental to the Art of Pammachon. Burst increased the power and momentum of attacks, not to mention agility when it was used to accelerate his movement. Tachypsychia allowed him to see the opponent’s move and develop a counter in limited time. Neural Suppression let him go all out without his own mind limiting him in the process, especially since he could trust his lifeforce to heal himself from any injury. And shatterfist… Well, it was practically tailor-made for the martial art.

He didn’t know what was more surreal. The fact that his skills were perfect to let him excel at this particular fighting style, or the idea that Inanna had methodically, deliberately, and covertly shaped him and his skills to excel at this style. Regardless of his own choices and all-around stubbornness.

Just how far into the future did her web of intrigue and planning extend?

Lukas shook his head. It was moments like these that opened his eyes once in a while. No matter how human Inanna looked, she wasn’t one.

She was a goddess. Reflection or not.

He settled into a fighting stance.

Rule number one of Pammachon— always maximize reinforcement at all times.

Like most people, his first instinct was to scoff at the notion that maintaining a strong defense was good. Obviously such a concept was good, but that didn’t mean it was simple.

Pumping a steady stream of lifeforce through one’s musculoskeletal system while keeping the lungs and heart operating at maximum efficiency during a fight was anything but simple. Honestly the entire setup required concentration so enormous that, if not for his recently awakened Third Eye, everything would’ve fallen apart like a house of cards in a hurricane.

In its essence, reinforcement had nothing to do with strength. It was more so pouring in lifeforce to enhance the very existence of an object— make it more perfect, so to speak. But since no clear guidelines existed to define perfection, absolute reinforcement was impossible. For his bones, it was about increasing tensile strength and durability. For muscles, it was density, firmness, and the capacity to function for long periods of time without fatigue.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the complexity of reinforcing his lungs. Or worse, his brain.

Lukas took a deep breath. And then he pushed.

A fraction of a second later, a lifeforce-enhanced punch met Inanna’s open palm head-on, the energy from the collision radiating out in all directions. Before he knew it, Inanna twisted her entire form around his arm in mid-air. It was lithe enough to make a cat green with envy.

Lukas watched in alarm as both of her feet came swinging towards him, her legs spread apart to grapple his head between them. A part of him realized there was no way to muster up a solid defense at such short notice, but the lifeforce flooding through him didn’t care. Instead, it saw an enemy that had to be killed, and the best way to do that would be to get up close and rip her throat out.

Except, if he tried to do the same, Inanna would bloody the ground with his guts.

Lukas didn’t wait. But he also didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t have to. Instead, he concentrated every bit of lifeforce at his command, and shoved it outward all at once.

It hit Inanna like a freight train.

And propelled him backwards, the raw kinetic force discharged landing him out of her reach.

“Cheating does not make a Pammachon master,” the goddess snorted, arching a perfectly curved eyebrow.

“If you aren’t cheating, are you really trying?” Lukas shot back.

Inanna smiled, gesturing towards him with a beckoning finger.

“Come.”

“With pleasure.”

Tachypsychia activated at full throttle, slowing down her movements to his discerning eye. And then, Inanna went even faster.

POW!

“Fuck!”

Even so—

He swerved his fist, but found Inanna’s foot inches away from connecting with his cheek.

BAM!

“Oww!”

—He was fighting Inanna, a literal goddess by her own right. No amount of training, however intense, would be able to get the better of her.

But that wasn’t all.

Lukas had learned something fundamental. After constant exposure to the goddess’s thought process and constantly applying his ingrained skills against all the predators that lurked in this crypt, he was slowly beginning to understand some crucial aspects about fighting predators. Things he never noticed as a part of civilized human society.

Predators always went after the weak. The wounded. The unaware.

The notion went double for solitary predators like the thoggua, or worse, monsters like the naegelin. Solitary predators, more often than not, attacked when they had the element of surprise on their side. Or when they had every single advantage stacked in their favor. Hell, even the larger and more powerful monsters abided by that rule.

Predators never picked a fair fight. It ran counter to their nature and robbed them of their inherent advantage.

And Inanna? She was very much a predator.

Throughout all their time training together, Lukas had noticed the subtle shifts in her behavior. Unknowingly or not, Inanna never let an opportunity slip by when she could instead increase the advantages she held over him. Whether it was showing off her magical abilities, enhancing her supernatural charm, or something as simple as exposing more of her marble-white skin, the goddess always went out of her way to ensure he held nothing short of awe for her very presence.

It told him she was rather unused to dealing with people on any other grounds. That she hated not having him at her mercy. If not for her ego, he’d have become a quivering wreck.

Ultimately, it told him that deep down, whether she knew it or not, she was nervous.

He was nervous too, but at least that was a familiar feeling for him. Not for her. But that worked out just perfectly for him, since he too would take any advantage he could get.

What else was humanity good at, if not proving others wrong?

“Another round?” he asked, readying himself.

The goddess tilted her head to the left. Very slightly.

A burst of lifeforce surged through his legs as Lukas rushed forward, faster than he could have ever imagined a few months ago. Sure, she was quicker and somehow freakishly flexible, but he had the advantage of studying her style for days on end, not to mention being at its mercy. His fingers clenched into a fist as he drove straight punches towards her, pouring in all the lifeforce he could muster into a solid frontal assault.

She immediately sank down, her legs extending outwards like a ballerina doing the splits, and stopped his incoming punch with her palm just inches before it came close to striking her face.

Inanna smiled.

It was a dangerous thing to witness.

Pushing herself off the ground with her other hand, she swept herself up in a circular fashion, her other leg slamming into his ankles and throwing him forward. Easily weaving out of his trajectory, she kicked him again— this time on his backside —and sent him tumbling down onto the floor.

The worst part about it was that the entire exchange happened in a fraction of a second. He knew because he was still using his tachypsychia, and was still unable to keep up with her speed. With ordinary human vision, he wasn’t sure if she’d even register as a blur.

“Well done, mortal. For a fleeting moment, I truly thought you might come close to hitting me.”

Lukas spit out the blood that filled his mouth. His entire body felt like it was aflame, but after months of doing nothing but surviving, pain had long become an old acquaintance.

“Give me some more time,” he got out between gulping breaths. “I’ll get a scratch on you.”

“Scratching and pawing like vermin,” she sighed in a teasing manner. “And after all my efforts to housebreak you.”

“Talk is cheap,” he taunted back, making Inanna lift her head and laugh aloud. It did wonderful things to her neck and chest.

Not willing to waste an opportunity, Lukas pushed every ounce of lifeforce he could muster and shot ahead, veering straight towards her. Inanna simply slid out of his way and grabbed his hand, pushing him forward by using his own momentum against himself.

Just as he’d predicted.

He carried through with the motion, pushing himself downward and hitting the ground with his palm as he spun around, his legs swerving around like a breakdancer to kick her back. Between his sudden movement, his Burst, and the effects of Tachypsychia, there was simply no time or space to dodge.

Yet somehow, Inanna still managed to escape within that interval, grabbing his right leg with her hands and twisting it, sending jolts of acute pain shooting up his spine. Lukas felt himself lose his coordination and fell onto his hands, fracturing his thumb in the process.

Inanna smirked haughtily.

Lukas smirked back.

And slammed his other leg, foot-forward, right into her left knee.

Inanna had once taught him that an average person was actually three times stronger than what they believed. And yet, most people never used the strength except under dire circumstances where their mind entered a tunnel-vision. It was this inhibition that kept the average human being from destroying themselves while fighting.

Luckily for him, fighting without inhibitions was precisely what Neural Suppression was all about.

The concept behind Pammachon was maintaining a constant flux of lifeforce to create singular points of kinetic force, liberating each one with pinpoint precision when necessary. Inanna had used an analogy of wielding a knife to shatter a wall by probing at all the weakest link, employing the maximum kinetic force to break the whole structure down.

When one added lifeforce and adrenaline to the mix, the art was amped up to also generate explosive strength.

That was essentially what had just happened.

Her knee popped like a balloon from the force of his strike, dislocating the ball from its socket as Inanna let out something that, if he didn’t know any better, sounded like a muffled whimper.

And then she looked at him.

Wounded lions wished they looked half as savage as she did right there. It was no surprise, really, that Lukas found himself wishing he were dead at that very moment.

Before he knew it, she traversed the distance between them and slammed her fist into his stomach.

“Gah!”

Lukas practically folded in half. Air rushed out of his lungs first, followed by saliva and stomach acid and what felt like half of his internal organs.

It hurt. Damn, it hurt. Several of his ribs snapped despite his lifeforce-enhanced reinforcement. In the back of his mind, he genuinely wondered whether he’d actually been split in half, as the pain seemed to cut straight through him, from front to back.

By the time his pain-addled brain had registered what was happening, he was spinning. Or, not spinning, per se. He was being moved around.

Like a log.

Round and round.

Even before the nausea and vertigo had a chance to settle into his system, he was skidding across the floor like a broken rag doll.

“Kah! Fuck!”

Everything hurt. His chest was on fire. His limbs felt like lead. His pain receptors were clearly being soaked in magma. His head throbbed like it was just about to explode. Every time his heart palpitated, it seemed as if it was pumping agony throughout his system rather than blood. Every time he drew breath, something inside of him tore and screeched in agony.

Yet, despite all that, a maniacal grin burst from his lips.

“Did… Did I win?”

The last thing he remembered was a strange look on his mentor’s face as his world turned to black.