Chief watched Bolder change the floor structure to accommodate for the target's new position. He had barely started when Ironblood moved so quickly he seemed to disappear. That wasn't unexpected; they had seen that same move in the Timelord's time rewind and were prepared to counter it.

So, Chief turned to Eyes, who would assist him in locating—

Eyes was dead. The target had taken a sword out while he moved, and the moment Chief looked at her, her head flew.

Chief was surprised. He had never felt Ironblood moving toward her—

Wait. He suddenly realized he couldn't feel Ironblood at all. Following Eyes' death, Ironblood disappeared again, then reappeared in front of Pot. Though Chief could see the sword move toward the healer, his spatial filling acted as if there was only empty air where the man stood.

"Damn it! B-Two!" he yelled the command. Without Eyes' whisper on the wind skill, his voice echoed in the room.

B-Two was the worst scenario they had discussed. It meant they found themselves without the means to magically locate the target. Bolder acted at once, covering the endangered Pot and himself with a protective layer of stone that deflected the sword—

The barrier didn't deflect the blade. Ironblood infused his sword with Arcane Energy and it cut through both stone and the enchanted armor Pot wore as if they were made of paper. Pot's head also flew.

Chief ignored it and kept moving to get in the B-Two position. Suddenly, he felt Arcane Energy appear right in front of him. He swiftly erected a spatial shield around himself, but the energy wasn't an attack.

Instead, it was a skill that repeated some words he had said before. "Damn it! Third variation! Attack!"

He hated dealing with illusionists. Fortunately, the team's drills contained scenarios where the enemy tried to confuse them. He immediately yelled, "Compromised comms!" However, the opposing orders would still confuse them for a moment, leaving them vulnerable.

Left with no other choice, he kept doing what he was supposed to in the B-Two scenario. He moved closer to the group's four stronger fighters and erected spatial shields around them all. Well, he tried.

Unfortunately, Fireshot was one of those who got confused by the conflicting orders and moved away from Chief. He was the weakest one of the stronger Hounds, so he was the last one Chief protected.

Ironblood decapitated the man with another swing of his blood-soaked sword.

"How does he move so fast?!" Bolder shouted, panicking. The floor beneath them all disappeared as he turned it into thousands of stone spikes and shot it to all sides. They bounced harmlessly off Chief's spatial shield, but they were effective in revealing Ironblood's location as they hit him, also without causing damage.

Chief easily kept his three protegees — the Entropomancers — and himself floating, and then the three acted.

They stopped Ironblood and the stone spikes midair. Chief used—

Nothing. He had no time to use anything, for the three Entropomancers coughed blood, and time resumed for Ironblood. He arrived before Bolder, who was still falling midair. Bolder tried to condense some spikes into a wall between them. However, all spikes were too far away.

Chief wasn't supposed to waste energy saving Bolder in a B-Two scenario, but he liked the man and swiftly erected a shield to protect him. It was a weak one because of the lack of time, but it should've been enough to hold a Four Star Qi Manipulator.

It wasn't.

Ironblood attacked a weakness of the shield that Chief didn't even know existed, and his skill shattered. The rebound from having a skill forcibly cut down like that made him dizzy for a few instants.

The sword kept going, cutting through the lump of stone in front of Bolder, then his armor, and finally making the man's head fly.

Ironblood had to appear for a few instants for that kill though, and the Entropomancers were prepared. This time, they went all out. They held each other's hand and used a powerful and complex layered skill to stop time for Ironblood in such a way that would be impossible—

The skill shattered, they screamed in agony, and they dropped dead like puppets with their strings cut.

The commander couldn't even understand the concept of resisting or escaping Time skills, yet Ironblood somehow counterattacked them easily. From their deaths, it was obvious that the stronger the skill, the greater the damage Ironblood could cause on the caster. Chief was unexpectedly glad that he hadn't been able to erect a powerful shield to protect Bolder.

And he could barely believe that the Three Rising Suns of the West had died like that.

Their future had been boundless. They were the blessed children of powerful clans that held great sway over the empire. They had been sent to the Seventh West Garrison only to accumulate some experience before they reached the Champion level. Once they did, they would be only below the emperor himself!

Chief decided he needed to escape right away. The death of the Three Rising Suns would make the heads of their families hunt for him too, but he had been willing to run from the Temple of Light anyway. His life was more important than anything else, and he didn't think he could kill Ironblood anymore. He would make a last attempt just to make sure though.

"Spatial breach!" he yelled out of habit, trying to kill Ironblood like that. The man dodged as expected. "Spatial breach! Spatial breach!" he tried again and failed again.

That wouldn't work. Those three breaches had taken half his Space Energy already. He had to prepare to leave now.

Seventh Grade Space Skill: Spatial Storm!

He only knew two seventh-grade Space skills, spatial breach, and spatial storm. While the latter wasn't as powerful as the former, which could literally shatter reality, it was still a mighty skill. And, more importantly, it was an area attack.

An enormous spatial storm appeared all around him. It was made of spatial clusters as big as horses. The clusters looked like clouds made of thousands of transparent lightning bolts. They kept shooting gray lightning around them at a fast rate, except the bolts were extra-sharp spatial blades instead of proper lightning.

Extra sharp spatial blades that could cut through anything.

The clusters kept appearing randomly everywhere for a couple of instants then disappearing. There were tens of thousands of them, and they swiftly covered a vast region of the city. Chief couldn't control the area when he used the skill, but he was willing to accept the collateral damage to save himself.

For the first time, Ironblood was forced to retreat. The area around Chief was the most condensed with clusters, and they were too unpredictable except for the fact that they didn't attack him. Chief wasn't even surprised to see Ironblood forcibly resist some gray lightning that tried to cut him apart. He wasn't left unscathed, as cuts were appearing throughout his entire body, but he wasn't dying either.

Eventually, the damned Herald of Light reached a kind of optimal range where he could dodge the clusters and lightning without taking any damage. It was close, still inside the building — which was crumbling as it was sliced into tiny parts — but it should be far enough. It was time to run.

Eighth Grade Space Skill: Recall!

Chief activated his highest-graded skill, which had been gifted to him by the Army when he became a Garrison Commander. He immediately felt his body twist as it was warped into an invisible spatial tunnel back to the garrison. He would complete the skill in three seconds, and then he would—

Before he could finish his thoughts, Ironblood acted.

He thrust his sword at one of the gray lightning nearby. It was an impossibly precise, swift strike that hit the bolt spot on. The blade was filled with Arcane Energy.

Chief knew that while impressive, that meant nothing. Even if he destroyed his spatial storm skill, Chief would still escape, no matter the rebound. Nothing could stop his teleport save his death, and he would not die.

What could Ironblood accomplish by doing that other than destroying his sword?

The answer came quickly as Chief felt his spatial storm shift. As Ironblood's sword touched his skill, the Arcane Energy in it was assimilated by the spatial storm in a way that changed it.

Suddenly, that spatial lightning bolt connected itself to a spatial cluster right beside Chief's head. And then, a spatial tunnel opened between the linked parties.

The Garrison Commander couldn't even widen his eyes in surprise before the sword blade traveled through the spatial tunnel, materialized close to his head, pierced through his armor, and penetrated his skull.

He died with no understanding at all of what had just happened.

Aaron shook his head in depreciation. The skills the Champion had used were more complex than should be possible at the Champion level, but that brought too many weaknesses to exploit.

It was as if a glassblower who could only create glass rings pilled them on top of each other, glued them together, and called it a cup. It might work as a cup, but its structure would be filled with weaknesses.

That spatial storm skill was the worst of it all. Whoever had created that skill clearly had no idea what they were doing. Aaron had even hijacked it using lower-leveled Arcane Energy! And the delay to teleport away was also another consequence of a badly built skill.

Both storm and teleportation were interrupted when the Champion died. The lower half of the man's corpse still disappeared into the spatial tunnel he had created, but the upper half remained. It wasn't a clean cut. The partial teleportation was messy, twisting the upper half into something unidentifiable and showering the surroundings in gore.

The spatial storm also didn't end nicely. It had covered an enormous area around the now destroyed store to begin with, killing tens of thousands of innocent people in a blink, and bringing many structures down. When it was canceled, the storm clusters exploded like shrapnel, except it was made of sharp bits of space itself. They shredded about one-tenth of the city and the death toll might have reached hundreds of thousands. And even that was only because of Aaron's hijacking. He had managed to tune the destruction down a little.

He quickly stored all enemy corpses into his spatial ring and left as his store fell to the ground. All around him, the buildings suffered the same destiny, except for a few. Those had self-fixing formations or were designed in such a manner that they were hard to demolish. The store was in a rich area of the city, after all.

Aaron might save a few people if he went around healing some who were only injured, not dead. His clan took priority though. He didn't know if other enemies were attacking the girls.

He ran full speed toward Alys Tower.

He was midway there when he felt an enormous amount of Time Energy at the Royal Palace's direction. It kept active for almost a full minute and then he heard the distinct sound of a heavy building crumbling, shaking the city with it. He guessed the palace was gone.

Aaron kept going.

And the moment he touched the clearing around Alys Tower, he felt Champion-level Time Energy appear out of nowhere and instantly envelope him.

Time froze.

His mind kept working though. He had been keeping Qi on his brain and soul from the moment he noticed the enemy had brought Entropomancers. That allowed him to resist the effects of time freeze and had given him a chance to counterattack the three Five Star cultivators.

A simple exploit of their ridiculously flawed skills had been enough to kill them. But Aaron realized it wasn't the case for whoever was attacking him this time.

In fact, he was positively impressed with the quality of the skill being used on him. He could find five flaws at a glance, but they were hard to exploit. So hard that he couldn't use his Three Star Arcane Energy to abuse any of them at all.

As he kept analyzing the skill, he felt a rising thrill within himself.

At long last, he had met a worthy opponent.