Light elemental magic is easily the one element that is reasonably associated with speed.

So how come I was able to keep up with this man’s light attack.

The answer is simple, as always: aina enhancement.

Two years ago, I discovered that I was able to create a midair platform by giving the air itself a solid form through aina enhancement.

It is where the secret behind my speed lies.

Not only do I enhance myself, I am also, in a reverse-enhancement, capable of nullifying the air resistance when I move around. Though this does contribute to maybe roughly 16 to 20% of my speed, I can’t deny the wonder of this technique.

"Attack incoming!"

The man approached me in a very daring and brazen manner.

Besides having grown wings, he has also summoned a full set of armor for him.

So here he was, coming at me barehanded.

Or maybe I should say bare-winged

Earlier, he was strangely keen on ending this fight rapidly, but once he realized he couldn't, he remained a safe distance away from me. No, I felt it while battling him. It was of my blade that he was particularly afraid.

He closed the distance, swung his wing forward the same way someone swinging a sword would,

At first, I thought about blocking it, but then I realized it would be a very bad idea, given how large his wings were. This sword wasn’t particularly great for blades with this enormous reach.

I immediately propelled myself backward, to avoid his attack.

His wings swung at the ground, where I had been standing only a few seconds before.With a blast, an immense cloud of smoke, dirt, and sand were sent flying into midair, hiding him completely within it.

The cloud was almost immediately discarded by a slash of his wings waving toward me.

"This is bad."

Without a single pause, he closed the distance between him and me, then immediately greeted me with a wing slash.

Left with no choice, I parried the slash with my sword. The moment it made contact, the other wing came at me, clearly going for the head.

To avoid the attack, I had no way of blocking or deflecting it, so I crouched. The wing went past my head, severing a little bit of my hair in its passage.

Wasting no time, I once again propelled myself away from his reach. Being this close is no good, at least not now.

I didn’t even manage to clear a distance of ten between us before. With a series of wing swings, he sent out a blade of light onto me.

A slash came at me. I deflected it. It was easier to handle than the wing swing from earlier.

But this relentlessness.

It was bad!

The instant after the other was deflected, another came, then came another, then another.

I kept deflecting again and again and again.

The sheer intensity of my sword’s blade and his light slash was such that each time they met, a mini-explosion occurred. Wherever I went, I was followed by the man's incessant attack. As such, with how mobile I was, it was as if the place was randomly bombarded by it.

In an attempt to find a way to evade those attacks, as each blow was more burdening than the previous, I found myself deflecting blades in midair.

Very suddenly, the barrage of slashes stopped, yet I knew it meant nothing good.

"Very powerful attack, incoming."

For a very short period of time, the man charged an attack in the same way someone readying himself to throw a javelin far away would. The only difference between the two would be the killing intent this man exuded, and the amount of mana he was pouring into this attack.

Yet, once again, the man swung his giant wing at us, freeing a giant and powerful curved light slash straight at us.

I could feel it all the way to my bones, and it was easily twenty times more powerful than the ones I wasted time deflecting earlier.

"Han!"

"Hum?"

"I leave this one to you."

"So you’re finally calling on it, the power of friend-"

Here it comes!

Using my sword to block the incoming attack.

Along with the weight of the mountain, and the heat of an erupting volcano, it came at me.

My body was blasted away by that attack like a lightning strike to the ground.

I was literally blasted away for hundreds of meters within this massive cave before landing with a thud on what I believe was a wall.Rocks from the wall and from the ceiling crumbled from the impact.

A salty taste invaded my mouth; blood.

With his wings flapping, I heard the man approaching.

There was a particularly priceless thing about aina-sense enhancing. It's how you can literally peak into the heartbeats of your enemies.

And right, I just heard that man's heart skipping several beats.

With a very frustrated voice, the man shouted, "What! What was that!? Why didn’t you die from that attack! Was it that sword?! Where did-"

"Shut the hell up!"

There was a haughtiness in his voice that highly pissed me off.

From the mini-crater I landed on, I stood up.

"Han, well done."

The landing was rough, but no bones were broken. So far, aside from feeling a little dizzy, I don't believe I've injured any organs.

"It’s always a pleasure to serve, sir."

"How!?"

Completely ignoring the man, I continued.

"Being blasted away this violently wasn’t anticipated, but it was my bad."

" The test was a success then…. So, what do we do now?"

I got my revenge. We got what we wanted. Let’s finish this off. "

"Aye."

Brandishing my sword, I readied myself to resume the fight.

Feeling my intent, the man spread his wings wide. He was about to flap them, as he had done to send those aerial slashes from earlier.

But before he could send it off, I closed the distance between us.

Reacting to my action, he swung his wing at me, with the intent of chopping me in half. With the distance separating us, it would be easy.

But that wasn’t what happened next.

When he swung his wing at me, I kindly welcomed it with my swords.

The moment it made contact, instead of what was expected to happen, or what happened earlier, I cut through his wing.

I repeat. I cut through his light-made wing. After being severed, the severed part of the wing instantly vanished into harmless mini-particles of light.

"Ngh!"

Panicked by what happened , the man sent out his other wing, chopping at me, but once again, deftly manipulating my sword, I cut off his other wing.

The man, having seen what happened immediately, retreated by drawing some distance between us.

"As if I will let you get away with only this."

I immediately nullified the distance between us and swung my blade onto him.

My attack inflicted a diagonal cut on his chest.

I didn’t even have to be proud of it, because he had already started healing up, and soon he was already fully healed.

He regrew his wings and scythed them both onto me.

Swinging my sword circularly, I once again cut off both of his wings.

"Aaaaargh" he raged.

The next course of his action was less expected than the precious one. He thrust his hand, embedded with light, toward my face.

By slightly tilting my head, I avoided having my skull crushed by such a cheap attack.

His hand passed through my ear,

This provided me with a plethora of opportunities to land an attack on his face.No, at that instant, it was his entire body that was vulnerable.

Yet, I still went for the face.

Using my free hand, I made him taste the best uppercut these woods had to offer.

His body flew upward from it, but before it could get any higher, I followed my uppercut with a punch to the chest.

It sent him flying several dozen meters away, but I felt it. My fist, upon impact on his chest, shattered several bones and most likely organs too.

I wasn’t sure if it was enough to make him beat, so I started to walk toward the man, to ascertain it.

Despite his injuries, it didn’t take the man long to stand up and patch himself up thanks to his healing magic.

His hateful glare was plastered on me.

If a glare could kill, I would be dead by now.

Once again, he grew his wings back, but instead of coming at me, he spread them high in the sky, and between them, something resembling a mini-sun appeared.

The moment he started doing what he was doing, the temperature of the room rose beyond what was humanly bearable.

"Hoy, he's pouring, a powerful attack, like really powerful; this has to be one of these, you know... a last and desperate attack. Right now, he is not holding back anything. "

A suicide charge, huh?

I suppose this is his last ressort then.

"Fine, if this is your most powerful attack, then I too will take you with my most powerful one. Han, let’s end this. "

"Oho."

I casually approached.

Only several dozens of meters separate us now.

I raised my sword high into the sky and began to gather what I needed to unleash my most powerful attack.

Winds diverged violently toward my sword. The soil itself shook beneath my feet.

By the time I was still charging my attack, the man was done charging his.

His mini-sun has grown to a size that exceeds that of an adult person.

He immediately unleashed the mini-sun on us.

"Finally, it's my time to shine."

One year ago.

We’ve been defeated, in a sense, we won because we survived, but the fight against our Solomon was undeniably our loss.

Too much was lost to call it a win.

The vessels were gone.

But we didn’t simply swell at what had been lost, and instead worked ourselves on improving what was left, and learned from what had been witnessed and survived upon.

We kept harnessing the lethality of my AoB while also working on how to imitate, or at least replicate, a certain technique belonging to a certain person named Solomon.

One year went by and I can say that the time spent wasn’t in vain, the sweat shed wasn’t for naught.

The mini-sun flew ominously at us, but I remained still, with my sword held high in the sky..

"Here I come! Esoteric Art: Hanti-Magic."

The mini-sun, that a moment earlier came at us with no sign of stopping, suddenly vanished into minuscule particles in a rather anticlimactic way after having entered a very strict perimeter away from us.

The mini-sun vanished, but a considerable amount of fire, and even lava spread and lashed onto us, engulfing us thoroughly.

Once again, the name was ridiculous, but the effects weren’t. As the name suggested and displayed a few moments earlier, Hanti-Magic, consisted of nullifying magic.

How does it work? Where did we learn it?

The answer to the second question was Solomon. The answer to the first is that it works with a combination of magic and aina-wielding.

Han is the one in charge of this technique, so all I pretty much do is influence the surrounding aina. The rest is up to Han and his mana.

Yes, despite not being able to manifest his vessels any longer, he is still capable of using a copious amount of mana he has left from his vessels.

By combining my aina manipulation and his mana, we are capable of giving back any elemental magic in its original form, just as we did earlier with that man’s mini-sun.

This is the famous technique he was talking about back then.

It was also through that technique that I was able to avoid his previous attack.

We only talked about it a year ago, but apparently, during the three years we traveled together, Han was mostly to blame for what we came to refer to as "bad fortune."

The majority of the monster attacks we faced were caused by Han's magic, or rather its appearance. Aside from his ability to manifest his vessels, his magic has another passive ability, or perhaps it should be called a visual effect rather than a passive ability. Han, like the Chrackt Queen and the Chrackt, creates a fog-like substance that covers a vast area around him; the stronger the fog-like substance, the larger the area covered.

It was that fog’s fault, that we most of the time ended up, being randomly attacked by strong monsters, if one were to praise that passive ability, it would be that it while attracting the hostility of strong monster, it also repelled weak monsters, not every one of them, but definitely those which would’ve been a pain in the ass to deal with, not every monsters are willing to put a fight without visual covering.

So one can say that with this it, the props somehow weigh the cons.

As previously stated, the mini-sun's fire and lava were about to fall on me, but before it could get any closer, it was absorbed into the massive vortex of wind and lightning above my head that I had created with my sword.

The suction, the size, were so exaggerated that pieces of faraway were sucked into the vortex. The whirling air above me screamed deafly; the earth trembled beneath me.

Feeling that the charge of my attack was at its apex, I stanced and unleashed my attack on my opponent, raging its stupid name.

"Esoteric Art: Beam of Friendship, Annihilation."

When unleashed, the Beam of Friendship, as it is ominously called, annihilated, no, consummated everything in its vicinity.The moment it was unleashed, it was as if hundreds of volcanoes were simultaneously erupting.

The entire underground structure crumbled onto us.

***

"Whaaah! That was something. "

"Yeah."

I stood atop an ocean of crumbles.

"Next time, we should take care to not use that thing in a closed space like this one. I may have no vessel, but I thought I would die when the ceiling started to fall on us."

"Yeah, I think so too. This is the last time I'm doing this with an underground ceiling under my head.

As he said, the moment that attack was unleashed, the ceiling, the entire structure fell apart upon us. Though it wouldn’t have been close enough to even kill or hurt me, the experience was still quite fear-inducing. The last time something like this happened, it was completely out of control.

Wasting no time, I began to search for something, or to be exact, someone.

It didn’t take me too long to find it.

A pillar of light emerged from the mountain of crumbles.

From that pillar emerged the man we unleashed that attack upon.

He wasn’t dead.

And to be honest, good for him, I can’t imagine the humiliation of being killed by an attack named "Power of Friendship."

He had nothing left of the sense of grandeur he had previously exuded. Blood gushing wounds were scattered throughout all of his body.

"..." He mumbled something, but he was in such a bad state that I couldn’t even imagine what the hell he could’ve been saying.

He tried to take a step forward but ended up falling back against the ground.

It seems that he had no mana left to even heal himself properly.

I approached the seemingly dying man.

The moment I did, we immediately noticed.

"Hon, he’s … "

"Yeah, I know."

Done being bothered by this pathetic display, I raised my sword to the man and asked, "Is this really all you have, mister?" Or maybe I should call you Kiady the Eternal… I see… I got it you have nothing to say to me. Then I suppose it is time for me to stop this. "

With these words blurted out, I swung my blade.