Jade grabbed the area below the spinning runes like the spinning runes were the hilt of a sword. He swung his imaginary sword toward Quake who dodged the attack by floating away. The ground and water were split by the strike and wisp like black energy, Warp, distorted the matter around the slash.

Unlike before the Warp energy did not dissipate after a while instead it proliferated. This new attacked roughly combined Warp and Spatial slashing, it was the Oblivion Sword spell. Quake chuckled and sent beams and balls of vibrating energy out of his body.

Most of them flew toward Jade while some of them just hit the ground or entered the water. Jade remained unmoving as the beams disappeared when they entered the rune circles around him. Jade smiled when this happened, Quake didn’t understand the consequences of mindlessly sending energy to the portals.

Quake expanded his energy zone and filled it with vibrating energy as he approached Jade. Jade flew back and sent another slash from the Oblivion Sword but the vibrating energy shifted the spatial slash greatly, to the point where it seemed to dissipate.

Jade slashed and slashed but he couldn’t get through the vibrating energy domain. The slashes would go in but the Warp and spatial energy would just be dissipated by the sphere soon after.

Seeing that Quake would certainly close the distance, Jade opened a small black circular portal above the center of his forehead. He sunk into his soul realm and somehow channeled not only all of his glyphs and Mandalas but his entire soul and sphere of consciousness into the center of his forehead.

A vertical split ran across the center of his forehead and the skin on the sides of the split folded, revealing a vertical eye that resembled his normal eyes that had black whites and a cluster of sparkles for his eyeballs. The third eye was different in that the sparkles formed rough concentric circles in the supposed eye ball. The third eye exuded a sense of intelligence that made it seem as if it was its own person.

The small circular portal before the eye was connected to the space where Jade had been sending Quake’s energy. When Jade saw the energy through the eye it looked so bare, so simple, the workings were laid out for him like the energy was trying to explain everything about itself as fast as possible. Jade closed the portal and looked at Quake with the Cosmic 3rd Eye.

He saw the buildup of Quake’s body and was honestly impressed. His body had no weakness and could adapt easily. Jade saw tiny multicolored runes, sparsely in the water and concentrated in Quake’s body. Jade read the runes with his Cosmic Eye and learnt the secrets of Quake’s body and the environment.

Quake felt a shiver swim down his spine as he looked at the third eye on Jade’s head. Merfolk never had a fear of nakedness and they only wore clothes because the thought they were more beautiful with clothes than without. But Quake looking at the Cosmic eye felt the thing every human naturally felt; the fear of nakedness.

He felt everything about him was being exposed unwillingly as the eye stared at him. He forcefully calmed his impulse to use his more dangerous skills. The eye closed after a while and the battle entered a new stage.

Jade dashed toward Quake who backed away quickly. Jade teleported a few times closing the distance and performed another slash with the Oblivion Sword. This time the vibrating energy domain had no hold on the slash.

Quake’s skin was cut but the slash stopped at his muscle. Quake sent an upward kick coated in vibrating energy at Jade. The kick possessed too much concentrated shifting energy to be absorbed by the rune circle’s teleportation so they passed the portal that appeared, destroying it and causing some of the runes to crack. The space and time around Jade suddenly ebbed causing the vibrating energy to dissipate and Quake’s kick to slow down. Jade dodged easily and countered with a slash after instantly repairing the rune circle.

The battle devolved into a beat down as Quake’s vibrating energy was countered by Jade’s space manipulation and the Warp energy struggled to spread around the wounds in his body. Quake’s body quickly adapted to the Warping energy and found it easier to curb it but it couldn’t stop the spatial slashes from going in.

Quake thought ‘Should I stop the fight?... No I’ll show one last card before I quit’. Quake’s energy suddenly changed on such a fundamental level that Jade felt as if he was looking at a completely different person. He would have immediately used his Cosmic Eye to analyze the situation in a normal fight but this was just a spar and using the eye made him lose parts of himself while he kept it open.

Jade tried to make some distance but Quake roared before he could. Jade felt his body and mind vibrate again. The vibrations reached for his soul also but again couldn’t grasp it. Jade quickly used the Cosmic-Soul glyph to stabilize his mind and body but the environment was now transferring the vibrations to him so he had to maintain it constantly even though he couldn’t remove the vibrations completely.

Quake sent a punch toward Jade’s chest and Jade moved out of the way but his body vibrated in a way that drew him toward the punch. The punch grazed him but the vibration energy entered his person and intensified the vibrations he was already feeling.

Jade teleported away from Quake but found that he had teleported Quake with him by some sort of mistake. Quake sent a kick to his gut which he couldn’t dodge.

“BAAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The solid kick threw him back for a short moment before the force warped and drew him toward the punch that was coming toward his face.

“BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

And like that Jade was trapped in a vicious cycle. He felt like he was listening to a song that he couldn’t help but dance to as the vibrations controlled his movements and his magic, making him fall into quake’s rhythm. Jade thought ‘So deadly, so profound, so inspiring!’

The rune circle sphere was now just a circle of cracked runes. The energy palettes that made them up disappeared but Quake felt something new. The control he had on the environment weakened and he felt like he was inside Jade’s palm even though Jade’s body and mind were partially under his control.

Quake sent another punch but his arm and space went crazy and it bent at a 90 degree angle just in front of Jade’s face that was drawing into the punch. His felt no pain from what happened even though the bend wasn’t at a joint. He pulled his fist back and saw that it was impossible for him to make his arm straight as his arm withdrew from the space as if it was water that entered an L shaped tube that was being drawn back.

He attacked time and time again but space seemed to disagree with his movements. His arms and legs kept bending at weird angles to avoid Jade, his vibrating energy was somehow perfectly countered. During this time Jade successfully rid himself of Quakes vibes and isolated his own space from Quakes hence the environment wasn’t causing him to vibrate anymore.

He could only do these advanced feats because he had looked at Quake’s body and the environment with his Cosmic Eye. Controlling the space in the environment and in Quake’s body was only possible because Jade had slipped the energy palettes into the environment and Quake’s body and was controlling the space runes that made up and both. This was only possible because he used Cosmic Energy which normal energy could not reject since it was the very energy the energy organ fed on.

Jade thought ‘Space is a very passive concept. The higher I go on the manipulation ladder the fewer choices there are for aggressive forms of space and space manipulation’. Jade smiled and said “I win”. Quake stopped attacking and said “I guess you do”. He had no answer to whatever Jade had done to him.