(Nov 7)

“Man, how was I supposed to win this?” I muttered to myself as I stared at the black beast, aka Briggs.

Briggs didn’t normally have long hair, quite short actually, but in his current berserk phase, he looked like he had long hair due to the black miasma rising from him like seaweed.

His back was slight hunched forward with his two arms dangling down and knees slightly bent.

His sharps hands looked like claws and the curse miasma became so dense, it was like a black flame wiggling around on his body.

His entire figure looked like that of a humanoid beast.

I don’t think I need to explain how much power that was being oozed out of him body. I’m sure that even if I didn’t explain, anyone would be able to conclude that he’s strong. Much stronger than me.

He reminded me of when I fought The Grinch.

Facing against overwhelming strength.

And yet, for some reason, I wasn’t nervous.

Quite opposite actually, instead, I felt… confident.

It may have been arrogance or overconfidence, but I was not nervous at all.

I knew I couldn’t win no matter what I did, but for some unknown reason, I also felt like I wasn’t going to lose either.

I was just calmly standing there, assessing the situation.

The grounded erupted as Briggs suddenly disappeared; a wave of dust and air washed over the area.

Without even thinking, my body immediately lowered, taking a large step forward and started sliding towards where Briggs was last seen.

As I did, Briggs appeared behind me and punched the ground where I was before I had moved.

I instantly turned around, leaned back and raised my arms to cover myself.

The air in front me was sliced apart as Brigg’s arm swung past, barely missing me.

However, the force of his swing unleashed another shockwave of air and miasma which blew me away as well.

Parts of my hand were burning from his curse miasma.

Briggs was very fast.

I’m not sure if he’s as quick as The Grinch was, but he’s darn close.

And since I wasn’t as strong as I was when I fought The Grinch, I wasn’t able to perceive Brigg’s movements. The only time I saw Briggs was when he was standing still.

You must be wondering, how was I able to just dodge Brigg’s attack just now if I couldn’t see his movements?

Well, it’s as I said earlier, Briggs is very similar to The Grinch. Both are overwhelming powerful, having a wild and aggressive fighting style relying on brute strength like a beast.

I have a lot of experience with these kinds of opponents.

From the very beginning of my journey, wild beasts like wolves are the one type of enemy that I’ve had the most experience in fighting.

Although they were never anywhere near as strong as The Grinch or Briggs, I did learn a lot and I developed an ability to learn and predict the attack patterns of enemies, especially beast types and those who fight aggressively.

Such as when I fought The Grinch, I was able to learn it’s movements quite easily since I already had muscle memory and experience with fighting against similar attack patterns.

Briggs is no different.

Even if he is technically a human, he fights like a beast, especially now that he has lost his mind and became a berserker.

And that was my area of expertise.

When facing against a wild beast head on, the first thing it will usually do is lunge right at you.

With that knowledge, my muscle memory kicked in and I instinctively decided to dodge by sliding under him.

I turned out to be correct, Briggs had moved exactly as I predicted.

However, Briggs is no ordinary beast, he is still technically a human, a very strong one.

Every single one of his attacks causes massive AOE shockwaves and miasma waves, not to mention he was so quick I could barely react. A singe direct hit would’ve torn my body to shreds.

Experience, muscle memory and predictions alone wouldn’t have allowed me to dodge and survive his barrage of attacks.

But that wasn’t all I had. I also have dragon instincts, which allowed me to somehow detect danger without seeing it.

If I combined my dragon instincts along with my fighting experience, my ability to learn/ predicts attacks, muscle memory and heightened senses, I was able to stand a chance.

Briggs threw dozens of attacks within seconds, and every single time, I managed to dodge just narrowly.

And even though I dodged, his curse miasma was still affecting me.

I needed to find a way to end this fight.

First, I began my counterattack; merely dodging was only going to eventually tire me out.

As Briggs was about to jump into the air, I instantly created a dragon missile next to his knee and detonated it, causing his leg to bend and stopped him dead in his tracks.

Every time he tried to make any big movement, I would detonate a dragon missile next to his joints to stop it.

He wasn’t hurt, but he would be stunned.

Then just as Briggs was standing up from being knocked down, I noticed something.

Briggs… was smiling. Like, an actual grin on his face.

“Wait a sec… Briggs… are you still conscious?”

He didn’t reply, instead just breathed heavily and stared at me, before once again attacking me.

Despite the fact he didn’t seem like he was conscious, he was smiling, and I’m pretty sure you’re not suppose to be smiling when you’ve gone berserk…

Unless he’s partially conscious?

Suddenly, I got an idea on how I could end this duel.

If Briggs was still somewhat conscious, I needed to wake him up.

But how? His berserker power had taken over his mind and gave him great strength in return. The only way to wake him up was to defeat him… or was it?

Briggs is a berserker who gains power the more injured he is, and the reverse was also true. If he’s not hurt, then he will lose his powers.

All I needed to do was heal him.

The issue is I’m not a healer and never learned any healing magic.

I do have an ability to heal myself using my dragon essence, but it only effects me and my own regeneration. I couldn’t heal others with it… or could I?

Briggs was only stunned for a mere moment, and then once against jumped at me creating holes in the ground every step he took.

I got down low and dived forward at his feet, tripping him over.

I quickly grabbed his feet and injected my dragon essence into him.

At that moment, his wounds started to close.

I didn’t heal Briggs, what I did was boost his regeneration ability.

All living creatures can regenerate and slowly heal over time, but it usually takes a long time to close even a small wound.

For me though, if I concentrate my dragon essence, I can near instantly regenerate any injury as long as I didn’t lose a limb.

So if I inject my dragon essence on another person, it should be possible to speed up their regeneration as well. Like a healing potion.

Of course, Briggs didn’t just lay there letting me heal him.

I was able to stun him once and a while, but it’s still incredible risky and if I accidently breathed in his curse miasma, it would’ve probably melted my insides.

Even though I had a layer of dragon essence protecting my body, it still made my skin bubble up and release ooze, so I don’t want to imagine what the curse miasma would do to the insides of my body.

I tried to create web essence to see if I could bind him from afar and avoid getting close, but as expected, it didn’t work.

The moment my web essence touched his curse miasma, it was instantly disintegrated and dispersed into nothing.

I already saw how effective his curse miasma was in reversing magic during his fight with William, so I wasn’t expecting much anyways.

There was no choice except to do things the good old fashion way.

I held my breath when getting close to him, covered my body in as much protective magic as possible and went all in.

Hundreds of possible movements paths appeared before me, and almost all of them would’ve caused me to lose a few limbs or would’ve out right killed me.

But my deduction and dragon instincts allowed me to instantly predict where to move with minimal damage.

My brain was seriously working overtime for this, running like 50 different processes at once.

As Briggs blasted past me, I wrapped my arms around his waist, grabbed onto his back and held on for dear life like I was trying to stay on a wild horse.

I then poured as much dragon essence as I could into his body before Briggs released a burst of his curse miasma, forcing me to jump off.

Although it was only for a moment, his body was healing.

Briggs was a berserker, his healing was already a lot faster than a normal person and with my dragon essence on top of that, it was regenerating in real time.

As such, he was also getting slightly weaker.

It became easier and easier to dodge him which led to me being able to heal him faster. Once his miasma had weakened enough, I wrapped his entire body in web essence, typing him up.

He struggled for a bit until I went over and emptied all my entire dragon essence into him.

Finally… his body collapsed onto the ground, with a grin still on his face.

He had finally calmed down and stopped moving,

And Briggs slowly opened his eyes.

“Phew. Wow. I don’t know what just happened, but I feel great! I haven’t had a good workout like that in a long time!”

Briggs had finally returned.

Relieved, I too also dropped onto my ass.

My brain physically hurt, I had a severe headache and my body felt like it was covered in fire ants.

Unlike The Grinch fight, I wasn’t on drugs and this actually hurt for real.

But ya know what? I’m glad this duel happened. I learned a lot. Normal training isn’t as effective as a proper sparring match with a strong opponent.

Briggs got up and walked over to me, looking like a satisfied child after being fed.

“Hey Anthony, who won?” He asked with a grin.

I couldn’t help but smile at his question.

“You did. I couldn’t beat you. It was my total defeat.”

Briggs nodded and reached out to me.

I grabbed his hand and he pulled me up.

And just then out of nowhere, a voice shouted out from behind us.

“HEY! WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?!?!”

It was Mona, Brigg’s sister.

And she looked furious.