Robes whipping around wildly as her hair thrashed this way and that, the woman unleashed an endless barrage of punches against the base of the barrier that sent shivers running through its breadth. Each hit caused an earsplitting sound as if a jackhammer were going off right in Jason’s ears, and it wasn’t long before small cracks began to appear in front of her.

Laughing over the windstorm as she ceaselessly dished out at least a dozen strikes per second, the woman’s aura suddenly grew much heavier as the energy around her arms flared up into large, person-sized hazes of shimmering scarlet.

She’s crazy, he thought as he poured more spiritual energy into the barrier in order to mend the cracks that she had made. As he tried to keep calm in such a harrowing situation, more cracks began to spider web out from beneath the giant finger. Although he sealed them up as quickly as they appeared, it still proved a significant drain on his spiritual space to continuously expend energy in order to combat a martial skill that had already been manifested and thus was maintained at a far lesser cost in terms of fatigue.

If the woman actually managed to make it past his protective shield then she would likely force a fist-to-fist melee, in which case there was a very real risk that he would lose control of the barrier only to be crushed to death alongside her in the event that he failed to flee in time.

Humph, you think I’m scared to roll the dice?

While Jason had achieved a hard-fought cultivation of the seventh level of Integration, he could only barely hold off someone at the seventh level of Genesis. Even against someone at the sixth level he would only have a fifty-fifty chance of survival in a direct confrontation with them, at least relying on strength alone. The woman in front of him was no ordinary person, clearly able to fight those with higher cultivation levels than her own. He wasn’t an ordinary person either, however, for he had knowledge of the strongest and most cost-efficient arrayment diagrams in existence, along with muscle memory that he had gained from the Soul Meld that he’d undergone with Actius and the other Neomen. While he’d only practiced using a few dozen of them since he’d fought his way free from that nightmarish independent space in the eastern reaches of the Dragon’s Tail, it was more than enough to deal with a martial cultivator within his general range of strength.

After mending the arrayment one last time, he severed his connection with it and immediately set about drawing out two fresh ones, a schematic for each hand. Seeing both the speed and ease with which he moved his fingers, the woman slowed her punches for a moment and watched him with interest, though this was followed by an abrupt increase in her energy expenditure and a vigorous renewal of her efforts to break inside of the slowly deteriorating barrier.

It took him thirty seconds to draw out and activate the first diagram, which saw countless strands of silver light appear in the air around him before they slowly began to writhe around his limbs like tiny, slithering snakes. These gradually settled over his body where they continued to circulate after form-fitting to his dimensions.

Dropping down to the ground, which was still quaking like the end of days, Jason jumped up and down in an experimental manner. He maintained his footing with perfect balance despite the quaking earth, impressed at how light on his feet he had become.

He activated the second diagram just as the woman’s fist broke through the barrier and allowed her arm to sail through the gap. This time large wisps of golden energy began to form around him, these settling around his body in the same way as before so that he now wore nothing but a moving mass of squirming, ribbon-like energy.

Inspecting his own aura, he noted that nothing had changed in regards to its strength or density, which only attested to the amazing effects of the techniques.

Narrowing his eyes as he watched the woman knock down a torso-sized section of the barrier, he dismissed the large dome of his own volition and suddenly dashed in the opposite direction of where his opponent was momentarily stumbling, having kicked at an obstacle that abruptly disappeared. Barely a second after he had decided to flee, the massive finger suddenly stabbed into the earth with an impressive amount of force that drew the attention of the many distant combatants, as had nearly every exchange between him and the red-eyed elder.

He had only cleared about two hundred metres when the woman appeared at his side with a keen stare and an energy-clad palm, which he met with his own at the very last second. Their hair billowed westward as the fallout from her martial skill poured outward from the point of contact, their feet sinking into the ground as they held their positions and began a rapid exchange of unflinching attacks.

“What did you do?” called the woman, who jumped back about fifty metres after a brief scrap. “I’ve never heard of arrayments that increase physical strength.”

Which is why you're going to lose, he thought, though he didn’t waste time talking with her.

Jason appeared before her in an instant and lashed out with a strong punch that shook the air around them for hundreds of metres.

Jumping backward, she didn’t expect the punch to precede the Scarlet Serpent Strike Technique and thus was caught on the wrist by the mouth of the small yet powerful snake that sprouted out from Jason’s right arm the moment that she made to avoid the attack. Composed of around half of his remaining energy, its long, elastic body managed to grab hold of her forearm and break the bones within with a strong, merciless bite, though the snake was dispersed when she flooded her broken arm with energy and tore it free of its body with a martial skill of her own.

Seeing that she had used the Scarlet Serrated Hand Technique with a hand that was half-crushed, Jason was impressed by her tenacity. Still, he wasn’t about to give her a chance to catch her breath. Covering his hands in similar cloaks of energy, he dashed forward and began an unrelenting assault that saw her fleeing in random directions, suddenly on the defensive.

Pressing her with all his might, he transitioned the inner essence around his right hand so that a small spear of energy formed in a subtle, instantaneous way. In order to keep her distracted, he flooded his left arm with inner essence and summoned a house-sized palm of energy directly above his opponent, bringing it down upon her in the blink of an eye. She managed to defend against this by shielding herself with the same offensive martial skill, though Jason wasn’t about to let her get away. She had only barely managed to block the attack, which placed their contesting palms mere metres above her head.

This is it.

Jason powered his martial skill with all of his remaining inner essence in order to make sure that it didn’t break prematurely. Growing dizzy within a matter of moments, he snickered to himself as the force of the competing techniques caused the ground around her to sink about a metre lower, leaving a fifty-metre impression in the earth. Beneath such a force, all of the woman’s clothes were destroyed once more.

Jason instinctually cast out a net of spiritual energy and caught something that had seemingly dropped out of the sky—something that he knew for a fact had been thrown by Sersa from nearly three kilometres away—and willed it to hover directly in front of him. His opponent was trapped in a perilous situation where she couldn’t flee without running the risk of losing control over her martial skill and thus dying before she could even take a single step, so he allowed himself a few moments of respite.

“No—please,” said the young man before him, whose face was covered in streams of snot and tears. “They made me come here. I didn’t want any of this! P—please!” His arms and legs were all broken, and he appeared to be in immense pain based upon the way that his voice had cracked.

“You say that, yet you still killed enough people to reach the peak of Integration.” Making a mental note to thank Sersa later on, he plunged his left hand into the man’s chest and quickly refined all of the energies within. This only replenished his reserves by a small amount, but it was still enough to clear the drowsiness from his mind.