Roars echoed through the atrium as ancient battle instinct clashed with modern power.
Kashimo shifted his approach instantly.
The aggressive, wild sweeps from their initial exchange vanished, replaced by precise, calculated strikes.
He probed Julian’s guard, testing the reaction time and density of his energy shield.
A veteran of four hundred years of mortal combat did not rely solely on raw output.
Facing an opponent who hard-countered his primary charge-transfer mechanism, Kashimo adapted on the fly.
“Let’s see how long that frame holds!” Julian shouted, blue lightning sweeping across his shoulders as he drove his right fist forward.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The collision of iron against reinforced flesh rattled the remaining steel beams of the mall.
White-hot arcs of lightning snapped outward with every blow, scorching the stone floors and cracking the supporting pillars.
Julian took a heavy blow to his left forearm, the vibration rattling the bone beneath his skin.
Even with Special Grade physical reinforcement, taking a direct strike from a Cursed Tool wrapped in high-density energy felt like blocking a sledgehammer with bare skin.
“That’s hardly fair!” Julian called out, stepping back to shake out his numb wrist.
“You’re swinging a steel staff while I’m using bare knuckles.
Drop the weapon and let’s settle this with fists!”
Kashimo didn’t even slow his momentum.
“Fairness?
You dropped out of the sky with an innate lightning technique, and you’re complaining about a piece of iron?
Use a weapon if you have one!”
Julian’s passive electrical field had already flared into full activation during their exchange.
Blue lightning branched off his body, striking the air around them.
Yet, Kashimo’s innate electrical resistance proved almost absolute.
The ambient shocks slid off his skin like water off oil, doing zero damage to his core.
Because both combatants wielded lightning-attribute energy, their secondary crowd-control effects canceled each other out.
Neither could easily stun or paralyze the other through direct electrical contact.
The battle had devolved into a pure test of physical endurance, output capacity, and tactical positioning.
“Fine!” Julian grinned, adjusting his stance.
“No weapons, no fields—just raw hand-to-hand output!”
Kashimo offered a cold, dismissive snort.
“I decline.”
His eyes swept over Julian’s torso.
Faint, dark scorch marks had begun to form along Julian’s arms where the iron staff had made contact. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Julian’s technique relied on converting his cursed energy into lightning to reinforce his body and project attacks.
But Kashimo’s energy was fundamental electricity itself.
In a direct clash of pure voltage, small traces of external heat still bled through Julian’s defensive layer, singeing the skin beneath.
Julian glanced down at the minor burns, then brought his hands up.
“Just surface scratches.
I can do this all day.”
Kashimo didn’t answer.
He stepped forward, driving his staff down in a sharp, diagonal strike.
Julian slipped to the right, letting the iron tip shatter the floor tiles.
Over the next dozen exchanges, Julian’s brow began to furrow.
It wasn’t that Kashimo’s speed had increased.
On the contrary, the precision of his swings seemed to be dropping.
Several times, the iron staff struck the ground or the adjacent walls meters away from Julian’s actual position, leaving deep, scorched gouges in the concrete.
“What’s the matter, old man?” Julian taunted, dodging another wide sweep that missed his shoulder by half a meter.
“Losing your vision?”
Kashimo remained silent.
He lunged inward, swinging the staff horizontally.
Julian leaned back, slipping the arc, and countered with a lightning-infused right cross aimed directly at Kashimo’s jaw.
Kashimo didn’t try to block the strike.
He twisted his torso mid-air, using his momentum to slap the side of the iron staff against Julian’s hip before leaping backward.
Thud.
Julian took two steps back, frowning.
The blow held surprisingly little weight.
It felt almost deliberate—as if Kashimo was conserving his energy for something else.
Is he running out of output?
Julian thought, then immediately dismissed the idea.
No way.
A monster like Kashimo doesn’t tire out in five minutes.
He’s setting a trap.
Kashimo landed lightly on a ruined display counter twenty meters away, slinging the iron staff across his shoulders.
A cold, victorious smile touched his lips.
Julian lowered his guard slightly, sweeping his gaze across the atrium.
His breath caught.
The concrete floor, the supporting pillars, the steel railings, and the surrounding brick walls were covered in hundreds of glowing, microscopic electrical marks.
Every single “missed” swing, every strike that hit the floor or the walls, had been a deliberate placement.
Kashimo couldn’t plant a positive electrical charge directly inside Julian’s lightning-resistant body.
So he had planted them across the entire physical environment instead.
“Realized it a second too late, didn’t you?” Kashimo raised his right hand, a dense, blinding sphere of light condensing at the tip of his forefinger.
Julian felt the air around him go dead silent.
Countless blue specks of light hovered throughout the multi-story shopping mall.
The entire structure had become a massive, closed-circuit lightning trap.
Kashimo was about to detonate the entire building.
Julian flexed his core, preparing to sprint for the exit, but the atmospheric pressure locked his limbs in place as the charges aligned.
Kashimo’s voice echoed through the crumbling atrium, clear and resonant.
“Positive charge.”
“Negative charge.”
“Feedback discharge.”
The two charges met.
BOOM!
An unrestricted, omnidirectional electrical storm erupted inside the mall.
The explosion didn’t target a single individual—it expanded outward like a localized nuclear detonation.
The sheer heat and voltage vaporized structural steel, pulverized concrete pillars, and blew the roof off the building in a blinding flash of white light.
Glass, stone, and steel were reduced to fine ash in a fraction of a second.
When the blinding flash finally receded, the multi-story shopping complex had ceased to exist.
In its place lay a massive, smoking crater filled with melted steel and shattered concrete.
Amid the smoking ruins, Julian knelt on one knee, using a piece of rebar to keep himself upright.
His clothes had been burned away by the heat, and severe carbonized burns covered his arms and torso.
His breath came in ragged, painful gasps as he channeled Reverse Cursed Technique to patch his damaged internal organs.
Ten meters away, Kashimo stood amid the rubble, his skin scorched and his robes torn, but his stance remained firm.
Because the discharge was an environmental explosion rather than a targeted strike, Kashimo had taken a portion of the blast himself.
But with his innate lightning resistance and reinforced core, he had absorbed the shock far better than his opponent.
Kashimo stepped over a pile of slag, stopping a few paces from Julian.
He raised his iron staff, resting the tip lightly against the ground.
The ancient thunder god had claimed the ruins of Tokyo.