Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

Chapter 100: The Fourth Page

Atlas fell from the sky with his eyes closed, unconscious before he even understood what had happened or why that shockwave had formed in the first place.

His body dropped through the air and crashed into a dense section of forest far from the route to the Central City, bushes and trees surrounding where he landed, and the impact left a small crater in the ground beneath him.

CRAAAACK

The Traits had already started wearing off the moment he lost consciousness, his control over them gone with his awareness, only Regenerative Hide remained active, running on the same instinct-level it had been operating on since his Control had grown high enough for that, and it turned its attention inward toward the damaged organs, the ones that had taken the force of that shockwave that had carried no visible energy, no Spirit, no identifiable form, just pure destructive force spreading outward from the point where Fuzai-jū had connected with the monster.

Blood still flowed from his mouth, slower than it had been mid-air but still moving.

The monster was dead.

What had happened at that moment was straightforward once the pieces were in place — Kankon-Rei had struck the monster at point blank range, and the monster had Null mixed with Spirit running through its skin and muscles, so when Kankon-Rei, which had Null pressure at its fundamental level, made contact with that mixed Null and Spirit combination, the result was a clash between the original and the hybrid version of the same energy.

The ZZTTZZZZ sound was that clash, Kankon-Rei cutting through space around its Sign while the monster’s mixed energy resisted it, but the original always wins over a hybrid of itself, and Fuzai-jū was not just energy to begin with, it was an Active Vector, something that cut through the very space around it and erased whatever occupied that space, so the clash lasted less than a single second before it forced through the resistance and cut the monster’s body apart, erasing it from where it had been standing.

That forceful cutting was what produced the shockwave, the backlash of the erasure hitting Atlas at the same range the technique had fired from, and that was what had dropped him from the sky.

Inside his body, Regenerative Hide worked through the internal damage organ by organ, each section of torn and shifted tissue stitching back together slowly, the process running at its instinct-level pace rather than the faster rate Atlas could produce when conscious and directing Spirit into the damaged areas himself, which meant it stretched across hours rather than minutes.

Three hours passed.

Atlas’s hand curled against the ground, fingers closing slowly around the dirt beneath them, and his eyelids opened.

He couldn’t stand immediately the way he usually could after losing consciousness, his body registering the severity of what had happened even after the regeneration finished, and he lay there for a moment as a severe headache hit him, then faded.

He turned his head and extended his senses outward, no one was nearby, no Spirit signatures in the area around him, which meant only one thing alongside the fact that he was alive.

"It’s finally dead..."

He said it quietly while looking up at the sky through the gap in the trees above him.

Then he looked at Reiden, and the carved lines across his arm glowed faintly in response, and he spoke without changing his expression, "I almost died, I am still weak, Damn it all! But still It took a lot of effort at the end and it died...an S-rank Monster is really powerful and it had Null at that."

He didn’t think about why that shockwave had formed in the first place anymore, how and why it happened, he could figure it out later but what mattered the most was that...The Monster was dead and with it... it’s Null was also gone, Atlas couldn’t sense Null other than him anywhere now.

The glow of the carved lines pulsed softly again and he continued, "But our targets are Humans, and S-ranks with Intelligence far above that Monster...not to mention those abilities they carry."

He thought about Mark as he said it, the way that Revenant had used a small and precise amount of Spirit to defeat Velgrath the Crowbeast, and compared that to how he himself had just fought this S-rank monster, the gap between those two approaches was clear, "That Revenant was way stronger than we are right now...he had used so little Spirit and defeated that Crowbeast...I’d need to surpass that, and not only that, I have to reach a point where I can go against SSS-ranks without any

difficulty."

He said that as he only knew SSS-ranks existed from what little he had heard, he had no knowledge of Ex-ranks, even some Nobles had no knowledge of them, so that ceiling was all he was measuring against for now.

He sighed and pushed himself upright, "Hah...for now I need to reach S-rank, but...one thing I don’t understand is how that Monster had Null."

He turned the question over in his mind and a possibility surfaced, "What if that thing...had a Codex of its own?"

It was the most direct conclusion available to him, he couldn’t outright deny that another Codex could exist, though the idea of it sat uncomfortably because of how absurd it would be for something like the Codex to exist more than one.

He dismissed it though, because if the monster had a Codex functioning the same way his did it would have had Traits and physical strength well beyond what it had shown, and most of all it had Null so why couldn’t it use...an Active Vector or something similar to it? If it had it would’ve used it in the last moment or before that but as per Atals’s observation from the fight it had used nothing like that...

And it was already an S-rank with multiple traits, so the connection didn’t fully line up with that conclusion.

Then his chest glowed.

Atlas looked down at it, "What?—!"

The Codex emerged on its own without him calling it, the first time it had ever done that, floating in front of him and opening without any input from him at all, the pages flipping on their own until they stopped.

Atlas stared at the page it had opened to.

The Fourth page.

The lock of the fourth page was gone, in it’s place, at the uppermost section The heading started to write itself.

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[A/N: Two Chapters at Once from today as we have hit 100 Chapters and also I apologize if it felt like the Chapters were too short...

Somebody give this Author a Gift, maybe a super gift? For the celebration of 100 Chapters?]