The Transcendent Step scored better than the Lightning-Demon style with only its foundation form, but the martial art also had six advanced ones that truly pushed it toward the peak of the Global Army’s ranking.
Nevertheless, the six advanced forms were incredibly challenging. Each almost behaved as a standalone martial art, requiring unique and different approaches and training routines. Mastering a single one could take a lifetime, and no one had ever learned all six to this day.
Khan had long since acknowledged the magnitude of the task, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Truth be told, he had initially planned to learn a different advanced form for various reasons, but his past training had eventually pushed him toward the third.
Sharp waves of pain rose from Khan’s toes, and his right leg felt on the verge of bursting open due to all the energy amassed in its fabric. However, Khan’s face showed no emotion as he kept his eyes closed and focused on the technique’s theory.
Khan held his breath as every function in his body seemed to stop. He forgot about the humanoid storm ravaging his foot, only focusing on synchronizing his entire being with the raging energy inside his leg. Everything disappeared. His world went dark, with his stretched limb as its sole light.
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Then, Khan exhaled, and his body’s functions resumed working, albeit in a downward motion. The same went for the almost unbearable amount of mana in his leg, and the world under his toes flattened.
The humanoid storm of debris didn’t have typical sensory receptors, and the same went for the energy controlling it. However, the mass of strange lifeforms felt the unsurmountable pressure that fell on the entirety of its gigantic figure.
The titan could exert immense physical strength in that shape, but all its struggles amount to nothing. Its structural integrity immediately crumbled under that pressure. It seemed the very sky was falling, pushing its entire weight on it.
Things didn’t end there. A strange aura pervaded that unopposable weight, joining it in its descent and affecting anything in its surroundings. The debris, be it metal, rocky, or sandy, crumbled on its own under its influence, and even the gales started breaking apart, losing their terrifying might.
Everything that followed happened too quickly for either Khan or Chuwei’s lifeforms to study.
Khan found himself in the desert, kneeling with one leg stabbed in the sand. Debris littered his surroundings, but everything was flat. From above, one would be able to see that he was at the center of a perfectly circular and leveled hole, surrounded by dunes created by the soil his attack had pushed aside.
As for the titan, the area showed no trace of its existence. Even the storms unaffected by the lifeforms’ technique were pushed away, bringing peace to a vast zone all around Khan.
Still, Khan sensed some movement and tried to chase after it, only to discover that his right leg wouldn’t budge. A wave of pain also shot from it, filling his body and pushing a grunt out of his mouth. He clenched his teeth to endure the agony but didn’t forget to wave his hand.
’Get it,’ Khan ordered as a red flash shot out of his fingers and dug into the sand, chasing after what he had sensed.
A foreign bloodthirst flared inside Khan’s mind while he clung to his right knee and squeezed it in an instinctive attempt to suppress the pain. He even closed his eyes, summoning his experience of suffering to endure that phase.
Meanwhile, the red slash reached its target, piercing it to unleash its destructive sharpness. A sliver of Chuwei’s lifeform had escaped Khan’s attack, but the Divine Reaper cut it down, extinguishing its energy and making him aware of what it carried.
A bottomless, ancestral anger invaded Khan’s brain. He had only connected with a tinge of alien energy, but that had been enough to update him on the unwilling fury Chuwei’s natives wielded.
Khan knew that anger far too well. As a fellow carrier of the Nak’s nightmares, he had experienced similar feelings, but his curse had evolved toward his current desperation. That foreign emotion resonated with him but quickly vanished under the unreasonable clicking cry of his mind.
A modicum of peace returned to Khan’s mind, moving its focus back to the pain radiated by his right leg. The sand hid many wet spots caused by the explosion of his blood vessels, but nothing else seemed broken. Still, everything was numb and greatly hurt, highlighting the immense strain it had endured.
’I miscalculated,’ Khan cursed in his mind. ’It’s still a far cry from a perfect execution.’
While Khan’s body had gotten stronger, the energy he unleashed matched his improvements. The Transcendent Step’s third advanced form shouldn’t have unleashed such power. It did because Khan had been the one performing it.
However, Khan’s current state confirmed his lack of mastery over the technique. His execution wasn’t only flawed. He also had to add Maban’s skill and more of his element’s core aspect to the equation. The journey was still long, and the martial art also had five more advanced forms awaiting him.
Khan rested in that position for almost a minute before forcing himself to stand up. His right leg still hurt, but it worked somehow, and that was enough. Time was of the essence here, and Khan couldn’t waste that potentially temporary moment of peace after paying such a steep price to enforce it.
Nevertheless, Khan stopped again after standing up. His eyes fell on the desert, reminiscing on the flash of anger that had invaded him. Those lifeforms carried the sorrow of generations, but he had killed them anyway.
’I’m sorry,’ Khan thought. ’My anger is stronger than yours.’
Khan remained lost in thought for a few seconds before snapping back to reality. The sandstorm was closing on him again, and he had yet to check the underground graveyard’s state after the battle.
So, Khan turned toward the already partially covered vast cavity, limping on the sand to make his way back underground.
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