Chapter 140: A battle-obsessed maniac dissatisfied with Leon.
The swamp continued to disappear.
It was no longer possible to call that region a battlefield.
Much less natural territory.
Victor and Leon had surpassed that stage several minutes ago.
Each clash between the two destroyed a different part of the landscape. Centuries-old trees vanished. Entire lakes evaporated. Mountains of mud were hurled into the sky only to collapse seconds later as rain.
Most impressively, neither of them seemed particularly tired.
The fight was still escalating.
And that was a problem for everyone else present.
Leon emerged from a mass of condensed shadows as his black spear advanced on a trajectory impossible for most participants to follow.
The weapon cut through the air.
It tore through the atmosphere.
It pierced the space where Victor should have been.
But found only emptiness.
The next instant, Victor appeared above him.
His knee dropped.
Leon raised his arm.
The collision produced such an absurd shockwave that an entire wall of water rose up around them.
For a brief moment.
It looked like two monsters were trying to rip each other’s heads off.
And in a way, they were.
Leon’s eyes remained focused.
Calm.
Precise.
There was no hesitation.
No anxiety.
No anger.
Just calculation.
Victor realized this within the first few minutes.
And honestly?
It was disappointing.
Not because Leon was weak.
Quite the opposite.
Leon was absurdly strong.
Probably stronger than any other participant Victor had encountered up to that point.
The problem was his personality.
Or rather.
The lack thereof.
Victor spun in the air while dodging a stream of shadows that tried to pierce his torso.
Then he responded with an explosion of Black Ice.
Hundreds of stakes appeared.
Leon destroyed them all.
Neither gained an advantage.
Neither retreated.
But as they fought, Victor began to realize something.
He was having fun.
Leon wasn’t.
For Leon, this was just a battle.
A task.
An objective.
A situation that needed to be resolved.
Victor almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
The fight continued.
The shadows advanced.
The ice responded.
Black blood crossed the battlefield while explosions destroyed everything around them.
But little by little, a conclusion began to emerge in Victor’s mind.
Leon believed he was pressuring him.
And that was funny.
Very funny.
Because Victor was allowing it.
From the beginning.
The truth was simple.
Victor hadn’t yet shown half of what he could do.
Not even his full physical strength.
Not even his blood-related abilities.
Not even his ice control.
Not even his flames.
Not even that strange, monstrous perception.
He was fighting.
But he was also observing.
Learning.
Testing.
It was like someone playing with an interesting puzzle.
Leon didn’t realize this.
At least not immediately.
Because Victor was extremely good at hiding advantages.
He left small openings.
He would allow certain attacks.
He accepted some exchanges of blows.
He gave the impression of being pressured.
When in reality he was just assessing responses.
It was an extremely irritating way to fight.
In case the opponent found out.
Fortunately.
Leon hadn’t found out yet.
The two collided again.
The shadow took the form of a colossal sword.
Victor blocked using only one arm.
The impact destroyed half of a nearby hill. Leon advanced immediately.
Without pausing.
Without wasting a single movement.
Victor watched this for a few seconds.
Then he sighed.
"You’re boring."
Leon blinked.
The phrase was so random that even he seemed confused.
"What?"
Victor dodged a spear made of shadows.
Then he dodged another.
Then a third.
All while maintaining a completely disinterested expression.
"You’re strong."
He replied.
"But you’re boring."
Leon remained silent.
Victor continued.
"Emma was trying to kill me while screaming."
He dodged again.
"Charlotte too."
Another blow.
Another dodge.
"Grace short-circuits when I provoke her."
Leon kept attacking.
Victor kept talking.
"You just stand there being reasonable."
Finally Leon responded.
"You complain because you can’t provoke me?"
Victor thought for a few seconds.
Then he nodded.
"Exactly."
The silence that followed was almost offensive.
Leon simply continued attacking.
Victor watched this.
Then he sighed again.
"See?"
Another blow.
Another defense.
"Not funny."
For a brief moment.
Very brief.
It seemed like a vein pulsed in Leon’s forehead.
Victor immediately smiled.
"Ah."
He pointed.
"You almost got angry."
Leon completely ignored it.
Victor’s smile vanished.
"What a waste."
Then something curious happened.
Victor actually lost some interest.
Because it wasn’t just a provocation.
It was true.
He liked fighting.
He liked it a lot.
More than he should.
Much more than he used to like it before.
And this change wasn’t a coincidence.
In fact.
It had an extremely specific origin.
An origin that few people had noticed.
Not even Victor fully understood it yet.
When the Primordial Blood awakened within him, it wasn’t just abilities that emerged.
It wasn’t just physical capabilities.
It wasn’t just powers.
Personality traits also emerged.
Instincts.
Tendencies.
Impulses.
Characteristics deeply buried within that ancestral lineage.
And one of them was impossible to ignore.
The pleasure of battle.
No.
Pleasure was a weak word.
Very weak.
It was closer to fascination.
Obsession.
Need.
There are people who enjoy fighting.
Then there are battle maniacs.
The two categories are completely different.
An ordinary person fights because they need to.
Because they want to win.
Because they have a goal.
A battle maniac fights because the fight itself has value.
Combat ceases to be a tool.
And becomes an end.
The confrontation.
The pressure.
The danger.
The adaptation.
The evolution.
All of this produces a satisfaction that few other things can reproduce.
That’s why they are dangerous.
Ridiculously dangerous.
Because unlike other people,
They don’t run from risk.
They seek risk.
They don’t avoid strong opponents.
They hunt strong opponents.
They don’t desire security.
They desire challenge.
And within vampire society, there were two extremely famous examples of this.
Serafall.
And Chysis.
The two possessed many differences.
Distinct personalities.
Distinct methods.
Distinct objectives.
But they shared exactly this characteristic.
When they encountered an interesting battle.
They changed completely.
They became more alive.
More animated.
More dangerous.
More happy.
It was a characteristic that had taken them far above most other vampires.
Because while others sought comfort.
They sought growth.
While others protected what they already possessed.
They sought situations capable of forcing them to evolve.
It was an absurd mentality.
But extremely efficient.
And now.
Victor was beginning to exhibit the exact same behavior.
Perhaps in an even more extreme version.
Because he didn’t just like to fight.
He liked to discover things during the fight.
He liked to encounter strong people.
He liked to understand abilities.
He liked to test limits.
That’s why Leon had been interesting initially.
It was a new challenge.
An unknown variable.
A puzzle.
But now?
Now he was already understanding.
And when Victor understood something...
The interest waned.
The two collided again.
The shadow advanced.
The ice responded.
The resulting explosion crossed kilometers of forest.
But something had changed.
Leon noticed it first.
Victor was different.
He kept smiling.
He kept fighting.
But that initial curiosity had disappeared.
The excitement too.
It was as if he were reaching a conclusion.
An assessment.
A result.
Leon narrowed his eyes.
Because it bothered him.
For the first time since the beginning of that fight.
He felt something very close to irritation.
Not because of the provocations.
Not because of the jokes.
But because of the feeling of being analyzed.
As if Victor were deciding how much value that battle really had.
And that was irritating.
Deeply irritating.
Because Leon wasn’t weak.
He wasn’t ordinary.
He wasn’t someone who could be discarded.
But as the minutes passed.
The impression remained.
Victor was letting him believe he had an advantage.
When in reality...
Perhaps he never had one.
The conclusion began to slowly emerge.
And the more it appeared.
The harder it became to ignore it.
Because Victor kept learning.
Kept adapting.
Kept evolving.
While Leon.
For the first time in a long time.
Feeled to be fighting someone who was growing faster than he could keep up with. And that made the battle far more dangerous than either of them had initially imagined.
Victor blocked another sequence of shadow attacks with a single hand as the swamp continued to crumble around them. The mud beneath their feet no longer looked like natural terrain; it looked like the result of a continuous bombardment by two monsters who refused to retreat. Trees burned. Water boiled. Fragments of black ice remained embedded in broken trunks like makeshift tombstones scattered across the area.
Leon advanced again, his spear reinforced by blood and compressed shadows. The blow ripped through the air in a perfect trajectory, but Victor dodged with apparent ease and reappeared beside him the next instant. The shadow sword immediately spun to intercept him, only to encounter a wall of black ice that appeared out of nowhere and exploded into hundreds of razor-sharp fragments.
The two continued exchanging blows for several seconds in a sequence too fast for any ordinary participant to follow. Shadows advanced like gigantic serpents. Black ice appeared at impossible angles. Condensed blood took the form of weapons and chains. Each collision produced a shockwave strong enough to destroy another part of the swamp.
Then Victor sighed.
Not a sigh of weariness.
A sigh of boredom.
"You’re not entertaining me."
Leon spun his spear and retreated a few meters, keeping the shadows scattered across the terrain under control. His expression remained serious, but there was genuine attention in his eyes now. After the attack that had ripped half his body off earlier, he no longer treated Victor as an ordinary participant.
"Funny." His voice came out low and controlled. "You seem to be having quite a bit of fun."
Victor tilted his head slightly.
"I was."
The shadows began to thicken again around Leon as he prepared another offensive. The entire swamp responded to the command; the water darkened, the fog thickened, and dozens of black arms emerged from the mud around him. It was the same phenomenon that had crushed the previous participants. The difference was that now all that mass was being concentrated against a single target.
Victor observed this for a second.
Then he reached out his hand.
The cold came first.
Black ice began to grow from his palm at an absurd speed, forming a long, elegant blade. Unlike the stakes he had been using during the hunt, this weapon seemed built for real combat. The dark surface reflected only a deep, almost nonexistent blue, as if the sword absorbed light instead of reflecting it.
Then the fire appeared.
White flames erupted along the blade without any gradual transition. They didn’t crackle. They didn’t produce smoke. They simply existed. The heat was so intense that the surrounding air distorted instantly, while even the black snow forming near the sword evaporated before touching the ground.
Leon’s shadows reacted instantly.
Not advancing.
Retreating.
The black arms closest to the blade simply vanished upon contact with the white fire. They didn’t burn in the usual sense. They were extinguished. As if that flame negated the very existence of the dark matter it touched.
Leon saw it happen.
And for the first time since the beginning of the confrontation, his perfect control of his expression faltered for an instant.
Amazement.
Small.
But real.
"What is this...?"
Victor swung the sword once. The white flames left a luminous trail in the air while the black ice remained intact beneath the impossible fire.
"I’m still figuring it out."
The shadows tried to advance again. Black currents rose from the swamp, arms emerged from the trees, and an entire wall of darkness rushed toward Victor. The white fire responded even before he moved his sword. The flame simply spread across the blade and touched the darkness.
Everything that came into contact with it vanished.
No explosion.
No resistance.
Not even ashes.
Leon’s shadow domain began to collapse around that white fire like rotten fabric exposed to acid.
Leon didn’t retreat.
Instead, he compressed all the remaining darkness around his own weapon. The black spear thickened, gaining additional layers of solid blood and condensed shadows until it looked more like a piece of artillery than a weapon. He charged directly at Victor, using what remained of his territorial control to propel the advance.
Victor advanced as well.
The two vanished from the ground at the same time.
The collision happened in the air, above the devastated swamp. The black spear met the black ice sword bathed in white fire, and for an instant the whole world seemed to stop. The pressure released was so absurd that the clouds above the region opened in a gigantic circle.
Then the sword passed through.
There was no prolonged exchange.
There was no balanced contest of strength.
The white fire consumed the shadows reinforcing the spear, the black ice cut through the condensed blood, and the blade continued advancing directly through Leon’s guard.
Victor completed the movement with a full body rotation.
The sword drew a white and black arc across Leon’s chest.
CRAAAAASH.
The impact sliced through the air for miles. The released energy split the swamp mist and opened a gigantic furrow in the terrain below them. Leon was thrown backward like a projectile, piercing trees, rocks, and bodies of water in a straight line of destruction.
When it finally stopped, the upper half of his uniform was gone. A deep cut ran diagonally across his chest, and the wound exhibited an impossible phenomenon: the edges were simultaneously burned and frozen. The white fire continued to consume any shadow that tried to touch the wound, while the black ice kept the surrounding flesh rigid and dead.
Leon tried to regenerate.
The recovery began.
Then he slowed down brutally.
He didn’t stop completely, but he moved forward at a fraction of the absurd speed he had demonstrated before. The combination of white fire and black ice seemed to directly interfere with the dark regeneration mechanisms that sustained his body.
Victor landed lightly on the ground, the sword still burning in his hand.
He watched Leon trying to rise amidst the wreckage of the destroyed swamp. The man managed to support one knee on the ground. Faint shadows tried to gather around him, only to be extinguished whenever they touched the white residue left by the wound.
Victor sighed again.
"Ready."
Leon looked up. There was still defiance in his eyes. There was still the intention to continue. But his body no longer responded as before.
Victor could finish this.
He knew.
Leon probably knew too.
The black ice sword remained motionless as Victor watched his defeated opponent trying to gather enough strength to stand again.
Then he thought of the past.
Not on that battlefield. In another time. In another historical timeline. Jake had eliminated almost all the monsters of the younger generation when the family’s internal power began to crumble. The Valentine Family had survived on paper, but had lost precisely the people capable of preventing the subsequent political collapse. The result was a weakened, divided, and desperate vampire house.
Leon was a problem.
But he was also an absurd strategic asset for the family itself.
Killing him there would resolve an immediate conflict and create a much bigger problem in the future.
Victor made the sword disappear. The black ice dissolved into dark particles, and the white fire extinguished without leaving a trace.
"I would even kill you." He said to himself, far enough away that Leon couldn’t hear him. "But the last time almost all the monsters in the family died too young, the result was complete shit."
Leon remained silent, breathing heavily as the slow regeneration continued to fight against the residual damage.
Victor turned his back.
"So today it’s just a beating. We’ll play in the future."
Victor then looked at the monster in front of him. "Your turn now."
