Chapter 67: Clash
They came to a clearing in the forest a couple of kilometres from the city, the same one Alaric and Eva had come from.
Facing each other, Alaric in his blue robe, while Hundao in a white robe, fluttering in the direction of the wind.
Everything was quiet until it was not.
To an onlooker, it would seem that in one breathtaking instant, the two figures vanished from sight. A thunderous shockwave erupted in their wake, rippling violently outward and sending the tall grasses and ancient trees swaying and trembling as though the very earth itself recoiled from their sudden clash.
Both combatants were fierce brawlers, exchanging blows at speeds that seemed to blur the air itself. Fists cracked through the space between them with a force that made the ground tremble.
What truly captivated Alaric, however, was the martial technique Hundao employed: with uncanny precision, Hundao seemed to slip around any strike he could sense coming, his movements fluid and nearly impossible to track.
Even when Alaric managed to land a hit, the impact was strangely muted, as if Hundao’s body absorbed the force and rebounded it harmlessly, like trying to punch into a living, elastic shield.
After carefully observing Hundao’s movements, Alaric began to unravel the intricacies of his opponent’s technique. He realised that Hundao’s origin energy had not simply enhanced his body, but had fundamentally altered its nature, imbuing his flesh, muscles, and even his bones with an extraordinary elasticity.
It was as if Hundao’s entire form had become a living, flexible material, able to bend, twist, and absorb force in ways that defied normal human anatomy. This malleability granted Hundao an uncanny ability to execute evasive manoeuvres, contorting around incoming strikes or springing away with a sudden, whip-like motion that left afterimages flickering in the air.
Alaric noticed that every successful blow landed on Hundao’s body felt bizarrely unsatisfying. Rather than the jarring impact of fist meeting flesh, there was a sensation akin to striking a thick, viscous membrane.
His punches would sink in slightly, only to have their force ripple outward and dissipate harmlessly, like tossing a stone into a pool of syrup. The energy would spread through Hundao’s body in undulating waves, robbing Alaric’s attacks of their effectiveness and making it nearly impossible to inflict real damage.
Impressed by this unique display of martial prowess, Alaric couldn’t help but voice his admiration. "You have a fascinating technique."
Hundao’s eyes sparkled with pride, and a mischievous grin spread across his face. "Hehe, I made it myself," he replied, his tone brimming with satisfaction at his own ingenuity.
Alaric smiled at that. Not at the technique itself, though it was genuinely impressive. He smiled at the pride in Hundao’s voice, the way a craftsman sounds when he shows you something he built with his own hands and knows it is good.
"You should be proud," Alaric said.
Then he hit Hundao three times in the space of a single breath.
The first strike found the left shoulder. The second landed at the sternum. The third, lower, two inches below the ribs on the right side. Each blow sank in the way Alaric had come to expect, the force spreading outward through elastic flesh like pressure released into water, the impact rippling and dispersing before it could concentrate into damage. Hundao rolled with it beautifully, the motion so practiced it had become unconscious. His body simply knew how to eat force and return it to nothing.
He rebounded sideways, dropped low, and came back in with a hooking sweep aimed at Alaric’s lead leg.
Alaric moved his foot before the sweep arrived.
He had moved it, in fact, before Hundao had committed to the trajectory. This was not a prediction in the intuitive sense. It was arithmetic. Hundao’s weight shift, the angle of his rear knee, the slight coiling at the hip that preceded every low attack.
Alaric was not in the path of the sweep; it felt like he was never in the path of anything.
This was what he had been working to conceal for the past several minutes. The restraint was not just in his strength, though he had throttled that down to something Hundao could engage with without getting hurt. It was also in his footwork, his timing, his positioning.
He was fighting with one hand loosely tied behind his back, not in ability but in information, pretending not to know things he already knew three movements in advance, so that the fight felt like a fight and not like a lesson in geometry.
Hundao pressed forward.
He was fast. Genuinely fast, not just fast relative to his cultivation stage but fast in the absolute sense, the kind of speed built from ten thousand hours of repetition until the body screams for help. There were no wasted movements in his technique; each step landed him in the next optimal position.
The elasticity technique was not just defensive. He used it offensively now, letting his arm extend beyond its natural range and then snapping back like a whip, adding that rebounding quality to his strikes so that the impact came twice, once on contact, once when the energy returned to the point of origin.
It was a sound, inventive technique. The kind of thing that would give most opponents real difficulty.
Alaric slipped left of a straight right hand, letting it pass near his jaw without touching him, and studied the arm as it went by.
He had been studying the elasticity since the first exchange. Origin energy suffuses throughout the body at the tissue level, altering the mechanical properties of muscle and bone rather than simply reinforcing them. It was a fundamental modification, meaning it operated continuously rather than only on activation. The body could not selectively disable the elasticity when it was no longer needed. It was simply what the body was now.
That was the weakness.
Not a flaw in the technique. More of a physical law that the technique could not escape. Elasticity disperses concentrated force by converting it into oscillation and spreading it across a larger surface area. The tissue distributed the energy, neutralized the peak, and returned the body to a state of rest. The problem was the return. The oscillation had to go somewhere. Under normal circumstances, with normal force, it went everywhere, dissipating harmlessly.
What if the oscillation could not dissipate?
Alaric stepped back and let Hundao advance, buying himself four seconds of space.
He pushed origin energy into his right hand.
Not in the usual configuration. He did not reinforce the bones or harden the skin. He sent the energy cycling through the hand in a rapid, tight, alternating pattern, current against current, wave against wave, until the hand itself was vibrating at a frequency he could feel and closely analyze intimately.
The air around his knuckles blurred faintly. The sensation was unusual, like holding something that wanted to shake itself loose.
He had never done this before.
He had thought of it approximately forty seconds ago.
Hundao came in with a two-hit combination, right body shot, left cross, the sequence designed to work together, the first forcing a guard response and the second finding the gap it created. He had used it twice already, and both times Alaric had simply not been there. This time, Alaric let the body shot land.
Or rather, he turned into it, accepting the impact on his left forearm in a partial block rather than moving fully clear.
He felt the elasticity at work, even through the block, the force blooming outward and trying to scatter harmlessly. He felt the follow-up left cross arrive and deflected it outward with an open right hand, redirecting it rather than stopping it, so Hundao’s arm swept past and pulled his shoulder slightly forward.
The opening was there for less than a moment.
Alaric drove his right fist into Hundao’s midsection.
The impact, to an observer, would have looked unremarkable. A clean punch, well-placed, nothing spectacular in the speed or the visible force. Hundao’s body accepted it the way it had accepted everything else, the elasticity pulling the force apart, spreading it, preparing to return him to equilibrium.
But the vibration was already inside him.
The moment Alaric’s fist made contact, the rapidly cycling origin energy transferred, not as an ordinary origin energy, but as a frequency, the kind of tight oscillating pattern that the elastic tissue could not simply spread and neutralize. It had nowhere to go.
The dispersal mechanism that made the technique so effective worked by translating concentrated force into wide-area oscillation, but this was already oscillation. The tissue received it, tried to distribute it further, and, in doing so, amplified it, passing the frequency from muscle to adjacent muscle, tendon to bone, each layer picking it up and carrying it deeper.
Hundao’s eyes went wide for the first time in this fight.
He staggered, losing control, elastic rebound of the previous exchanges. A genuine stagger, one foot going back to catch his weight, his hand coming to his midsection as if checking whether something had changed there. His expression shifted through surprise and landed somewhere closer to confusion, the confusion of a man whose fundamental assumption about how he worked had just been contradicted.
Alaric lowered his right hand and waited.
Hundao straightened slowly. The oscillation would fade on its own, and the tissue would return to its natural state once the frequency source was removed. Nothing was damaged in any permanent sense. His ribs and muscles were fine. What was not fine was the internal experience of having his own technique turned against him at the tissue level, the elasticity becoming an amplifier rather than a shield, running the vibration through him like a struck bell.
He stood there breathing, working out what had happened.
Alaric watched him work through it and said nothing.
"You just created a technique?" Hundao said finally. It came out less like an accusation and more like a statement of fact that he was still processing. "In the middle of the fight, you made something new."
"The weakness was obvious to me," Alaric said. "Elasticity disperses, but it cannot disperse something that disperses by its nature. Feed it the same thing it produces, and it has nothing to do with the input."
Hundao stared at him.
"You figured that out while we were fighting."
"Yes."
A long pause. Hundao could feel frustration slowly creeping in.
"How long did it take you?"
Alaric considered whether to answer honestly. He decided Hundao had earned it.
"About forty seconds from the first exchange." He answered truthfully.
Silence filled the area.
"Forty seconds," he said.
"The technique itself is excellent," Alaric said, and meant it. "What you built is genuinely difficult to fight. The vibration only worked because I could read your energy structure from the outside. An opponent without that perception would struggle with you for a long time."
Hundao absorbed this. His chin came up slightly.
"But not you."
"Not me," Alaric agreed, without apology or softening. "Never me."
The clearing had gone quiet again around them, the grasses settled, the trees still. Somewhere above the canopy, the sun had moved another degree west, and the light that fell through the leaves had shifted from white to the first faint suggestion of gold.
Hundao rolled his shoulders, wincing once, and looked at Alaric with something in his expression that had not been there at the beginning of the fight. Not admiration exactly, but closer to the specific respect of someone who has been shown very clearly where they stand and has decided, in the same moment, exactly how far they intend to go to close that distance.
This was the first time he had truly been defeated. When he entered the city, the only reason he didn’t fight those who robbed him was the impact of their battle. They would have been difficult to beat, but they wouldn’t have beaten him either; this, however, was different. He was losing.
"Again," he said.
Alaric settled his weight back into a loose, open stance, his half-lid purple eyes watching Hundao calmly.
"Again," he said.
