Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 371: The Final Round [III / Bonus Chapter]

The stadium fell breathlessly quiet.

Thousands of spectators leaned forward against the cold metal railings, staring down at the blood-soaked pit.

Blood-Saint slowly rose to his feet.

The mud dripped from his ragged priest vestments as he wiped a streak of dark grease and gore from his jaw, spitting a mouthful of coppery phlegm onto the ground.

"Haaaaaa... Haaaaaa...."

And then... something fundamentally changed.

The frantic twitching madness that had consumed the priest since the very first preliminary match completely evaporated from his posture.

His eyes stopped rolling frantically. The manic drooling grin vanished as his face relaxed into a chilling crystalline stillness.

Slide!

Blood-Saint slowly adjusted his bare feet in the mud.

He didn’t take an awkward unstable brawling stance.

He widened his base, dropping his center of gravity flawlessly until his hips were perfectly aligned with his core.

He brought both hands up, tucking his elbows tightly against his floating ribs to completely shield his vital organs.

His weight shifted effortlessly onto the balls of his feet, balanced with the fluid precision of a master Muay Thai fighter, while his hands hovered open in the classic devastating guard of ancient Lethwei bare-knuckle masters.

Silas stopped in his tracks.

Behind the silver fangs of his Oni mask, his Rip-Current Perception scanned the man’s entire structure.

There were no glaring openings, sure a bit of weak points here and there but there was no overextended balance.

Every single tendon, ligament, and muscle fiber across the priest’s scarred body was coiled with deep refined efficiency.

’Oh,’ Silas thought with a genuine spark of surprise flickering in his chest. ’Look at that. He actually knows real, elite martial arts. He isn’t just relying on cheap biological drugs or cybernetic hydraulics like the rest of these underworld bums... He actually trained for this.’

Blood-Saint exhaled a slow frosty breath into the humid air.

WHOOSH!

He moved.

The man didn’t charge like a berserker, he glided across the mud with terrifying frictionless force instead.

He closed the twenty-foot gap in a fraction of a heartbeat, stepping directly into Silas’s inner guard.

He unleashed a master-class combination of powerful strikes.

SNAP!

A lightning-fast lead jab aimed directly at Silas’s throat.

Silas tilted his chin back half an inch, feeling the displaced wind scrape his collar.

CLACK!

Blood-Saint immediately pivoted on his lead foot, rotating his entire torso to bring a vicious downward elbow strike slicing straight toward Silas’s right temple.

Silas brought his left forearm up, intercepting the elbow with a sharp parry.

THUD!

The collision sent a sharp shockwave through Silas’s arm, stinging the nerves.

The priest’s internal mana was fueling his strikes with terrifying power.

’An actual challenge...’

Without breaking momentum, Blood-Saint stepped through the parry, driving a devastating upward spear-knee straight toward Silas’s liver.

BAM!

Silas dropped his right elbow, catching the knee just inches before it could rupture his side.

The two fighters instantly erupted into a breathtaking high-speed hurricane of elite hand-to-hand combat.

SMACK! CLACK! THUD! BANG!

They blurred across the center of the ring, trading blocks, lightning-fast feints, and bone-rattling strikes.

Blood-Saint attacked like a flowing river of knives... spinning back-fists, sweeping low kicks, and devastating close-range headbutts.

Silas was actually forced to actively engage his physical defense, slipping punches by millimeters, deflecting lethal palm strikes with heavy forearm blocks, and returning sharp concussive counters that the priest narrowly parried with master-level footwork.

Sweat, mud, and flecks of blood sprayed into the air with every violent collision.

Up in the stands, the crowd didn’t even cheer.

They were completely spellbound, watching a display of martial perfection rarely seen outside the echelons of the Sovereign Realm.

Silas felt a rare genuine thrill coursing through his veins.

The priest’s technique was undeniably good.

’Well thankfully, I’ve had a lot of practice with the martial arts of this world.’

"You possess divine form!" Blood-Saint hissed between clenched teeth as he parried a heavy hook from Silas and countered with an open-palm strike to Silas’s chest plate.

THUD!

Silas absorbed the heavy blow with his body anchoring his mass without yielding a single inch of ground.

"You’re not bad yourself," Silas admitted bluntly through the mask, stepping forward to press the offensive. "Better than the cyborgs at the very least."

But Silas was not an ordinary martial artist.

He was a Lord.

He possessed a Mythic Gold Core that provided an inexhaustible reservoir of endurance at this level so in a prolonged exchange of pure physical attrition, the laws of biology were on Silas’s side.

Blood-Saint launched a high sweeping roundhouse kick aimed at Silas’s neck.

Silas read the trajectory perfectly. He dipped beneath the sweeping shin, stepping deep into the priest’s exposed center line.

Blood-Saint’s guard was split wide open for a split-second.

Silas seized the opening instantly and he didn’t hold back the output this time.

He rotated his hips, coiling his entire body weight into a massive, full-power devastating straight punch aimed straight at the dead center of Blood-Saint’s solar plexus.

It was a punch designed to shatter the sternum, collapse both lungs, and end the match in a single definitive blow.

SHLUCK!

The sound that echoed across the dirt was not the sharp concussive crack of breaking bone that Silas expected.

It was a wet horrific sound of tearing flesh.

Silas’s eyes widened in genuine shock behind his mask.

The skin, fat, and muscle across Blood-Saint’s stomach were bizarrely soft.

The moment Silas’s knuckles made contact, the flesh didn’t offer an ounce of resistance... it yielded like warm butter instead.

Silas’s entire right hand, wrist, and forearm punched straight through the priest’s abdomen.

His black-gloved fist burst cleanly out through the back of the man’s bloody robes, dripping with dark fluid.

’Fuck...’

He had accidentally impaled him like a pig on a spit.

Silas froze in place, his stomach churning with deep disgust at the wet, boiling heat of the internal organs wrapped tightly around his arm.

’What the hell?!’ Silas thought, horrified. ’I didn’t mean to do that! His body just gave out!’

"Ah..." Blood-Saint let out a soft wet gasp.

A thick stream of dark crimson blood leaked from the corners of his lips yet he didn’t collapse.

He didn’t fall to his knees and he didn’t scream in agony.

It was weird...

Blood-Saint slowly tilted his head down, staring at the massive arm buried straight through his midsection.

Then... he slowly tilted his head back up.

The cold disciplined martial focus in the priest’s eyes instantly shattered as the rabid religious fanaticism returned with ten times its original fury.

"RAHHHHHHHH!"

A wide terrifying smile stretched across Blood-Saint’s face, exposing blood-coated teeth.

"Got you..." Blood-Saint whispered, his voice trembling with ecstasy.

CLENCH!

Instantly, the impossibly soft abdominal muscles and viscera inside the priest’s torso violently, magically contracted.

They constricted around Silas’s forearm with the terrifying bone-crushing pressure of an industrial hydraulic vice.

Silas was completely locked into the man’s body.

Before Silas could forcefully wrench himself free, the massive volume of dark blood pouring from the gaping wound began to unnaturally boil.

HISSSSSSSSSS!

The latent mana trapped within the biological fluid ignited.

Blood Magic.

The dark crimson fluid completely defied gravity.

It surged upward, crawling rapidly up Silas’s trapped arm like a living swarm of crimson leeches.

The magically charged blood generated intense heat, instantly eating through the reinforced fabric of his trench coat and sizzling against his skin.

’Fuck! It just got fixed!’

"You are too dangerous to be allowed to breathe!" Blood-Saint shrieked at the top of his lungs, thick flecks of acidic saliva and blood spraying from his mouth.

His veins pulsed with a blinding toxic violet luminescence.

"MY GOD IS SCREAMING AT ME!" Blood-Saint howled, his voice splitting into multiple demonic frequencies. "HE WANTS YOUR HEAD! HE DEMANDS YOUR SOUL! SACRIFICE! SACRIFICE!"

Silas felt the intense burning heat of the acidic blood attempting to chew through his skin and dissolve his Gold bones.

’Get your disgusting guts off me!’ Silas thought with furious revulsion.

He braced his boots against the mud, lowered his center of gravity, and violently jerked his right arm backward with everything he had.

RRRRRRRRRIP!

With pure brute force, Silas tore his arm completely out of the vice.

The violent extraction ripped a massive dinner-plate-sized chunk of flesh, shredded muscle, and ruptured intestines straight out of the priest’s torso, scattering gore across the dirt.

WHOOSH!

Silas rapidly back-pedaled fifteen feet across the arena, furiously shaking his right arm to fling the sizzling acidic blood off his smoking ruined sleeve.

"Fuck... Fuck... Fuck..."

Blood-Saint didn’t even flinch at the fatal gaping crater in his stomach as he completely lost all remaining vestiges of human sanity.

He went terrifyingly feral.

BUBBLE-HISSSS!

The gallons of boiling blood pouring from his catastrophic torso wound didn’t drop to the earth.

They hung suspended in the air, swirling around him in a dense, crimson vortex before rapidly solidifying into six long razor-sharp tendrils of dense crystallized blood.

They whipped through the air around him like the legs of a monstrous arachnid.

"K-K-K... KILL!" Blood-Saint shrieked, his mind consumed by demonic whispers. "XVESU! THE BLOOD FLOWS! GOR-VASH-TOK! KILL! TEAR THE DEMON! KILL! KILL!"

High above in the rafters, the Syndicate snipers watched the blatant display of external magical manipulation.

"Holy shit! He’s using external magic! He’s bypassing the Null-stone suppression!" the sniper yelled into his comms. "Authorization to eliminate the rogue target!"

"Fire! Fire!" the team lead ordered.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

Three high-velocity armor-piercing kinetic rounds tore down from the ceiling catwalks at three times the speed of sound, aimed straight for Blood-Saint’s temple to enforce the cage’s absolute rules.

Blood-Saint didn’t even look up at the ceiling.

WHIP-CLANG!

Two of the crystallized blood tendrils snapped upward with blinding speed, swatting the supersonic sniper slugs completely out of mid-air like annoying flies, sending loud metallic rings echoing across the dome.

On his hovering platform, the Announcer completely lost his nerve.

He frantically grabbed his encrypted comms unit with both hands, screaming into the channel.

"Boss! Boss, he’s actively bypassing the Null-stone suppression!" the Announcer panicked with his voice cracking. "The cage can’t contain blood magic! Should I drop the emergency blast doors and flood the cage with neurotoxin?!"

CLICK.

"Do not touch that switch," the deep cold voice of the Black-Ash Boss resonated calmly through the earpiece. "Look at the telemetry... The betting pool just hit an all-time record. The audience is captivated so leave the cage open and let them fight to the death."

Down in the mud, Blood-Saint dropped onto all fours with his blood tendrils driving into the earth like spider legs.

"KILL! SACRIFICE THE DEMON! KILL!"

BOOM!

The dirt exploded behind him as Blood-Saint launched himself forward.

The six crystallized blood spears flared with toxic mana, thrusting simultaneously toward Silas’s chest, throat, and eyes with enough force to punch through a battleship hull.

WHOOSH!

Silas stood perfectly still in the center of the ring.

He stared through the narrow slits of his Oni mask at the incoming storm of crimson blades.

’Alright,’ Silas decided. ’I’ve had enough of this circus..’

Silas completely abandoned every single restraint he had placed on his physical output.

FZZZZZZT!

Silas moved so incomprehensibly fast that he simply ceased to occupy the space before the spears could even register his movement.

THOOM!

The six blood spears pierced empty air, obliterating the dirt where Silas had stood an instant prior.

In the very same second, Silas materialized directly to the left of Blood-Saint’s flank.

Silas drew a massive tidal wave of Mythic Gold Core mana from his core, channeling the concentrated energy straight into the fibers of his right leg as his boot blurred, displacing the atmospheric pressure around his shin into a vacuum.

He stepped through the mud and unleashed a single devastating kick.

KRA-THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The heavy steel-toed combat boot struck the left side of Blood-Saint’s jaw and the staggering power behind the strike didn’t just break the man’s neck... It didn’t just shatter his skull either.

The shockwave cleanly severed Blood-Saint’s head entirely from his torso, sending the severed skull launching across the arena like a cannonball before it obliterated against the far Null-stone wall in a wet dark red crater.

SPLAT!

For a long agonizing second, the headless mutilated body of the priest remained standing in the center of the dirt.

The six crystallized blood tendrils instantly lost their magical cohesion, collapsing into harmless sizzling puddles of dark fluid in the mud.

THUD!

The headless corpse collapsed heavily onto its chest, going completely still as the entire subterranean colosseum fell silent.

Thousands of people sat frozen in their seats, staring down at the slaughter in the pit. The broken cyborg, the comatose assassin, and the headless priest.

High above, floating on his anti-gravity platform, the Announcer stared down at the carnage with wide trembling eyes.

The microphone shook violently in his sweaty grip.

He swallowed a mouthful of bile, finally finding his voice.

"L-LADIES AND GENTLEMEN..." the Announcer stammered, his voice trembling through the PA system. "THE ROYALE IS OVER! BY CARNAGE... ONII-CHAN IS THE UNDISPUTED CHAMPION OF SHOGITOWN!"

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