What appeared to be blood of various colors stained the grass as well as the trunks of the trees surrounding the raised platform from which a gentle, many-colored light streamed out like water vapor.

  The glassy platform itself also had blood around the rim where the Gohkamorian had been sitting. Bloody drag marks led into a row of fat bushes. Eik was probably not the first challenger to make it up here.

  Whether the Gohkamorian had dispatched all previous arrivals on his own thus far or simply been the most recent in a long string of Awakened taking turns to kill each other to sit on the metaphorical throne was impossible to say with any kind of certainty.

  The giant man drew a similarly gigantic sword from his back where it had been fastened not by a sheath but by three overlapping straps. It thunked into the grass in front of him as he relaxed his grip. The same colors of different blood that stained ground covered the thick blade from hilt to tip.

  The Gohkamorian’s face was nothing but a mask of stone as he gazed at Eik. He didn’t seem to have any interest in talking. Eik didn’t either so a quiet approach suited him just fine.

  Raising his sword up high above his head, the man gripped the handle firmly with one hand while the butt of the sword rested on his upturned palm, With practiced poise and a balanced stance, he stepped slowly toward Eik, whose blade was held simply in one hand with no trace of any real training.

  “Come!” the alien roared, breaking the assumption of silence as all muscles in his massive body suddenly tensed up, ready for combat. “Come! Face me! Show me that you are more worthy than those who came before you!”

  Mikla had mentioned that the Gohkamorians were a warlike people with an incomparable reverence for combat. His stoic expression seemed to prove that, at least this guy, embodied that nature to its fullest.

  Eik stepped up, his own steady gaze never wavering.

  Settling into a low stance, ready to explode forward at a moment’s notice, Eik held the wakizashi out in front of him. The giant warrior widened his own stance slightly as well in response, anticipating the imminent clash with clear excitement. “I am ready to meet you!” he shouted.

  The Gohkamorian was clearly a proud man and he deserved for that pride to be met with something of equal weight. Something to match the spirit exuding from every ounce of his being.

  Too bad Eik wasn't the one to do something dumb like that.

  Abandoning the ready stance entirely, he threw himself bodily to the right, crashing through rows of fat bushes with the cracks of breaking vegetation. He rolled across the corpse of a woman, a deep gash spanning her entire torso from collarbone to below her navel clearly the cause of her death.

  Did the Gohkamorian have some kind of ability that allowed him to slice through armor? Hers was shattered all along the cut. Or perhaps he was simply so strong that it didn’t stop him. Well, whatever it was, Eik had no intention of ever finding out.

  One thing was for sure though. The bastard was powerful and dangerous.

  Recovering almost instantly from the surprise of seeing his opponent disappear into the green rather than coming head on, the Gohkamorian started after him, leading with the tip of his blade held in a low grip.

  He trampled through the bushes, careful to not inadvertently stomp on any of the corpses. He had seen the new arrival jump through the bushes here and not come back out, so a preemptive downward slash chopped cleanly through the twigs and leaves and carved a deep groove into the earth.

  The little man was gone.

  Bringing his blade about in a wide arch around himself, his eyes darted from tree to tree and from corpse to corpse, looking for any sign of the vanished man. Could it be invisibility? Or perhaps an ability that allowed the user to change physical size? Hyper speed, maybe? Environmental camouflage?

  Three small throwing knives came free of his belt and thunked into the three closest tree trunks but it revealed nobody hidden. Then what?

  He scanned the ground by his feet. There was nothing but the corpses of his former adversaries, puddles of their dried blood, as well as a small, glowing puddle of some manner of blue substance. The remnants of a dimensional gate, perhaps?

  Alertness never leaving him, he knelt by the puddle to take a closer look. If its origins were materials for dimensional travel, he might be able to track it, assuming the distance traveled wasn’t too far. When he dipped his armored finger into the liquid, it suddenly drained in through the gaps in his armor, defying gravity.

  As if jolted by electric shock, he shot up with an involuntary and exceedingly dishonorable yelp. Even upon removing his finger from the remaining liquid, it continued to flow about his body as if alive, seeping in between the segmented metal.

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  Being a swordsman with no real way to get at this strange liquid, all he could do was try to sweep it off his body with his hands. But there was nothing to do. It was under the plate.

  Suddenly, before he could react, it streamed up through the collar of his armor and past his neck as it gathered and materialized into a person. Forming out of the liquid, a slender blade slid across his neck, a streak of red immediately spilling blood.

  “Alright, go ahead, guys,” the most recent challenger said as the Gohkamorian, unable to maneuver his large blade properly in time, resorted to a clenched fist. A forceful shove more than a punch, it sent Eik careening through the air with a scream. “I left the door open for you,” he yelled.

  At that moment, eight little blobs of blue came rushing up from the inside of the armor, and before he could slap them away, they disappeared into the newly opened wound in his neck. Cold sweat broke out on his back as he felt the substance invade. It felt wrong. It was alien.

  Pain followed shortly after, worse than any he had experienced during practice. Truth be told, unlike many Gohkamorian battle arts, his school valued training and preparation above even real life combat experience. Juhak Mimandomikaou, as he had been renamed upon passing the true test of a warrior a few years back, was extraordinarily gifted to the point where it had allowed him to qualify to join the Championships despite having less real life experience than many of his peers.

  That wasn’t to say that he had none at all, of course. His school simply believed that solitude, meditation, and image training was the best way to polish oneself, both when it came to physical capabilities as well as spiritual advancement. That thorough preparation for fewer but more challenging ordeals was worth more than countless small trials and difficulties. There was more to power than levels and power ranks. Might followed will in this world and will could be honed just like the sharp edge of a blade.

  Most of the warriors from his school did not amount to that much, unfortunately, but he had proven especially capable. He was proud of his school. He followed their every directive to the letter.

  Honor and frankness was at the forefront of his mind at all times — an awareness of the image of himself he projected into the world at all times. So why did this man refuse to meet him fairly?

  “Face me! Face me, I say!” he bellowed, as the damned human legged it in the other direction, disappearing among the trees.

  For years he had endured the worst of pains every single day in pursuit of strength. But what coursed through his body at this very moment was something different. It was primal and otherworldly, and it did not belong.

  Leading the charge with his blade and an activation of his movement ability, he gave chase, determined to cut into that slippery, dishonorable eel of a man at least once before whatever had been planted inside of him began to do its foul work on his body in earnest. He activated his self healing ability although it might be a bit early.

  “Where are you, you filthy rat? Have you no respect for an adversary you meet in battle?”

  A glob of blue sailed through the air from somewhere behind a bush. He side stepped one and ducked another two before realizing that the man might well be disguised as his own ability like he had been before.

  Whirling about, bringing his blade around in a deadly arch, he expected to find the man about to stab him in the back. But there was nobody there.

  “The ones with no respect for an adversary are you,” Eik snarled as he materialized behind the Gohkamorian’s exposed back. His skin was peeling off in patches where it wasn’t already gone, revealing thin blue streaks much less significant than those from other instances of Backflow.

  Loaded up with both the empowering effects of the standard blue Backflow as well as a Potion of Mighty Strength class 2, he was like a wraith as he moved from his hiding place behind a tree to the Gohkamorian’s neck near instantaneously. With a foot on each of the alien’s massive shoulders, he plunged the wakizashi into the meat of his neck and down through his torso.

  At that same moment, Accelerant beat through the giant’s body, massacring him from the inside. Eik let the shock wave carry him away as he kicked off the shoulders of the proud warrior. Landing a few meters away, he strolled leisurely to the glass-like platform of hazy light.

  With a sigh, he plopped down on the rim, sitting where the Gohkamorian warrior had been sitting when he first made his way to the peak. Ten Living Manifestations climbed into the world and leapt onto the warrior and entered the wound in his neck.

  Closing his eyes and looking inward, he did everything he could to calm down and gain control over the Backflow. It was not as intense as the other times it had been activated, but it still felt like it would begin to run wild at any moment. And more than anything, it still hurt so much that he wanted to scream.

  The assimilation of Resistance: Toxin into Profound Toxin, along with the extra levels it had earned at the same time, had definitely done something considerable for his ability to withstand the torturous side effects of Backflow.

  He found himself almost begging his own damned ability to withdraw from his system and end his suffering. This was the first time he had been mentally present to a degree where he could actually make a conscious effort to make it calm down.

  By the time he looked up at the Gohkamorian approaching with shuffling, lumbering steps, the blue was beginning to retreat up his arms and legs, pain relief following.

  Blood pumped and poured out of the grievously deep wound in the back of his neck as he walked, his face looking pallid and sickly. He wobbled on his feet. The muscles in his arm flexed as he tried to lift his heavy blade but they failed him, the sword eventually falling to the ground with a dull thud.

  Two vials of healing potion, now empty, lay on the ground a couple of steps behind the giant, but with the severity of the injury, their effect would not be sufficient to save him.

  Eik didn’t deign to stand. The discoloration in the skin that characterized Profound Toxin’s invasion of a system was already spreading to the Gohkamorian’s throat and up his jaw like strangulating fingers.

  “You may have… b-bested me,” the warrior rasped, barely able to get the words past his lips. “But my ho—… my honor is intact. Can you say the same about your own?”

  Eik snorted and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “In ten seconds you will be lying lifeless in the grass in a pool of your own blood. Why don’t you tell me what your honor is worth then?”

  Managing only a couple more steps, the Gohkamorian’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and he finally collapsed mere paces from where Eik sat.

  Offering a last glance at the dead giant, Eik turned his attention to the glassy platform. He scooted a few meters to the side. On the rim was written a block of text. Finally some damn information. He began to read.

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