Against the Shot of Inception, even Sousa couldn’t remain careless. He stepped back quickly while raising his arms to block the attack; speed, however, was not his forte. It would seem that Sousa’s estimation was still off, even without the environmental factors of the new world. His arms did little to stop the black feather as it shot into his c.h.e.s.t.
Sousa let out a muffled groan, and his expression turned odd. His body swayed briefly before he found his footing once again.
After suppressing his injuries, Sousa turned to Howard instead of Qianye. “Courting death!” He arrived before the vampire prince in a single step and swung a heavy fist at his c.h.e.s.t.
Howard laughed. “Now that’s playing dirty.” A long staff appeared in Howard’s hand, with which he tapped the ground, conjuring a cloud of blood around him.
Under the gravitational force of Sousa’s attack, the cloud of blood was first compressed to a single droplet and then into a barely discernible crystal. Howard, though, was no longer around.
Sousa observed the surroundings and saw the man appear hundreds of meters away. “You vampires and your petty tricks. Howard, when all is said and done, you’re still a second-generation primogenitor. Are you going to keep running away?”
“Fleeing requires energy too. Do you want to try and see how many more times I can flee?”
Sousa only snorted in response. Howard was using his essence blood to mitigate the gravitational force, so every escape involved a certain price. Sousa wasn’t about to underestimate this prince, however. The man had been alive for thousands of years and acc.u.mulated an abundance of tricks up his sleeve. He might be injured, but there was no telling how many times he could run.
Seeing that Howard was still avoiding a fight, Sousa took to the air and made a beeline for Qianye. The latter of course wouldn’t let him get close; he immediately moved back and put some distance between them.
However, Sousa let out a sinister laugh at this point. His body expanded once again until he was one meter taller than before. An invisible force bore down on Qianye and pulled him back toward the werewolf great monarch.
At the same time, Sousa swung his left hand and pushed Nighteye far into the distance. He no longer paid any attention to Howard.
Dragging Qianye in, Sousa launched a punch. A giant dark fist of energy formed in the air and blasted the incoming target.
Qianye held the azure blade with his right hand while pushing onto the backside of the blade with his left. He would block this giant fist using the sword as a shield.
Sousa’s strike contained two opposing forces, which locked down Qianye and made it impossible for him to flee.
In the end, his movements came to a standstill as he took on the giant fist!
Qianye was sent flying hundreds of meters away, slamming into the ground like a cannonball. The impact left a deep groove in the hard rock.
Qianye struggled up and couldn’t help but spit out a mouthful of blood. That punch was so powerful that it felt almost indefensible; even his ancient vampire constitution couldn’t quite take it.
This time, Qianye was noticeably slower as he climbed out of the hole. The two heavy attacks had dealt quite a number on him.
Sousa was even more surprised. “No ordinary duke can take two strikes, let alone injure me. It looks like that idiot Brock didn’t die an unjust death.”
Qianye staggered for a bit before reclaiming his footing. His aura began to rise again.
Sousa was in no rush to run him down. Instead, he sized Qianye up from head to toe, saying, “It’s bloodboil again. That vampire ability looks useful, but it’ll only make you lose faster. Blood energy isn’t unlimited.”
Those words made sense, but Sousa said after some thought, “Then again, you have the Book of Darkness. This is the main reason I’m here to capture you. Looks like I can’t let you catch a breath, let’s beat you half-dead before further discussion.”
He took a step forward and performed the usual slap.
This time, a large projected image of a vampire appeared behind him. The illusory shadow pounced on Qianye and synchronized with his movements. Qianye held the sword up to the sky with both hands as he faced the incoming palm.
Qianye’s resistance was unexpectedly strong this time around. Sousa actually failed to slam him into the rocks like before. Instead, his palm was pierced through by the blade.
Qianye activated Spatial Flash and moved a hundred meters away once Sousa had retracted his palm. This distance might be enough for an ordinary expert but definitely not sufficient against a great dark monarch.
This time, however, the vampire projection expanded abruptly and was peeled off by the gravitational force. Qianye himself was freed from the restraining force, allowing him to fire yet another Shot of Inception.
Having taken two losses in a row, Sousa realized that he had no way to evade the incoming attack. Rather than waste energy, he simply took that Shot of Inception head-on.
He turned to Howard nonchalantly, saying, “As expected of the Dark Gospel to interfere in the battle like so. Looks like I should kill you first.”
That sanguine illusion was a form of blessing produced by Howard. Not only did it greatly increase Qianye’s strength, but it also served as bait to deceive Sousa’s gravitational power. These two abilities were tailored to deal with the current battle situation. Qianye—who could do little except take a constant beating—was now able to retaliate.
The azure blade in Qianye’s hand was also Howard’s item. It could break through the defenses of a great dark monarch, adding some wounds to Sousa’s body. Even mosquito bites could get rather annoying over time.
Howard waved his staff after seeing that Sousa was coming for him. Two vampire ladies appeared near Qianye and merged into his body.
“I prepared the Sanguine Gemini especially for you. I can’t use them for the time being, so Qianye will activate them in my stead. You’ll see just how powerful they are.”
Sousa ignored whatever Howard was saying. He didn’t even look back as he charged forward and swung a palm at the vampire prince. Howard repeated the proven method, using one drop of essence blood to escape the heavy blow.
Now that he had reached a distance where he could use the Shot of Inception, Qianye wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip by. He immediately produced Dragonsgrave and unfurled his wings. A bullet infused with the power of Venus Dawn shot out and struck Sousa in the back.
A wound that could be considered grave for a duke was negligible to Sousa’s body. He gave up on Howard and glanced at Qianye in anger.
Following a long howl, Sousa produced a set of dark armor around himself and charged at Qianye again. The man hadn’t even arrived when the gravitational force had bound Qianye to the ground. The latter had no choice but to respond by drawing his azure blade and slashing at the incoming fist!
Standing to Qianye’s left and right, the Sanguine Gemini actually pushed the gravitational power away, allowing Qianye to utilize his full power.
At this moment, Qianye had no more time to separate the chaos energy into Venus Dawn and dark golden blood energy. A hazy radiance appeared on the blade as he channeled the origin power in its raw form, so much so that the azure glow was suppressed.
At the same time, Qianye’s joints began to crackle and groan under the power of the Excavator. His strength reached its peak in the blink of an eye, imparting boundless power to his slash!
The azure blade slashed right through Sousa’s giant fist projection. The dark origin power condensed around the fist melted like snow in the sun and soon scattered.
Qianye hadn’t imagined that the punch that had forced him into a corner a while ago was so easily broken through. Sousa’s expression seemed odd. “What’s this origin power?”
Even Sousa couldn’t tell what the hazy origin power on the azure blade was. Yet, this grey energy had destroyed most of Sousa’s own origin power. The great dark monarch had never seen this type of origin power throughout his long career in war.
Naturally, Qianye’s only answer was to charge forward with his blade, the twin girls mirroring his every move. He could feel that his strength had increased by at least thirty percent.
As the sword and palm met, Qianye was once again sent flying from the impact, but this time, he was only knocked back a dozen meters. Sousa didn’t give chase and simply stood there while gazing at the deep gash in his palm.
The wound was shrouded in greyish energy. It was destroying his flesh, blood, and origin power indiscriminately, causing his wound to expand.
Sousa found this unbelievable. He was a great dark monarch, and his origin power was already quite close to the darkness origins. Yet before this mysterious grey matter, his origin power was losing like a new soldier who had never seen the battlefield. Even against Nighteye’s dark golden blood energy and Qianye’s Venus Dawn, his blood energy was only at a slight disadvantage.
A thought suddenly appeared in Sousa’s mind. Perhaps only the supremes would have this level of origin power.
It was at this time that his heart skipped a beat. He glanced back to find a rolling deluge of sword radiance barreling toward him.
Nighteye had recovered?
Sousa roared in fury. The dark armor around his body thickened abruptly as he swung out several fist shadows to blast the incoming blades. It was just that Sousa’s brutish attacks couldn’t weaken Awakening Dream as much as Brock’s Wall of Sighs.
The Wall of Sighs ranked high among the demonkin secret arts, comparable to Qianye’s Life Plunder. Brock was at a rank disadvantage, while Sousa was lacking a secret art of sufficient quality to deal with Awakening Dream.
Sousa attacked ferociously but only managed to negate half of the attacks, with the other half slashing his dark armor into a miserable state. All of a sudden, a hidden sword radiance erupted and slashed Sousa’s c.h.e.s.t.
Sousa was just about to suppress the sword wound when he felt an intense pain within his body. One of the black feathers had exploded! The previously suppressed Shot of Inception had taken the advantage to deal a massive blow to the werewolf’s internal organs.
This explosion surprised Sousa quite a bit. Only then did he realize that his origin power rank had actually dropped by an entire rank.
Upon careful observation, Sousa discovered that there was a strange poison inside him silently eating away at his origin power. If it wasn’t for the Shot of Inception, it might’ve taken him some time to realize this.
He also realized how he was poisoned. “Howard! How can you be so despicable?!”
Howard laughed. “I have quite a lot of tricks to deal with you, and this is just one of them. I’ll show you more if you manage to survive.”
