The Primal Hunter

Jake had invited death nine times to learn about Valdemar and hopefully find a path to victory. He had done everything with the goal of somehow winning and defeating Valdemar, and in all honesty, he could see a scenario where he would have accepted his loss.

That is until he realized Valdemar had never truly taken him seriously. He had, through his own will, increased his fighting aura to a level far above anything he had done in the fight prior. Jake hadn’t forced him to either… he had just done it to show Jake how truly powerful he was. It probably wasn’t to make Jake despair, but just because Valdemar liked to show off, but to Jake, it felt like all his struggles had been for naught.

Again and again, Jake had underestimated the power of Valdemar’s Transcendent skill. Till the very end, he never saw the Primordial’s true limits while inhabiting a level 0 body… but then again, did Jake ever really give it his all?

As Valdemar had said, they were just in a Challenge Dungeon. Nothing was authentic in there. There was no true death, but just a potential loss of some points or a lost attempt on a hard opponent. Compared to experiencing the end of your own existence, it was completely meaningless. The stakes were too low… and perhaps this was where Valdemar truly set himself apart from Jake. Because at that very moment, when Valdemar used his final strike, Jake became certain that Valdemar truly was in control of his Transcendence. At least enough to “fool” it into recognizing the battle as one with real stakes.

But Jake…

With every death, he had restrained and stopped his final survival instinct… the final act of his Bloodline to allow him to survive. He got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that using it was a final act of desperation and not something to casually do. Jake was confident that had this been the real world, his Bloodline would have reacted without even giving Jake a chance to stop it, but here, with no genuine danger, he had a choice.

Every prior time, Jake had chosen to suppress it and not take a massive unknown risk by unleashing something best saved for a true moment of desperation. However, this time… this time, Jake was done holding anything back as he wanted to show Valdemar everything he had. So when the Bloodline came knocking, rather than restrain it this time, he let it loose with that one thought:

Fuck it.

The moment he did, time itself seemed to stop. Valdemar’s massive golden axe looked as if it moved at a snail’s pace… and then he felt a heavy heartbeat. It echoed throughout the arena as a pulse reverberated through his body. A pulse of unknown energy released directly from somewhere deep within Jake’s Truesoul. It did not stop simply when it hit the edges of his physical body but spread out. A hundred meters, two hundred, five hundred… it continued hundreds of kilometers all around him. It was incredibly vast, yet a familiar range.

Because the pulse released had filled not just Jake’s body but his entire Sphere of Perception – the range he could usually only see with Pulse of Perception, too.

Right as the realization struck him, Jake’s vision went black. Then sound died, all smells disappeared, and he no longer even felt his own body or could taste the blood in his own mouth. For a mere moment, all his senses were gone as if he was struck in some void, and then…

Only clarity.

Every detail, every sound, taste… the feeling of the heat of the sun, countless grains of sand touching his body as it had gotten stuck under his torn clothes… not a single thing was missing. He felt it all. His usually heightened senses had reached a new level above anything else before, and as Jake stared up at the axe descending toward him, he saw not just the fighting aura but what existed between him and the axe - the mana in the air, the concepts that constituted the reality the axe was traveling through.

Raising a hand, Jake didn’t think much but simply sent out a small whisp of energy infused with his will. It merged into nothingness as the golden axe momentarily seemed to disappear from sight. At nearly exactly the same time, the ground around Jake exploded, golden fighting aura ravaging the entire middle of the arena, except for one small area around Jake.

Standing there completely unharmed, he looked up casually as what looked like a small black dot in space still floated for a few seconds where Jake had commanded the whisp of energy to move. Like a dead pixel on a screen, there was simply nothing there, and when the axe had pierced through this spot, a part of it had met the same fate as everything else when it simply ceased to exist, allowing none of the golden energy to ever reach Jake.

Time still seemed to move at a crawl as Jake slowly stood. Slowly, because he simply couldn’t move his body fast enough to keep up with how he perceived reality. By the same the erupted sand fell down, reality had mended itself as the black dot was gone. Gone, but not forgotten.

magic? No… it was more like it just opened

answer but instead looked at his opponent

the time it would take

returned to Origin and became pure energy that Jake casually commanded into his body. Within a second, his body – but not his resource pools – was filled with energy. Enough for him to

Six seconds.

been staring, suddenly displayed

Sparks appeared in his vicinity, yet his body didn’t seem to burn with energy. There was no fancy display outside of crackling discharge around him, as it all stayed

had boosted his body haphazardly without control. Foolish and inefficient, he could admit, especially when it seemed too easy to control now. It was so simple to tame as the

and found it lacking as a new one of pure arcane mana appeared in his hand, condensed from the environmental mana. The same level of inadequacy

Five seconds.

didn’t sit still even if he had welcomed the attack. Roaring golden energy filled the arena as he charged forward faster and stronger than ever before, as the luster that made him look like a golden god had simply

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to meet it with his axe, but Jake found humoring Valdemar’s attempt to make this

blow. As if it had a mind of its own, it expertly flew by the head of the axe, and even Valdemar’s attempt to block his face with an arm was predicted as it changed direction for a second time and shot

back wall of the

fact he was a mere level 0. The limitations meant his heavily weakened mind would break if he tried to do something like that again. It was unfortunate he was in this state, but it would have

Four seconds.

faster than before as space itself seemed to give way, voluntarily moving out

as a massive golden crescent wave shot out. With little difficulty, Jake jumped over it and continued his sprint toward the

wound marred his chest, and arcane energy still burned on his body, but his golden aura was as strong as ever. With a roar and

Three seconds.

already been predictable before, but now, it was almost funny. With his heightened sense of perception, even the axe seemed to move relatively slowly now, though it was still

hand began to glow golden, and at the very last moment, Jake chose to abandon his attempt to counter as he instead avoided the punch entirely. If he hadn’t, Jake would have likely cut off one or two of Valdemar’s fingers but lost a hand himself in return. He had to admit that even if he could read

have preferred to summon them closer to the Primordial than he did, but the one place Jake felt no sense of control was everywhere the golden fighting aura touched. Valdemar’s Transcendent skill created the type of energy that Jake simply

Valdemar, who let out a loud roar, releasing a shockwave of golden energy that

summoned another five, but he felt a heavy strain as he did so. His clarity was wavering, but he had to maintain it for at least a little longer. Valdemar was far more prepared for the second barrage of arrows which were all coming for his right side, where he

Two seconds.

his left. Lying partly covered in sand, not even four meters away from them, was an arcane spike from Jake’s quasi-Protean Arrow he had shot