Chapter 65 – Master of Fist and Body
Why is *he* here?
For a second, I honestly thought the smoke was making me hallucinate.
So Sang-kyu.
Immortal DragonFist.
The old madman who, in every timeline I remembered clearly, only ever existed as a rumour. A wandering eastern master who might have crossed the Safon trench, might have punched a sea monster in half, might have taught some obscure styles in some distant corner before dying off-screen like a badly written side character.
He was never here.
Not in Ocria.
Not in any of my runs.
And yet—
There he was.
A single human figure in the burning square, moving like he'd offended gravity personally and it refused to touch him unless he allowed it.
The Outer-touched thing loomed over him, tall as a tower, a heap of shifting meat and wrong angles and half-faces that kept trying to remember what "human" meant and failing. Its limbs cracked the cobbles when they hit. Its shadow ate light.
So Sang-kyu looked like a dot.
A dot that kept *hitting it in the face*.
Fist. Impact. Shockwave.
Every time his knuckles connected with something that might have been a jaw or a chest or a conglomeration of stolen ribs, the air shook. You could see the pressure rippling out—broken windows, shattered tiles, Outer flesh denting inward like mud hit by a hammer.
"This doesn't make sense," I muttered.
Melody drifted closer, eyes narrowed, gaze tracking the old man's path.
"At what point," she said mildly, "has that ever stopped anything from happening to you?"
Good point.
I dropped lower, just enough to see properly without stepping into the main field of fire. The exoskeleton adjusted with me, tiny corrections at the ankles and spine keeping my balance without me asking. My mask fogged very slightly with each breath.
Focus.
The Immortal Dragon Fist moved like water having an argument with a landslide.
No weapon. No armour. Just a plain sleeveless tunic scorched black in places, loose trousers tucked into worn boots, dark hair tied back into a short, fraying tail. His face should have made him look ordinary—middle-aged, lines at the eyes, a couple of old scars.
Instead, he looked like something carved out of the phrase *do not touch*.
Every step he took made the stone under his feet crack. Not because he was heavy. Because the force had nowhere else to go.
And his mana—
My breath caught.
Seven cores.
I could see them.
Not in the normal sense. Not physically. But when you've spent enough time dying and restarting, when you've forced mana through every channel in your own body until they screamed, you start to notice patterns in other people.
Most people had one core. A few had two if they were freaks or blessed or cursed.
So Sang-kyu's body was a constellation.
Seven distinct cores, all different sizes, scattered through his frame—one in the usual place behind the heart, one lower in the gut, one in the head, one in each forearm, one coiled deep somewhere between spine and stomach.
Mana ran between them like molten metal in mould lines. His veins weren't just blood-paths, they were channels, thickened and carved by use. Every punch he threw, every step he took, shifted the flow in a different pattern—one core dimming, another flaring, then another, like a breathing diagram no normal human should have.
"Monster," I heard myself say under my breath. "He's a monster. A monster beating up another monster."
Melody's fingers tapped sharply against the side of my head.
"Later," she said. "Gawking later. Thinking now."
She was right.
It *looked* like he was winning.
From a normal angle, a street-level view, you'd see an old man driving his fists into an abomination and making it stagger.
From my angle—
Under the burn and the shockwaves and the bruising hits, I could see the numbers.
Seven cores, burning down.
Fast.
Too fast.
His regeneration was insane. His channels were strong. But even that kind of system has limits. You can't cheat conservation forever.
Meanwhile, the Outer-touched thing…
It wasn't tiring.
Its flesh sagged where he hit it, yes. Limbs tore. Faces melted. Chunks fell off.
And then the missing parts flowed back in.
Not from itself.
From the people it had already taken.
Bodies around the square—guards, mages, civilians—had that same wrong pink mass where their faces should be, a smooth, pulsing flesh-plate. Threads of that substance were being tugged, almost gently, toward the main body every time Sang-kyu landed a blow.
It was eating damage.
Consuming impact.
Growing on the aftermath.
"Feeding," Melody said quietly, tracking it too. "He hits it, it drinks the echo."
"In some runs, he dies here," I said. "It has to be. There's no other way for those numbers to line up. Seven cores or seventy—it'll outlast him like this."
"Then how does Ocria stand in those runs?" she asked. "You said the ducal crest doesn't fall. History doesn't mention a city burning off the map here."
"Sacrifice," I said immediately.
The word tasted foul.
Some year, some loop, some version of this old man threw himself into something and took the monster with him. Left nothing the bards could point at, just a vague "crisis" that got resolved off-screen.
That kind of thing happened a lot.
I didn't like it.
"I can't solve the entire timeline equation right now," I muttered. "If this was a full break, I'd be seeing more divergence elsewhere. Right now it feels like the river's still trying to flow toward the old bed, it's just… deeper."
"Meaning?" Melody asked.
"Meaning whatever 'original' is, it's not gone," I said. "I'm walking alongside it. Maybe on top of it. Maybe under it. I don't know. I'm too busy being on fire all the time to draw a proper diagram."
"You're rambling," she said.
"I'm stressed," I replied. "Shocking, I know."
Below, So Sang-kyu drove a fist into the entity's central mass. A shockwave rippled out, rattling windows three streets away. The Outer flesh dented inward, collapsing like a cave-in.
For a heartbeat, it actually shrank.
Then more of that pink, faceless meat flooded from the bodies around the square, refilling the dent, reinforcing the structure. New limbs budded. New almost-faces bulged out and sank back in.
Seven cores drained further.
The old man didn't hesitate.
He just *kept going*.
Of course he did.
***
Decision time.
If I stayed up here, he'd die.
If he died, maybe the thing died with him, maybe it didn't. Maybe it crawled away into the walls and turned Ocria into a quiet grave over the next few years. Maybe the ducal scribes wrote "unfortunate incident, now resolved," and the world kept turning while the cracks spread.
If I went down—
"Melody," I said.
"Yes, Master?"
"Hold your edge. We're going in."
"I was wondering when you'd stop narrating to yourself and start doing something," she said, but there was no bite to it. Just anticipation.
I adjusted Vector.
Mana bent, forming another invisible ramp.
This one aimed straight for the square.
The wind screamed past as I dropped, cloak snapping, mask humming faintly with the impact of air.
The entity's malformed head cluster twitched.
It felt me coming.
Good.
***
The heat hit first.
Normal fire is a blast, a rush, a shove away. This was… sticky. It clung. The air felt congested, full of ash and things that weren't ash, particles that grazed the edges of my aura like sandpaper.
The exoskeleton shifted, runes flaring slightly to compensate, redistributing some of the pressure away from my lungs and into the plates. It didn't help with the smell.
Burnt stone. Melted metal. Cooked meat.
I landed at the edge of the square, boots cracking the cobbles.
For a moment, nobody noticed me.
Everyone was busy.
The Outer-touched thing towered in the centre, its limbs punching through buildings and dragging more material into itself. The flames around its feet burned darker, devouring thrown water and counter-spells alike. The Duke's guard line had collapsed into scattered pockets—some still fighting, some just… standing, their faces gone, their heads tilted at sick, identical angles toward the thing that ate them.
And So Sang-kyu.
Closer, he looked worse and better at the same time.
Sweat plastered his hair to his skull. His tunic was half gone, shredded by glancing blows and stray shards of stone. His skin was a map of bruises and shallow bleeding cuts.
But his eyes—
Clear.
Focused.
Alive.
He moved like his body was a problem he'd solved years ago and barely needed to think about anymore.
One fist hammered into a mass of reaching arms, shattering them like rotten branches. His heel rolled, turning his weight into a pivot, and his other hand lashed out, striking a section of flesh that had begun to bulge with new faces.
Those faces imploded.
For a heartbeat, I almost pitied the thing.
Then I watched more stolen humans stumble forward as if on strings, letting it eat them to refill itself.
Right.
No pity.
I stepped forward, keeping just outside the immediate kill zone of flailing limbs.
"Hey!" I shouted.
It felt stupid, trying to get the attention of a man currently punching an eldritch abomination's organs into paste. But voices carry in places like this, whether you want them to or not.
So Sang-kyu's head flicked sideways for a fraction of a second.
His eyes met mine.
Black. Sharp. And for some reason, faintly amused.
He ducked under a sweeping limb so lazily it almost offended me, leaped *onto* another, ran along it like it was a bridge, and drove his heel down into something that might have been a knee-equivalent.
The monster roared—or did the air around it just vibrate with wrongness? Hard to tell.
I pushed forward, skirting the edges, feeling my mana channels align, my breath fall into casting rhythm.
"Hold it back!" I yelled. "Pin it for me!"
He didn't speak Imperial Common.
Not really.
That was what the records said.
That was what his broken conversations suggested in other lives.
This time, he barked something in a language I didn't know, the syllables sharp and rolling.
Then, weirdly, he added, in absolutely butchered but understandable Common:
"Back… to… understood!"
I blinked.
Melody snorted.
"Close enough," she said.
It would do.
He shifted his stance—not to finish, not to blow everything in one last glorious sacrifice, but to *stall*. His footwork changed, becoming more circular, drawing the entity's attention entirely to him, dragging its mass away from the edges of the square.
Every time it tried to lunge sideways—to reach for another building, another cluster of people—he was there, fist, elbow, knee, redirecting force back into its centre.
He was trusting me.
Which meant I had no excuse.
"Alright," I muttered. "Big one, then."
Vera Flamma wasn't right for this.
Tier 5, yes. Powerful, yes. But designed for point targets—monsters, leaders, anything roughly building-sized. This thing was a *district*. It needed something that didn't just burn its flesh, but ate the link tying stolen bodies into it.
Fortunately, I'd been bored once.
"Master," Melody said, reading the shift in my aura. "You're using that."
"That," I agreed.
Vector thrummed under my skin, aligning with the ambient field.
Fire would still be the main engine. But fire alone wasn't enough. Fire alone *fed* things like this, in the wrong configuration.
You had to cheat the rules.
In my mind's eye, circuits flickered into being.
Not drawn. Felt.
Spell structure for a Tier 5 construct: a lattice of mana flow, core node at my chest, secondary nodes in my hands, tertiary anchors along the ground. Normally, you accept the world as it is and light it up.
I didn't accept things.
Fire needs fuel and air.
Everybody knows that.
What they don't think about is *how* the air reaches it. How the fuel moves. How pressure builds and collapses in pockets.
In my last run, I'd spent a stupid week in a ruined lab listening to wind whistle through broken pipes and thinking about choke points.
If you constricted *where* a spell could exist, forced it to move through narrow metaphysical channels, then dumped mana into it, it would accelerate. Just like water squeezed through a pipe shoots out faster on the other side.
And if you tailored the guidance so that the "other side" was not the target's surface, but every *connection* between it and anything it was feeding on—
Then you didn't burn the meat.
You burned the *threads*.
I rolled my shoulders.
"Melody."
"Yes?"
"If this goes wrong, remind me that this was the smart version," I said.
"I already disagree, but I'm curious," she replied dryly.
Mana pooled.
My S-rank core throbbed, pushing power out into my channels. The exoskeleton caught some of it, buffering the excess, feeding it back in a controlled trickle. Ethan's runes glowed faintly under my clothes, damping spikes.
I raised my right hand.
The air around my palm warped, heat building, not outward but inward, compressing into a tight, trembling sphere the size of a coin. Yellow at first. Then blue. Then white at the edges.
Not Vera Flamma.
Something else.
A name flickered at the back of my throat, something half-remembered from a classification system no one here had invented yet.
True flame was one thing.
This was—
Movement at the edge of my vision.
I almost ignored it.
Stupid.
One of the half-melted guards on the far side of the square shuddered.
His body was… mostly intact. Armour blackened. Limbs shaking. But his head—
Where his face should have been, that pink, pulsing flesh-plate pushed and contracted obscenely, as if trying to remember features it had never had. A thin line opened in the middle of it, not a mouth, not really, just a split that suggested one.
He turned toward me.
I felt it.
The thing in the centre had most of its attention on So Sang-kyu.
Not all.
Some small fragment, some echo-thread, had noticed a new source of power starting to coil itself.
The faceless guard's neck cracked as something tugged at the muscles from the inside.
He took one step.
Then another.
Hands hanging limp at his sides. Feet dragging. But every movement fast enough to be wrong.
"Master," Melody said, tone suddenly sharp. "Left."
"I see him," I said.
My circuits were half-built.
The spell was still drinking mana, still shaping itself. If I aborted now, I'd lose the compression, burn the channels, maybe fry my own nerves. If I split focus—
The guard—no, the *thing riding the guard*—twitched.
Then it moved.
One instant, it was ten paces away, stumbling.
The next, it was *there*.
Right in front of me.
The pink mass where its face should be bulged, strained, split wider, as if something behind it was pushing, desperate to get out, or in, or *through*.
Its hands snapped up, fingers distending into too-long digits tipped with something that wasn't quite nail and wasn't quite bone.
They reached for my throat.
For the white-hot point in my palm.
For both.
Spell half-formed, cores burning, lungs full of ash, nameless Outer echo staring at me with a face that wasn't a face—
I moved.
Or tried to.
The world constricted to that one, wrong, blank *not-face* lunging for me.
And everything else stopped mattering.