Void Reaper: The Essence Apocalypse

Chapter 81 81: Don’t tell me you can’t be killed

For a fraction of a second, Leon genuinely wondered whether the blades growing out of the beast's shoulders were just a bodily mutation - or a full-fledged skill, something the System had assigned it the same way it had given him Darkness Manipulation. In this new world, the line between "natural transformation" and "active ability" was getting harder to see, and the longer he survived, the more he understood that evolution wasn't just bigger numbers.

It was breaking rules that used to feel unquestionable.

Only now - standing across from a creature that wasn't just fast and shielded, but armed with weapons fused into its own body - did he truly understand why Valeria had looked at him with that strange blend of pride and gravity when she said he was one of the few capable of killing something higher-ranked. It wasn't about raw strength.

It was about adapting to something that had long since stopped being a "monster" and started being a new form of existence.

Creatures like this were simply terrifying.

If a First Order entity could generate that kind of pressure, react to attacks, deploy a barrier, and fight with precision… what would a Second Order opponent look like? And what about something even higher on that absurd ladder the System had forced onto the world without asking anyone's permission?

And where did Valeria fit into that - Valeria, who spoke about the Sixth Order like she was commenting on yesterday's weather?

Only now did Leon fully understand why she used terms like "Lower Beings" and "Higher Beings" so casually. The difference wasn't subtle or symbolic.

It was brutal and physical - like the difference between a man with a stick and a man with a machine gun.

"If those are your little toys," Leon growled under his breath, staring at the blade-arms, "then I'll take your head and we'll see how you do without it."

He wasn't a poet. He wasn't preaching. He was a man simplifying the problem to its most basic form.

He lunged forward without hesitation - not like someone losing control, but like someone who'd made a decision and didn't plan to take it back. His movement was clean, stripped of flair, locked onto a single purpose.

The evolved zombie rebounded off the wall, rolled several meters along the floor, then rose with the same fluidity it had shown when it vanished through the air.

But before it could use its speed to set up another surprise angle, Leon was already on it - closing the distance faster than the creature seemed to expect.

His daggers came down from above.

The zombie lifted both blade-arms to block.

BOOM.

This time the impact wasn't subtle. Leon didn't just throw strength into it - he threw his whole body. Hip rotation. Back tension. The coordination he'd carved into himself over the last few days of fighting for his life.

The result was immediate.

The beast was ripped off its feet and hurled into the air like something heavy that had been kicked too hard.

It slammed into a wall a good dozen meters away. Concrete cracked. Dust spilled from the ceiling, as if the building itself was reminding them it had never been designed for battles like this.

Leon didn't stop after the first hit.

He surged forward, exploiting the moment the opponent was still airborne, still collecting balance. His silhouette cut through the corridor like a dark streak.

He was there almost the same instant the creature bounced off the wall, and his blade arced diagonally - clean, deliberate - aimed straight for the neck, the one place where even the toughest hide and the strongest defenses had to respond.

"Don't tell me you can't be killed," Leon said quietly, and there was no surprise left in his eyes now. No curiosity.

Only cold.

Not theatrical. Not exaggerated.

Just the cold of someone who'd accepted a simple truth: in this world, if you didn't take a monster's head, it would take yours.

The shock of impact rolled through the corridor with such weight that for a moment it felt like the entire fourth floor trembled - like the building remembered, too late, that it wasn't made for creatures that had crossed the boundary of ordinary humanity.

Leon drove both daggers down with full-body rotation and muscle tension. The evolved zombie didn't even try to dodge.

It had to take it head-on.

It dropped to one knee and crossed its blade-limbs into an X to catch the force.

The concrete beneath its knee cracked.

Not a symbolic fracture.

A real, structural damage that made it painfully clear their clash was producing force far beyond a "normal" exchange of blows.

And then another sound cut through.

Tick.

Quiet. Almost nothing - something between glass scratching and metal under strain.

In normal conditions no one would have noticed.

But in a narrow, nearly empty corridor where even shifting air could be felt, it rang like a warning bell.

The beast's green eyes flicked.

A low, vibrating rumble crawled out of its throat as it looked at its own blades - thin spiderweb cracks spreading from where they'd met Leon's weapons.

Leon's daggers weren't some random loot scavenged off a corpse.

They were rare-grade treasure at the peak of what their current phase could offer - mana-saturated blades designed to pierce the defenses of beings under level forty. In practical terms, even a military vehicle's armor wouldn't come away unscathed if those blades hit clean.

The zombie's blade-arms, despite looking like a natural extension of its body, clearly couldn't absorb impacts like that without consequence.

"To hell with you," Leon spat, never easing the pressure.

Before the creature could fully stabilize, Leon pivoted on his foot, shifted his weight, and snapped a kick into its ribs, taking advantage of its half-kneeling posture.

The strike was clean.

Not flashy.

Just effective.

The evolved zombie lifted off the floor and flew down the corridor, rolling across the tiles until it crashed into the opposite wall hard enough to leave a fresh crack - and a smear of blood and black sludge.

Any ordinary Evolver at this stage, fighting something like that unprepared, would've probably ended up missing a limb - or infected by a single precise cut.

But Leon hadn't been fighting equals since the apocalypse began.

He'd been fighting stronger opponents.

And every victory didn't just raise his level - it raised him, because his stats were being fueled by the essence of beings that had already exceeded what he should have been able to handle.

CLANG.

BOOM.

Metal kept slamming into metal as the zombie tried to use its Dexterity advantage - vanishing from Leon's view and reappearing at sharp angles.

But every time its blades met Leon's daggers, it wasn't Leon who got thrown back.

It was the beast.

Leon's reflexes were enough.

His reaction speed, too.

The gap between them wasn't as obvious as it had been at the start.

Leon frowned as he absorbed another strike.

Why isn't it using the barrier?

The thought wouldn't let go.

Its blades were cracking more and more, fractures widening with every collision, but the creature still wasn't reactivating that half-transparent shell that had effortlessly rebuffed his shadow chains earlier.

It couldn't?

Was it a one-time effect - mana-expensive?

Did it require a split-second of concentration it couldn't afford while Leon kept smothering it with pressure?

Leon didn't ease off.

In a world where mana was as real as oxygen and every skill had costs and limits, being strong wasn't enough. You had to understand when your enemy couldn't afford more.

A hiss cut through the corridor as Leon - after a quick, cold calculation - pushed more than thirty mana into his control. The shadow beneath his feet and along the walls thickened, rose, and shaped itself into six massive spears, their tips long, narrow, unnaturally sharp - darkness forced into geometry.

These weren't thin needles he used to test opponents.

These were heavy constructs meant to pierce, crush, and pin.

The spears fired almost as one, leaving blurred streaks as they tore toward the evolved zombie, which was only just struggling upright after another brutal collision with the wall.

For a moment it looked like an execution.

And then - again.

That hum.

The same strange, prismatic energy poured around the beast, forming the half-transparent, egg-shaped barrier.

The shadow-spears slammed into it.

Several impacts thundered in rapid succession, like metal stakes driving into armor - but instead of breaking through, they rebounded, shattering into fragments of shadow that slid down the walls like black rain.

Leon's brow tightened as he felt the mana he'd spent fail to produce a proportional result.

He couldn't afford to keep experimenting like that.

Fighting in the dorm's tight corridors was already risky. And if his opponent had a defensive skill whose limits he didn't understand, mindlessly burning resources wasn't bravery.

It was a mistake.

And in this world, mistakes rarely ended as bruises.

Until I know how it works, I'm not pumping more mana into that, he thought, drawing his shadow back closer.

But he didn't stop.

The moment the barrier started to fade - energy thinning, dispersing into the air - Leon surged forward again and reentered that brutal, direct dance where every movement was measured to minimize risk, and every error could end with a severed muscle, an artery, a throat.

The beast's blades whistled through the air at a speed an ordinary human wouldn't even register.

But Leon hadn't been ordinary for a while now. His body reacted faster than his mind could form commands.

Block.

Counter.

Sidestep.

A curved cut.

Metallic impacts echoed down the corridor. Dust drifted from the ceiling and settled on their shoulders, like the building itself was silently watching.

The zombie tried to regain distance, to use its Dexterity and accelerate freely…

But Leon wouldn't let it.

He kept closing. Denying it space. Forcing reactions instead of initiative.

Pressure was his weapon.

Step by step, he drove the beast deeper down the corridor until it stopped choosing attack angles and started searching for an escape route.

A door to one of the marked rooms sat a few meters behind it.

The zombie sprang back, rebounded off the wall…

And vanished through the doorway, leaving a fresh impact mark on the frame.