He released another shot, but the result was the sa.
Worse, Haron caught it even more easily this ti.
"How disappointing," Haron sighed, the sound carrying more boredom than anger.
Rain’s eyes moved faster than his mouth.
While Haron was still drunk in power, he was already dismantling the bow in his mind—pulling it apart concept by concept, identifying every inefficiency in its design with the expertise of an engineer who just watched his prototype underperform.
The draw weight was wasted on a curved limb that bled force sideways. The string’s contact point was too broad, dispersing energy at release instead of concentrating it.
The overall shape was primitive—functional, but only in the way a stone axe was functional.
He rebuilt it.
Dark material from the VIEL flowed and reshaped in real ti, following the revised blueprint.
Carefully, the bow’s limbs split and recurved, layering back on themselves—each bend designed to store more tension and release it faster.
Locking perfectly into his palm, the grip felt as if it had been molded around his hand from the start.
The entire redesign took twenty seconds. Haron watched it happen with his arms at his sides.
He recognized the shape—vaguely. Sothing between a modern compound bow and a chanism that had no historical precedent.
His organization’s intelligence files on the Viel of Gluttony were thorough.
Nothing in those files had ntioned this.
Rain drew the new string back.
The difference was imdiate. Where the first draw had warped the air in slow waves, this one simply compressed it.
A dense pressure built at the front of the bow so rapidly that the stone floor ahead of him began to fracture under it before he even released.
Haron’s scaled arm ca up again, fingers spreading.
Rain released.
The bolt arrived before the sound did.
Haron’s arm snapped across his body in a sharp parrying arc—redirecting rather than catching. The bolt glanced off his forearm and drove itself into the floor at a steep angle.
BOOOOM!
The crater was still settling when the second bolt ca.
Then the third.
Then four more in rapid succession, each one arriving from a slightly different angle—Rain’s arm adjusting mid-draw, the shots fanning across the chamber in a pattern that left no clean direction to step into.
Haron abandoned blocking entirely.
His body dropped low and he launched off the nearest floating stone cube, the dark aura around him compressing into his legs as he drove upward.
Fast—faster than his body suggested, the beast’s influence rewriting the rules of what his muscles could demand from themselves.
He covered half the chamber’s length in a single bound.
Rain also moved.
The bow stayed drawn the entire ti, string pulled back at full tension even as his body twisted and redirected between surfaces of the cubes.
He fired twice while airborne.
Haron twisted around and then he closed the distance between them in a flash,
"You’re good, but not good enough!" Haron shouted, unleashing a punch.
Rain transford the bow just in ti, turning it into a shield—but the force still sent him flying, crashing into a wall before he could stop.
Blood leaked from his mouth. That blow had shattered most organs in his body—and that was with the VIEL’s protection.
Haron paused, watching as Rain leapt from the wall, landing as if nothing happened.
"Your regeneration is fascinating. Even stronger than my own after rging."
Rain wiped the blood from his lips. "Well... it’s the only thing keeping alive."
He spat the last of the blood from his mouth and looked at his hands.
Dark material pooled at his fingers, climbing his knuckles, spreading across his hands and up past his wrists in layered plates that locked against each other.
Dense. Seamless. The gauntlets that ford weren’t decorative—every surface angle was calculated, the knuckles slightly raised, the wrist reinforced at the exact point where impact force traveled up the arm.
Haron looked at them.
Then at Rain’s face.
"You’re going to punch ," he was in disbelief.
The beast had granted him strength capable of liquefying organs, yet his opponent still insisted on fighting at close range.
Rain cracked his neck in a single, fluid motion before launching forward, every muscle coiled and ready to strike.
He crossed the distance fast but not recklessly, his approach angled slightly left.
Haron tried to intercept with his own punch, but to his surprise, Rain had moved preemptively, dodging the attack effortlessly.
BANG!
His right gauntlet connected with Haron’s ribs. The sound it made was dense and flat.
Haron absorbed it and threw a counter imdiately, faster this ti.
Rain slipped beneath the strike, driving his right fist into the sa spot on the ribs again.
BANG!
Sa spot.
Their battle erupted into a series of exchange—but the outco remained the sa.
Haron took twelve consecutive hits in the sa spot, and black blood began to seep from his mouth.
His organs were actually destroyed, and even his regeneration couldn’t keep up.
The gap wasn’t in strength—it was in technique. Haron’s physical power may have been enhanced, but he had once been a caster.
His movents remained predictable, and Rain wasted no ti exploiting every opening.
Rain threw three in combination—a pattern designed to cover every reasonable exit angle simultaneously.
Another strike to the ribs sent Haron to his knees.
"Is this your ceiling?" Rain asked, tossing the sa question back.
Haron could only laugh bitterly. He was so drunk on his own power that he failed to recognize a master who dedicated countless years to perfecting his craft.
Even imagining victory against Rain in close-quarters combat was sheer insanity.
"You are indeed strong... so why waste your ti following that mad woman?"
"Why?" Rain repeated. "No real reason. I just felt like sticking around might lead to experiencing more interesting things."
Haron laughed once. Then he stood.
"I don’t know how long you lived to get this bored, but you’re going to regret following that woman."
His aura expanded without warning—and kept expanding, swallowing the remaining light in the chamber in one slow exhale.
"I’m done playing with you. Pray—you’re going to need it."
Rain’s expression didn’t change. "That’s the first interesting thing you’ve said since we started."
The temperature of his body kept rising as he pushed past his limits.
At 100%, this sweat vanished, turned instantly to thin vapor.
At one hundred and ten percent, the moisture in his eyes began to dry and sting. Only his regeneration kept them from bursting.
Then ca 120%.
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