Chapter 761: Ren vs. Jack Part I
The silence that followed Ren’s warning did not last.
It couldn’t.
The dark energy roaring through Jack’s circulatory system was not a localized spell that a sudden act of will could dismiss; it was a torrential, predatory current that had spent the last several minutes systematically consuming his humanity.
His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped beast, each contraction pumping thick, blackened mana into his muscles until his skin burned with a terrifying, hyper-oxygenated heat.
The voice of the Shattered King had withdrawn back into the abyssal depths of his subconscious, but the door it had kicked open remained unlatched.
The residual high of the Madness form, paired with the staggering psychological weight of the ancestor’s revelations, left Jack’s mind fractured, detached from reality, and feral.
To Jack, the world was no longer a physical reality of stones and sky. It was a canvas of raw, pulsing vectors of heat and life force. And right in front of him stood the brightest, most stable source of life on the battlefield: Ren Ryzard.
Jack didn’t give a warning or form a thought.
His body moved on its own.
With a sound like a tearing canvas, Jack vanished from his position.
The ground where he had been standing detonated outward, stone fracturing into microscopic dust under the sheer kinetic violence of his departure.
He crossed the intervening space between them in less than a millisecond, a streak of absolute darkness wreathed in violent, jagged arcs of black lightning.
His face was a mask of unhinged, ecstatic fury, his bloody grin stretched wide as he drove his right fist directly at Ren’s face.
Ren didn’t flinch.
The Sovereign-rank entity stood his ground, his sharp blue eyes tracking the impossible trajectory of the human with the clinical precision of a warrior who had spent centuries surviving the apex predators of the Prosperity Kingdom.
He didn’t draw his katana.
To draw his blade against his master was a boundary Ren refused to cross until every other tactical option had been thoroughly exhausted.
Instead, Ren adjusted his stance by a fraction of an inch, his heavy, ornate scabbard rising in anticipation of what was about to happen.
CRACK!
The collision of Jack’s fist against the reinforced lacquer of Ren’s scabbard produced a shockwave that rippled across the barren plain, flattening the dust for fifty meters in every direction.
The black lightning dancing across Jack’s knuckles hissed violently, desperate to bite into the Sovereign’s flesh, but Ren’s foundational technique was flawless.
He didn’t try to stop Jack’s momentum entirely; he absorbed the kinetic shock through his knees, angling the scabbard slightly to guide the raw force of the punch downward into the earth.
The stone beneath Ren’s boots shattered, web-like fissures spidering outward across the cratered wasteland, but the warrior himself remained entirely immovable.
”Calm yourself, Jack,” Ren said, his voice flat, carrying the immense, crushing weight of absolute martial discipline.
“The enemy is dead. You are fighting a phantom.”
Jack didn’t hear him. The words were nothing but empty noise filtering through a brain that was actively drowning in demonic adrenaline.
Frustrated by the deflection, Jack pulled his fist back and unleashed a blinding, relentless barrage of strikes.
Left hook, right upper, a devastating knee aimed directly at Ren’s midsection.
Each movement was a localized catastrophe, propelled by stats that should have belonged to a mythological beast rather than a human.
His martial mastery was not a digital attribute that Jack’s system could measure; it was a deeply ingrained physical philosophy forged through blood, repetition, and decades of high-tier bat.
With his left hand braced against the back of his scabbard, Ren engaged in a masterclass of defensive redirection.
He slipped inside the trajectory of a lethal left hook, letting the wind of the punch tear past his helmet.
He brought the heavy iron pommel of his sheathed weapon up to intercept Jack’s descending elbow, turning the strike aside as casually as brushing a fly aside.
Every block was clean, every parry was calculated to use Jack’s own frantic momentum against him.
Ren maintained a highly efficient, controlled sphere in which everything within it was under his control, while Jack’s efforts to penetrate his defenses met with unwavering resistance.
For Ren, this represented a recurring dynamic. He perceived Jack as an uncontrollable entity, a subordinate whose judgment had been promised by the intensity of conflict.
The goal was simple: contain the output, exhaust the vessel, and wait for the biological tax of the Madness state to force a natural collapse.
But Jack’s body was no longer operating under standard human parameters.
As Ren continuously shut down every frontal assault, parrying three consecutive strikes with effortless precision, a profound, primal frustration peaked within Jack’s instinctual core.
He didn’t possess Ren’s centuries of formal training, but the bloodline waking up inside his bones possessed something far more terrifying: an ancient, evolutionary capacity for absolute adaptation.
Without a single conscious thought, Jack’s posture adjusted frame by frame.
The frantic, unhinged wildness of his movements vanished instantly, replaced by a sudden, chilling fluidity. His center of gravity dropped. His physical posture exhibited an unsettling, precisely calculated structural integrity that was not a result of formal instruction.
Ren’s eyes widened slightly as he registered the sudden shift in momentum. Jack didn’t throw another punch.
Instead, he slithered beneath Ren’s rising defensive guard, his silhouette blurring as he slipped entirely inside the Sovereign’s secure perimeter.
It was a movement so perfect, so devoid of human hesitation, that it pletely bypassed Ren’s anticipation.
Before Ren could adjust his stance to reset the distance, Jack planted his open hand flat against the center of Ren’s heavy chest plating.
There was no physical impact, sound of metal buckling, or kinetic recoil.
Ren braced himself, expecting the standard discharge of black electrical energy to wash over his armor.
An element that his inherent magic immunity would easily dismiss. But the black mana didn’t explode outward.
Instead, the dark energy sank straight through the physical layer of the armor. It pletely ignored the magical resistance wards woven into his body, bypassing the external protective aura entirely as if it didn’t even exist.
The volatile, ancient force flowed into Ren’s physical form like liquid lead, traveling through his muscle tissue and internal pathways with terrifying velocity.
A millisecond later, the energy reached the space directly behind Ren’s spine.
BOOM.
A massive, concussive explosion erupted violently out of Ren’s back.
The detonation was horrific, a fountain of pressurized black energy and shattered stone dust tearing outward from the rear of Ren’s armor, shredding the heavy fabric of his cape into smoking ribbons.
The sheer force of the internal projection didn’t damage his chest plate; it weaponized the interior space of his own biology, throwing his internal equilibrium into absolute chaos.
Ren was sent staggering backward, his boots carving deep, jagged trenches into the rock as he struggled to maintain his balance.
A rare, sharp gasp of pain escaped his lips, his chest heaving as his respiratory system momentarily locked up.
His internal systems were reeling, his core vibrating with a sickening, chaotic resonance that he had never experienced in his entire existence.
He was immune to magic. He had always been immune to standard elemental manipulations.
But this technique had pletely ignored the rules of the system. It didn’t attack his armor; it used his body as a medium for an exit wound.
For the first time since the battle began, a jolt of genuine alarm flashed through Ren’s sharp blue eyes.
He looked up through the settling dust, his gaze fixing on Jack, who was already coiled to spring forward again, his vertical pupils shaking with an insatiable, mindless hunger to repeat the devastation.
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