Chapter 7186 Sputtering Flames The Withering Thrust was not a pure darkness spear technique. It also involved concepts such as death, decay, wood and so on. It was a relatively more complicated technique to pull off for a pure wielder of darkness. Fortunately, Ves had gained an artificial foundation in the withering curse from an enlightenment fruit, so he happened to be able to meet these troublesome requirements. This was why the Withering Thrust was the most suitable technique for him and the Dark Apostle despite being way more complicated than many other techniques. The Withering Thrust that the Dark Apostle just pulled off relied heavily on the Dark Tooth and Blinky to gain its power and structure. Both of them constituted rather potent sources of power, so the threat posed by the Withering Thrust immediately caused alarm bells to ring in the Fiery Axe's mind! Unfortunately, she was already fully committed to attacking. She had the opportunity to retreat sooner, but instead she chose to stay and wear down her opponent's spatial barrier as soon as possible. Since this was the case, she may as well stick her chosen direction to the end! "SHATTER!" The burning spatial barrier finally couldn't withstand the abuse any longer and shattered after the Fiery Axe landed another blow! However, the Dark Apostle could no longer be stopped! Before the Fiery Axe could land another attack, the Dark Tooth shot forward like a predator pouncing on its prey. The ominous dark spear first struck the spatial barrier! It became very clear that defense was not the Fiery Axe's best trait. She had passed over the decision to integrate phasewater organs that could upgrade her first line of defense multiple times. That said, that was normally not a terrible decision because the most basic spatial barriers were already fairly strong from the onset. It should easily be able to resist a single blow, even if it came from a transphasic hyper weapon! Yet this was not a normal weapon. The Dark Tooth was not only a D-arm, but its wielder executed a powerful technique that massively amplified its damage potentia! Although the spear did not collide against the spatial barrier with an overwhelming amount of force, its corrosive and destructive energies wore down the energy defense so much that it broke in less than a second! "THAT SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE!" 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦 The Fiery Axe became completely astonished by the fact that the Dark Tooth was able to puncture through her spatial barrier in a single blow! Not only that, but it still had enough force left over to piece through her raiment and make a shallow cut into her chest cavity! The Fiery Axe let out a bestial roar and immediately used her weapon to slap away the spear before it could be pushed any deeper! "IT HURTS!" The woman formerly known as Fasia Meledor had always prided herself on her toughness and her ability to endure hardships. Yet the pain inflicted by a shallow puncture wound from a dark spear inflicted more pain than she had suffered in the past! When the Fiery Axe briefly lowered her head to inspect the rather small and unassuming wound, she grew pensive when she saw that a high concentration of darkness energy had infected her injury. Her companion spirit's flames were desperately trying to douse this dark infection. While the fire was making limited progress in excising the darkness, it proved to be incredibly persistent. It did not help that there was a clear gap between the two energies. The darkness energy and other negative energies formed the structure of a modified withering curse. It continually sapped the Fiery Axe's energy. The flesh around the stab wound aged at a rapid rate. The biological cells affected by this dark infection would not survive longer than two days. The best way to prevent this from happening was to counter or neutralize the threat. "My fire… shall cleanse my flesh!" This was what the Fiery Axe had been doing on instinct already. More and more fire energy concentrated on her wound, however none offered any salvation. The compromised cells withered with every passing second. The power of darkness drained them of all of their vitality, strength and purpose. The cells that offered the weakest resistance succumbed first. They did not die completely. They weakened until they lost almost all of their original functions. In exchange, they gained the power to spread their withering corruption. The affected cells turned black before turning against the body that spawned them in the first place! A part of the Fiery Axe grew horrified when she discovered that she was being attacked by her own flesh! The withering curse continued to spread like a slow-moving wildfire. Her injury would continue to expand and debilitate her further. It would be especially alarming if the corruption spread to one of her nearby phasewater organs! She could not allow that to happen! The Fiery Axe gritted her teeth. She immediately came up with a reckless and undoubtedly painful idea. A normal person would have hemmed and hawed for a while before making the decision. She did not waste any time! From the moment she thought it was viable, she instantly made her move! She raised her axe before pressing its burning blade right against her wound at her chest! The Fiery Axe screamed in pain as she forcibly burned away the withered and corrupted flesh! Though her reckless move could not go deep enough to affect the blackened cells that were buried deeper in her body, she successfully neutralized the corruption that had settled closer to the exterior of her true body! In an instant, she had burned away most of the infection, choosing to inflict immediate damage to her true body in order to spare herself from greater debilitation! She let out another roar! "I AM THE AXE THAT BRINGS FIRE! I AM THE CONFLAGRATION THAT BURNS PLANETS! I FEAR NO PAIN! FIRE IS MY ALLY! THE DARKNESS SHALL FLEE BEFORE THE HEAT!" Her words centered her thoughts and enabled her to pull through her pain. She successfully dealt with her crisis before lifting her axe with slightly greater difficulty than before. Her grin grew wider as she truly felt challenged by the Dark Apostle for the first time since they commenced this duel. "THIS IS ROUND 2!" The Fiery Axe renewed her offensive! What was amazing was that she did not seem to have slowed down in any way! Her attacks struck the Dark Apostle with almost the same force and frequency as before. Though her rhythm had become a little more disordered, it didn't matter as her sheer grit and determination sustained her offensive and caused the challenger's raiment to suffer numerous armor breaches! The Dark Apostle was taken aback. He assumed that his Withering Strike would have been powerful enough to not only punch through her spatial barrier in a single go, but also strike her flesh and spread a curse fueled by concentrated darkness. He never expected her to deal with this tricky and troublesome curse by employing the braindead method of simply using her burning axe to cauterize her wound! This was a serious oversight on Ves and the Dark Apostle's part, and now their true body suffered for their mistake! Pulling off the previous power move sapped a lot of energy from them. Their true body was not used to executing such a burdensome move and could not perform another Demonic Possession Spearmanship technique in a short amount of time. This meant that the Dark Apostle had no choice but to remain passive and do his best to block as many axe attacks as possible! He made an immediate strategic decision. He allowed the axe attacks that were likely to hit the undamaged portions of his raiment through. At the same time, he resolutely blocked the attacks that targeted the sections that had already incurred serious damage. At the same time, he continually shifted his grip on his spear while also rotating the shaft to change its surface orientation towards the Fiery Axe. This allowed the Dark Apostle to endure significantly longer. His true body had yet to suffer a truly devastating axe strike while his Dark Tooth was able to hold out longer, though it gained scars at a terrifying speed. The Fiery Axe did not seem to care! Her mind was on fire and her axe burned hotter as her only solution to all of her problems was to attack! Of course, every attack splashed fire onto the Dark Apostle. The dispersed distribution of every strike prevented the flames from overlapping and turning into a more serious threat for the time being, but who knew when it would last. Blinky immediately took care of the threat. Unlike the Fiery Axe, the Star Cat was able to deal with the persistent flames with an easy solution. He opened his maw and began to devour all of the fire energy that granted extraordinary traits to the fire and made them so dangerous and persistent! The influx of fire energy had no time to burn Blinky before it all disappeared into the Blinkyverse, where it would harmlessly integrate into a vast imaginary universe! In this way, the Dark Apostle neutralized one of the Fiery Axe's attack vectors and prevented her from gaining too much of an advantage during this fight! Not that the female Ascended Giant minded all that much. She became more delighted when she realized that her current target dummy would be able to last longer! "HAHAHAHA! MY PAIN IS NOTHING COMPARED TO THE PLEASURE OF SWINGING MY AXE! MORE! GIVE ME MORE!" Her momentum seemed to grow even stronger out of the blue! If she was not a mech pilot, then Ves might have mistaken her for an expert pilot due to how her will strengthened her combat performance! Both Ves and the Dark Apostle understood that they were quickly running out of time. If they wanted to squeeze out a victory from this duel, then they needed to make a more serious sacrifice in order to reverse victory and defeat. If only the Dark Apostle could gain enough distance to throw his spear! The Dark Tooth was not solely designed to function as a medium to channel darkness energy. It was also capable of exploding with great force! That was when the human phase lord came up with an inventive solution. As long as he was willing to pay a real price and expose one of his trump cards, he was confident he could end this duel before it grew any worse! He immediately conveyed his idea to Ves, whose cooperation was vital for this gambit. Blinky immediately frowned. "Your idea has merit, but are you sure you want to end this duel this way? It will feel like cheating." "Pff. I don't care. We are merely making use of one of our inherent strengths, so we are still operating within the rules. It is already good enough that we have been able to put up a good showing in front of the Fiery Axe. The Ascended Giants should have developed a better impression of me. This can easily change if I start to suffer serious injuries due to my stubbornness. Let us end it now before it can grow any worse. Trump cards are meant to be used. The stakes are too high to leave it unused. Just make sure to invest enough energy to end this duel in the next attack." "Hm, since you don't intend to perform a traditional power move, we won't be able to succeed unless we make a serious investment. Get ready." Blinky secretly began to mobilize energy, but the Fiery Axe was sharp enough to sense the rapidly escalating threat from her adversary. She became more frantic and began to land more blows onto the Dark Apostle's raiment! In a few instances, she even managed to strike deep enough to cut and burn the surface of his true body! Yet the Dark Apostle took these wounds in stride and began to grin back at the madwoman. "You have fought well, woman, but the time has come to bring this duel to its inevitable conclusion. Have a taste of my true strength!" The Dark Apostle no longer used his spear to defend himself, but instead thrust it out with such speed that the Fiery Axe could not avoid its tip! Initially, the Fiery Axe did not feel too threatened, because the D-arm did not accumulate enough darkness energy to pull off a power move. Yet she soon became alarmed when she saw that it glowed with a different and considerably more potent kind of energy! This bright white glow contrasted sharply against the darkness that emanated from the Dark Tooth. As soon as the tip of the spear struck her in her belly, it pierced through the raiment and sunk deeper into her tough phasewater-reinforced flesh as if it was a Saint Piercer arm! When it had finally reached a respectable amount of depth, the remaining extraordinary energies exploded, causing the Fiery Axe to suffer a disastrous internal wound that affected multiple of her phasewater organs! She roared in pain instead of excitement this time and fell back with all thoughts of attacking had finally disappeared! Her true body grew heavier while her flames had dimmed. She had already become half-crippled by a single attack from the Dark Apostle! The challenger did not expect any other result. Blinky had invested a whopping 41 percent of his Worclaw energy reserves to empower his last attack. It would have been a surprise if the Fiery Axe had been able to withstand this move! Although the Dark Apostle was only left with 50 percent of his Worclaw energy reserves, he did not regret this sacrifice. Mostly.