Chapter 131 - A Grandmaster
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Socrates moved.
Not toward it — sideways, the Heavenly Rank Physique giving him the only thing he had in this exchange — speed. The white freezing flame followed him immediately, not as a projected technique but as an extension of the Grandmaster's attention. Where it looked the flame went. The corridor ahead of Socrates erupted before he reached it. He changed direction. The flame changed with him.
He couldn't outrun its attention.
He drove the cold element outward — full output, the Yin energy pouring from both palms in a projection that would have stopped anything below this level cold.
The white freezing flame ate it.
Not countered. Consumed — the Grandmaster's fire and Socrates' ice occupying the same space and the fire winning without apparent effort, the cold dissolving into the white flame like shadow dissolves into direct light.
The punch came from his left.
The curved horn driving horizontally — Socrates ducked under it, the displaced air of the swing hitting him like a physical force that sent him sliding across the frost covered floor fifteen meters. He got up. The poison element — his right hand, the purple halo darkening — drove forward at the Grandmaster's knee joint.
The flame burned it away before it arrived.
At Grandmaster Realm the energy wasn't channeled. It wasn't projected. It was the extension of the body — present around every surface simultaneously, burning away what approached before approach became contact.
Socrates understood it in the first thirty seconds.
Nothing he had was getting through.
The earth halo — the Heavenly Toppling Art driving through the floor, the corridor stone erupting in a ridge toward the Grandmaster. The white flame touched the ridge and the stone became nothing. The water element — white water bubbles, the poisoned ones, released into the air. The flame incinerated them before they dispersed. The poison reached nothing.
He was running. Fighting. Moving.
Taking hits he couldn't fully avoid — each one carrying the white freezing flame that burned cold and the frost in him expelled it, the Yin element in his Dantian reading the flame as an intrusion and pushing back. But each expulsion cost him something. The Dantian newly formed, the meridians newly opened — each push-back straining the pathways that had been dead for years and were not yet built for this volume of output.
He was being worn down.
The Grandmaster watched him run with the patience of something that had never needed to hurry.
"Interesting." It said — tracking Socrates through the burning corridor. "Your cold expels my flame. That's more than most." It raised the curved horn. "But expelling isn't surviving."
It brought the horn down.
The white freezing flame came with it — a full directed output that covered the entire width of the corridor, floor to ceiling, no gap, the cold fire consuming everything in its path.
Socrates raised both hands — every element simultaneously, the five halos blazing, the Heavenly Toppling Art pushing maximum output through his body — and the cold hit the flame and held for two seconds.
Two seconds.
Then the flame pushed through.
It hit him and the world went white.
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'MASTER—'
Sun Wukong appeared immediately — the golden armor expanding, the aura that had ended four Master Realm cultivators without apparent effort rising around him in the corridor's burning air.
He put himself between Socrates and the Grandmaster.
The Grandmaster looked at him.
Sun Wukong looked back.
The golden eyes finding the ancient Asura's flame-exuding form with the assessment of something that had fought at the King Tier Realm and understood the distance between where it currently stood and where it used to stand.
'This is a Grandmaster.' Sun Wukong registered. 'And I'm at Master Realm peak. The gap—'
He moved anyway.
The first strike — launched at the Grandmaster's midsection with the full output of peak Master Realm cultivation and a thousand years of combat knowledge behind it — hit the white freezing flame surrounding the Grandmaster's body and dispersed.
The Grandmaster looked at Sun Wukong's fist.
At the golden armor showing scorch marks where the flame had touched it.
"A beast." It said. "A strong one." It tilted its enormous head. "Still not enough."
The curved horn came across.
Sun Wukong blocked — both arms up, the golden armor taking the impact. He held. The force of it drove him back thirty meters across the corridor floor, his boots cutting furrows through the frost and stone, but he held.
He came back.
Again. And again. Each exchange the Grandmaster receiving Sun Wukong's best output and the white freezing flame absorbing it, each exchange the curved horn finding Sun Wukong and the golden armor holding for one exchange, then two, then three — the scorch marks accumulating, the armor's surface degrading under the sustained contact with Grandmaster level flame.
The Grandmaster wasn't trying.
That was the thing Sun Wukong understood by the fourth exchange and couldn't change by the fifth. The Grandmaster was present in this fight the way a mountain is present in rain — not engaging, just being, the effort of it requiring nothing from something that existed at that level.
It toyed with him.
The curved horn found a gap in the armor's degraded surface on the seventh exchange — driving through and catching Sun Wukong's left side, the white flame going in through the gap — and Sun Wukong made a sound that Socrates, still down on the corridor floor and expelling the cold fire from his system, had never heard from the Monkey King before.
Pain.
Sun Wukong landed ten meters away. Didn't get up immediately.
The Grandmaster stepped toward him.
Then toward Socrates.
Both of them down. Both of them alive but the margin between alive and the alternative narrowing with the specific patience of something that had been here before and knew how it ended.
It raised the curved horn as it prepared to kill them both with one strike...
One clean strike and he'll incinerate them both....he just have to strike his hand down and there will be no more.... Both of them..... they'll no longer exist...
But at that moment, a loud humming sound was heard.....
A blue array dragging his attention...
And then something crashed down from it....
A silhouette.... A humanoid silhouette....
Who spread his senses around immediately...
Surprised and shocked filled his faces....
"Five Elders dead.... But the disciples.... They're thrice the number expected.... Interesting..."
The silhouette said as he turned to the Asura clan member...
"You must be the boss of this dungeon....Asura King" He said
"And you must be the Nothern Gladiator... The leader of the humans that have been disturbing my peace... " Replied the End Boss.
"Yes.. I'm the Nothern Gladiator... And I'm here to defeat you and conquer this dungeon.... " The leader of the Northern Gladiator Guild boldly claim...
"You jest... " THE Boss RELEASED HIS GRANDMASTER AURA AS THE FLAMES BURST FORWARD..
THE NOTHERN GLADIATOR MATCHED A FOOT FORWARD AS TWO PILLARS RAISED UP RAISING Socrates body and that of the Monkey King up...
Golden energy of the Grandmaster Realm burst out of his body as he condensed a sword out of the earth....
He's a Mid STAGE grandmaster cultivating the Earth attribute..
"COME.. "
And the battle begins.