Chapter 158: fight me

Jolo, Mira, and Atlas met Tongen at a spot he had told them to meet him outside the academy. After speaking with them for a while, he asked Mira and Atlas to return to the academy. Jolo told them to relax.

Mira and Atlas didn’t question him, but they wondered why he had asked them to come out of the academy in the first place if he was just going to send them back later. They also wondered what was going on between Jolo and Tongen. Had Tongen found out about Jolo’s ability? Jolo hadn’t told them anything yet, so they didn’t know whether he had informed Tongen about his ability or not.

Back with Jolo and Tongen, they went to Tongen’s house. After a while, they stepped into the yard, and Tongen finally said to Jolo, “I want you to fight me without holding back, without hiding your strength. I want to see your full power. I want to analyze how strong you are. I want to know what I’m dealing with. I want to know where I can help you improve, because I see you as my greatest asset. I see you as a very valuable asset to this academy, and I want to see you reach your full potential,” Tongen explained.

Jolo didn’t have much of a choice, so he agreed to fight Tongen. Besides, fights like this helped him learn how to face top opponents and gain experience.

They both took their stances, ready to fight, wasting no more time.

The Weight of Motion

The air between them crackled the moment they faced each other.

Jelo moved first.

He drove his palm forward and Dragon Claw erupted from his hand — a jagged, claw-shaped lance of energy that tore through the air with a sharp hiss, aimed straight for Tongen’s chest. Fast. Precise. The kind of strike that had ended fights before they’d really begun.

Tongen didn’t dodge.

He raised one hand and caught the momentum of it.

The energy projection slowed — visibly, unnervingly — like a video being scrubbed to a crawl, and then stopped entirely two inches from his palm, suspended in the air like a frozen scream. Tongen tilted his head slightly, studying it. Then he flicked his wrist and sent it rocketing sideways, harmlessly into nothing.

“Interesting,” Tongen said.

Jelo’s eyes sharpened — his enhanced vision already reading Tongen’s posture, his weight distribution, the micro-shifts in his stance. He vanished.

Wing Burst.

He reappeared behind Tongen mid-strike, elbow driving toward the base of his skull. But Tongen had already turned — not because he’d seen it coming, but because the momentum of Jelo’s movement had announced him. Every displacement of air. Every rushing force cutting through space. Tongen felt it like a hand on his shoulder.

He grabbed Jelo’s arm at the peak of the strike.

And redirected every ounce of that speed back into Jelo.

The impact was catastrophic. Jelo’s own velocity folded back into his body like a crashing wave, and he was hurled across the ground, skipping twice before he planted his feet and dragged himself to a stop. He coughed. His arm felt like he’d swung it into a concrete wall at full sprint.

He used my own strike against me.

Jelo activated Skilled Guard. He felt his skin solidify — a slow, dense tightening running from his forearms up through his shoulders, his chest, his jaw. He steadied his breathing. If Tongen could redirect momentum, then he needed to take away the momentum. Make his strikes short. Calculated. Hard to read.

He fired three Dragon Claws in rapid succession — not at Tongen, but around him. Different angles. Forcing him to deal with multiple vectors at once.

Tongen exhaled slowly.

He nullified the first. Redirected the second upward. But the third clipped his shoulder before he could process it — and for the first time, he staggered.

Jelo was already inside his guard.

He hit Tongen three times in close quarters — short, brutal, deliberately low-momentum strikes, each one stripped of the telegraphing force that Tongen fed on. Body. Ribs. Jaw. Each hit landed with a dull, real weight. Tongen’s head snapped sideways on the last one.

A thin line of blood traced his lip.

He smiled.

“Good,” Tongen said quietly.

He planted his foot and released everything he had stored.

Every redirected Dragon Claw. Every joule of Wing Burst velocity he had absorbed. Every ounce of force from Jelo’s three strikes that he had taken and quietly banked without Jelo realizing it. He had been collecting the whole fight. Like a dam holding back a river, waiting.

He released it all at once — shaped into a single, concentrated wave aimed directly at Jelo.

Skilled Guard took the first second of it.

Then it shattered.

Jelo was launched off his feet with tremendous, crushing force, the air driven from his lungs in a single broken gasp. He hit the ground hard and rolled, and didn’t get up immediately. His vision swam. His Guard had bought him life but not comfort — he felt like he’d been hit by something the size of a truck.

He pushed himself to one knee.

Wing Burst — he needed distance. He needed a moment to breathe, to recalibrate, to figure out how to fight a man who turned every attack into ammunition.

He activated it.

He moved — and Tongen caught the momentum of his escape mid-burst, seized it mid-flight like a hand closing around a thrown ball, and simply stopped him. Jelo hung in the air for one horrible, weightless moment, completely arrested — and then Tongen reversed it.

Jelo came back faster than he had left.

He crashed to the ground at Tongen’s feet and lay still for several long seconds, chest heaving, fingers pressed flat against the earth. Everything ached. His Skilled Guard was spent. His enhanced vision was still working but there was nothing left to calculate — no angle, no opening he hadn’t already tried.

He raised his head.

Tongen stood over him, breathing harder than before, shoulder still marked from where the Dragon Claw had caught him. Not untouched. Not unscathed.

But standing.

Jelo’s arm shook as he tried to push himself up again — and held. He stayed on one knee, jaw tight, eyes burning with something that refused to be entirely extinguished.

“You’re stubborn,” Tongen said. There was no mockery in it. Something close to respect.

“Not done,” Jelo managed.

“Yeah.” Tongen reached down and put a firm hand on his shoulder — not cruel. Final. “You are.”

The pressure that followed was quiet and absolute. Tongen applied the last of what he’d stored — not as an explosion but as a slow, irresistible crush of redirected force, pressing Jelo flat against the ground until his arms gave out completely.

Jelo lay there, still breathing, still conscious, still furious.

Just finished.

Tongen straightened up, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his hand. The fight had cost him something. He felt it in his ribs, in the throb behind his eyes, in the way his legs wanted badly to sit down.

But the ground beneath him was steady.

And he was still on his feet.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep