Chapter 169: Papabear wins

Jelo went still.

Unusual for him. Coolbot watched carefully, the blue shimmer pulsing steadily.

He’s thinking, Coolbot realized. That’s the dangerous part.

Jelo’s enhanced vision was tracking the field. The shimmer had a rhythm — faint, almost imperceptible. A pulse tied to Coolbot’s breathing. Not constant. It breathed.

Jelo fired a Dragon Claw — deliberately slow. Aimed carefully.

Coolbot delayed it. Three-second window, waiting for it to pass—

Jelo Wing Bursted around the side and hit Coolbot from behind in the same window — arriving at his spine at the exact moment the Dragon Claw’s delay expired on his chest.

Two simultaneous inputs. The field screamed.

Dragon Claw detonated through his front. The heel kick hammered his back. Coolbot’s body couldn’t process both directional forces at once. He was twisted violently sideways and hit the ground face-first with a sound like a car accident — the delayed echo arriving a full second later, a horrible double-boom.

He lay there.

Jelo stood over him, one hand bleeding where Dragon Claw energy had blown back across his own palm. His legs ached. His lungs were tight. Wing Burst was draining him fast.

Get up, he thought. I know you’re not done.

Coolbot got up.

Slowly. Arm shaking. A long cut above his eye. But up.

“You figured out the timing,” he said. Something between impressed and frightened.

Coolbot stopped being passive.

He charged — and the moment Jelo’s hands moved to summon Dragon Claw, Coolbot delayed his own sprint. His body appeared to freeze mid-run for one surreal second — then surged forward at double the expected speed, arriving while Jelo’s claw was already aimed at empty air.

He drove his shoulder into Jelo’s gut. Both went down hard.

On the ground it turned ugly. Coolbot was delaying Jelo’s strikes as fast as they landed — but Jelo activated Skilled Guard, his skin hardening to something dense and unyielding. Coolbot’s return blows rang off him like hammers on granite.

But the Guard wasn’t infinite.

Coolbot was stacking. Four hits banked in the buffer simultaneously. He took two more guarded blows to the face — absorbing them into the delay — then broke away and let every stored impact fire through his own body at once, riding through the burst, while releasing all four of his collected hits from Jelo’s earlier unguarded moments.

Four delayed blows erupted across Jelo from what felt like every direction. Guard was already gone.

He tumbled hard across the ground, tearing up his shoulder on landing.

Both of them were finished. Huffing. Bleeding. Coolbot’s ribs almost certainly cracked. Jelo’s palm burned, shoulder raw, legs leaden.

They stood fifteen feet apart.

Back to where they started.

Jelo closed his eyes for one breath.

When they opened — they were burning. Not just gold. Fire-threaded gold. The fire enhancement he’d been quietly feeding since the second exchange now bled fully into his Dragon Claw. It wasn’t structured energy anymore. It was heat. Real combustion coiled around raw force.

He raised both hands.

Coolbot saw it and felt something cold move through him. That’s different.

Jelo didn’t Wing Burst. He walked forward. Slow. Deliberate. Counting Coolbot’s breathing. Tracking the field’s oscillation with every step.

Coolbot delayed everything preemptively — stacking air itself against Jelo, burning through his own endurance to hold the field at maximum density. His hands were shaking.

Jelo stopped.

Three feet away.

And waited.

He watched the field pulse. Watched it breathe. Waited for the exhale — that quarter-second window where the oscillation dipped — and in that sliver he drove both hands forward and released everything. Two minutes of built-up fire and force. Point-blank. No distance for the delay to operate across. The field inhaled, tried to grab the strike—

Too late.

The Dragon Claw detonated at contact range. The explosion of fire and force sent Coolbot flying. He crashed through whatever stood behind him and came to rest somewhere in the dust and debris beyond.

Silence.

Then a groan.

Then nothing.

Jelo stood in the smoke, both arms trembling, the amber light dying from his hands. His legs buckled. He dropped to one knee, catching himself on his knuckles.

He stared at the settling dust.

“…You’re a nightmare to fight,” he said quietly.

From somewhere in the wreckage — a cough. Weak. Ragged.

Alive.

Jelo let out a slow breath and stayed on his knee a moment longer. He had nothing left to stand on just yet.

Jelo wins.

Their strengths had just been renewed, and Coolbot and Jelo were sent back to the interface to search for fights and send requests. The glowing panels floated in front of them, displaying lists of available opponents, rankings, and rewards.

Jelo glanced at the timer hovering at the corner of the interface. He still had a little bit of time left. If he really wanted to, he could probably squeeze in one or two more matches before his access to the Arena Nexus expired.

But he hesitated.

Part of him felt like he should leave and focus on other aspects of his training. The missions he and his teammates had been carrying out with Tongen had already taken up most of their time, and he hadn’t had much opportunity to train properly outside of that.

Still, earning twenty points without taking any physical damage had felt incredibly satisfying. It seemed like such a waste to leave now when things were going so well.

Jelo leaned back in his chair, staring quietly at the interface while he thought.

If he kept fighting, he could gain more points, level up, and increase his firepower. That would make him stronger in the long run. After that, he could always return to physical training later.

But there was another problem.

How exactly was he supposed to train physically?

Most of the time, he had been figuring out how to use his powers on his own. The system explained his abilities to a certain extent, but it only gave brief descriptions and basic guidance. Firepower in particular felt much more complicated than the other abilities he had experimented with.

Jelo only had three close friends, and none of them possessed firepower abilities. That meant they couldn’t really help him improve.

After thinking for a moment longer, Jelo suddenly leaned forward and reopened the match search.

His time in the Arena Nexus was limited, and he refused to waste it.

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