A Yaoguai tore from the sky and landed amidst scanty, bone-like trees and unmoving, solid water made of sword blades.
The creature was a skeleton dressed in rusted armor, wielding a long odachi that was almost as tall as itself. Its left arm was gone, and dread and anger seemed to fill its hollow eye sockets.
It stared at its armless shoulder bone in disdain and rasped, grating its teeth together to create an irritating sound. If not for that other damn soldier, it wouldn't have lost its arm. It wouldn't have fallen into the Tether and landed back on the surface.
That damned wench had even attacked it while they were frozen. Why do that?
Of course, Yaoguais possessed no normalcy, as they acted only on bloodlust. Their once-living souls were now a vast nihility where nothingness and corruption reigned supreme.
Consequently, this Yaoguai wasn't acting based on active senses, but rather on the enmity it felt toward its fellow soldier—an enmity fueled by corruption and an emotional nihility that severed all secondary attributes.
Soon, more figures fell from the sky, landing in different parts of the region. One of them caught the monster's attention. The moment the Yaoguai saw the figure, it rasped and ran toward the direction of the fall.
****
Mason wore a nonchalant expression as he walked across the sterile, silver water. Jumong's white hair had already started to look good on him... or rather, it would have looked good if it were well-combed. The hair was much longer now than when he had started the tutorial one month ago.
'Does that mean my real hair has become just as bushy? Who knows.'
His thoughts were interrupted when a figure landed in front of him. The way the water reacted to the impact would have made Mason lose his balance; instead, he simply somersaulted and landed back down once the water had retracted.
He was actually in the mood for a battle, as he was running out of meat, but the features of the Yaoguai annoyed him.
'Is it one of those stupid skeletons again? They've been falling down a lot lately.'
The Yaoguai stood eight feet tall. Indifferent to Mason's disappointment, it lunged forward in a frenzied but precise manner, wielding a giant halberd.
Mason dodged the first swing by somersaulting over the creature and landing behind it. He could have landed a strike in that split second and ended the battle in moments, but this was no mere Yaoguai. It was a former soldier who had fought for or against the Red Dragon in a catastrophic war.
Its martial abilities could not be parried by a mere human of the Mortal rank.
The monster did not let a heartbeat pass. As Mason landed behind it, it did not turn clumsily; instead, it utilized the momentum of its initial miss. With a skillful movement, it kicked backward with a skeletal heel while simultaneously spinning the giant halberd in a low, sweeping horizontal strike.
Mason clicked his tongue, forced to hop over the blade. That wasn't all. He watched while mid-air for a brief second as the Yaoguai transitioned from the low attack into a high overhead thrust.
The halberd came down with the weight of a falling pillar. This time, Mason decided not to dodge. He shifted his weight and, instead of meeting the force head-on, he stepped into the blind spot of the long-reaching weapon. He slid his blunt sword upward to deflect the wooden shaft of the halberd rather than the iron head.
The vibration rattled his teeth, but he held his ground.
Over thirty days of survival, Mason had been able to understand tiny fragments of blending martial arts with street fighting.
He had been unable to learn Jumong's skill, as it was much harder than he had imagined. 'What was so special about it? Wasn't it just a single stroke?'
Unable to master it, he placed his hopes in the incorporation of street fighting and martial arts. He had become flawless in using the pivot, hip, and anchor skills of the first Yaoguai he had fought. Not only that, he had also been able to unlock the key that brought these two different categories of combat together.
Watching and imitating his opponents had helped him greatly, giving him the chance to build his own stances and his own style of combat.
The fluidity between martial arts and street fighting in Mason's mind was less a perfect blend and more a violent, high-stakes conversation. Traditional martial arts relied on form, breath, and centuries of refined discipline—a logic the skeletal soldiers used to predict and punish every standard move. Street fighting, however, was built on pragmatic chaos; it was the art of the dirty pivot, the sudden weight shift, and the absolute refusal to move in a predictable line.
By bridging these two, Mason created a combat style that felt overpowered to his opponents. He would use the Anchor skill he'd stolen from his first kill to ground himself like a master, then immediately transition into a frantic, off-balance lunge that no disciplined soldier would ever expect. It was the meta-breaker of this nightmare realm.
It was as if he had created his own "single stroke."
The Yaoguai's hollow sockets flared with a dull, sickly light. It released one hand from the halberd and attempted a palm strike aimed directly at Mason's chest—a move meant to create distance so it could utilize the length of its weapon again.
Mason's smile widened. He had seen this technique before during his month-long "retirement."
He dropped low, letting the palm strike whistle over his head, and drove his shoulder into the creature's midsection, aiming to unbalance the towering frame before it could reset its martial form.
As Mason's shoulder slammed into the halberd-wielder's ribs, the skeleton's violet eyes flickered with brief confusion. It tried to reset its stance, its bones clicking as it attempted to find its center, but Mason was already flowing into a different rhythm.
Mason didn't let it recover. He hooked his foot behind the skeleton's calcified heel while simultaneously driving his blunt sword into the gap of the creature's elbow joint.
"You're not going anywhere," Mason grunted, his white hair whipping across his face as the star-shaped scar on his forehead throbbed.
The creature's balance was shattered. As it began to topple, the Yaoguai instinctively tried to defend using a mid-fall recovery technique, using its own center of gravity to pull the attacker down with it.
Mason felt the shift in the creature's weight. A month ago, he would have been dragged down. Now, he anticipated the move.