The final echo of Lord Malkor's words did not fade into the canyon; it seemed to solidify, hanging in the sub-zero air like an immutable decree.
The brilliant, vertical ring of pristine gold light hovering behind his broad shoulders flared with a sudden, blinding intensity, casting razor-sharp shadows across the ground.
Malkor did not take a step, nor did he lean forward. He simply willed the space between himself and Tyson to cease existing. Instantly, the twenty-yard gap vanished, and Malkor materialized a mere inch from Tyson's face.
His left hand shot forward in a devastating, straight palm strike aimed directly at Tyson's throat.
The strike carried no sound, no warning, and completely bypassed the normal limits of atmospheric resistance.
Having already experienced the sheer velocity of Malkor's sudden spatial movements in the previous exchange, his mind instantly calculated the necessary parameters.
Tyson violently bent the law of inertia acting upon his own skeletal frame. Instead of physically stepping back, he forced his entire body to drop downward vertically at ten times the speed of natural gravity, slipping perfectly beneath the trajectory of Malkor's lethal palm.
As Malkor's hand cut through the empty air above him, Tyson pivoted on his left knee, driving his weight upward with explosive force.
He gathered a massive swirl of his golden aura into his right fist and unleashed a brutal, rising uppercut aimed directly at Malkor's exposed jaw.
To maximize the impact, Tyson bent the law of kinetic transfer, forcing the momentum of the strike to compress into a singular, microscopic point on his knuckles, ensuring that the entirety of the force would detonate deep within Malkor's structure upon contact.
Malkor's faceted visage did not show surprise. Before the fist could connect, Malkor altered the progression of time in the immediate coordinate space surrounding his chin.
Tyson's rising fist suddenly slowed down, hanging in the air as if moving through thick, frozen amber. The golden plasma of his aura sputtered, trapped in a micro-second delay that completely killed the strike's explosive momentum.
With his target temporarily suspended in time, Malkor brought his right leg around in a swift, devastating low sweep.
Tyson felt the sudden, overwhelming gravitational shift through his lower body. Knowing he could not escape the sweep while his fist was caught in the temporal delay, he accepted the strict law of universal compensation.
He allowed his golden aura to wildly expand through his left leg, bending the law of thermal dynamics to flash-freeze the moisture in the ground beneath him into a dense, molecularly compacted pillar of ice to brace against the incoming blow.
*BANG—!!!*
The mountain-weight sweep slammed into Tyson's icy brace.
The sheer, unyielding force of the collision generated a deafening shockwave that ripped the surrounding bedrock to shreds, launching a massive cloud of stone shrapnel into the air. Tyson's ice pillar shattered instantly into a million glittering fragments, and the physical backlash of the blocked impact traveled straight up his leg.
He coughed up a spray of blood as his internal organs absorbed the redirected kinetic energy, and his body was launched sideways across the canyon.
Tyson spun mid-air, his boots scraping hard against the stone floorboards as he forced his center of gravity to re-align.
He slid fifteen yards, leaving two deep, smoking trenches in the dirt before coming to a halt. His chest heaved violently, his uniform torn and stained with blood, but his golden eyes never left the enemy.
"Your calculations are remarkably swift," Malkor spoke, his tattered dark cloak settling perfectly around his broad shoulders as he floated back up an inch above the ground. "You willingly sacrifice your own internal physical structure to balance the feedback loops of the universe. A brave tactic. But a vessel made of flesh has an definitive breaking point."
Tyson wiped the fresh blood from his chin with the back of his forearm, a fierce, wild grin cutting through his face. "I'm still standing, aren't I? As long as I can breathe, I can still kick your ass".
Without waiting for Malkor to dictate the pace, Tyson lunged forward. He didn't use a linear dash; instead, he entered a high-speed, erratic weaving pattern, his boots tearing up the loose gravel as his golden aura flared in short, rhythmic pulses.
He closed the distance in a fraction of a second, stepping deep into Malkor's guard.
Tyson unleashed a relentless, high-level boxing combination.
He threw a lightning-fast left jab, followed by a slipping right cross, a short left hook to the ribs, and a devastating spinning back-fist.
Every single strike was delivered with flawless martial precision, his fists blurring into a wheel of golden fire.
Malkor met the fury with absolute calm.
He did not step back. Moving only his upper torso, he executed a series of microscopic slips, parries, and deflections.
He deflected Tyson's left jab with the back of his wrist, tilted his head by a millimeter to let the right cross graze his faceted cheek, and brought his elbow down sharply to catch the left hook.
The sounds of their physical exchange echoed through the canyon like a continuous string of thunderclaps.
*BANG! BANG! CRACK! BANG!*
Tyson's spinning back-fist came around with immense velocity.
Anticipating a block, Tyson bent the law of friction around his own arm, reducing it to absolute zero. When Malkor raised his left forearm to intercept the strike, Tyson's fist effortlessly slid right past Malkor's guard, bypassing his defense entirely, and slammed squarely into the side of Malkor's geometric diamond face.
*THOOM!*