"Cough...!"
In the underground chamber, Sweet Mask coughed up a mouthful of blood, his eyes widening in disbelief.
"Sweet Mask?!" Sitch's horrified scream echoed from afar, filled with sheer panic and fear.
But Sweet Mask could no longer hear it. All sounds seemed to be drifting farther and farther away. His neck stiffening, he slowly lowered his head and looked at his body.
There, a horrifying wound stretched across his waist, as though he had been cut in half by a single slash. Blood poured out in torrents, instantly staining his entire body red.
"Cough...! Ah...!" With a painful groan, Sweet Mask finally collapsed, the ground beneath him gradually turning crimson.
"Sweet Mask!" Sitch rushed over in a panic. He knelt beside him, completely at a loss, before finally remembering something and frantically pulling out his phone. "Quick! Get the medical team down here! Sweet Mask, Sweet Mask has suffered a fatal wound! If this continues, his life is in danger!"
His terrified cries echoed throughout the underground shelter.
Lying on the floor, Sweet Mask struggled to lift his head. The only thing he could see was Fang Li's retreating back.
"Damn... it..." The moment the words left his mouth, darkness swallowed his vision. His head dropped, and he lost consciousness.
"Sweet Mask! Sweet Mask!" Sitch's desperate cries rang through the chamber.
...
Meanwhile, Fang Li had already returned to Sylvia's side.
"You really..." Sylvia couldn't help looking troubled. "Did you have to get that serious?"
Hearing that, Fang Li smiled slightly. "I only got a little serious."
After all, that hadn't been his strongest attack.
Ever since advancing to the Third Rank, Fang Li was no longer comparable to the person he had been at the Fourth Rank.
How could there even be a comparison? His attributes alone had increased by a full 200 points since before his promotion. The Battle Suit provided an additional 50 points each to Strength, Vitality, and Agility.
As for the fifty free attribute points he had received from sharing Sylvia's reward, Fang Li had invested all of them into Intelligence.
In other words, every one of his attributes had increased by fifty points. That was no joke.
Fifty attribute points might not sound like much at first glance. Take Strength as an example: for a Fifth-Rank God's Messenger, fifty points of Strength would only be enough to smash apart rocks.
But for a Third-Rank God's Messenger who already possessed a hundred points of Strength, an additional fifty points could allow them to demolish entire buildings.
That was how attributes worked. The higher they became, the greater the increase each point represented. Otherwise, when Fang Li had possessed only one point in every attribute while a trained athlete had five points, did that mean the athlete was literally five times stronger than him? Obviously not.
But at higher levels, things were different. The gap between 1 and 5 points might not even amount to a full multiple, while the gap between 1001 and 1005 points could very well be several times greater.
And now, leaving his other attributes aside, Fang Li's highest stat, Agility, had already surpassed 200 points.
Combined with the bonuses from his skills and equipment, a simple test inside his personal residence in the Main God's Dimension had already allowed him to reach an astonishing speed of Mach 3.
If his movement speed was that fast, then naturally his attack speed could reach the same level. In other words, Fang Li's attacks could also achieve three times the speed of sound.
Of course, Mach 3 alone wasn't enough to instantly defeat a Third-Rank expert like Sweet Mask. Sweet Mask's strength ranked comfortably among the middle tier of the Third Rank; he was far stronger than the Wild Man leader Fang Li had fought before. A casual slash wasn't enough to bring him down.
However, there was something important to remember.
When Fang Li tested his speed in the Main God's Dimension, he hadn't used Prana, nor had he used the Flashing Dash technique from the Nanaya Assassination Arts. With Prana boosting him, surpassing Mach 3 was effortless.
And if Flashing Dash was added on top of that, the skill's 300% enhancement would combine with the technique's own unique effects to push his speed even further.
Even accounting for real-world limitations, air resistance, wind conditions, atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, and other factors that prevented him from fully reproducing his theoretical performance, reaching Mach 10 was still no problem. In other words, Fang Li's true top speed was around ten times the speed of sound.
And that was merely his raw speed.
The real terror of Fang Li's combat style wasn't speed alone. The Nanaya Assassination Arts also contained countless extraordinary movement techniques and footwork methods. They didn't merely accelerate him; they created afterimages, illusions, feints, and deceptive movements that made him even more terrifying.
Following the same logic, what would happen if Fang Li used that level of speed together with the ultimate one-hit-kill technique of the Nanaya Assassination Arts?
The supreme secret art known as: 'Extreme Death - Seven Nights'.
The answer was simple. The result was Sweet Mask's current condition.
That slash had been Fang Li's true full-power attack. True, he hadn't used the Mystic Eyes, but the Mystic Eyes didn't increase speed. So without releasing his Stigma, this was unquestionably the fastest attack Fang Li could currently perform.
He had already calculated it. One hundred times the speed of sound. That was the current pinnacle of his Nanaya Assassination Arts.
Against this man obsessed with hating evil, Fang Li had directly used the ultimate secret technique. A slash moving at one hundred times the speed of sound, there had been no way for Sweet Mask to dodge it.
Of course, when Fang Li said he had gone all out, he only meant in terms of speed. Given the circumstances, he had deliberately restrained the attack's destructive power. Otherwise, that single slash could have split the Hero Association Headquarters in two. It might even have cut all of A-City in half.
As a result, Fang Li had unleashed only the speed of the technique, not its full power.
Even so...
"Extreme Death: Seven Nights really isn't something I can use casually..." A faint stinging pain traveled through the hand holding his sword.
Just like Kanzaki's Yuisen, 'Extreme Death: Seven Nights' was a sure-kill strike that drew out all of the user's power in an instant, dramatically increasing the body's workload.
Although the technique possessed a mysterious property that prevented the muscles from tearing apart even when pushed beyond human limits, that didn't mean it imposed no burden at all.
A strike capable of reaching one hundred times the speed of sound, a strike that could potentially cleave a city in half, wasn't something that could be used freely.
Sylvia understood this perfectly, but she didn't point it out. Instead, she only asked, "Will that person be okay?"
Not a trace of hesitation appeared on Fang Li's face. "Who knows?"
He hadn't intentionally avoided any vital areas. "Whether he lives or dies depends on the Hero Association's medical technology and the abilities of its doctors."
Leaving those words behind, Fang Li departed with Sylvia, who wore a helpless expression on her face.
(End Of This Chapter)
You can read ahead up to 70 chapters on my patreon https://www.patreon.com/GGS6395