The enlarged fist connected with his face, creating a booming sound as his face was violently distorted by the force of the attack. He flew away with terrifying force, knocking off the large table and then hitting the reinforced iron wall, forming a human shaped pit on it ten meters away.
The air in the warehouse suddenly got still.
Nocthar stood up slowly ten meters away, appearing to haven't sustained any damage from the earlier attack, his yellow eyes gleaming with predatory amusement. Blood still dripped from his knuckles, Steven's blood, from the beating he'd administered moments ago.
He'd expected the boy to stay down. But Steven had risen, and successfully landed an attack on him, due to his own carelessness.
"Silent type, aren't you?" Nocthar's voice slithered through the dust-choked space. He circled slowly, rolling his shoulders, the motion fluid and confident. "I've broken more than five thousand spines, boy. Heard every scream, every begging whisper. You know what they all had in common?"
Steven didn't answer. He never did.
His black eyes, utterly devoid of white and humanity, tracked Nocthar's movement with mechanical precision. The vein-like patterns crawling across his face pulsed with dark energy, threads of shadow visible beneath his skin. At 2.7 meters, he towered over most men. But he was still absorbing and growing.
"They all felt something." Nocthar's grin widened, revealing teeth too sharp to be natural. "Fear, Hope and then Desperation. That delicious cocktail that makes me stronger. But you?"
He laughed, a wet, rattling sound. "You're a fucking corpse with a pulse. Where's the fun in breaking something that doesn't care it's broken?"
Steven took a step forward. The concrete floor beneath his bare foot cracked .
"Oh? Coming to me?" Nocthar spread his arms wide, yellow energy beginning to crackle across his fingertips. "Good. Good. Let's see if that pretty new body of yours can actually do something, or if you're just a bigger target."
Steven moved.
He charged, simply closing the distance with a burst of speed that tore a sonic boom through the warehouse. His fist, wreathed in condensed dark energy, punched toward Nocthar's center mass with devastating, uncomplicated intent.
Nocthar blurred sideways, afterimages trailing in his wake. "Too slow, corpse!"
But Steven's attack hadn't been a committed strike, but a probe.
His black eyes tracked the displacement of air, and the minute disturbances in dust particles.
He twisted.
Nocthar's knee, aimed at his spine with enough force to shatter a tank, whistled through empty space. Steven's elbow drove backward with clinical precision, catching nothing but air as Nocthar materialized three meters away, yellow eyes narrowed.
"You're reading me." Nocthar's amusement had dimmed slightly.
"Not predicting but reading . Like a machine processing data." He clucked his tongue. "Boring but efficient. I suppose that's your whole thing, isn't it?"
Steven remained silent. The dark energy in his veins churned hotter, and he felt it, the familiar tearing in his muscles, the degradation of tissue that came with every surge. His liver was already showing signs of strain. His kidneys burned, but the pain was data. Data to be filed away and ignored.
He attacked again.
This time it was a blitz, left jab, right cross, knee to the ribs, elbow to the temple. Each strike flowed into the next with mechanical perfection, with no wasted motion nor telegraphing. The air screamed as his fists broke the sound barrier repeatedly.
Nocthar weaved through the storm, his movements growing more frantic. A glancing blow caught his shoulder, spinning him half around. He recovered instantly, yellow energy flaring around his body in a protective shroud.
"Fine." His voice had lost some of its playful cruelty. "You want to play the silent warrior? Let's see how silent you are when I make you feel something."
He thrust both hands forward. A shockwave of compressed yellow fear energy erupted toward Steven, a wave designed not to harm the body, but to assault the mind. To dredge up every nightmare, every buried terror, and moment of helplessness.
The energy hit Steven square in the chest.
And passed through him like smoke through a fan.
Nocthar's eyes widened. "What—"
Steven was already moving. He'd used the shockwave's momentary distraction, the split second where Nocthar expected him to falter to close the gap. His right hand shot out, fingers rigid as iron, and speared toward Nocthar's throat.
Nocthar barely twisted aside. The strike caught his collarbone instead, and the crack of breaking bone echoed through the warehouse. He hissed, yellow energy surging to repair the damage, and backhanded Steven with a fist wrapped in fear-force.
The impact sent Steven skidding backward, his bare feet carving trenches in the concrete. He stopped.
Looked down at the dent in his chest where the blow had landed. The flesh was already knitting itself back together, dark energy stitching muscle and bone with brutal efficiency.
"You're not feeling it," Nocthar whispered, real confusion creeping into his voice. "The fear energy. You're not, it's not touching you. How?"
Steven began walking forward again. Methodical and Unstoppable.
Inside, his body was screaming. The dark energy he'd absorbed to reach this state was tearing him apart cell by cell. His height had crept to 2.8 meters. His heart was laboring under the strain of pumping blood through reinforced, oversized vasculature. His brain registered the damage, catalogued it, and dismissed it.
He was a machine of war. And machines did not fear.
"Stop walking," Nocthar snarled, and the warehouse shook with his voice. Yellow energy erupted from his body in a corona, and he raised both hands. "STOP"
A concentrated beam of absolute blackness lanced from Steven's eyes.
Nocthar threw up a shield of fear energy at the last instant. The annihilation beam struck it, and for a moment the two forces warred, yellow against black, fear against void. Then the shield fractured, and Nocthar threw himself sideways with a snarl of pain.
The beam carved a trench through the reinforced house wall, through the building beyond it, and into the distant skyline before Steven blinked, cutting the flow.
He turned his head slowly back to Nocthar.
The fear-feeder was breathing hard, a burn mark scorched across his side where the beam had grazed him. For the first time in five years of consuming mutants, and growing fat on terror, Nocthar felt something unfamiliar.
Doubt.
"You're going to be difficult ," he hissed. Then he smiled, and it was all teeth and malice. "Good. I've been bored."
He vanished again.
But this time, when he reappeared behind Steven, his fist wrapped in enough fear energy to level a city block,
But Steven was already facing him.
Their fists collided. The shockwave demolished what remained of the warehouse roof, sent debris raining down for kilometers. The ground beneath them cratered, a ten-meter depression forming instantly.
Nocthar's grin faltered.
"You're adapting. Learning my patterns."
Steven still said nothing, remaining silent. His left hand shot up, catching Nocthar's follow-up strike mid-swing. He squeezed. Bones ground together. Nocthar's eyes widened,
And Steven headbutted him with the force of a freight train.
Nocthar's nose exploded.
Blood sprayed. He stumbled backward, yellow energy flaring wildly as he tried to regenerate, to reassert his dominance.
"Fine," he spat, blood dripping from his chin. "You want a war of attrition? I've got the reserves of more than five thousand souls in my veins, boy. What do you have?"
Steven's answer was to take another step forward. His body was 2.9 meters now. The veins beneath his skin had thickened to cables of shadow. His face had lost all recognizable humanity, just black eyes and pulsing dark lines in a mask of indifferent destruction.
And still, he did not speak.
"FUCKING SAY SOMETHING!" Nocthar roared, and the warehouse finally collapsed around them, the structural integrity failing under the cumulative damage. Tons of steel and concrete rained down.
Neither fighter moved to avoid it.
My beloved readers, like i said before, I'm a new webnovel author, and this's my first novel. Making some small errors here and there is a must because English is not my formal language, so writing the chapters in such good English is somehow of a challenge, but don't worry, it'll get better the more i write. I've edited the entire novel, from chapter 1-28, so if you've read it before, it'll be best if you started again from chapter 1. I corrected alot of errors and bad English in those chapters. From now on, I'll try my best to release 4-5 chapters a week. So, stay tuned readers. Thanks for your patience, and please I'll appreciate some comments from my readers to notify me of some other errors. It's a different kind of support for an author when a reader comments on their novel.