Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 473: Tides Of War [III]

The hit wasn’t clean.

Ivan’s blow connected. One more blinding flash followed. But something wasn’t right. It felt like he had tried punching through layers upon layers of cushion and glass.

The former made sense.

Casey’s power was related to kinetic energy transference and vibrations.

She could do wondrous things with it — like absorbing the force of an incoming impact and converting it into raw potential energy to store inside her body.

She could then release it all later in explosive counter-bursts of superspeed and superstrength.

That’s why she was a pain in the ass to deal with for any hand-to-hand combatant. The more force you hit her with, the harder she’d hit you back.

That’s also why she defeated Reiner Tovak so easily while somewhat struggling against the silver-haired Bishop. It was a bad matchup.

But there was a limit. A ceiling to how much raw potential energy her body could containerize before the threshold broke and her internal organs turned to mush under all that excessive pressure. Especially now, when she was poisoned and could only use the full extent of her innate ability once per day.

And Ivan had just detonated a point-blank mini-supernova in her face. She shouldn’t have been able to hold out… and yet, she did.

Casey was floating a few meters away, teeth gritted tight and blood dripping from her nose. Her arms were crossed in a defensive guard over her chest, her shoulders trembling in pain.

Tough one, she was.

Fine, no problem.

He’d just need to throw one more punch.

Ivan closed in again, and Casey tried to swim away. But it was of no use. He was far too fast, and she was far too slow, still concussed from the sheer force of his previous attack.

Ivan drew back his right fist, burning through another fifty seconds of his seven-minute underwater breathing timer.

But before he could start moving, Casey threw both her hands up and conjured a thick, concave barrier of ice in front of her.

This was another aspect of her power.

She couldn’t create ice from nothing. But she could rob the surrounding water of its thermal energy by lowering its molecular vibration, flash-freezing everything around.

This was not something she could do without a proper medium. Fire and air offered little to work with. All she could do on dry land was make objects vibrate more by injecting kinetic energy into them.

Here, she had much more leeway.

But a little ice wouldn’t stop Ivan.

Kabooom—!!

The underwater explosion shattered the ice and the resulting shockwave hit Casey like a hammer to the gut and sent her reeling down.

She gasped out a bubble of bloody air, her vision blurry with twinkling dark spots as she hit the riverbed, kicking up clouds of fine silt.

…And something still wasn’t right!

Even after plowing through her ice barrier, Ivan didn’t feel like his punch connected with as much force as it should have.

This time, however, he noted translucent shimmering shards of solid light scattering all around before dissolving into nothingness.

Ivan turned his head, indignant to see Irina floating several dozen meters away. Her hands were trembling from exhaustion.

Her palms were emitting a faint golden glow, and her eyes widened when she saw Ivan staring at her.

Now it made sense.

Someone was behind her. A Caster.

Ivan veered his body sideways just as that Caster sent a spear of compressed light tearing through the water where his head had been.

The projectile moved differently underwater. Slower than it would have in open air, but no less deadly.

Argh! They were already regrouping. Ivan decided to stop holding back and used all his remaining timer to eliminate the rest of the Cadets in water. Starting with his own girlfriend.

A second and third spear of golden light followed.

Ivan twisted between them, the currents bending around his body as he moved. The attacks passed harmlessly by, vanishing into the depths behind him.

He had almost reached the pair when, somewhere from his left, three long tentacles with circular serrated rings of chitin in their suction cups lashed out to wrap around his right arm.

Ivan was jerked backward before he could finish his stroke.

The suction cups clamped onto his flesh hard, those chitinous teeth sinking deep enough to draw trails of dark red blood into the water.

Another naval specialist like him. It was a dark-haired boy with the ability to turn his arms and legs into a cluster of tentacles. A transformation-type Origin Card.

Ivan narrowed his eyes, but before he could do anything else, a girl appeared before him a short distance away.

…Only she didn’t look like a girl. Not like a human girl, anyway.

Her skin was pale like bone, and her eyes were completely dark. From waist down, she had a long, serpentine lower body covered in glistening black scales.

She opened her mouth. And in the very next second, Ivan was hit by a sonic wave that traveled through the water like a visible distortion, powerful enough to rattle his bones.

The acoustic shockwave hit Ivan like a battering ram, underwater vibrations tearing through his eardrums and sending a hot spike of agony into his skull.

The pressure threatened to pop his blood vessels from the inside out.

Those tentacles were pinning him in place while the Gorgon-Banshee hybrid was dealing a fatal blow, her dark eyes hollow and merciless as the distortion wave tried to turn his brain into pulp.

Ivan would’ve screamed out if not for being underwater. But he had no time for mundane things such as pain right now.

From his peripheral vision, he could see another aquatic Hunter not too far away — a Cadet forcefully parting the water to create a vacuum blade that would undoubtedly slice Ivan in half.

One more Cadet was swimming toward him, this one a boy with a giant fishing hook grasped in his hands, its curved side sharp like a razor meant for disemboweling sea monsters.

The Caster behind Irina was also getting ready to shoot another light spear at him.

And considering how many more people were ganging up on him, Ivan knew that if he didn’t break free right this instant, he would be overwhelmed.

So he burned away a little more of his remaining timer and whipped his other arm forward, the one holding the trident.

BOOOM—!