PATH OF THE STAR HUNTER

Desmond didn’t expect his opponents to have an arcana user specializing in the Law of space, which led to the fight turning against him. Desmond wasn’t an expert in the laws of physics, but he did know a thing or two about space and based on that little understanding, Desmond came to a rather upsetting conclusion: he didn’t have the means to counter the space user.

Some attacks weakened quite a bit as they went through the spatial distortion, but Desmond still suffered much damage. To see any despair on Desmond’s face, one would believe he was cornered.

With his wounded appearance, Desmond looked like a rabbit who picked a fight with a pack of foxes, looking pathetic and cornered; but the wild smile on his face said much more.

Even as Paulett dropped a stone pillar on Desmond, the smile on his face didn’t go away, and only moments later would everyone understand the real reason why Desmond was considered a monster.

Rather than dodge the falling stone pillar, Desmond grinned madly and took the attack head-on, quickly crushed and buried in the ground. In the heat of battle against an enemy who endured so much when surrounded by powerful foes, everyone overlooked a fact that should have been obvious; that this was the second floor.

Focused on annihilating Desmond, his opponents forgot the details of where they were, and it quickly cost them dearly. While the floor was still collapsing due to Paulett’s stone pillar, a pair of hands emerged from the ground. The space user felt like a pair of iron claws grabbing his ankles before his body was dragged to the floor below.

The space user’s scream of agony was followed by the sound of a human body being torn in two with brute force. Alerted, the rest of the users used whatever means at their disposal to bombard the area where they believed Desmond was.

By the time the barrage of attacks ended, there was almost nothing left of the command room, the floor below following his example, becoming a pile of rubble. But no matter how far they looked down, Desmond’s body was not in the wreckage.

.....

The officers didn’t know that Desmond had taken advantage of the chaos to hide the sound of his actions. With a blow of stone, Desmond emerged not from below but from one of the rooms adjoining the command center.

Using their strengthened bodies, the aura users reacted defensively to Desmond’s sudden intrusion into the room; it was a shame Desmond wasn’t going after them.

Even being a mana user, Paulett reacted because she was a level above her subordinates; that’s why she clearly saw Desmond brandishing two giant silver pistols.

It was as if time had stopped for Paulett, who watched in horror as Desmond opened fire indiscriminately, turning all the arcanists and elementalists into corpses full of holes.

It was absurd, it was just an oversight, a window of opportunity as small as a fraction of a second, but when it was over, everything had changed. Desmond had many abilities, but his ability to exploit even the slightest opportunity to turn the tide of battle had gotten him this far.

Desmond had used his environment to exploit the biggest weakness of low-level users; the fragility of their bodies. Unless one was an aura user of Desmond’s level or higher, one would still fear bullets; their bodies would still be highly fragile.

On the other hand, Desmond also took advantage of humans’ preconceived ideas when considering walls as objects of protection. A wall was only an actual obstacle and means of defense if the enemy could not pass through it; otherwise, a wall was a means of concealment for the enemy.

Desmond wasn’t even finished. Predicting the movements of the lower-level aura users, Desmond engaged them in close combat before shooting them in the chest at point-blank range. The aura users foolishly believed that by approaching such close range, Desmond would discard his weapons as these did not seem suitable for combat, and that misjudgment led to their swift death.

With the use of , Desmond dodged what looked like the killing move of the last aura user alive, who was wearing a commander’s uniform. Now standing in the doorway again, Desmond saw a very different scenario than he had experienced when he had stood in the same spot a minute before.

Paulett experienced a sense of surrealism as the command center, once filled with her comrades, was now a pile of rubble that fell to the floor below where the brutally mangled corpses of her friends lay.

And there was the source of it all: a macabre smile that fully bared his fangs, blue eyes colder than winter, and black hair full of deadly omens. Paulett did what no user should ever do; succumbing to fear, seeing a bloodthirsty and invincible monster, she collapsed and lost all hope of survival.

Commander Paulett’s fear came at too high a price for her only living companion, who believed that with Paulett’s help, they both had some chance of surviving even if they couldn’t win.

The last aura user attempted to confront Desmond; the result was death. With no user to stop him, Desmond could do what mana users do best; gather a horrendous amount of mana and blow his enemies to smithereens.

The aura-using commander didn’t stop when he saw Desmond muster his energy, believing that such efforts would be interrupted by Paulett, but support never came. The commander confidently walked straight into Desmond’s fist.

“”

The aura-using commander was obliterated and reduced to a mist of scattered blood as Desmond slammed into him with all his might. That was how big the difference was between someone normal and someone like Desmond, who using his ridiculous affinity for mana and advanced abilities, could fight several levels above his own.

To tell the truth, such a result was to be expected. The only reason why Desmond found himself so cornered before was that, between so many attacks, it was challenging to find the opportunity to gather mana since everything was spent on dodging and defending.

Put another way, if the three commanders had kept fighting in coordination against Desmond, he would have been the loser. Desmond wasn’t invincible, and neither path was inherently superior to the other; they were just different. Desmond had the same weaknesses as other aura users, which could be exploited.

However, Desmond was well aware of his weaknesses and chose to find ways to cover them up. If melee mastery and complementary skills weren’t enough, Desmond would use weapons, and if those weren’t sufficient, Desmond wouldn’t mind resorting to explosives or other tools.

In the same way that Desmond resorted to poison to kill his prey in the sovereign martial world, the means did not matter, only the result; After all, Desmond wasn’t a warrior or a hero; he was a hunter.

The battle was brief, but the winner couldn’t be more evident, and now Desmond’s gaze rested on the last of his prey, one that had lost the will to fight. Too lazy to make the trip, Desmond summoned half a dozen water tentacles that dragged Commander Paulett in front of him.

Fear was indeed a terrifying thing, turning the previously calm and beautiful Paulett into a mess of snot and tears. Desmond couldn’t help but feel disgusted and disdainful for the pitiful-looking woman.

“To think you’d pee on yourself, you don’t look like a commander, have some courage Paulett. Even your men didn’t look this pathetic as I killed them.”

The only reason Paulett was still alive was that Desmond wanted some answers, but he had underestimated how broken the woman’s mind had become. Like a puppet with its strings cut, Paulett sat blankly on the floor as she shivered nonstop and muttered madly.

“The black wolf killed them all... He killed them all... the black wolf is coming to eat me... mama save me from the black wolf.”

Desmond was speechless; this was the first time he had seen someone fall so deep into the pits of despair that they went insane. Someone else might have pitied Paulett because of her sorry state, but Desmond wouldn’t.

“Light and dark, good and evil, lies and truths intertwined.” Placing his right hand on Paulett’s forehead, Desmond began activating his Law of Contradiction.

“An ephemeral eternity, a second that extends to infinity. A future that will never come to be, a past that is not yet over. In a world of illusions, only I hold the truth. .”

This was one of the few fixed ways that Desmond could use his Law of Contradiction without suffering side effects. An ability that came to him from seeing something similar in a cartoon and associating it with the magical item he used to view the memories of a place instead of a person.

This application of the Law of contradiction had only one fatal flaw, it completely broke the mind of the person on whom it was used.