Chapter 264: Tier 4 Rematch

He kept his back toward the assassin. He did so for good reason though. He was purposely luring the man to attack. Perhaps he would think that Julius would have his guard down and make some mistake.

Sadly, he didn’t fall for it and kept his distance.

“So you’re saying that the Conclave is not working for or with any Houses?” Julius asked in a tone that plainly revealed his skepticism.

“Nope,” the man said with another grin, not disclosing anything to him.

The one thing that Julius did notice though, is that the man was ever so slowly shifting his position so that he placed himself between Julius and the woman that was incapacitated.

“She important to you?” He asked the man with a wondering tone.

He felt the man’s entire body tense for a brief moment, the first real reaction he got out of him so far.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the man played ignorant.

Julius shrugged, with his back still toward the man. “That’s good to know. I guess I will-”

He was interrupted by a flashing sword slashing toward the back of his neck. With a quick burst of mana, he covered his hands with constructs and parried the next flurry of attacks with careful precision.

It would appear that the man was quite protective of the woman and thought that Julius was maybe threatening her. Of course, this wasn’t true at all. Julius would never try to beat someone by threatening someone they care about. His pride as a fighter would have him rather die than do something like that.

But he did hope to bait the man.

Of course, the Tier 4 didn’t know that and was pressuring him with quite the ferocity. It took all of his focus to avoid getting slashed by those scary-looking blades. However, the most dangerous attack was done by the man’s Authority which tried to suppress Julius. Unlike some of the other Authorities he had experienced, this one was quite different.

It wasn’t as outright oppressive or strong, but it was sneaky. If Dustin’s Authority was like a sledgehammer that crushed him, then this was like someone was trying to stab him in the dark with a knife.

No matter how strong his willpower was, it was a different battle than anything else he had fought before.

Thankfully, his new aura helped a lot with this. The ruinous effect was the first thing confronting this Authority. And it helped keep it at bay. More than the Tier 4 was clearly expecting.

Julius could see the man’s surprise and took advantage of it.

Unleashing more of his body enhancement skill than before, he got in close and smashed a fist covered in dense mana in the man’s chest, but the man leaned toward the side just enough that he simply sent him staggering backward.

He sent a volley of spikes screaming at him and grinned as the explosions rocked the man. Using [Flash Step], he kept up the pressure and sent a kinetically charged leg at his opponent, but clicked his tongue as the man was wrapped up in a thick cloud of black mana and disappeared from sight.

Stupid teleportation skills, when can I get one, huh? He grumbled to himself as [Spatial Perception] tracked where the man appeared and he sent several spikes at that location without hesitation.

The man’s composure cracked even further as he was swarmed instantly by more mana constructs. He used another quick teleportation to escape but it didn’t help. Julius found the man once more and bombarded him.

It would also seem that his teleportation skill was on some sort of cooldown and couldn’t just run away.

Thank god for that.

But Julius could only shake his head in utter bafflement as the man displayed an intangibility skill much like the one the woman had used and watched as the construct passed right through him without harm.

Teleportation and intangibilty? What? Is he afraid of ever getting hit? Julius thought with a shake of his head.

Typical of an assassin.

Despite being annoyed at this, he already had an idea of how to handle such an ability from fighting the woman.

He sent a bunch of smaller constructs toward the Tier 4, trying to keep the man focused on using the intangibility skill. While he was doing this, he sent a blast of condensed aura much like he had with the woman.

Unfortunately, the Tier 4 had a much more sturdy will and his aura didn’t have quite the debilitating effect. But this didn’t mean he let up. He kept sending lots of smaller constructs at the man.

He was aware of the skill’s proclivity to use a lot of mana while it was active. Thus, until he found another way to get around the skill, he was content with just wasting the man’s mana.

If there was one thing he wasn’t worried about, it was using all of his mana before the man had to deactivate the skill.

Sure, the man might have a larger mana capacity than he did by sheer advantage of his tier, but the intangibility skill was much more mana-hungry than his small constructs. So if there was someone who was going to run out of mana first, it was going to be this man.

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Unfortunately, the man was not unaware of this fact either. While he didn’t know just how deep Julius’s mana pool was, he soon realized that he was in a losing battle of mana attrition.