A Waste of Time-Chapter 106: Sunswept Hollow

Through the cloud of dark smoke, Daemon’s Weapons tore forward with unstoppable momentum, whizzing with the sound of violence. Steel split the murk—and met nothing.
Emptiness where force should bite was enough to clang alarm bells inside his chest. All three heads tilted, six eyes raked the pitch for a silhouette, a ripple, a mistake. The smoke pressed like wet cloth over his skin, the roar of leather wings folding the world into a single, grinding note.
My Lightning-Cocoon Skill won’t stay active for much longer.
I need to end this fight as soon as possible. Once my Mana runs out… I’ll be forced to feel my way in the dark. Quite literally!
“Hahahaha…” Her laughter carried before she did, light and cruel. Ping Xueling hovered roughly ten meters above him; her Bats parted for her like loyal servants as she stepped on the air. “The difference between us Cultivators in the Foundation-Establishment Realm and those below in the Qi Gathering Realm isn’t just quantity,” she said, smile curving as the night made a frame of her legs, utterly unbothered by what her stance revealed to his sharp eyes. “It’s quality.”
Her Fan lifted. Her gaze gleamed.
“Let me show you how to properly suffocate someone—really drag them to the depth of darkness.”
She pointed the Fan at him.
Shadow Vortex!
The darkness moved.
Daemon’s Passive Skill flared, a cold knife of certainty: maximum danger in the
bite
, nuisance in the
swarm
. Basic Instincts spilled him fast, clean facts—entry vectors, speed, elevation, impact windows—every single Bat that crossed within seven meters pinged like a bead of light on a board only he could see. Another truth landed in the same instant: the Lightning-Cocoon wouldn’t stop that tide now, not with Mana in the few dozens.
So he made the hard choice.
He killed his only light.
Night slammed down. The storm howled. The ground felt further away, the sky closer, everything measured now by sound, pressure, and the steady drum of his own pulse.
Her ability is harmless to me so long as her Bats aren’t biting, and I’m not teleporting anymore,
he thought, trusting the clear cold of Basic Instincts.
Seven meters. Come in, and die.
His five arms lifted.
Edges aligned.
They arrived.
The first Bats knifed into range like thrown stones—Daemon’s arcs met them with perfect economy: a throat parted; a ribcage folded; a wing fell in two soft pieces. He did not chase. He fed the storm a geometry and let it collide with the shape he made.
Lone Tower!
The declaration rang from his chests like a bell struck under a cliff. The tower rose—not in stone, but in tempo. The more that came, the faster his arms moved. The circle around him turned into law.
“You want a piece of me? Come then!” Each mouth spoke the same promise at the same time, iron and laughter mixed. He wasn’t speaking to the Bats.
He lifted his intent and aimed it at their mistress.
Battle Cry!
The roar burst outward, dragging the Vortex’s hunger off its leash. Edges of the funnel kinked; Bats that might have skirted his perimeter lurched inward and crashed headlong into slaughter. Rage became a magnet. Numbers became a debt.
Asura’s most lethal combo against swarms—proven among Spiders, Gargoyles, and most of all the Army of Undead Skeletons—unfolded like a familiar ritual. The first beat cut, the second stacked, the third multiplied.
Above, Ping Xueling’s smile sharpened at his “childish” provocation, and she kept her high ground, refusing to be baited—until the tide buckled wrong. Her Vortex flowed
into
him and came back torn. A blink, then another. The curve of her mouth forgot what it was doing.
“I—Impossible!” The word rasped out of a suddenly dry throat.
Below, the giant accelerated.
His arms blurred, a storm of doom and destruction, every swing exact, every follow-through set to catch the next throat, the next breastbone, the next membrane stretched thin. Bats hit the circle and entered a grinder; meat and bone and shadow became paste. Splashes clung hot to his skin, stringing between forearms and shoulders in ropes of black red.
Daemon didn’t flinch. He had stood under a rain of spiders’ innards and learned what true disgust could be. Compared to that baptism, this was common filth—something that rinsed off with a decent bath. The smell here was almost laughably sweet beside the breath of those violet trees of Hell.
Ping Xueling’s eyes narrowed, then narrowed again. Her mind moved fast, measuring, cutting away the impossible to find what remained. She watched for the flare of a tool, the telltale press of a seal, the hush of a suppression field—anything. She saw none. The Vortex carried
her
quality,
her
edge, and yet—
How did he do it? I didn’t notice him activating any tool of suppression!
The thought hit like a dropped stone, and ripples ran through her control.
Daemon’s answer was in his silence. He changed nothing. He simply kept feeding Lone Tower and letting Battle Cry drag more prey into the teeth of his reach. Seven meters. In here, there was only him.
The Vortex shrieked and tried to crush him flat. He stepped half a pace and split five with two Weapons; he dipped a shoulder and let a mouth miss by a finger’s width, then punished the neck it belonged to without looking. No waste. No panic. No light—only the cold whisper of motion and death.
Bodies fell in great numbers.
Ping Xueling’s Fan trembled once.
And the night she created bled opposite to the sight on her Fan, this time, Bats were the vanquished enemies in this gruesome picture.
Damn it.
Daemon’s three brains pressed harder than his arms ever could, combing the night for a path that didn’t end with Ping Xueling grinding him down. The darkness was a lidded jar around him, packed tight with the hiss and scrape of wings, the air thick enough to chew. His Basic Instincts gave him a thin ring of certainty—seven meters, no more—where shapes flared into being as they crossed the threshold and vanished under steel. Beyond that halo: nothing but her Shadow Vortex, a tunnel of black without end.
If I’m dragged into a battle of attrition, then her win is certain. What should I do?
He listened to the dark. Pressure rolled and unrolled against his circle like a heavy sea. The floor was treacherous underfoot—slick where bodies had fallen—yet his stance stayed steady, weight low, breath measured. Every heartbeat, another handful of lives tried the seven meters and failed. It bought him seconds, not a victory.
My Critical Blow is for melee—close, committed, a finisher. It needs a fixed target. Useless if I can’t pin her down in this soup.
A membrane brushed his forearm and slid away, a wet whisper more insult than threat. He gave it nothing. The only motion he spent lived inside that ring, precise and unhurried, steel answering the pings his instinct lit like beads on a dark board.
Chain Lightning should be perfect here—long-range, clean stun—but I’m blind as a bat. What would I even shoot? The dark itself?
A gout of hot copper climbed the air and sat on his tongue. He swallowed once. The storm of wings compressed, then loosened, then compressed again, a breath taken by something that wasn’t breathing at all.
And Mass Displacement… I threw away my chance to leave. Pride. Fighting spirit. I chose to stay and fight her in her night.
He tasted the word
chose
and let it settle, heavy and honest. There was no gate left to run to, no sky to punch through. He had shut the only door out with his own hand.
I’m starting to feel like I’m going to regret that.
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