Chapter 144: The Lightning Blur
—
The Prince of Orphans looked down at me with his hands still loose at his sides.
I was on all fours on the broken stone. My arms were shaking just trying to keep me off the floor. Blood dripped off my lip and hit the rock, and I could taste metal in the back of my throat. The Thunder Dragon Poison Array wasn't in my human veins anymore, but the damage it did to my chi channels was still there.
My Dantian felt like someone had taken sandpaper to it, and for a sensation that I'd felt for the first time in my life, it was disgustingly painful.
"Surrender," he said again. Same flat voice as before.
A patient man, he was.
The crowd above us was loud. I caught pieces of it. People yelling about the human kid, people yelling about Tetra‑Man being fake, some people just yelling because everyone else was. That was all background noise.
The important part was on my wrist.
The Omnitrix dial had been red when Four Arms collapsed. Now, while I was sucking air and trying not to puke, the red faded, blinked once, and turned green again. Cooldown over. It did that sometimes in the show too after a forced revert.
The Prince took a slow step forward instead of pouncing on me immediately, unlike what someone else like the Tiger's Daughter would have done. Like he was giving me time to think.
Respectable man, he's nice. I'll remember this.
Sadly, in a tournament, that was his mistake.
He'd seen me as Four Arms and put me down. Now he saw a bleeding teenager on his hands and knees and some part of his brain clearly went, fight is over.
I slapped the Omnitrix.
If I'd tried to scroll through the playlist, he'd not remain calm. I had no time to pick. I just hit the dial and prayed for something that wasn't a stationary brick.
Green light burst up around me.
My skeleton didn't bulk up this time, it shrank.
Bones thinned and lengthened, my spine twisted, and my legs popped and reformed into something that bent weirdly. A tail whipped out behind me, and a hard, black visor dropped over my eyes. Every nerve from my skull down to my toes lit up like someone had plugged me into a socket.
"XLR8!"
The light faded and I found myself crouched low on the broken stone in a new body. Five feet of blue raptor‑looking alien with black stripes, wheels built into my feet and hips, and legs that nearly vibrated.
The world around me already felt slower. XLR8's perception speed was already insane even without chi.
Oh, nice. I actually lucked out.
The crowd's yelling dropped into a different kind of noise. Full of confused shouting. Seeing that this wasn't a four‑armed demon and instead a sleek blue lizard on rollerblades gave them a totally different vibe.
That was the problem. Will this count, though? I'd walked in here as Tetra‑Man, registered as Tetra‑Man, fought as Tetra‑Man, and now I'd basically pulled a "haha, new challenger approaches" halfway through. These tournament rules were ancient and loved their technicalities. I had no idea if transforming into different forms was inside the fine print…?
Across from me, the Prince's expression finally moved. His eyes widened the tiniest bit and his weight shifted back. He'd expected me to either stay down or, if I could transform again, to turn into Four Arms.
Seeing a random, strange one must be surprising.
Okay, testing time! I inhaled and pushed chi into these new legs.
The Dantian responded like it had been waiting for this. My Chi rushed into XLR8's nerves and muscles, and the effect was crazy. The blue stripes along my limbs started glowing electric blue, little arcs of lightning jumping between my claws. In this body, the Crane Mother's blessing didn't feel like it was trying to blow my circuits. It just poured straight into speed.
I moved.
One second I was crouched, the next second the air was screaming past the visor. The Prince barely had time to bring his arms up. I hit his ribs with a straight kick while I was sprinting past, and his body went flying sideways across the rubble.
By the time he bounced off an upturned slab, I was already behind him. I tagged him twice in the back, on his left shoulder, and on his right kidney with quick jabs and kept going. They were nothing special or hard, just speed plus momentum.
This is insane.
XLR8 had always been fast, I've pushed myself to the limit, but this… this was so much easier! It wasn't as if I was moving faster than I had ever, but I knew I could, and more importantly, all of it felt much easier if that made sense. Like I had better control and brakes.
The chi was stacking with XLR8's base speed in a stupid way. Every time my foot hit the ground, the stone cracked. Little trails of scorched rock followed the path of the lightning that was bleeding off me.
Despite my speed, however, the Prince recovered faster than I liked. He wiped his lips off blood, and then planted his feet on the flattest chunk he could find.
He sucked in a breath, and then lightning blew off him in all directions.
It was a full sphere, maybe ten feet out. Everything inside that bubble was just raw crackling chi. I had to skid to a stop on the edge. I didn't have hair on my arms in XLR8 form, but if I did, they'd have stood up.
If I stepped a toe into that, I was eating the hit.
Smart. If you can't catch the fly, fry the air the fly has to go through.
This Prince of Orphans was a great fighter. He must have planned intensively to win against Four Arms, and when he succeeded, he quickly made a plan to counter the speedster next. Impressive.
Against anybody else, he'd have won. How unfortunate for him.
I started circling him at the very edge of his lightning sphere, wheels humming. He turned to track me, but his eyes couldn't keep up. At this speed, I was a blue blur even to me. He switched from sight to chi sense; I could feel him pinging the area with little pulses.
Every few seconds he'd pulse the field wider in one direction, forcing me to juke out of the way.
I was in no rush, I had no time limit. Even if my Chi ran out, I could keep running. But my Chi wasn't running out. While his was. So as expected, he soon changed tactics. He cut the sphere and instead started punching the ground with lightning.
Each bolt he sent down left a crackling patch for a few seconds. He didn't aim at me, he just dropped them in a pattern around the broken arena. In about ten heartbeats the whole place was a weird minefield of little electric zones that I had to dodge while not slowing down.
I misjudged one.
My right foot clipped the edge of a patch and a shock jumped up my leg. My chi stuttered and my balance went weird for a fraction of a second. XLR8 was fast, but that… wasn't always a good thing. I was running about five hundred "fractions of a second" per actual second, so yeah, I stumbled.
The Prince was on me instantly, his hand already coming in, lightning coiled around his fingers.
I twisted as much as I could and took the hit on my shoulder instead of the chest. Still sucked. Lightning chi slammed into the joint and my entire arm went numb.
If I were human, that might've been game over. Heart shot, system fried.
But I wasn't.
XLR8's body did something strange, surprising me. The lightning he pumped into me didn't just wreck my flow, instead it sank in. The chi network in this form grabbed it, mixed it with what I already had, and spat it back out as more speed.
The Prince saw it happen. His eyes went wide for real that time.
"Uh, thanks," I said.
Then I hit him.
Six shots in about two seconds. First straight to the chest, then quick snap at the jaw, both knees, gut, and lastly, I spun and cracked him in the side of the head with my tail. Somehow, all my attacks carried a spark of lightning.
He tried to raise that full lightning shell again, but I was already inside the range before it finished forming, and his lightning was absorbed by my body, crackling around my exoskeleton.
I dropped my center of mass and slammed my shoulder into his sternum. Then we went sliding across the arena together, stone shattering under our combined weight, until his back met a tilted slab hard enough to crack it.
He bounced and slumped.
He tried to get up. He had a strong fighting spirit, I'll give him that. He put one knee under him and tried to bring his hands up, while little sparks still spat between his fingers. But his guard was loose, and his eyes weren't quite looking in the same place.
I was already behind him with one clawed hand resting lightly at the side of his neck.
"Good fight," I said. "Surrender."
His shoulders sagged. The lightning fizzled out around his hands. "I yield."
The announcer's voice boomed from somewhere above. "What a shocking sight. Winner, Tetra-Man…? Tetra-Man! The Champion of K'un‑Zi advances!"
I let go and rolled my arm out.
The chi in my Dantian was spinning like a storm from how hard I'd been pumping it, but I was upright. He wasn't. The visor peeled back from my eyes and folded away, and I glanced up at the lords' ring.
Will they allow the victory, is the question.
The crowd was split down the middle. Half were cheering because fast blue chaos was definitely fun to watch, the other half were already arguing. Bits floated down.
"Shapeshifter!"
"Void the match!"
"That's not the same demon!"
"…did you see that last combo though?!"
Up top, Illyana was on her feet, Soulsword in one hand and the other braced on the railing, smirking at me. But it was a smirk that promised trouble. The Crane Mother hadn't moved but her fingers dug into her own knee, white through the grey skin of her hands.
Then someone decided to pour gasoline on everything.
"That creature is not the registered champion!"
The voice came from Tiger Island's section. The elder was standing with his arm outstretched, finger aimed right at me. Li Hua sat next to him, jaw wired, eyes bright. Behind them, the Tiger Champion had also risen, scars on his chest catching the light.
"Tetra‑Man is a four‑armed demon warrior," the elder said. "This is a different being entirely. The rules are clear. I demand disqualification!"
The sound in the Nexus shifted again. Cheers turned into murmurs. Heads turned from the arena to the lords' ring, then back to me.
I frowned, focusing on their reaction. Illyana's knuckles tightened on the Soulsword's grip while the Crane Mother's mask tilted directly at Tiger's section, her body still going like someone had hit pause.
This was going to get annoying.
**
**
**