## Chapter 126: Face-Slapping the Arrogant
The air tasted of ozone and blood. The chaotic skirmish at the flanks had bought them a few precious minutes, but the Alliance's war machine was too vast, too disciplined. They'd reeled back, their formation coiling like a wounded serpent, and now they were pushing forward again with renewed, brutal focus.
From the heart of their gleaming ranks, a figure strode forward. He didn't walk; he carved a path through his own soldiers, his presence a physical weight. General Kael Volsung. His name had been a whispered curse in the refugee camps. The Butcher of the Southern Pass. His armor wasn't just metal; it was a legend forged from blackened orichalcum, scarred from a hundred battles, said to be impervious to any blade or spell below the Epic tier. In his hand, he held a massive halberd, its edge humming with a sickly green light.
He stopped just outside the effective range of the city's archers, his voice a gravelly roar amplified by some enchantment. It scraped against Li Chang'an's ears.
"Enough of this farce!" Volsung bellowed, his helmeted gaze fixed on the city walls, specifically on the solitary figure standing atop the gatehouse. "You hide behind walls and tricks, beggar king. You lead a rabble of filth who have forgotten their place. Come out. Face the judgment of your betters."
A ripple went through the Alliance army—a mix of awe and fear. On the walls, the defenders stiffened. Old Man Feng spat over the parapet. "That bastard… he salts the earth where he walks."
Li Chang'an felt the collective fear of his people like a cold draft. This wasn't just another commander. This was a symbol of the Alliance's unassailable might, a man who represented the absolute divide between the Extraordinary and the condemned.
He's not just challenging me, Li Chang'an realized. He's challenging the very idea that we can defy fate.
A slow, calm smile touched Li Chang'an's lips. This was the perfect opportunity.
"Hold the barrier," he said, his voice quiet but carrying. "No one fires a shot."
He stepped onto the battlement, then simply stepped off.
Gasps erupted from both sides. He didn't plummet. The air beneath his feet rippled, each step meeting a momentary, invisible platform of solidified force—a basic application of kinetic dispersion he'd comprehended from watching spiders on silk. It looked like he was walking down an invisible staircase.
The act itself was a slap to Volsung's grandiose entrance. It was effortless. Unconcerned.
Li Chang'an landed on the churned, muddy ground between the city and the army. He wore simple, grey combat robes, no armor. In his hand was a standard-issue city guard's longsword, its steel already nicked.
Volsung let out a contemptuous snort, the sound echoing from his helmet. "No armor? A peasant's blade? This is the defiance the rumors speak of? It is the stupidity of a doomed man."
"Talk less," Li Chang'an said, his voice cutting through the heavy silence. "Fight more."
With a roar that was more rage than warcry, Volsung charged. The ground trembled. His halberd became a blur of green death, a technique called [Phantom Serpent's Coil]—a High-Grade martial art that created after-images to confuse and entrap. It was fast, brutal, and had ended countless duels in its first three moves.
Li Chang'an moved. But he didn't use [Flickering Shadow Steps]. He didn't use any of the evolved, heaven-defying techniques he'd comprehended. He used the most basic footwork from the city guard's manual: [Three-Position Retreat]. A clumsy, defensive shuffle.
The halberd whistled past his chest, missing by an inch. The shockwave of the blow tore a furrow in the earth behind him.
"You see?" Volsung boomed, circling. "You are a child playing at war!" He attacked again, a sweeping blow meant to bisect Li Chang'an at the waist.
Li Chang'an parried with a fundamental [Upward Block]. The clash of metal was a sharp, discordant shriek. The force of the blow traveled down the cheap sword and into Li Chang'an's arm, numbing it. He let himself be pushed back, his boots skidding in the mud. He made it look difficult. He let his breath come out ragged.
A cruel, gleeful laugh erupted from Volsung. "Is this all? This is the comprehension that defies the heavens? Pathetic!"
Inside, Li Chang'an's mind was a serene, crystal-clear lake. With every basic block, every awkward dodge, he was reading Volsung. The slight hitch in his swing when he overcommitted. The way his weight settled a fraction too long on his left foot after a thrust. The predictable pattern to his rage—a heavy overhead chop always followed a failed lunge.
To the armies watching, it was a massacre in the making. The mighty General Volsung, a tempest of dark metal and green energy, was bullying a seemingly outmatched youth who could only barely defend himself. Sneers spread through the Alliance ranks. On the wall, knuckles were white on sword hilts.
"He's playing with him," Old Man Feng muttered, but even he sounded uncertain.
Volsung, drunk on perceived dominance, went for his signature move. "Enough! [Serpent's Devouring Strike]!" He feinted high, then spun the halberd low, the green energy coalescing into the gaping maw of a spectral serpent, aiming to swallow Li Chang'an whole and dissolve him in corrosive qi.
This was the moment.
Li Chang'an didn't block. He didn't dodge.
He had been watching the waterfall that fed the city's mill for days. The relentless, unimaginable weight of it. Not the splash, not the mist, but the impact. The point where timeless water met unyielding stone and, over millennia, won. It wasn't about force against force. It was about transferring everything. The entire river's momentum into a single, infinitely small point of contact.
His [Heaven-Defying Comprehension] had taken that observation, that feeling of profound, patient power, and evolved the most basic palm strike in the martial canon—the [Pushing Palm]—into something else.
As the spectral serpent lunged, Li Chang'an dropped the sword.
He took a single, soft step forward, his body aligning not with Volsung, but with an invisible line of force that connected him to the earth, the sky, and the distant, pounding waterfall. His right palm drifted out, slow, impossibly slow compared to the halberd's fury.
It looked foolish. Suicidal.
Volsung's triumphant roar died in his throat.
Li Chang'an's palm did not meet the halberd. It touched the center of Volsung's orichalcum breastplate, right over his heart.
There was no loud sound.
There was a crunch.
A deep, visceral, grinding sound that wasn't of breaking metal, but of the very concept of durability being revoked. It was the sound a mountain core might make if it cracked.
The legendary black armor didn't just dent. It disintegrated. From the point of contact, a web of fine, bright lines exploded outwards, racing across the entire surface before the entire chest plate, the pauldrons, the backplate—simply ceased to be solid. They fell away in a cloud of black, metallic dust, leaving General Kael Volsung standing in his padded under-gambeson, his face exposed, pale and utterly dumbfounded.
The halberd' energy winked out. The weapon fell from his nerveless fingers, thudding into the mud.
The silence was absolute, heavier than any roar.
Li Chang'an leaned in close, his voice for Volsung alone, yet somehow carrying to the very back ranks of the stunned Alliance.
"You called me a beggar," Li Chang'an said, his tone conversational. "But you are the one who is poor. Poor in skill. Poor in comprehension. And now," he glanced at the dust settling on Volsung's boots, "poor in armor."
With a flick of his wrist, Li Chang'an used a gentle pulse of the same kinetic force. Not to harm, but to unbalance.
General Kael Volsung, terror of the south, Butcher of the Pass, stumbled backwards. His boot caught on his own fallen halberd. He fell, not with a warrior's cry, but with a graceless, wet splat into the mud, landing squarely on his backside.
A single, hysterical giggle broke from the city walls. Then another. It swelled into a roaring, cathartic wave of laughter and cheers that shook the very stones.
Volsung lay there, not wounded, but utterly destroyed. His legend, his authority, his very identity, had been shattered more completely than his armor. He looked at his trembling, empty hands, then at the laughing, jeering faces on the wall, and finally at the impassive face of the young man who had not even broken a sweat.
Something in him broke.
A low clang echoed in the silence. A soldier in the front line of the Alliance had dropped his spear. Then another. And another. They weren't deserting to join the city; they were simply backing away, melting into the ranks, their will to fight for this humiliated master evaporating like morning dew.
From his place in the mud, Volsung watched his personal legion—the elite Iron Scale Battalion—begin to dissolve in front of him. The tide of fear wasn't coming from the city anymore.
It was flowing from him.
Li Chang'an turned his back on the broken general, a gesture of supreme disdain, and began his calm walk back to the city gates. But as he walked, he looked past the dissolving ranks, towards the distant command pavilions of the Alliance.
There, he saw a new figure had emerged, observing the field. This one didn't radiate brute force. He stood perfectly still, clad in pristine white and gold robes, his face obscured by a simple, featureless silver mask. In his hand, he held not a weapon, but a slender, glowing scroll.
And as Li Chang'an met the gaze of that silver mask, a notification, cold and alien, burned across the forefront of his mind—a message not from the Trial World, but from the Universal Reincarnation System itself:
[Alert: An Official Extraordinary Reincarnator has entered the Trial Zone.]
[Designation: Inquisitor.]
[Objective: Quell Anomaly.]
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