## Chapter 175: Lightning in the Dark
The words hung in the cold air, a punctuation mark to the trap snapping shut.
For a heartbeat, the clearing was a frozen painting. Six assassins in charcoal-grey stealth gear, their poisoned arrowheads still glistening with a sickly purple under the sliver of moon. The scent of pine sap and damp earth was suddenly undercut by the sharp, coppery tang of adrenaline.
Then, the world exploded into motion.
Li Chang'an didn't run. He unfolded.
[Lightning Flash Assault]
It wasn't speed. It was displacement. One moment he was ten paces away, a calm silhouette against the dark trees. The next, a crackling line of blue-white energy connected his former position to the nearest assassin. There was no sound of footsteps, only the ozone smell of a summer storm and the low, visceral thrum of charged air.
The assassin, a wiry man with eyes wide behind his mask, had time to twitch his dagger upward. It was a reflex, honed by a hundred kills. It meant nothing.
Li Chang'an's fist, wreathed in flickering arcs of light, didn't strike the dagger. It passed through the space the man's throat would occupy a fraction of a second later. The impact wasn't a crunch, but a damp, terrible pop. The assassin crumpled, a marionette with cut strings, before his nervous system could even register the miss.
Too linear, Li Chang'an thought, the analysis cold and separate from the storm in his limbs. A single thread of lightning.
He pivoted on the ball of his foot. The second and third assassins came at him in a pincer movement, their movements synced, blades seeking his kidneys and neck. Their coordination was beautiful, lethal.
Li Chang'an let them come.
At the last possible microsecond, he stepped into their kill zone. His body became a conduit. The [Lightning Flash] energy didn't just move him; it bifurcated. Two afterimages, shimmering and faint like heat haze, split from his core. One leaned left, the right.
The assassins committed. Their blades passed through empty light.
The real Li Chang'an was already low, his leg sweeping out in a crescent of crackling energy. It connected with both their ankles. The sound was like green branches snapping in a gale. They fell, screams strangled in their throats, as he rose between them. Two open-palm strikes, palms glowing like captured stars, tapped their temples. Their bodies went rigid, then still.
Four seconds had passed.
The remaining three assassins, including their leader—a broader, silent figure who had hung back—stumbled. Their confidence, a palpable force moments ago, shattered. They weren't facing a skilled fighter. They were facing a natural disaster in human skin.
"Don't cluster!" the leader barked, his voice a gravelly scrape. "Spread! Use the nets!"
They scattered, reaching for coiled devices at their belts—weighted mesh meant to entangle and conduct disabling shocks. A sensible tactic against a fast, close-range fighter.
Li Chang'an almost smiled.
He didn't wait for the nets to fly. He became the storm itself.
[Lightning Flash Assault: Raging Cloud Form]
This was the evolution, the comprehension that had bloomed in his mind after seeing a thunderhead split the sky. He didn't move in a line. He moved in a field.
One Li Chang'an flickered behind the assassin on the left, his elbow jamming into a kidney. Before the man could gasp, that afterimage faded, and the real one was in front of the assassin on the right, catching the weighted net in mid-air and wrapping it back around its thrower's neck with a sizzle of contained lightning. The man gagged, collapsing.
The clearing was now a discoherent nightmare of afterimages—five, six, seven flickering copies of Li Chang'an, each pausing in a different combat stance, the air humming and alive. The leader stood alone in the center, his eyes darting, unable to track the truth.
"Illusion!" he snarled, trying to sound convinced. "A cheap trick!"
"Is it?" The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. From right behind his ear.
The leader spun, his own blade, a cruel hook of blackened steel, lashing out in a desperate arc. It cut through empty air.
He panted, sweat beading under his mask. The silence from his men was absolute. The ozone smell was overpowering, mixing with the stink of voided bowels and blood. He was a veteran of dozens of Trial World skirmishes, a man who had killed budding Reincarnators. He had never felt this—this utter erasure of his craft.
"You…" the leader hissed, backing away, his free hand fumbling at a pouch on his chest. "You're not just some backwater prodigy. What are you?"
Li Chang'an let all the afterimages fade. He stood plainly before the man, ten paces away. Unmarked. Not even breathing heavily. "The last thing you'll see."
The leader's hand emerged from the pouch. He wasn't holding another weapon. He was holding a small, carved jade tablet, which he crushed in his fist.
"Then see nothing," the man spat, his voice thick with venom and finality.
[Veil of Silent Death]
It didn't explode. It unfolded.
A sphere of absolute negation bloomed from the crushed jade, swallowing the clearing in an instant. It wasn't darkness. Darkness is a thing. This was the absence of light. A void so complete it felt like a physical pressure on the eyeballs. The faint moonlight, the glow of distant camp embers, the lingering crackle of lightning energy—all were sucked away.
Worse was the silence.
The rustle of leaves, the distant call of a night bird, the thump of his own heart in his ears—gone. Replaced by a thick, wooly nothingness that pressed against his eardrums. Li Chang'an was blind and deaf, severed from the world.
Sensory deprivation technique, his mind raced, the Heaven-Defying Comprehension already dissecting the experience. Not an attack on the body, but on perception. High-level. Requires a consumable artifact. He can likely navigate within it.
His other senses screamed to compensate. The smell of ozone was gone, too. Only the damp earth and his own sweat remained. He dropped into a low stance, every muscle coiled, listening with his skin, with his bones.
He felt the vibration first. A faint tremor through the soles of his boots. Then, the displacement of air—a whisper of movement from the right, slightly high.
He leaned back. The blackened hook blade passed so close to his throat he felt the chill of the metal on his skin.
He's fast. Confident in his veil.
Another vibration, this one from directly ahead. A feint? Li Chang'an shifted his weight left.
It was a feint. The real attack came from above, a silent, two-footed stomp aimed to crush his collarbone. He rolled forward, the movement clumsy in the utter black silence. Dirt filled his mouth.
He was on the defensive. For the first time since entering this Trial World, he was genuinely reacting.
A cold, logical part of him was fascinated. The rest was a rising tide of alarm.
He felt the air part again, a horizontal slash aimed at his knees. He jumped. Too late, he sensed the second, follow-up thrust from a different angle. The hook blade bit deep into the meat of his thigh.
White, silent agony lanced up his leg. He couldn't hear his own grunt. He hit the ground and rolled, his hand clamping over the wound. Warm blood seeped through his fingers.
In the absolute, smothering void, the gravelly voice of the assassin leader manifested directly in his mind, a psychic sneer laced with triumph.
"The lightning is extinguished. Now, you die in the dark like the worm you are."
Li Chang'an knelt, wounded, blinded, and silenced. He felt the killer's presence solidify in front of him, savoring the moment, the blade rising for a final, decisive thrust to his heart.
End of Chapter 175
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