MIGHT AS WELL BE OP Chapter 974: Reverse Casuality

Surprise and bewilderment flashed through Aaaninja's thoughts as agony erupted fiercely inside his head, his arm flying uncontrollably across the sky before crashing onto the earth with a dull, inert bang. He failed to comprehend Lucian's method; despite launching the initial strike, he emerged as the victim of the wound, a baffling and irrational reversal that verged on the inconceivable.

Yet such concerns held no weight—he could spare no room for any minor interruption in this fierce clash. At that instant, his regenerative power surged to life, with muscles, tissues, skin, bones, and vessels twisting and merging back into form as a fresh arm materialized right where the previous one was detached, substituting it perfectly as if the harm had simply been a brief mirage.

Lucian showed no delay or uncertainty; right after his opening blow connected, he exploited the opening with merciless accuracy, spinning in a surge of dominating velocity while his katana slashed toward Aaaninja’s throat with deadly purpose, even as Aaaninja’s blade howled ahead at the same time aiming for Lucian’s neck, the space dividing them howling from the raw power of their clashing weapons.

In the following moment, Lucian triggered the identical power once more, yet this time Aaaninja’s Eyes Of Genesis pierced its essence, even if he couldn’t grasp it entirely, appearing as if Lucian were directly altering reality on the spot, quietly reshaping the rules of being by exchanging spots, amplifying his assaults, and nullifying foes’ blows prior to their full emergence.

However, prior to Lucian’s power completing its activation, Aaaninja responded, engaging his Time Slip technique and disappearing from his spot as he glided across time and space, fading from the current instant like a specter departing the physical realm.

Lucian’s katana, enveloped in Sword Intent and dark thunderbolts, struck nothing, ripping apart space, atmosphere, and gusts all at once, the ruin from his failed assault ravaging the combat zone in a cataclysmic storm and booming roar that warped the essence of the isolated dimension.

Lucian felt no shock at the miss of his strike, having anticipated it beforehand, for with Aaaninja’s absurd aptitude and his ridiculously overpowered Eyes Of Genesis, repeating the same tactic a second time was out of the question, though he attempted it anyway just to probe the edges of what was feasible.

Lucian spun around without delay, his gaze locking onto the spot where he detected Aaaninja’s aura, but the instant their eyes connected, Lucian sensed it—a gash ripping open across his torso as a broad, horrific wound tore him asunder out of nowhere. Skin and muscle split savagely, crimson spraying in heavy streams. His healing ability activated right away, mending the ripped tissues as if chronology had been compelled to rewind.

Lucian merely faded into a haze as he widened the gap from Aaaninja, his figure dissolving into a ghostly trail slicing through the void. Yet Aaaninja advanced with one stride and materialized right in front of Lucian, then lashed out with his sword once more, and prior to finishing the swing, Lucian’s throat was nearly severed from his body, the head clinging by scant threads of tendon and mangled meat.

Lucian refrained from retaliating, the area surrounding him crumpling like fractured crystal as he warped away from his stance, and during the shift, his throat realigned while the damage mended at once without a trace of marking. His dark gaze stayed fixed on Aaaninja’s as he pondered the uncanny reliability with which Aaaninja inflicted these harms.

’How does he pull this off?’ he mused inwardly, for in one heartbeat he held the upper hand, and in the next Aaaninja had claimed total dominance. He’d landed just one hit, but Aaaninja countered and amplified it twofold with horrifying swiftness.

’The result strikes prior to the strike even finishing,’ Lucian swiftly realized, piecing together the structure and core principle driving Aaaninja’s assault.

Aaaninja named it Reverse Causality.

To produce a result, a reason must precede it, but through this ability Aaaninja flipped that concept upside down, manifesting the outcome ahead of the trigger. The outcome embodied the wound, whereas the trigger amounted to the subsequent assault, a macabre reversal of reasoning that defied the inherent structure of the world.

Aaaninja lunged forward anew, his gaze fixing on Lucian’s location as he surged ahead, Temporal Acceleration propelling his pace past all bounds like never before, closing the separation from Lucian in under an eye’s flutter, materializing at his rear as his blade flashed to bisect him straight through at the midsection.

But prior to the outcome even connecting, Lucian had already vanished, slipping away, and now that he comprehended Aaaninja’s technique, evading it posed no challenge, requiring only that he surpass the outcome and flee the fated result.

The second he rematerialized at his fresh spot, his katana shimmered as he released a raging barrage of swift, dark-thunder-charged sword streaks. Each erupted with sparking energy and fierce momentum as they bore down on actuality and being, each slash connecting to the following in a complex, lattice-shaped web before imploding toward Aaaninja’s spot in an unyielding trap of annihilation.

Aaaninja’s gaze sharpened abruptly, his Eyes Of Genesis revealing the ideal route ahead with perfect precision. With his Sword Intent sheathing his frame, and Temporal Acceleration paired flawlessly with Temporal Deceleration, he charged like a shooting star, his shape slicing brutally through the breeze as he confronted Lucian’s onslaughts directly. His sword sliced through each one without the slightest pause or uncertainty.

Wherever a dark-thunder Sword Intent streak lingered, he was there in advance, his form blurring as he shifted from spot to spot, trailing illusions and echoes behind. With each strike he nullified, it burst into raging blasts, but Aaaninja had departed before the chaos could touch him.

The whole isolated dimension appeared engulfed in utter catastrophe and ruin, blade scars gouging profoundly into the soil beneath, wrenching enormous sections of landscape loose, peaks demolished to dust regardless of their toughness matching that of stellar formations and worlds, and forests shattered into tiny fragments and bark remnants of what they once were.

Dust surged skyward in enormous, tumbling clouds, enveloping the whole combat area and isolated dimension in dense fog and twisting, eddying rubble. Tremors ripped outward without cease, fissures and abysses gaping and stretching upward as these two entities obliterated all and sundry in view with chilling disregard.

Yet the Isolated Dimension restored itself right away as if chronology had been made to retreat, space reconnected without seams, foliage sprouted anew in a flash, abysses sealed, fissures faded, and the entire Isolated Dimension reformed from scratch as if the doomsday wreckage had never taken place, abandoning only quiet and the faint resonances of their colossal might.