Chapter 467: S‑Rank Battle

Lu Yu moved.

No opening move. No charge. No any prelude belonging to a human combat system.

A second ago he was still standing in the center of the courtroom, hands in his pockets, the hem of his school uniform fluttering with a rustling sound from the aftershock.

The next second—

It was empty.

That spot was empty.

Zhang Yuanqing's S Ji perception completed a full-area scan within 0.01 seconds. Front, back, left, right, overhead, and below— all six directions were locked.

Nothing.

Nowhere.

Wrong.

Zhang Yuanqing's pupils snapped shut.

His perception was correct. Lu Yu was indeed still in the courtroom. It was just— too fast. So fast that before the signal his S Ji perception captured could return to the cerebral cortex for processing, Lu Yu had already shifted to three different positions.

A rush of wind brushed his left ear.

Zhang Yuanqing instinctively threw a left punch.

The fist, imbued with Karma enough to collapse half a building, caused the law glyphs on his bone armor to flash wildly, the air compressing into a visible white cone—

It hit empty air.

The punch wind brushed past Lu Yu's hair tips, flinging a few stray strands from his forehead.

The boy's head was off by only three centimeters.

Three centimeters.

Not more, not less. Just enough to turn the heavy blow that could pulverize an A Ji trickster into a mere breeze.

That evasion range was precise to a hair's breadth.

Su Ming lay behind the rubble, his pupils contracting sharply. He is a reincarnated one, having witnessed countless masters clash in his past life. Yet that level of bodily control—compressing safe distance to the millimeter scale, repeatedly hopping at the edge of an S Ji attack—cannot be explained by talent alone.

It is an instinct that crawled out of a sea of corpses and blood.

It is the body's automatically calculated optimal solution.

As Lu Yu slipped past that punch, his right hand slipped out of his trouser pocket.

His five fingers gathered, the palm edge straightened.

A palm‑knife strike.

The target was not Zhang Yuanqing's chest, not his face, not any spot a normal person would choose to attack.

It was the junction of the left scapula and clavicle.

There lay a gap less than two millimeters wide—a structural opening that forms between two plates of the law‑etched bone armor when the shoulder joint moves.

Snap.

The sound was crisp, like a dry branch snapping.

Zhang Yuanqing's left shoulder sank two centimeters.

A roar squeezed out of the split at the base of his ear. Not pain. Disbelief.

His bone armor—Zhun S Ji law‑etched bone armor—had a crack split by a hand‑knife?

"You—"

The words were unfinished.

Lu Yu had already pressed against him.

The distance was compressed to zero.

True zero distance. Close enough for Zhang Yuanqing to see the curve of Lu Yu's eyelashes, close enough that their noses almost touched.

At that range, for Zhang Yuanqing, whose body swelled to two‑meter‑three and was clad in heavy armor, it was an absolute blind spot.

His fist needs room to swing. His Gavel needs a charging arc. His resentful‑soul shockwave needs a dispersal distance.

But Lu Yu doesn't need that.

Elbow strike.

The right elbow struck precisely the weak band of bone armor between Zhang Yuanqing's seventh and eighth right ribs.

Knee top.

He lifted his left knee, the top pressing against the spot corresponding to Zhang Yuanqing's inner thigh femoral artery. In that area the bone armor, to allow leg mobility, was only one‑third as thick as elsewhere.

Palm base.

He thrust the base of his right palm upward, smashing the left mandibular joint protrusion.

The three attacks were completed within 0.4 seconds.

Each strike's target was not chosen at random. All were structural weak points of the human—or humanoid—body: joint gaps, nerve clusters, skeletal stress concentration points.

Zhang Yuanqing came from a forensic background. He knows more than anyone how many fatal weak points the human body has.

But he never imagined anyone could, in real combat, treat those textbook knowledge points as an attack menu.

"Gah—"

Zhang Yuanqing's jawbone dislocated.

His body, due to inertia, tipped backward; his two‑meter‑three massive frame staggered three steps on the courtroom's blood‑red floor tiles. The ghostly flame tail dragged by his bone protrusion traced two ragged arcs.

He hadn't steadied himself.

Lu Yu followed up.

His steps were so light they seemed less a fight than a dance. A waltz of the slaughterhouse, with a beat only he could hear.

Right fist—left elbow junction.

Left palm—inner side of the right knee joint.

Fingertip—between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.

Top of the foot—three centimeters above the Achilles tendon.

The dull impact sounds merged into a continuous noise, dense as rain hammering a metal roof.

With each sound, a piece of bone armor shattered. White fragments mixed with fluorescent green karma residue sprayed outward, tracing short parabolas in the air before falling.

Zhang Yuanqing was retreating.

One step. Two steps. Five steps. Ten steps.

His counterattacks were utterly futile. Every punch he threw hit only air. Every attempt to create distance was instantly closed by Lu Yu's faster steps.

He had S‑Ji energy reserves, he had the Terror Force of two hundred thirteen vengeful spirits—but his combat experience, his fighting instincts, his real‑world reaction speed were still at the level of a thirty‑nine‑year‑old chronic alcoholic former medical examiner who couldn't even truss a chicken.

It was like stuffing an F1 race car into the hands of someone who'd never touched a steering wheel.

No matter how powerful the engine, if you can't drive, you can't drive.

Liang Wen crawled completely out of the rubble, then sat dazed on a pile of rubble, his mouth hanging wide open.

"Is… is this a fight against an S‑Ji?" his voice floated, "I feel like I'm watching a PE teacher scold a truant student."

Jiang Yuan didn't respond. He knelt where he was, staring at Lu Yu's back, his Adam's apple bobbing once.

He recalled the scene of his first encounter with an S‑Ji Weird— that all‑encompassing oppression, the sensation that even breathing required permission.

And Lu Yu—

This kid was beating an S‑Ji.

One‑sided.

In the physical sense.

With fists and knees.

Even the Anomalous Power was inferior to Zhang Yuanqing.

Purely relying on a lifetime of killing techniques.

Pop—

Another piece of bone armor shattered. This time it was the thickest central plate on the chest; cracks radiated outward from the center like a dried riverbed.

Zhang Yuanqing's stature had shrunk from 2.3 meters to just over 2 meters. Bone‑armor coverage dropped from ninety percent to under forty percent, leaving large swaths of flesh exposed to the air, covered in fist and palm prints.

The cluster of eerie green fire in his eye sockets was violently fluttering; it was no longer the calm, judgment‑like steady burn of before.

It was fear.

A being that proclaimed itself a god had been made to feel fear by a teenager in a school uniform.

"Enough!"

Zhang Yuanqing's voice tore apart. The overlapping resonance of the two hundred thirteen audio tracks had mostly dissipated; what remained was a hoarse, broken tone laced with the madness of being driven to desperation.

"Enough enough enough enough—"

He did not retreat.

His feet were planted on the ground; the remaining bone armor contracted, no longer trying to cover his whole body but concentrating on his arms and chest.

He abandoned defense.

He gave it all up.

Back, sides, lower stance—everything was exposed to Lu Yu.

Lu Yu's attack rhythm paused for 0.1 seconds.

It wasn't that he couldn't strike; it was his combat intuition sending a warning.

The prey had stopped running, meaning it was ready to fight to the death.

Zhang Yuanqing brought his hands together in front of his chest, fingers interlaced. Bone‑armor fragments flew back from all over his body and embedded themselves in his palms.

He was editing.

Not through the normal editor process. He directly burned all his remaining karma, forcibly tearing an editing window into reality.

Su Ming's face changed.

"He's self‑destructing—no, he must be improvising a weird tale!"

Liang Wen: "What? This works too?"

Whether it works or not, Zhang Yuanqing has already done it.

The court's bone walls began to collapse inward.

It wasn't a collapse; it was being sucked inward.

The blood‑red floor tiles lifted one by one, cracked, turned into a stream of crimson debris that flowed into Zhang Yuanqing's palm. The vaulted bone structure peeled away, the stone pillars melted, and even the lingering vengeful‑spirit fragments in the air were drawn in.

The entire court domain—was self‑devouring.

"Everyone withdraw!" Su Ming roared.

He grabbed Liang Yu beside him and ran outward. Jiang Yuan reacted fastest, the Shadow Soldier turning into a black tide that lifted Qin Zhixia's body and surged toward the crack. Chen Shao gritted his teeth, crawled up from the muddy water, seized Xu An's collar, and pushed outward with full telekinetic force.

But they couldn't escape.

The court's exit was collapsing. All walls, floor, and ceiling contracted toward the center—like a fist clenching, with them all trapped in the palm.

Lu Yu did not run.

Zhang Yuanqing's mouth split back to his ears; black blood seeped between his teeth.

"Why run…?" his voice sounded like iron rust scraped from deep in his throat, "The court hasn't adjourned… who gave you permission to leave…?"

He flung his hands wide apart.

The mass of blood‑colored vortex exploded.

It didn't explode outward; it sucked inward.

All matter detached from the court's structure—bone shards, tile debris, karma dust, even the air itself—began to spin rapidly around Zhang Yuanqing.

A bloody storm.

A tornado over thirty meters in diameter, made of flesh and broken bone, its internal cutting force enough to shred the defenses of an A Ji Guigu practitioner.

Su Ming was swept up by the airflow at the storm's edge, spinning twice in the air before being caught by Jiang Yuan's Shadow Soldiers. His face gained seven or eight bloody gashes, all from high-speed bone fragments.

"This madman—" Liang Wen clung to a half-melted rock pillar stub, his windcoat torn half off, "He's using his domain as a bomb!"

The storm's center.

Zhang Yuanqing's body could no longer be called human. He wove his own flesh into it, leaving only a skeleton and half a face still draped in flesh, but that skeleton clung tightly to Lu Yu.

Ten bone fingers clamped onto Lu Yu's shoulders.

Two leg bones coiled around Lu Yu's waist.

Like an undying skeleton, using the most primitive method—embracing the prey and waiting for the storm to reap.

"Die together." In Zhang Yuanqing's remaining left eye, the green flame burned brightest, "You can eat, right? Eat... eat this whole storm..."

He was gambling.

He bet that Lu Yu's devouring speed couldn't keep up with the storm's cutting speed, betting that in this no-mercy meat grinder, his divine body could last one second longer than the opponent's.

The storm tightened.

Thirty meters. Twenty meters. Ten meters.

The spinning bone shards and flesh began cutting Lu Yu's skin. His uniform was shredded into rags in 0.3 seconds, and numerous tiny wounds appeared on his exposed shoulders and arms.

Lu Yu's brow furrowed deeper.

The crimson light on his chest frantically devoured the incoming fragments, but the storm's density was too great; his devouring speed truly couldn't keep up with the cutting speed.

Blood slid down from his temple into his eyes.

His vision blurred.

Just this instant.

Zhang Yuanqing's sole remaining green eye caught it.

The 0.2 seconds when Lu Yu blinked, the gap when blood obscured his vision, the slight turn of the boy's head as he tried to shake off the blood droplet—

Left side. Carotid artery. Exposed.

Zhang Yuanqing's right arm bone sharpened in the storm; its tip was ground by the high-speed spinning fragments into a white bone spike sharper than a scalpel.

He laughed.

The muscles on half his face twitched.

"Found it......"

The bone spike thrust out.

Straight for Lu Yu's neck.