Blood Online: Evolving Endlessly-Chapter 192: Blood Cannon.

Akhil abandoned the airwalk skill, he had to try something else.

{Blood Essence: 75,000}

His enhanced mind was racing through options, analyzing what he’d learned. The coating denied physical force, rejected his blood manipulation, seemed to exist as an absolute barrier between the titan and anything trying to harm it.

But absolute barriers required energy. Had to. Nothing in the universe was truly impenetrable—everything had a threshold, a breaking point, a limit where the defense failed.

He just needed to hit that limit.

Akhil planted his feet and began channeling. Not a small technique, not an efficient application of power. Everything he had. Every drop of blood essence he could safely pour into a single attack without risking unconsciousness.

{Skill—Blood Cannon}

{Blood Essence: —30,000}

The sphere of compressed blood essence formed in front of him, growing from marble-sized to basketball-sized to something the size of his torso. Pure crimson energy so dense it had weight, so concentrated it pulled at the air around it, creating a vacuum effect that made breathing difficult even for his enhanced lungs.

The chamber’s temperature dropped from the sheer power being compressed into a single point. Stone cracked beneath Akhil’s feet from the pressure. His white skin glowed with the reflection of crimson light bright enough to illuminate the entire space.

The titan’s red eyes tracked the forming attack with what might have been interest.

Akhil released it.

The Blood Cannon shot forward like artillery fire, trailing distortion that made the space it passed through ripple and warp. It moved faster than his previous attacks, carrying momentum that should have punched through reinforced bunkers, dense enough that it pulled loose stone and debris into its wake.

The sound was catastrophic—not just the roar of the projectile but the scream of air being forcibly displaced, the crack of pressure differentials equalizing, the deep bass rumble that came from moving that much concentrated energy through matter that didn’t want to accommodate it.

It hit the titan’s coating dead center.

For the first time since the fight began, Akhil saw the barrier react.

Not breaking—not yet—but straining. The invisible coating became visible for a fraction of a second, rendered in sharp relief by the pressure being applied to it. Lines of stress appeared in the air around the titan’s torso, geometric patterns that suggested the barrier had structure, had architecture, had seams that could potentially be exploited.

The coating rippled, warped inward, compressed around the impact point like fabric being pushed by a finger. The titan’s feet scraped backward across stone, the first time it had been moved at all.

’Yes!’ Akhil’s mind flashed with excitement. ’It’s working! It can be broken, it just needs—’

The Blood Cannon disappeared.

Not gradually. Not dispersing or fading or losing momentum as the barrier absorbed its energy. One moment thirty thousand blood essence worth of compressed power was pressing against the coating, forcing it to strain, threatening to tear through—

The next moment it simply wasn’t there anymore.

Gone. Erased. Removed from existence as completely as if Akhil had never created it.

And where the attack had been, the coating around the titan pulsed with new energy. Not damaged. Not depleted. Reinforced. The barrier glowed faintly for a heartbeat, brighter than before, stronger than before, fed by the same power that had tried to break it.

’What—’ Akhil’s thought stalled out, his enhanced mind trying to process what he’d just witnessed. ’It didn’t just block the attack. It consumed it. Absorbed all that energy and converted it into more defense. The coating doesn’t just deny damage—it eats it. Uses it. Gets stronger from attacks powerful enough to threaten it.’

The implications hit him like a physical blow.

Everything he’d tried hadn’t just failed—it had made the titan’s defense better. Every technique that carried enough force to potentially breach the coating just fed it instead, reinforced it, turned his own strength against him.

He was making his enemy stronger by fighting it.

The realization was still settling when he noticed the titan’s stance had changed.

All four arms were already in motion, weapons cutting through space Akhil was still occupying because he’d been too focused on the failure of his attack to register the counterassault beginning.

’Shit—’

Akhil tried to move, to dodge, to do anything—

Too slow.

The twin cleavers came down in crossing arcs that would have bisected him if he’d been standing a foot to either side. As it was, they missed his torso by inches but caught his shoulders, the flat of the blades rather than the edges—not cutting, but the impact alone was enough to drive him to his knees with bone-breaking force.

The chain-whip wrapped around his throat before he could recover, tightening with pressure that his enhanced durability could resist but not ignore. The morning star was already descending toward his exposed head—

Akhil activated Void Carapace in pure desperation.

{Blood Essence: 43,000}

His white skin darkened, became something that looked like crystallized void, surface that absorbed light without reflecting it. The coating was supposed to make him impossible to hit definitively, each strike having a chance of passing through as if he weren’t there.

The morning star descended—

Passed through his head as the quantum uncertainty resolved him to intangible for that specific strike—

The chain around his throat remained solid, the uncertainty keeping him corporeal for that binding—

Then the twin cleavers reversed course, coming back in horizontal slashes while he was immobilized, and this time the Void Carapace’s uncertainty didn’t save him. Both blades hit him in the ribs simultaneously, solid impacts that his defense couldn’t phase past.

Akhil heard his ribs shatter, felt the impacts drive fragments into organs that tried to collapse, tasted blood in his throat as something ruptured internally.

{Critical Damage Sustained}

{Blood Essence: —35,000 - Emergency Healing Activated}

The chain released him and he was airborne, thrown across the chamber by the force of the combined strikes, the Void Carapace dissolving as his concentration broke. His transformed body skipped across stone like a stone across water before finally stopping in a heap near the far wall.

The healing kicked in—bones reforming, organs sealing, blood that had been flooding his chest cavity being reabsorbed and recycled. But the cost was mounting, his blood essence reserves depleting faster than he could regenerate them.

And the titan still hadn’t taken a single point of damage.

Akhil stood again, slower this time, his breathing labored despite enhanced lungs that shouldn’t need to labor. His white skin was split in a dozen places, healing but not fast enough, his transformed body starting to show the accumulated damage.

’The coating,’ he thought again, forcing his mind to focus past the pain and the blood loss and the mounting desperation. ’Nothing passes through it. Physical force rebounds. Energy disperses. Phasing doesn’t matter because it exists between states. It’s absolute defense—I can’t break it, can’t bypass it, can’t trick it.’

The titan was moving forward now, weapons raised, red eyes showing no emotion behind the mask. Just patient certainty that this fight had an inevitable conclusion.

Akhil cycled through options with frantic speed—abilities he’d collected, forms he could assume, techniques that might find a gap in something that appeared to have no gaps.

He tried Serpent Coil—an ability that turned his spine flexible enough to dodge between attacks, his body becoming liquid in its motion.

The titan’s weapons found him anyway, striking with precision that suggested they were reading his movements before he made them.

He quickly transformed his hands into claws, ones sharp enough to tear through reinforced materials, attacking the coating from multiple angles simultaneously.

The claws shattered against the invisible barrier, and the counterstrike caught him across the chest in a blow that painted the wall behind him with blood.

He tried Mirage Body—an ability that created solid illusions of himself, flooding the chamber with copies that all looked real, all moved independently, trying to overwhelm the titan through sheer numbers.

The titan destroyed every illusion methodically, then found the real Akhil and drove the morning star into his stomach hard enough that he felt his spine crack from internal pressure.

Every attempt failed. Every transformation met with violence that his defenses couldn’t handle. The titan was beating him systematically, efficiently, with the patience of something that had all the time in the world and an opponent who was running out of both time and resources.

Akhil collapsed against the wall after the latest strike, blood pouring from wounds that were starting to take longer to heal. His blood essence was below half. His body, despite all its transformations and enhancements, was accumulating damage faster than he could repair it.

And the coating around the titan remained absolute. Untouched. Unbroken.

The titan stood over him, all four weapons raised for what looked like the finishing sequence.

Akhil stared up at it through vision that was starting to blur at the edges despite his enhanced sight, and his transformed mind—exhausted, damaged, desperate—began running calculations.

There was only one thought in mind.

Blood. Looking around him... It seemed he had just the right amount.