Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!-Chapter 140, First Immortal Guardian
She was faster than he had expected.
Not surprising, exactly. Someone who operated in the Allheaven Expanse at a level where the entry threshold was relevant, who carried the Seven Star Immortal Conversion Halo and had the patience to wait two days above a volcanic basin watching for someone capable enough to clear it for her, was not operating on speed she had been born with.
That speed was built. Refined. The product of investment and time and the specific discipline of someone who understood that raw capability without development was the same as a sharp blade left in the rain.
She crossed the space between them in a burst that covered the distance before the conversation’s final exchange had fully settled, the flying sword angling into a trajectory that combined traversal momentum with combat intent in a single committed motion.
He met it.
The first exchange lasted two seconds. Blade against sword, force against force, each contact point producing a sharp sound that the basin’s volcanic acoustics amplified into something that rang off the walls.
She was strong. At close range, with the spiritual energy condensed around her in its combat configuration, her output was genuinely significant.
His output was operating at a scale she had not anticipated.
The second exchange lasted less time than the first. She read the imbalance immediately, which was the correct response, and disengaged rather than pressing against something she couldn’t match at close range. The flying sword carried her backward and upward in a single smooth withdrawal, putting distance between them before he could follow.
Then the barrier appeared.
One moment it was not present. The next moment it was, snapping into existence around him in a sphere approximately six meters in diameter, the walls composed of compressed formation energy that registered against his perception as genuinely dense.
She hovered outside it, the halo still in one hand, the formation treasure she had used to deploy the barrier visible in the other, a flat disc of inscribed stone that was still pulsing with the energy of recent activation.
"Formation barrier," she said. Her breathing had elevated from the exchange but her voice was steady. "Constructed using a treasure I acquired on the fourth day of the event."
She looked at the barrier with the satisfaction of someone watching something perform exactly as intended. "The energy density of the wall exceeds the output of anything below level 200. You cannot break it from the inside."
Lin Yi looked at the barrier wall from where he stood at its center.
she continued, "The highest level student from any regional academy is level 66. A third year from Heavenly Phoenix, actually. Your academy." She paused. "You cleared the basin in under ten minutes. That is not a level 66 performance. But it’s also not a level 200 performance."
The Greater Qilin was outside the barrier. It had been displaced by the barrier’s snap activation, the formation boundary having materialized around Lin Yi specifically rather than around the space they both occupied. It stood on the basin floor outside the sphere, its evolved eyes looking at the barrier wall with the specific attention it brought to obstacles it was assessing.
"The qilin can’t break it either," she said, following his awareness. "The formation’s threshold applies to external force as well as internal. Unless something out there is also above level 200, which I genuinely doubt, the barrier holds."
Lin Yi looked at the wall.
He thought about the sixty-four skill absorptions. He ran through them in the order they had integrated, not searching, just reviewing. The spatial techniques. The offensive techniques. The defensive passives. The area control skills.
Then he found the one he was looking for.
Dimensional Tear.
He had not used it since acquiring it. It created a temporary dimensional rift at a targeted location within range. The operative mechanism was spatial distortion applied to a fixed point, pulling matter and energy toward the rift’s creation point before the collapse. It was not an attack against the barrier’s energy density. It was an attack against the space the barrier occupied, which was a different target entirely.
A formation barrier resisted force applied to its walls. It did not have a mechanism for resisting space itself being torn open at a point on its surface, because the people who constructed the formation had built the threshold calculation against conventional energy output, not against a spatial distortion technique, and with the Heaven’s Will synergy passive running continuous output bonuses across all active skills.
He activated Dimensional Tear at the barrier wall directly in front of him.
The rift opened.
The rift opened.
The barrier’s surface fractured at the rift point. Not a clean breach, not a gap that could be stepped through, but a structural failure that propagated outward from the tear point along the formation’s energy lines, the compression bonds that held the barrier’s density stable breaking in sequence as the spatial distortion spread.
The barrier dissolved.
She stared at it.
For exactly one second, her expression was the honest version of itself. Unguarded. Genuinely caught by something she had not built a response to. Then the composure reasserted itself, and the combat posture returned, and she was moving again.
Too slow.
Lin Yi activated Heaven Step.
The spatial transition carried him from the barrier’s center to her position in an instant. She processed his arrival before she could respond to it. Her sword came up in the defensive motion of someone who had good instincts and was using them correctly.
He did not engage the sword.
He engaged the hand holding the halo.
The Celestial Lord Blade moved once, precisely, at the wrist joint where the hand connected to the arm, the angle chosen to avoid the sword’s defensive arc entirely. The strike was clean and immediate and absolute.
The hand fell.
*****
A/N: Thanks for everyone who is reading, I have listened to every complaint and amended any inconsistency. I’m planning a mass Chapter release, if you want to support the effort, gifts and golden tickets will be appreciated.
For gifts:
1 Dragon = 5 Chapters
1 Magic Castle = 10 Chapters
Above Castle = 15 Chapters
Also reviews will be appreciated, and I don’t delete reviews, I read them and improve
