Chapter 540: Reversal

The man slowly looked down at his shoes, and then raised his head with a wry smile, "But the shoes are so uncomfortable here..."

Eiro rolled his eyes, "Right, I should have known you're an idiot." He pointed out, "So, nevermind that. Rather, I want to know why you would do something like reversing the personality of my friend."

With a smirk on his face, the man shook his head, "How about you beat me if you want to find that out?"

"Hm, I was planning on that anyway, so let's go ahead and do it like that." Eiro said bluntly, as he took a deep breath. Finally, the announcements for this final round were beginning, and soon, they were going to hit the bell. Eiro watched the bell, and the moment that the ringing sound hit his ears, he jumped forward and hit the transmigrator straight in the face. He was thrown to the other side of the arena in an instant, unable to negate the force of the impact.

The momentum nearly destroyed the wall on the other side of the arena, but the man simply stood up as if he was unbothered. Or at least... he wasn't damaged, but he still experienced some amount of pain.

"So you can negate damage as well? That's kind of unfair, isn't it?" Eiro asked, as the transmigrator grinned broadly, "Guess I'll have to take this a bit more seriously after all." 

Slowly, the transmigrator pulled the blade out of its sheat. It was still blunt like before, but soon, the transmigrator started cutting into the air. It was a known fact that powerful swordsmen could create cuts in the air that traveled to their opponents on their own, even if it was weaker than a normal slash. However, what this man was doing was something else entirely.

He cut into the air, creating such a slash that would normally travel to Eiro quite quickly. But it wasn't moving, it was practically just frozen in the air. To others, it looked like the transmigrator simply swung his sword through the air a few times and nothing happened, as if he was trying to warm up, but Eiro could tell the changes in the air as this slash formed.

And the transmigrator didn't stop. He continued swinging his sword through the same spot, adding onto the cut more and more, until space itself seemed to want to shift around it. Even the audience was now able to see what was happening.

And then, while Eiro was standing there, waiting to see what was going to happen out of simple curiosity, the transmigrator pushed the tip of his sword onto the rift in space that he had created. And in an instant, said rift disappeared, and moved to another place. And that place was directly where Eiro was standing. If Eiro didn't have his sort of abilities, he would have died there. But luckily, he could simply turn part of his body into air, and everything was absolutely fine. There was no way for this sort of attack to damage him in that scenario.

"Huh. Interesting." Eiro muttered, as he simply stepped away from the rift. He pulled a bar of rock out of the ground, and pressed it into the rift. Immediately it was shredded into pieces, "That definitely would have hurt."

"It... should have hurt..." The transmigrator muttered confused, unsure how Eiro dodged that attack, as the Demon smiled slightly, "Oh, that is actually nothing, you know?"

With a gentle smile on his face, Eiro pushed his hand onto the rift, and immediately made it disappear. These sorts of slashed were created out of air pressure, and this guy mixed something like a special negation into it. But as long as Eiro just got rid of the air pressure, it didn't matter.

"This is something more like what you wanted to do." Eiro said, as he slowly moved his finger through the air, pushing out a massive amount of magic. And as he did, a compressed mass of space appeared in front of him, which slowly moved toward the transmigrator. And he knew that he wouldn't be able to negate this, since he didn't even know what 'this' was. So instead, he simply dodged, and the moment that it hit the wall reinforced by some of the greatest mages in the country, it simply moved through it like a knife through water, unhindered in the slightest. Of course Eiro dissipated the magic a moment later, but the transmigrator now understood what sort of being he was dealing with.

"...Okay, got it. No trickery anymore." He said, before pressing his fingers onto the edge of the blade. With what seemed like sheer physical strength, he created a sharp, albeit uneven, edge on the sword. But in the end, this wasn't done through physical strength, but the metal was pushed back by the negation of 'being allowed in that space'. It seemed like this sort of thing drained a lot of energy though, so it couldn't be used this actively in combat.

But it didn't need to be. The moment that the transmigrator pushed his foot into the ground, cracks formed all around the arena. In an instant, he seemed to teleport toward Eiro. He did the same thing as when he moved that slash in the air earlier. The slash itself was held in space by the negation of time itself, while it was moved by the negation of the distance between it and Eiro. Really, it was a ridiculously powerful ability.

The man swung his now sharp sword at Eiro, and the Demon knew that he couldn't just sit back and do nothing here. He forced his body to move out of the way of the blade's slash and pulled his dagger out of his treasury. He pushed it forward at the transmigrator with a twisting motion for a powerful and damaging stab, but the moment that the tip of the dagger hit the transmigrator's flesh, it simply seemed to stop.

'So he had been holding back even with this power, huh..?' Eiro thought to himself as he ground his teeth in annoyance. He pulled back to dodge the man's next slash at his arm, and quickly twisted around him in an unnatural and unexpected mannre, before grabbing his opponent's arm. Eiro pulled on him with the support of gravity magic to pull him toward his dagger, and once more pushed the tip of his dagger onto the transmigrator, and once more, the impact was stopped. But this time, Eiro didn't give in, and pushed the dagger into his opponent's flesh anyway.

The negation ability wasn't perfect. It wasn't all-powerful. And one of the most important parts was that each 'field of negation' that he created could only negate one thing, it seemed. So the field of negation right around his skin stopped any impact, but what Eiro did after that wasn't an impact anymore, it was just pushing his dagger into his flesh, so it worked differently. Knowing this, Eiro could still attack without issues if he just tweaked the way he attacked just so slightly.

While damage was slowly accumulating on the transmigrator's body over time, Eiro had not been hit even once, not a single time. The reason for that was that Eiro was simply still more powerful than this man even when he tried to take Eiro on 'seriously'. He was just a bit more complicated to fight for Eiro, so while it took longer, he wasn't a real threat now that Eiro figured out his technique.

Of course, Eiro still held back certain abilities of his. Using magic against the transmigrator wouldn't be worth it, since he could probably just negate 'mana' around him, so this was a lot easier and made Eiro seem more powerful. If he had someone just get rid of his magic like that so easily, then it would seem to the general audience that Eiro isn't as powerful as they thought. And Eiro didn't want that. Even if he really had to struggle more in this fight than any other time he had fought someone lately, he wanted it to seem like Eiro did everything with ease.

But there was still one issue. 'Reversal'. It was a powerful and troublesome ability. Eiro had been able to remove it from Krog by simply getting rid of the magic that caused the effect, even though it was trying to solidify inside of his abdomen for a permanent chance, but he still didn't know exactly how it worked.

It seemed like he was going to see it quite soon anyway. The transmigrator, grinding his teeth together, swung his blade at Eiro while once more being stabbed, and in that instant, he used the 'Reversal' ability.

In that instant, everything in what seemed to be a two-meter proximity around the transmigrator simply changed. It inversed. It turned into its opposite, practically.

"Eiro, I-" Bavet muttered, struggling to hold on, but the slime didn't have to worry. Eiro had already anticipated this.

In that exact moment, Eiro pulled all the mana that he had been subtly spreading out through the arena back into his body, and was forcefully dragging the 'Reversal' mana into himself at the same time. Eiro absorbed it, made it his own. Like that, it didn't affect him, and the ability was wasted by the transmigrator.

Ripping open his eyes confused, the man took a step back, "B-But how... how did you do that?" He asked, and Eiro grinned slightly, as he moved the reversal magic that he absorbed right onto his hand. In an instant, he moved forward, and punched the transmigrator into his stomach. Eiro twisted his hand around, and in that moment, a weird effect could be noticed.

The transmigrator wasn't able to negate Eiro's attacks anymore, since this was the transmigrator's own ability, but he wasn't pushed away.

Because what Eiro was doing was simple. He punched the man, and the force was inflicted onto him. And when the reverse-force was about to hit Eiro... it simply once more injured the transmigrator. And instead of being pushed away, the transmigrator was pushed further into Eiro's hand.

The Demon had such immense control over this ability that he had just absorbed that he was able to reverse only the things that he wanted to. Like that, even though the punch only lasted an instant and seemed incredibly weak from an outsider's perspective, this was probably the most powerful, destructive punch that a human ever had to endure. Soon, when the reversal magic had been fully used up, the transmigrator fell to his knees and started spitting up blood. He wasn't able to move anymore. That one punch had taken nearly all of his health, so he couldn't continue this and expect to win anymore the way that things were going.

But before he could even make an active choice about this, he fell unconscious, and Eiro had won.