Grand Ancestral Bloodlines
chapter-1816

1816 Far More

Ryu shifted from combat style to combat style as though he couldn't decide what he wanted to be. He coated his body with ice first, causing his defenses to skyrocket. Nothing could seem to penetrate through his defenses, and his ferocity felt unmatched. Every time he collided with a figure, he shattered their bodies.

But he found that as he came across stronger opponents, they would freeze first by the time he came close to them, ironically making it harder to kill them. Of course, they died just the same, but the efficiency was frustrating, and he could clearly feel the regression.

He swapped and started using his Dark Flames instead, but he found that this was ironically worse. It wasn't that it lacked combat power, because it certainly didn't. It killed with far greater ease than his ice did. The issue was that it was precisely because of this that Ryu was so unsatisfied. He couldn't seem to bring out the true strength of the Dark Flames, and at some point, he ended up abandoning them and coating his claws in Dark Phoenix Heavenly Patterns instead.

Every time his claws touched another individual, they would find a violent aura of destruction envelop them. Many would be shredded apart at the slightest touch.

But this made it all the more annoying. That was because Ryu could only seem to safely apply his Dark Phoenix Heavenly Patterns to his claws, but not directly to his skin like he would be able to with his Ice Phoenix Heavenly Patterns. The dense aura seemed to clash with his skin, and as such, he couldn't use it with his fists at all.

In the end, he had to deploy his scales, and only then did the versatility of his close combat style come back. Applying the Dark Phoenix Heavenly Patterns to his scales directly seemed to work perfectly.

However, this was just another sign that he was missing something. Why were his own talents hurting him? It was asinine. Plus, having to pull out his transformation just to use a minimum level of his Dark Phoenix Bloodline was a huge waste of effort. Of course, he could try pulling on the Seed of Darkness in his body to control it better, but that was an even worse waste of effort than just summoning his Bloodlines to transform his body.

Ryu ended up switching back to trying to see what Ice would do for him, experimenting with his Ice Phoenix Heavenly Patterns on his skin. But soon he found another problem. The ice made even his body a bit rigid. It was only by a small few percentage points, but the flexibility he had honed and the speed of his reaction and action was slowed by a tick.

Bumping up against problem after problem, Ryu was truly speechless. Did he really have this many problems with his combat style? He thought that he was making great progress in fusing his talents down a single path, but who could have expected that he was still flawed to this extent?

If Ryu's enemies could hear his thoughts, it would be a wonder how they'd react. That was because despite his "struggles," he was running through the city as though they didn't have any experts at all. He wasn't even really paying attention to who his enemies were or what their strength might be. He had hardly registered that they were a mix of Ice Elemental and Dark Elemental Fiends. To him, they were nothing more than practice dummies. Without their formation, they were practically fish in a barrel.

Of course, the sheer number of them seemed like they should have stumped and suppressed Ryu, but he moved in and out of them like a fish in water, even while in the middle of trying to figure out the best way to use his Ice and Dark Flames to move around like he wanted.

After a while, though, he gave up on that, using his Spacetime Soul Nature directly. It just wasn't what he needed. He had just been trying to find novel methods of applying these elements in hopes of finding something unique.

But then the thought struck Ryu.

Didn't he have all these Ice and Dark Elemental Fiends before him now? Could he learn something by observing them?

Ryu had never taken the initiative to observe the weak for tips, which was why this wasn't at the forefront of his mind. But when he had the thought, he abandoned everything else. He focused on the city, taking in the movements of countless Fiends at the same time as though just one wasn't nearly enough for him. He analyzed their movements, the methods they used to employ their tactics, and slowly began to form an understanding.

His Dark Phoenix Bloodline was still out of luck because it had Darkness, Death, and Fire aspects that were far harder to harness and understand in this place. But his Ice Phoenix…

'I see. It's possible to control the state of frozen a target entered. Ice, on the one hand, can be incredibly hard and difficult to penetrate, which is why it's known as one of the best if not the best defensive elements in existence. But if the process is different, ice can also be incredibly brittle. I've grown used to using ice as a defense, so I haven't considered how to use it offensively, and only barely transferred over what I learned from one to the other despite the fact that they required completely different approaches.'

When Ryu had this thought, he pushed out. A wave of cool air spread and suddenly, over three dozen Fiends froze in place before splintering and shattering like fragile glass.

'Decent.'

He still felt that this was far inferior to what he could do with his flames and lightning, but that much was fine. Because as he began to think about these matters, he grasped a hint of ingenuity that he could make use of.

'I will need far more control to pull that off… and…'