Ning had quite a few ideas for the attack, and it became hard for him to decide what to use.
"Attacking physically is boring, so I will attack from the distance," Ning said.
The assassin got ready to handle whatever he would be attacked with.
Ning put his hands forth and concentrated. The assassin got scared. Due to Ning being both an Invoker and Enchanter, he didn't know how he would attack at all.
A chill went down his spine when he saw the precipitations around him start to converge on him. The droplets of water appeared out of nowhere and stuck onto him.
More and more appeared in a matter of seconds, and before he knew it, he was surrounded by water, unable to breathe.
He tried to move, but he realized that he was already floating in the water, and couldn't use anything to push himself around.
He immediately enchanted himself to move to the side, but the water moved along with him under Ning's control.
He was starting to get breathless and was going to drown when Ning let go of the water.
The assassin fell to the ground and spit out the water in his lungs. He huffed for breath while the fear of nearly dying kept him vigilant.
He saw Ning's left hand still in the air and wasn't sure what he was about to do.
"Dodge!" Ning said. Suddenly, a ball of fire appeared in front of Ning that flew towards the assassin.
The assassin used what little energy he had mustered after nearly dying and jumped to the side.
Ning shot more fireballs towards him and made him jump around. That was quite funny to watch.
Ning stopped again and started creating many rocks around him the size of eggs. He shot multiple of them at once towards the assassin, who used his strong enchanted body to block them.
Once the barrage of stones stopped, the assassin looked in fear towards Ning at what he was going to do next.
Ning put his hands forth and tried to do something, but it didn't happen. "Hmm… weird. Is it because I'm not very familiar with electricity yet? I will have to learn how it works later," he said out loud and proceeded to do something else.
The assassin suddenly felt his clothes grow hot. The water in them started steaming heavily, practically cooking him inside them.
Ning had enchanted the assassin's clothes with heat energy.
The assassin threw away his shirt and stood there in his undershirt. He was huffing really quickly and knew that if he stayed here for long, the mad man in front of him will surely kill him.
He immediately turned around, put all of his strength into his legs and ran off.
He ran as far as he could for minutes on end. He hit a few trees a couple of times, but he didn't let that stop him. Even when the tree broke in half, he kept running.
After close to 10 minutes of running, the assassin found himself in a dark place, in the middle of the forest.
He fell onto his knees and breathed very heavily as he used one arm to hold onto a tree for support.
"You run really fast huh?" Ning said.
The assassin's eyes went wide and looked above him to see Ning sitting calmly on the tree.
"How?" he cried out.
"Come on. I need to try out a few more attacks," Ning said.
"No, please no," the assassin cried. "Just kill me please. Don't make me suffer."
"What?" Ning exclaimed. "No way. I have been looking forward to this since I learned your Aether rank. You can't take that away from me."
The assassin huffed, trying to catch his breath, while his eyes darted around in the darkness, trying to look for a way to escape.
He couldn't see any. So, he chose to do the one thing he could to get out of this torture.
The assassin took out a dagger from his storage and stabbed himself in the heart.
However, when the dagger hit his chest, he felt no pain. He tried hitting again, but all he could feel was the dagger hitting something really hard.
Ning had enchanted his body to protect himself. The assassin also enchanted himself to increase his strength and stabbed himself. However, no matter how hard he hit the attack never pierced his skin at all.
That made the assassin realize the difference between him and Ning. He looked up with fear in his eyes as he spoke.
"They are wrong. Th-The Pavillion is wrong about your strength," he said. "They think you are an Aether King, but you are not, are you?"
"Hmm… oh no," Ning said.
"You… You are not even an Aether Emperor. You…" the assassin's eyes went wide as he even said the next few words. "You are an Aether Saint, aren't you?"
Ning smiled.
"I'm correct," The Assassin said in both shock and fear. Every country only held a few dozen or so of Aether Saints because of how much talent and resources it required to reach that level.
As far as he knew, the Shadow Pavillion, which was the best-known assassin group in the entire world, only held about 10 Aether saints.
And somehow, this kid, this freak in front of him was one.
Ning scratched his head and said, "honestly, I don't know what I am. I don't really feel a bottleneck and have been advancing in rank like a breeze. Which, by the way, was never my intention."
"Also, I haven't bothered to check what rank, so I don't know what it really is."
"It may be Aether Saint, or… it may also be the rank one step higher. Given the time I absorbed Aether, it's one of the two."
The assassin's eyes nearly popped out of his sockets. "A rank… higher?"
"You don't mean an Aether…"
"Enough talking.. Will you fight me or not?" Ning asked.
