Boom-!
At the moment, two flashes of light were connecting in various locations along the width of the room. Each of their clashes resulted in an explosion that threatened to crack the sturdy floor they were fighting on.
From an outsider's perspective, it would be hard to even tell what was taking place to cause the bright flashes.
Damien raised his arm, punching forward with a light of spatial mana covering his fist. With each movement, he felt like he was shattering a piece of glass.
But instead of glass, it was the spatial layers in his vicinity that broke. The current fight wasn't taking place in the stability of the real plane but within its gaps.
It was previously explained that when Damien teleported, he connected the spatial layers of two different points and stepped through them, but in this fight, he was skipping the essential steps.
He stepped in between these layers and tried his best to track his opponent, but he wasn't doing too well. After all, his opponent didn't leave a single trace when he moved.
Boom-! Boom-!
Damien continued to throw punches, trying to force Tian Yang out in the open, but none of his attacks connected. The old man was simply too skilled at maneuvering through the folds of space.
Recently, Damien had almost completely forgone the usage of teleportation whilst in combat, and there was a very simple reason for this. He was unable to control the fluctuations of space when he emerged from within its folds.
At lower classes, this didn't matter much since people didn't have enough experience to deal with him even if they could sense the fluctuations, but that wasn't the same anymore.
If he had used teleportation in his fight against Long Chen, he would have been forced into a corner much quicker. He wouldn't have been able to react quickly enough while Long Chen would easily be able to attack before Damien even emerged totally.
This was a downside Damien had already accepted, and it led him to stop using the very first skill he earned, his short-distance teleportation. But everything changed when he first met Tian Yang.
The old man left no trace of himself after he disappeared. No physical clues, no lingering mana, and no fluctuations. This was something he truly admired, as he still hadn't figured out how to do it.
While he tried to observe Tian Yang's usage of space element, Damien clenched his palm into a fist before rotating it. Space followed his movements, distorting and cracking within a small radius of him.
With this, Tian Yang's figure was finally revealed. He was sitting leisurely in the air as if the entire fight was nothing to him. "You're finally making some progress, boy. But if you brute force your way through this, you won't learn a thing."
Tian Yang stepped forward, melding into the folds of space and disappearing once again.
Damien was feeling frustrated. He had already been at this for half an hour or more, but he wasn't able to learn anything. He knew that brute force wouldn't always be the answer, but he was letting his mind be clouded by his emotions.
So, he made the logical choice. Trying to emulate his moves from the forest earlier, Damien willed his emotions to enter the sphere of mana in his mind.
'Void Heart'
Entering this state, he only had one goal. Comprehend what Tian Yang was trying to teach him.
Damien's eyes lost their luster and became entirely emotionless. He slowly relaxed his posture, appearing entirely unbothered. Suddenly, he waved his arm to the right.
Bang-!
A projectile that was flying in his direction at untraceable speeds was flung away from his body. The vectors controlling its trajectory were entirely altered.
Looking in the direction it came from, Damien vanished. When he reappeared, he was 29 meters away from his original spot, punching toward the empty space in front of him.
Boom-!
His fist was caught by a much more powerful hand. "Although this method can be considered cheating, I applaud you for using everything in your arsenal. Now, continue."
When Tian Yang vanished again, Damien calmly stood and watched with utmost concentration.
'His movements are light. He wastes no motion while teleporting, not even causing ripples in the spatial layers.'
Tian Yang moved like a fish in water, while Damien was more like a caveman. He figured that his lack of familiarity with movement in space somewhat contributed to his inability to conceal himself.
'Efficiency isn't the same for every person. I have different means than his.'
Gaining such familiarity would take years of diligent practice, and that wasn't what Damien was trying to do right now. He wanted an immediate solution to this problem.
'In my arsenal, the best choice would be vectors.'
Vectors existed within everything. Even space itself could be said to contain countless vectors that coordinated its movements. When Damien learned vector control, he used space as a medium to manipulate vectors.
This time, he wanted to manipulate the vectors of the medium itself. If he could do this, negating the fluctuations shouldn't be a problem at all.
The ability to control vectors gave Damien a wide range of options that he hadn't completely explored yet. Among these was the ability to control magnitude.
Magnitude quite literally referred to the size or extent of something. Although space was ethereal rather than physical, it was the concept he felt most familiar with.
He didn't re-enter the real plane for his experiment, opting to stay within the folds of space. He also stopped minding the fact that Tian Yang was still occasionally sending projectiles towards him to disrupt his concentration.
He erected his vector field to passively reflect any attacks that flew in his direction. Raising his arm once more, Damien began lightly flicking the air like he was playing an invisible guitar.
With each flick, ripples appeared in the space around him. He coated his fingers in spatial mana to create this effect. Slowly but surely, he tried to grasp the vectors that upheld the space in his vicinity.
On the other side of the room, Tian Yang watched Damien work. For the first few minutes, he still sent attacks to try and challenge Damien's concentration, but they were all deflected effortlessly.
Some of these attacks even reflected in Xue Ruyue's direction, forcing her to dodge and parry to the best of her ability. Since she wasn't able to see what was happening within the folds of space, she immediately became incensed, thinking it was being done on purpose.
'The powers this boy possesses are interesting, to say the least. This kind of force used to control trajectories and other forces related to an object wasn't something I learned until very late in my journey. Not to mention, his method is completely different.' Tian Yang thought.
He watched as Damien slowly lowered the strength of the ripples emanating from his finger, even though the amount of force and mana he used was the same.
'And his rate of comprehension is also nothing to scoff at. In only an hour he has grasped a method to emulate my usage of space laws.'
While Tian Yang was deep in thought, he stopped paying attention to Damien, making him miss the time when Damien paused his experiments and looked in his direction.
And while he continued to think, Damien vanished from his previous position, appearing silently in front of Tian Yang and punching out with all his strength.
Bang-!
