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  I have fought all sorts of men over the years, from all sorts of backgrounds and situations. This experience has led me to consider what sort of warrior different lifestyles can produce. I don’t mean something so shallow as ‘lazy people are poor fighters’ or ‘Hardships breed strength’. Any fool can identify a trend like that, and they aren’t even reliably true anyway.

  No, no, what I am talking about is things like the allocation of,or willingness to spend resources. Say, for example, two men go to a master swordsmith, and they each have an identical sword crafted for them. Both men can pay for the weapon, but one man is rich, while the other is only of middling wealth. Can you tell me which man develops a more evasive style?

  It is the poorer man, while he may be just as brave as his counterpart, he cannot afford to simply replace his sword if it breaks. So he avoids blocking with the blade as much as he can, instead dodging and saving the edge of his weapon for offense whenever he can.

  While I had crushed a few people who dwelled on the city tier that was under the open sky, and even accidentally murdered one. Those were however just regular people who were without special armor that fought for them. Today was the first time I had fought someone obscenely rich enough to make use of an Evolution Suit, so I didn’t have enough points of reference to intuit anything useful for this fight.

  Well, I had correctly predicted that such a wealthy and impetuous young man wasn’t going to be conservative with his ammunition. Of course, he had pulled out six guns at once, so one didn’t need the experiences of a lifelong warrior to make that deduction.

  Two Uruk heavy pistols, launching bullets that whirred as they flew and would chew through whatever they hit, were in his human hands. Attached to the spider-limbs were two Saruman smart pistols that corrected their aim whilst the rounds launched from them were already in the air, and two Simaril personal grenade launchers. Those last two didn’t fire bullets at all, but small grenades, which both Diaochan and my HUD informed me were small balls that would violently explode either upon impact or after a certain amount of time; these were the impact ones.

  When the obsidian raindrop pulled his weapons about fifty feet across the rubble-strewn roof from me, we shared a look. I turned my killing intent way up, staring at him in a way that anyone would know meant death was coming for them.

  “You'd better have a lot of faith in those pistols,” I called. “ If I spend even a second in range, you’re dead.”

  He didn’t reply, and I couldn’t gauge much about his thoughts as his face had become covered by a black, mechanical-looking mask that wasn’t actually real. It was a ‘hologram’ projected by his armor. It featured four red eyes in addition to his original two that did not align with his face. They were certainly sinister-looking, I’ll give them that, and while I’m sure they had some use, like scanning for extra information, or slowing down the user's perception of movement, or whatever, I only really cared for the look of the things.

  ‘I need to get a hologram projector that can give me back a version of my pheasant feathers.’ It had been so many years since I’d fought without them that my head still felt naked without them flaring behind me as I crushed my enemies. Crushing this particular enemy was proving to be a little more challenging than I had expected.

  The barrage of bullets and explosives was both fast and accurate. They were so fast, in fact, that I thought someone else might not even be able to track their paths through the air. Being the most peerless of all warriors under heaven, I, of course, could not only see their passage but dodge and deflect them.

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  It was a good thing that I still possessed such ability, as the storm of projectiles was accurate enough that I couldn’t charge directly at my foe. Weaving around chimneys and debris, I changed directions multiple times and in multiple patterns of movement.

  The rooftop around me was torn to pieces as I knocked aside smart bullets and slipped around grenades, spinning my spear to deflect debris when I needed to. I took several short leaps to avoid explosions that came from attempts to place grenades into my path. After the first volley of cement-destroying projectiles, I understood the weapons of my enemy well enough that I could easily predict ahead of him, and utterly neuter the raindrop’s attempts to read my movements.

  I will give him one thing: his efforts to use one or two guns to drive me into the fire from the rest were well done enough that I was once forced to double back and use the drones that were pursuing me as cover. I grimaced as the bullets ripped a pair of the metal beasts apart, and yet more XP went to waste.

  I concluded that holographic feathers could wait, and I really needed to get a gun of my own as I dodged through a final cloud of bullets and launched myself the last few feet I needed to cross to get my spear in strike range. Alright, I admit it. I needed more than a single second to defeat the second raindrop. To my surprise, I even needed more than five.

  That being said, I knew a tricksy sorcerer when I saw one. The appearance might be different, the magics might have a different name, but this man was a thinker, not a fighter, and I was willing to bet his Evolution Suit would reflect that. Hey, what do you know, I could intuit something useful about this opponent after all.

  As I closed the final few feet, I thrust out my spear one-handed. At the same time, the man in his Anansie suit dropped two of the guns held by his spider arms, and the metallic limbs came together to block my attack in a crossed motion from over his shoulders. The block succeeded, and the raindrop tried to bring his four remaining guns to bear.

  I was ready for it, of course. I let go of my spear and let it drop before catching it behind my back with my other hand as I spun away from the angle of one of the spider limbs that was still holding a gun, along with his human hand closest to me. At the same time, I used my now free hand to smack aside the pistol in his other human hand, so it fired wide, and deflected the shot from his final spider limb with my spear.

  I kept moving in a tight circle around the raindrop so there would never be a point where he could aim at me with all four guns at once. At the same time, I switched my spear to a staff grip and unleashed a barrage of strikes with both the orange energy blade and the black metal but of my weapon.

  The dark skinned raindrop desperately tried to face me, but was too slow to actually pull it off. After that, he tried to once more create distance between us as his gunless spider arms desperately tried to fend me off. Against someone slower or with a worse sense of timing, I think the mechanical limbs might have even been able to slip in a stabbing strike or two with their own metal spear-like ends.

  Against me, they were virtually useless. I wish I could say the same about the drilling and self-aiming bullets, but one of those did manage to tear a chunk out of my left bicep. I expected it to hurt like an arrow launched from a powerful bow, which it kind of did, but there was far more of a burning sensation where the projectiles passed through my arm. I roared in pain and fury before redoubling my efforts to finish this before he could get lucky again, or the remaining drones that were circling us could find a way to enter the fray without hurting their master.

  The spider armor was durable, but as I had expected, not nearly as difficult to pierce as the Beowulf suit my previous opponent had been wearing. I suspected my foe had arrogantly assumed that he would be able to tear me apart at a distance like he had the roof and the pair of drones. He had focused on shooting at me rather than maintaining a safe range, and now he had no hope of escape.

  In spite of what I had said, I wasn’t keeping track of how many seconds it took for me to defeat the raindrop, but it wasn’t long later that my energy-bladed spear, which I had just then decided to name ‘Feather Fall’, punched through a gap I created in his stomach armor.

  The raindrop made a gasping noise and continued trying to retreat,though I was sure his A.I was telling him how very fucked he was at that moment. It was an opinion that I sadly didn’t hold for all that long, as a sudden beam of light shone down upon me from above, and a voice that was being projected loud enough to shake the pebbles on the ground demanded that I stop where I was and drop my weapon immediately.

  Obviously, it was a command I did not obey.

  Privileges of wealth I suppose

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