Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 286

’What the fuck was that?’ Zaeryn thought, his mind frantic as the sequence replayed in his head. She had just shot him down with her own energy beam, something functionally identical to his Concussive Blast, only hers was a terrifyingly deeper shade of blue.And he didn’t know how much he’d hurt her, but Mireille’s hit had hurt him like nothing else.

’Does she have similar powers to mine?’ he asked himself.

First there was the speed, and now this? She had to.

The system text flashed a prompt, answering his internal query with brutal honesty:

> Target: Mireille (Tier 2 Veteran Powerhouse)

> Confirmed Ability: Concussive Blast (Estimated Class: A)

> Warning: Target output vastly outscales Host Class F efficiency. Host lacks defensive matrix to neutralize high-tier kinetic payloads.

Zaeryn let out a worn out breath. He had not expected Mireille to possess Concussive Blast. And just because he had the baby version of the ability in his own toolkit didn’t mean he had any idea how to actually defend against a potential Class A nuclear alternative.

Pushing himself off the ground with an internal groan, Zaeryn slowly climbed back to his feet.

Mireille was waiting for him, her posture flawless and her hands resting loosely at her sides. She had one of those rare, arrogant looks in her eyes, a cool, subtle smirk that instantly annoyed Zaeryn. Of course he was annoyed; he was officially losing.

"You’re not going to give up yet?" Mireille asked, her smoky voice sounding less disappointed and more genuinely amused by his sheer willingness to take a hit.

She didn’t wait for his response. Mireille flicked her wrist, sending another sapphire-blue blast tearing through the dust directly toward his skull. Zaeryn triggered his speed, sidestepping violently, but it was a close call, the concussive heat whistled loudly right past his ear.

He could almost smell his hair.

’Damn! Her blast is much stronger than mine and I’m barely dodging it,’ he thought, his boots carving deep tracks into the soil. ’I don’t think if I went at her in a straight line using my speed I can get there in time.’

He needed a distraction to break her line of sight. Bringing his hands together, he wove a golden bow from thin air, pulling the string back to launch a rapid-fire volley of light arrows.

But Mireille didn’t blink; she simply blasted his projectiles out of mid-air with precise, consecutive snaps of her energy beams, completely vaporizing his constructs before immediately charging him at high velocity.

Zaeryn managed to drop into a desperate combat roll, dodging her leading strike just in time as her hand cut the air where his chest had been. He came up on one knee, his back to the massive spatial arena, realizing her pressure was becoming completely suffocating.

This was what he had wanted, wasn’t it?

All those taunts. All that arrogance. All those annoying little smiles he had thrown her way had not been for nothing. He had wanted Mireille to stop treating him like some fragile anomaly who needed to be handled carefully. He had wanted her irritated. Serious. Ruthless.

It was the only way for him to level up fast.

Still, as he stared up at her from one knee, sweat running cold down the side of his face, Zaeryn couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he had bitten off more than he could chew.

Mireille raised one hand. A sapphire-blue glare gathered in her palm.

Zaeryn’s pupils shrank.

"Oh, come on..."

She aimed at him and the blast tore toward him like a compressed thunderclap. Zaeryn threw himself sideways, boots scraping violently against the soil as he barely managed to get off one knee in time. The concussive beam carved past his shoulder and detonated behind him, sending a hot gust rolling across his back hard enough to rattle his bones.

He landed badly, one hand striking the ground to steady himself.

His shoulder burned. His lungs ached for air. His heartbeat pounded too fast, too loud, like a war drum trapped inside his ribs.

Mireille did not give him time to recover. She fired again.

Zaeryn clenched his jaw and wove a shield. A blinding light snapped into shape in front of him, cleaner and faster than it had ever come to him before, and this time it held.

The sapphire blast from Mireille slammed into it, and the impact still drove him backward, his boots carving trenches through the soil, the force rattling up his arms into his teeth. But the shield didn’t break. It took the hit and stayed standing, and so did he.

’Good, I’m improving.’

The moment the blast dispersed, Zaeryn pushed forward.

Mireille’s eyes narrowed slightly.

He moved through the fading smoke at full speed, his ribs screaming, every rational part of his mind telling him to put distance between them. He ignored all of it. Distance was death against her.

The ground burst beneath his feet as he closed the gap. Mireille shifted her stance to receive him, calm and composed as ever, too composed, too perfect, like she’d already decided the outcome and was simply allowing him to work through the steps.

That annoyed him more than the pain did.

He dropped his center of gravity at the last instant, dipping below her guard, and threw a sweeping kick at the side of her lead leg, not aiming for damage, just for balance.

Mireille blocked it, her own leg snapping down to intercept with brutal precision, and the impact cracked through the arena like two steel rods colliding. Pain shot up his leg. Before he could withdraw, her palm was already coming for his face, and though he twisted away from the worst of it, she still caught the side of his jaw and sent his head snapping sideways, his vision flashing white, his balance breaking.

She followed up with another move immediately. Of course she did. Her knee rose toward his stomach.

With no time left to dodge, he triggered Kinetic Rupture instead.

The force detonated from him in a violent ring, and this time Mireille wasn’t ready for it. It slammed into her at point-blank range and broke her rhythm outright, her boots dragging backward through the soil, her braid whipping over one shoulder, her eyes widening by the smallest, most satisfying fraction.

He saw it, and he didn’t waste it.

Still half-stunned, still fighting for breath, he planted his foot and drove forward, spinning his heel into her midsection with everything he had left. She folded just enough to prove she’d felt it, sliding back a step, one hand dropping instinctively toward her stomach. He used the opening, blurred past her left side, and vanished behind her in a burst of speed, reappearing with his fist already cocked.

She started to turn. Too slow.

His punch caught her square in the side, and her body jolted forward under it.

He’d actually hit her. Twice now. His confidence climbed, hot and reckless, and before she could fully recover he stayed on her, closing the distance in short, violent bursts instead of one long straight line, a shoulder feint, a half-step vanish, a low kick at her ankle, a palm strike toward her guard.

Mireille caught the palm strike on her forearm.

And then, before he could press again, she was gone.

Not fast. Gone, the way she had been vanishing throughout this spar.

His Hyper-Cognition slowed the moment down enough for him to actually study her instead of just reacting to her, and something about what he saw did not add up. When Mireille moved at her fastest, her feet were not touching the ground. Not through the whole motion, just in that narrow stretch where she moved quickest, but for that entire stretch her boots simply were not making contact with the floor at all.

She was not running across those distances. She was covering them some other way, weightless for the length of the burst, and only came back down once it ended.

He did not know what to make of it. It was not how his own Kinetic Acceleration worked, that much he was certain of, but he could not say what it actually was instead, only that it was real, and that it explained why his eyes kept finding empty floor exactly where he expected her to be.

He filed it away, the question still open, and had no time to think further on it before she was moving again.

He tried Sensory Jolt anyway, driving the spike straight at her the instant she reappeared in range.

Nothing happened.

Mireille’s face stayed perfectly still. "Nice try," she said, unimpressed and almost bored. "That’s not working on me twice."

He had not expected that. Sensory Jolt had worked on her once already, and some part of him had assumed once meant it always would. Whatever she had just done to shut it down, he did not understand it, and he did not have time to. He moved past it fast.

"Didn’t need it anyway," Zaeryn said, rolling his shoulder like the jolt had cost him nothing at all.

"Are you sure?" Something close to a smirk touched her mouth, there and gone.

He held her stare. "Stop holding back already. I know you’re not using everything you’ve got." He tipped his chin at her, breathing hard, refusing to let it show. "Where’s your aura? I haven’t felt the air get heavy once this whole fight."

Something shifted in Mireille’s expression, and it wasn’t annoyance this time. She rarely smiled, and even when she did it was brief, but this time it held. "It appears I underestimated you after all. You can take it." She declared, and her grin curved into something far more dangerous.

He could take it? Before Zaeryn could think about what that meant, the ground beneath him moved.

He barely registered the movement as a threat before the packed soil convulsed, and a fist of solid stone tore itself free of the floor and drove directly into his chest. The impact was nothing like her hands or her blasts had been. It was heavier, slower to arrive but somehow more total once it did, a single crushing force that seemed to swallow every part of his upper body at once and took the ground out from under him before he even understood he had been hit.

He was airborne before the pain caught up to him. For one strange, suspended moment there was nothing at all, no weight, no breath, no sound, just the false daylight of the ceiling spinning past somewhere above him. Then the ground came back to meet him, and it came back hard. He hit the packed earth and rolled, twice, three times, his shoulder and his hip and the side of his skull all taking their turn against the dirt before his body finally lost enough momentum to stop.

He came to rest on his back, staring straight up.

The pain arrived all at once, and it arrived everywhere. His chest felt as though something inside it had been pressed flat and then released too fast, an ache that pulsed outward with every half breath he tried to draw. His ribs screamed at him each time his lungs expanded even slightly, sharp enough that he gave up on breathing deeply and settled for shallow, useless gulps instead. His ears rang with a high, thin whine that made the whole chamber sound distant, as though he were hearing it through water. Underneath all of it, his heartbeat thudded loud and uneven, too fast, like it could not decide whether it was still keeping pace with him or simply reacting to the shock on its own.

He lay there a moment longer than he wanted to admit, staring up at the false daylight, his whole body refusing to move even though some distant part of his mind was already telling him that it needed to.

"What the hell was that?" Ignoring the intense pain, he managed, forcing himself onto his elbows.

Mireille wasn’t finished.

The ground beneath him lurched again, this time rising instead of striking, a slab of packed stone driving upward and launching him back into the air before he’d even gotten his knees under him. He hit the ground a second time, harder, and lay there a moment just trying to remember how breathing worked.

"You wanted me to stop holding back." Mireille’s voice reached him from somewhere above, unbothered, almost pleasant. "Lucky you."

He looked up in time to watch her leave the ground entirely, rising into the air without a running start, without anything beneath her at all, like gravity had simply stopped applying to her the moment she decided it should.

"I’m not holding back anymore," she said.