The Jester of Apocalypse
Chapter 5: Overwhelm (1)

Realistically speaking, it couldn’t have been more than fifteen hours since Neave had started fighting the demon. However, it felt like an eternity. Especially in contrast to the utter boredom he had experienced for heavens knew how long.

He had looped well over several hundred times by now. Fighting the demon barehanded seemed to be nearly impossible.

The main problem was that Neave was just a child. Trying to fist-fight an adult-sized demon, not to mention an adult-sized demon with supernatural strength, was just… Well, impossible, outright.

At first, Neave would rush at the demon and try to punch it. That was a failure that resulted in countless restarts. The main reason why was that Neave had virtually no reach. Or weight. Or physical strength. Or skill.

He didn’t have anything at all going for him whatsoever.

While his absolute disadvantage was the main contributing factor to his failure to fight the demon, his stubbornness was the main reason he was making no progress.

Neave was horrible at fighting, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know how to fight. He knew the theory. Even if one ignored that he grew up in a martial arts sect, he had read many texts that covered the basics of hand-to-hand combat, even in texts that weren’t related to fighting.

But some stubborn part of him refused to borrow from that pool of wisdom, so he charged at the demon, trying to figure everything out entirely on his own. When he eventually gave up on that, after over a hundred failed attempts, he conceded that striking the demon wasn’t wholly necessary.

He wouldn’t be killing it any time soon, so why even bother striking it in the first place?

So Neave decided to dodge for a while rather than focus on delivering the one-punch killing blow. This, too, ended in many restarts,

But he was also seeing progress.

It wasn’t even that many attempts later that his survival time went from seconds to minutes.

Eventually, after dying enough times, those minutes turned into hours.

The demon hit him only when he got too tired to think and lost concentration. The demon wasn’t as clumsy as Neave initially thought it was. Sure, its movements were burdensome and unwieldy, but they weren’t random.

Everything about the demon’s movements looked like it was almost intentionally giving away what it was trying to do. From how it pulled its arms back, to how its torso rotated, to how it solidified its footing, all of it was the same when the demon made a specific attack. The attacks were fast, but if Neave knew what it was trying to do ahead of time, dodging the attacks became straightforward.

The problem was counterattacking. Even if the demon overextended with a punch or swing and Neave found an opening, he couldn’t injure the demon without a weapon. He was starting to think his punches may hurt him more than the demon. He tried kicking too, but that wasn’t much better.

Neave didn’t care that killing the demon seemed off the table for now. There were a few things he was trying to achieve with barehanded fighting. The first thing he wanted to get good at was dodging. Yes, he could avoid the demon's attacks, but that didn’t mean he was good at doing it.

Full-body throws to the side or jumping back avoided the demon's wild swings, but that was far from optimal. He planned to learn how to dodge optimally, or at least well enough to move on to the second step of his plans.

***

Swing.

Dodge.

Thrust.

Dodge.

Swing.

Dodge

Neave’s vision was getting blurry. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, but he could swear that the demon's movements were getting slower. This was the longest he’d ever survived. It had been quite a while because of his thirst and sheer physical exhaustion. Suddenly, his vision blurred, and he dropped to the ground, losing consciousness.

Restart.

He was back at the beginning. However, he wasn’t sad or disappointed.

He was thrilled.

The absolute joy that filled him at this moment was the best feeling he’d experienced since he stepped foot into this hellscape.

I fucking did it!

He fought the demon until the exhaustion finished him off. Neave had bravely fought and had not been hit even once until the end. Sure, his opponent probably finished him off after losing consciousness, but that was beside the point.

He had not been struck for as long as he was awake, no matter his exhaustion. He hadn’t been grazed even once. Not one of the myriad attacks the demon had thrown at him had landed, and Neave didn’t even move out of the demon's range of attack a single time.

Restart.

That one didn’t count. He wasn’t paying attention. He had achieved step one of his plans and was about to move on to step two. He had planned to fight the demon until exhaustion rather than the demon finished him off, but he noticed something peculiar. He was confident that the demon did truly slow down as the fight went on. So Neave added step one point five to his plan. It wasn’t even a step, really. It was more of an experiment.

Neave wanted to see just how much he could exhaust the demon. If it slowed down toward the end, that must mean it also had limited energy reserves, and Neave wouldn’t glance over that potentially crucial detail. So he took a deep breath while waiting for the demon to approach him, and then…

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