Mira regained control of her body again and shivers went up her spine. She had almost died, she never knew the diamond could take decisions by itself but it was what saved her. She gritted her teeth and activated High Mind to regain her focus; the Titan was flying towards her. She heard small voices around her but in the din of battle she paid it no mind.

He sent flying slashes toward her but she created a big portal to teleport the slashes away. The aura also had an effect on space as the slashes didn’t come out from the other portal it was connected to, it just disappeared and closed the portals.

By the time the portals closed Mira had swiftly flown behind the Emperor and sent a barrage of different projectiles toward his back. The Emperors arm turned backwards unnaturally and sent aura slashes to counter Mira’s attack but she had drawn closer to him during the time he was blocking.

With a blast of Shooting Star from behind her she swiftly closed the distance between her and the Emperor. She was about to extend a spike of diamond toward the Emperor when a roar accompanied by a wave of aura escaped his mouth. A soundless influence changed Mira from the foundation of her very being and she entered a trance. In the trance she was a boy named Abdul. Her mind began fighting the reality since she knew she wasn’t such a person but the trance persisted, ignoring her efforts.

His father was a beggar and he was a street child that did all sorts of menial labor to make money. He learnt cobbling and sewing and eventually earned enough to buy his own set of cobbling gear. At this time the trance broke and Abdul became Mira.

The Emperor was frozen still before Mira, electricity flowing through his body, partially burning it before his natural regeneration healed the burns up. The current came from Mira’s body through his hand that was holding her wrist; he had tried to hold Mira so that she wouldn’t be able to create distance but this was the unfortunate result. The diamond that covered her had even moved away to ensure he made connection with her body. The aura covering his body, which made time for whoever touched it reverse, had no effect on Mira for some reason.

Mira completed her attack and a spike of immaterial diamond extended and pierced through the aura that coated the Titan’s head with much effort from Mira. It came out the back and exploded with a large pulse of energy coming from Mira, turning the head, neck and the top part of the Titan’s body to a gory mess that splashed into the air.

Mira gritted her teeth in frustration, there was no kill notification from her IP; he wasn’t dead. Mira had expected it since she read the information of the Emperor’s race abilities. It had an 8th stat after Biomass called Time. From what she read he could do a bunch of crazy stuff with it, one of it being reviving from death. It was also used to improve the effects of his aura on time. The roar was the only aura manifestation that wasn’t from his race but instead an original skill he possessed. The scythe was one of the so called advanced aura manifestations as described in the information. It could only be made by combining the Time stat with his aura.

The body before her disappeared and another replaced it. The Emperor opened his mouth to roar but Mira had already teleported away from him. He smirked as he shut his mouth, he could now make her runaway with that gesture.

The battle resumed with Mira and the Titan flying around and exchanging ranged attacks with Mira gaining the advantage since her diamonds just changed their path to dodge the aura slashes while Mira moved away from them with a portal from her space ring and sometimes with her superior agility.

The ring was supposed to be able to teleport her directly without a portal but it couldn’t anymore. Mira assumed it was because it had broken but she couldn’t say for sure. She didn’t bother to try phasing through the aura attacks since that ability only worked on physical attacks.

The Emperor was getting annoyed. The diamonds always reached him and he had to dodge. Any slip up of his would be punished by a powerful explosion that cost him a part of a limb or another part of his body. Mira was draining a lot of energy to keep up the attacks deadly to him since piercing his aura covering required a lot of energy. The Emperor had made some mistakes so he knew that he couldn’t afford to sit back. He had tried to study the pattern of her attacks to see if he could adapt to them but he learnt painfully that there was no such thing with this person.

He thought ‘Two times. She has avoided my killing blow two times. Should I bet on the third?’ The Emperor still had hidden cards he hadn’t shown Mira, his previous attempts were all results of Mira not knowing what he was capable of. But his failures were a result of him not knowing what she was capable of.

A game of cards. He still had one card up his sleeve but he didn’t want to waste it since he knew a stalemate with her would be bad for him. He now knew that touching her was a no-no and that her diamond would act on its own either to save her or fuck him up. But what if she had other things she wasn’t showing? Would he just reveal his final card only to have that countered too?

On Mira’s side, things weren’t so peachy about the battle. The stalemate was in her favor since her attacks landed on the Titan sometimes but she didn’t know how to break out of it. She couldn’t get closer to inflict fatal wounds because of his roar, it had a range and she had to stay out of it.

She had to expend great amounts of energy to ensure each attack she sent his way would be enough to kill or seriously injure him if he slipped. The only solace was that he was getting worse and worse at dodging the attacks but Mira was sure it would take too long and too much energy to kill him again and she didn’t know if she would be fine to face him when he revived after that. Her ears were not helping much as they only helped her know that the attacks were done with killing intent; she couldn’t hear the future of the attacks at all for some reason.

The battle went on for about 2 hours before the Emperor chose to break the stalemate. He opened his mouth to roar again but this time the attack was guided by his aura and went in a straight line towards Mira in the form of an aura beam. Even with all the speed he gave it, it was too slow to hit Mira from such a distance. Mira opened a portal to displace herself from the aura accompanied sound waves that were emitting transversely from the travelling beam, simply dodging wouldn’t do. She sensed mischievous intent from the portal that she created behind her but it was too late.

A similar beam of aura came through the portal she just opened. The Emperor had been holding back on the speed of his energy. He had made Mira think he was slow at attacking but the stat that got to Transcendent for him was energy. His aura was way faster than his movements would have one think. He shot a second beam toward the other end of the portal where Mira would have come out from.

The beam hit Mira toward the path of the other beam and she was assaulted by the equivalent of two roar attacks. She tried to resist the trance that came from the roar but the only result was that the tiny voices she heard grew louder before she sunk into the trance.

This time she became Abdul in his 40s. His father had died early on and he had become a self sufficient adult. On one of his trips back home he had been maimed by a car accident which mangled his legs and rendered him lame. He spent his life savings on the hospital bill and was extremely glad that he didn’t go into debt because of it. Since he couldn’t easily move around anymore and he couldn’t afford a wheel chair, he couldn’t go to people’s houses to repair their shoes or bags. He didn’t have money to set up a shop on the streets but he had to start from somewhere.

He started with begging. He woke up every day and went to the corner of the street to ask people for money and charity. He was soon kicked out of his one room apartment since begging couldn’t pay its rent. He sold most of his stuff to get food since he was still in the process of finding a good spot for begging but he always kept his cobbling gear since he knew that once he opened up a shop he would be free from the life of a poor man.

He spent his days asking for money and saving it up to build his own shop and he spent his nights sleeping under bridges and in other odd places with similarly unfortunate people. He avoided the cheap brothels that most beggars when to for fulfilling their sexual desires and saved up. He kept his feeding expenditures to the minimum no matter how tired he was. Day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day. For some reason Mira’s subconscious didn’t fight the trance this time.

…

While Mira was in the trance her diamond didn’t blast her away from the Titan. The reason was unknown but the Titan roaring to keep her in the trance as he closed the distance. He made good progress and within the first second, he was within striking range. He lifted his scythe with both arms in preparation for a vertical slash to split her in twain from head down when a bolt of white lightning fell from the sky and hit his head.