The Oracle Paths

"No nothing. Just a sudden urge to give you a taste of your own medicine." Jake smiled ominously. "You've wasted a lot of Aether and your mind is exhausted from all those big techniques. Isn't this a great opportunity for me?"

Elduin and Bhammod obviously couldn't understand what event Jake was referring to. After all, hadn't he just saved her? What would be the point of going after her now? This Guilty didn't seem like the perverted type, so what did he really want.

Ruby, by contrast, reacted in a very different way. She squinted warily, then pulled out her sniper, which she reflexively aimed at Jake.

"Don't move or I'll shoot." She declared slowly.

"Go ahead, please." Jake sneered as he rolled his eyes and spread his arms as if inviting her to take aim at his heart.

Ruby suddenly felt ridiculous and the pressure of her finger on the trigger slackened imperceptibly. The next second, a violent uppercut struck her in the solar plexus, jarring her feet off the ground, but Jake held her back with his other arm to keep her from flying off into orbit.

"Cough! Cough!" Ruby, felt her precious sniper being snatched from her hands and before she could protest, a second uppercut rocked her on the chin, rattling her brain all over the place.

Mercilessly, Jake followed up with another hundred uppercuts, this time with the support of his telekinesis and precise Aether control. Hold after hold, he then dislocated each joint, first the legs, then the arms with surgical precision. Elduin and Bhammod watched the scene with fear-stricken faces.

Ironically, Ruby didn't really try to fight back. If she wanted to, she could still stand up and fight, but she knew it would be an uphill battle that would probably cost her all the Aether she had left. But somewhere deep down she knew she deserved it. She just stared at him with a bright silver gleam in her eyes.

After a moment, Jake stopped beating her and inspected his handiwork with a satisfied look. Because Ruby had been wearing ordinary native clothes before she reverted to her current appearance, those clothes had ripped and she was practically naked. If she hadn't covered her body in silver chitin, it would have been a rather lewd sight.

"Don't give me that look." He justified himself cheerfully as he saw her glaring daggers at him, "The day you stole my Soul Stones leaving me for dead I was in a much worse state than you are right now. With your Vitality, you can recover from those injuries in a few hours if you really try. As for your arms and legs... As a half Digestor you can change their configuration to your liking."

'So he knows.' Ruby realized, her heart sinking in her chest though she didn't understand why.

"I'm not complaining." She snorted then. The pain was already gone. "You've already stolen something precious from me. Aren't you satisfied?"

"This?" Jake said as he held up her sniper. Then he let out a chilling laugh. "I'm far from satisfied. My motto is to return ten times every blow I take. I take no pleasure in beating a woman, but I can certainly rob you a bit more."

Ruby scoffed defiantly.

"So what? You're going to steal my clothes? Not that I have much left. Everything else is in my Oracle Device."

"Bingo!" Jake winked at her, casting an insistent gaze at her wrist.

A glimmer of understanding suddenly struck the young woman.

"Are you trying to steal my liquid alloy?"

She had almost 8 tons of it from slaughtering other Players, and 6 were in the Space Storage of her bracelet. The rest was well and truly distributed throughout her body.

"What makes you think that's my intention?" Jake watched her curiously, tilting his head as if he were dealing with an idiot. "As tempting as stealing your alloy liquid is, there's something else far more useful I can steal from a treacherous backstabber like you."

Ruby's eyes widened abruptly as she realized his true intent. She looked vulnerable and helpless and suddenly jumped to her feet, her bones snapping back into place with bloodcurdling sounds.

Her pupils flashed an intense bluish radiance and Jake felt himself nod off like Laudar earlier. Unlike the Baron, his Spirit Body was considerably lower in level, but unlike the Baron, thanks to his Myrtharian Bloodline lvl 3, his Soul and Spirit Body were 12 times more powerful than those of another Evolver of the same level.

And most importantly, he was equipped to deal with this type of threat. With a gun, even a weakling could defeat the world champion weightlifter if the latter fought barehanded.

He activated Bloodline Ignition in response, which could be compared to an ultimate shot of adrenaline and testosterone, and then activated the Soul Spells he had learned from Xion's Soul Stone to resist this influence.

The Dream Glyph was immediately shattered and reality reappeared before him. The problem was that Ruby had crossed the entire distance between them in that brief moment and she rammed him headfirst into a tight embrace.

With their different stats and sizes, Jake was obviously stronger. Planting his back leg in the ground, he slid only a few feet before stabilizing, but getting out of Ruby's embrace wasn't as easy.

Her arms had been turned into harpoons and she had rooted them deep into his flesh. Jake glared at her indifferently and decisively chose to rip her arms off to get free.

Yet, at the very moment the intention crossed his mind, Jake felt a torrent of hellish heat surge from every cell in his body. With a snap of his fingers, his body temperature, already much higher than normal, went from several hundred degrees Celsius to more than a thousand, and it was still rising.

Concomitantly, he saw while staring down an icy and undefinable substance being furiously drained from his body, then being voraciously absorbed by Ruby. The young woman's body became more and more glacial and he felt the strength of her embrace increasing rapidly.

'She steals my cold?' Jake wondered not hiding his perplexity.

He wasn't that upset after watching her fight against Laudar, but it was different to experience it first hand.

Jake's powers, incredible as they were, could still be explained rationally. Creating heat required energy. As the particles gained energy, they became more and more agitated, increasing their collision frequency until they eventually produced light, or radioactivity. When an object had no energy at all, it was absolute zero.

By this logic, the notion of cold energy should simply not exist.

In comparison, Ruby's powers were an enigma. He had always believed that the Throsgenians were the counterparts of the Kintharians. If the Kintharians lived on Mercury, the Throsgenians lived on Pluto. His reasoning was just that simple.

Well, apparently it was more complicated than that. Ruby was able to flip the physics on its head by deriving energy from something that had none. By stealing this "negative energy" from him, which shouldn't exist, the brake preventing his temperature from skyrocketing had been removed and as she stole his cold, his body became hotter and hotter at an alarming rate.

"What a shame." Jake said as he stroked the young woman's silver hair with a feigned display of pity. "I am your nemesis."

Ruby could also sense that something was wrong. The more she stole his cold, the stronger she became and the hotter his body became. Laudar had almost died because of it, but instead of getting weaker, why did Jake's aura seem to be getting more and more terrifying to her.

At some point, Ruby gritted her teeth as she roared,

"I refuse to believe that your body doesn't have a limit. If your body gets too hot, you'll end up burning like everyone else."

"You're right." Jake calmly acknowledged, his body blinding like a sun. "But, can you handle all that cold without freezing? Besides, the hotter my body is, the harder it is for you to get cold out of it, right?"

Ruby crumpled in fright at these foreboding words. If one was doped by cold and the other by heat, then the final victory would be decided by whoever had the better Constitution and Vitality.

As a Digestor, her Vitality had always been her strong point, but just by looking at this man she could feel that his physique was outperforming hers in every way and this scorching heat had no effect on him. Worse, blisters were beginning to form on her skin from the increasing radiation he was emitting.

On the other hand, Ruby had to convert this cold into energy for her body. Even if she wanted to, she couldn't cool herself beyond absolute zero. Even if she could, it would mean cryogenically freezing herself to death. Throsgenians were adapted to the cold, but they were still flesh and blood beings first and foremost.

This also posed another issue. Namely, the limitation of the environment. To stimulate his Bloodline, Jake could easily increase the temperature of his surroundings, or find an exploitable heat source like a campfire or oven. He even had his Aether Sun Core just in case.

Ruby, on the other hand, had more limited options. She was already training in liquid nitrogen, but it was hard to find colder stuff naturally, and all the Ordeals took place on worlds with warmer temperatures. To harvest cold, she had to actively steal it from her environment and that took extra effort. An item like an Aether Cold Sun Core was obviously much more complicated to obtain.

The direct consequence of this inconvenience was that her Myrghenian Bloodline had only gone up to lvl 3 two months ago while her Body Stats didn't even come close.

So, without any suspense, two minutes later, a half-frozen Ruby collapsed helplessly into the arms of a supernova-like Jake.