XANXUS slowly rose from the ground.
Although his expression was calm, he was already seething with rage.
He gathered the Flame of Wrath in his palm.
This time, he was no longer treating his fight with the young girl as a game. He actually wanted to kill her.
He picked up his pistols, which lay quietly on the ground, and coated them with the Flame of Wrath and the disintegrating power of Storm Flame.
Asuna was not to be outdone. She likewise wreathed her rapier in Dying Will Flames.
But this time, something was slightly different.
The flames wrapped around her rapier carried a faint tinge of blue.
The two immediately charged forward again and clashed.
XANXUS raised his two Beretta pistols again and fired wildly at Asuna.
To limit his long-range shooting, Asuna closed in on him, choosing to fight him at close quarters.
That way, XANXUS could not take advantage of his pistols.
But XANXUS was no pushover. His close-combat skills were equally impressive, and he used his two steel pistols to repeatedly block Asuna's twenty-seven-hit chain of rapier thrusts, which blurred into afterimages.
Yet as the fight continued, XANXUS's movements grew slower and slower, gradually falling behind Asuna's speed.
At first, Asuna's blade only caught the edges of his clothes.
Initially, XANXUS thought nothing of it, but little by little, he realized that he could no longer quite keep up with Asuna's movements.
More precisely, he felt that he should have been able to keep up, but his body had slowed down and could not follow.
This was precisely the Rain Flame's ability: "Tranquility."
The mechanism behind the Rain Flame's "Tranquility."
Rather than directly slowing time or physical speed, it interfered with the enemy's neural responses and coordination, disrupting the rhythm of their attacks and delaying their