After his seventeenth match, Luo Chen's codename began circulating in the dark corners of Slaughter City.
Lock. The name first appeared on the stone wall of the Hell Slaughter Arena's entrance passage, scratched in faintly, as if someone had written it absentmindedly. But after each match, someone added another stroke. After the eighteenth match, then the nineteenth, then the twentieth. The marks grew deeper, the strokes thicker.
Luo Chen didn't care. He used the same approach in every match: first, he locked onto his opponent with a pale white light, then sent out his Soul Beasts to finish the job. The one he used most often was the Blazing Wolf.
He never killed anyone with his own hands. His clothes were always clean. The spectators began to notice this detail, and some started calling him "the monster who didn't kill." Not because he truly didn't kill, but because he never did it himself.
In his twenty-first match, Luo Chen faced a tough opponent.
The man was called Ke Ke. He had won forty-three matches in the Hell Slaughter Arena and was one of the city's longest-standing competitors.
His Martial Soul was a pair of Shadow Daggers. He couldn't use Soul Skills, but the daggers were coated in poison. The rules allowed it—Soul Skills were forbidden, but poison was fair game.
When the opening bell rang, Ke Ke didn't charge. He circled the edge of the arena, daggers in hand, eyes fixed on Luo Chen's hands. He had studied Luo Chen's matches and knew the pale white light shot from his palm. If he watched Luo Chen's hands, he could dodge in advance. Luo Chen extended a hand, and Ke Ke immediately rolled to the left, avoiding the light.
But Luo Chen's method of locking onto him had nothing to do