"If you doubt me, then ask yourself why I chose to impersonate you, not the other two. I’ll tell you now that I made my decision of who to impersonate based on who I am capable of killing without breaking a sweat."
He seemed full of confidence, but she wasn’t willing to back down either. She smiled at him and said, "I guess I still need to convince you. I don’t mind doing that."
The deceiver didn’t say anything anymore. He simply sneered as he activated the Bewildering Darkness Metac and the Sea of Darkness Metac.
These two Metacs caused a cloud of darkness to erupt around him with a speed similar to the speed of the explosion that took place earlier. The speed of expansion of the cloud of darkness was so fast that it caught the forger and submerged her in the blink of an eye.
Once submerged in the cloud of darkness, her world became a world of darkness. Not only was she robbed of her senses, but the cloud of darkness also penetrated her mind to confuse her.
Even her mental world was quickly saturated and occluded by the cloud of darkness. This was because the cloud of darkness was mainly a mental attack whose effect quickly caused vertigo.
The cloud of darkness also caused her to lose her sense of gravity. All in all, she became unable to discern her right from her left. And if this effect were to be allowed to continue for a long time, she would lose her sense of self and might sustain permanent mental damage.
Now that his move had worked, she had become a sitting duck for him. No matter how powerful she is, she can only be meat on the chopping block for him.
This made him grin and say to her, "You have overestimated yourself. You might be strong physically and capable of highly destructive feats, but of what use is your power if you can’t use it or hit anyone?"
This is why he was so confident about killing her. It is because she is a forger who can’t resist mental attacks. So he never took her seriously despite her great physical prowess.
But as it turned out, she, too, had her source of confidence in being able to threaten him. Her source of confidence also happened to be something that she didn’t need to use her eyes or other senses to make full use of.
She gave an order to the black hammer in her hand, and it turned from black to white. The change wasn’t just a switch in color. It was also a switch in essence.
The solid black hammer made of tough metal transformed into a white phantom-like hammer made of white smoke. It looked worn and less sturdy than it usually looked, but this was precisely her source of confidence.
When the deceiver saw this, his eyes widened in shock, and he said, "A mutation! This can’t be good."
As soon as he saw the white phantom hammer, his first instinct was to step back, and he followed that instinct without questioning it. He quickly stepped back because he had never seen or heard something like this.
The Craftman’s Hammer should not look like this. He should know this because he used to impersonate the hammer and had studied it extensively.
So this had to be a mutation whose abilities he didn’t know anything about. This is why he didn’t stop taking precautions even after stepping back. He began using other Metacs to protect himself from unexpected trouble.
The first Metac he used was the Ropes of Darkness Metac. He used this to convert the cloud of darkness into ropes to bind her and restrict her movements. That way, no matter how dangerous she is now, it was unlikely that she would be able to do anything to him if she couldn’t move.
In order to ensure that her movement was restricted, he also used the Energy Solidification Metac. This caused the cloud of darkness to turn into solid rock. So she became trapped in a rock.
Then he used the Shadow Walk Metac to move away from her through the rock. While doing this, he also activated the Darkness Clone Metac to create five copies of himself, which he scattered in every direction.
His reaction was quick, and he had begun to do all of these as soon as he stepped back from her. He was not willing to take any chances against this unknown danger at all.
As he was doing this, the white phantom hammer left her hand and flew straight towards him. The hammer was a phantom, so it passed through the ropes and the solid rock trapping it without any trouble.
Fortunately, he had created fake copies of himself, and these copies were too good to tell them apart from him. So the hammer was confused and didn’t know who to target.
But the hammer still had a trick up its sleeve. Since it didn’t know who to target, it split into six hammers, which then picked one copy to go after.
The face of the deceiver changed when he saw the hammer pass through all of the obstacles he had placed in its path unhindered and target him without the active control of the forger. Then, when he saw the hammer split into many pieces, he knew he was in trouble.
So he quickly activated his Life Ability and turned into a tree. He also stopped moving to make his act convincing.
As a tree, he saw the white phantom hammers pierce the bodies of his clones and sink into them. There was no way to resist the white hammers, just like the ropes of darkness and the solidified darkness couldn’t stop the hammer.
Then he saw them fracture from the inside out. It was as if something had exploded within them.
All five of his clones met the same fate. They ruptured and dispersed forcefully.