Card Apprentice Daily Log

Date- 4 April 2321

Time- 01:48

Location- Southern Region, Blossom District, Sun blossom city, Circle’s Branch Headquarters

*Slash* *Splurt*

A deformed humanoid arm flew through the air as blood spurted into the surroundings. This was the result of my blood-rule-powered saber cutting one of Mike’s extra arms. During the last half hour, this was not the first time I had managed to injure Mike but he would immediately heal himself by making use of some monster traits. I was frequently able to land blows on Mike not because I suddenly become an expert in the six-armed sword fighting style instead Mike had grown careless as a result he was prone to making a lot of mistakes that he didn’t before.

I had this nagging feeling that Mike was not taking this fight seriously because the Mike I had fought at the start would not make such obvious mistakes. The more I fought with Mike the more I was convinced that either Mike did not consider me a threat or this was not Mike I was fighting with. Thinking of this possibility I scanned the Mike I was fighting using my soul pupils and everything came back normal. But considering my Soul pupil’s history with Mike’s myriad transformation body, I did not know if I could entirely trust the results given by them.

With my Soul pupils losing their credibility against Mike I had to go old school and rely on my instincts. And my instincts screamed that something was wrong with the Mike I was fighting. So I choose to go with my instincts and decided to stay alert as I continue to engage in a fight with Mike.

Was the Mike I was fighting with a fake one, a clone, or a duplicate maybe? Of course, if they were then they would have been modified by Mike’s ability that allowed him to morph his victim to take any form he wants. With help of Mike’s origin card, it would not be a surprise that his duplicates or clones were able to cheat the scrutiny of my soul pupils and pass as an original.

With the careless and reckless fighting style displayed by the Mike that I was fighting, I was pretty sure that this one was a fake, meant to keep me busy, while the original tried to ambush me. That sounded pausable, but why has he not tried to ambush me so far? Unless he had other plans, for example, he could be escaping.

Thinking of this I immediately had my two extra heads scan the surroundings for any object or beings with a variation in their soul pathway vibration. While they did that I fended off Mike’s reckless attacks.

The thought that Mike could possibly be escaping ticked me off because I was dead set on using my blood fate plunder rune on him as I had taken interest in his origin card. But I had a feeling that Mike was not one of those that would run with his tail in face of adversity. So if he was not ambushing me or planning to escape what was he up to sending a fake to keep me engaged? Asking this question to self a person came to my mind, Ji Feng. Earlier Mike seemed to be more interested in capturing Ji Feng than hunting me.

While using the fake to keep me engaged Mike had three courses of action to choose from,

First was the obvious one, to ambush me when I am least expecting.

The second was to make a run for it.

The third was to capture Ji Feng who appeared to be the main culprit behind my successful attack on the Circle’s sun blossom branch headquarters.

I could see why Mike would prioritize going after Ji Feng, he felt that if Ji Feng had not helped us with the desolate punisher array formation my army and I would never have been able to break into the circle’s headquarter’s defense system or slaughter all most all of its members. Not to mention Ji Feng was able to undo his origin card’s ability. Most importantly, Mike seemed to believe that Ji Feng was just a puppet of another force that was targeting their circle, I gather this when he kept constantly asking Ji Feng whose orders he was following.

As continued to contemplate while defending against fake Mike’s attack, Hive AI had completed scanning the surroundings as per my instruction and managed to find an object with a variation in its soul pathway vibration, a pebble, a rolling pebble to be exact.

Seeing the actions of the rolling pebble I sighed in relief as it was not trying to escape but tracing Ji Feng’s tracks while maintaining a certain distance. The pebble seemed to be cautious in approaching Ji Feng. Seeing how Ji Feng was able to find his pebble body last time, it was not a surprise that Mike would be cautious while approaching him in that form once again.

This time I did not have my slave conscious controlling Ji Feng to try and grab the pebble-bodied Mike but asked it to continue to act as if we had not seen through his plan. This was why I did not take the numerous opportunity I got to kill the fake Mike and instead wounded it time and again.

Mike with his transformation ability was a slippery bastard, trying to capture him would had proved to be very difficult therefore I planned to wait for him to come to us. By that I mean to use Ji Feng as the bait and I would be the fisherman, waiting for Mike to take the bait. Considering how Mike was obsessed with capturing Ji Feng, I think Ji Feng made the perfect bait.

Now that the stage was set, all I had to do was wait patiently for Mike to make his move. This time no mistakes were allowed as I realized that if Mike wanted to escape thanks to his versatile ability I could not stop him.