I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 49: The Invisible Setter

Revan kicked both legs upward and snapped his body off the mud in a single explosive motion.

His boots hit the ground and he was already jumping backward, two meters of distance bought in under a second.

BRAKK!!

Something slammed into the exact spot where his back had been. Mud erupted. The shockwave hit his shins and nearly knocked him off his feet.

"Tch—"

Revan hissed through his teeth, sliding to a stop in the slurry. His sword was up. His eyes burned.

His mind was racing.

Autopilot wasn’t going to cut it anymore. To kill this thing, he actually had to use his brain.

Revan exhaled. A cloud of white vapor escaped his lips.

’It pulled back after the spin. That means three things. First: the cut actually hurt it. Second: it didn’t expect to get hit while I was escaping. Third, and this is the important one, it’s reassessing me right now. It thought I was a mouse. Now it’s not so sure.’

A pressure surged from his left.

Revan didn’t try to block it. He stepped into it. Letting his left shoulder dip forward as the strike grazed the back of his coat, his right hand came around in a wide arc aimed at whatever had just passed him.

The blade caught something. Barely. A nick, a brief shudder running up the hilt, the faintest resistance before the thing was gone again.

Another came from behind. Low. Aimed at his legs.

Revan hopped and the strike passed under his boots. Before he landed, he drove the pommel downward like a hammer.

Thud. It hit something. The impact jarred his elbow.

’What do I know about this thing?’ Revan swallowed hard, fighting to steady his ragged breathing. ’Come on, Revan, think. Do what you always do. You wouldn’t have survived this long if you didn’t use your head, remember?’

"Fuck—!"

His focus slipped for a fraction of a second. That was all it took.

Something slammed into his guard with enough force to lift him off his feet. His sword caught the blow. And of course, the impact sent him tumbling backward yet again, mud and rain and white fog spinning into a blur.

Mid-tumble, something came at him from the left. His arm moved on its own.

CLANG!

Sparks bursting in the fog like orange fireflies.

His body hadn’t finished the second rotation before another strike came from above. He threw the blade up.

The third came from the right, almost immediately, and he barely got the flat of the sword in front of it before the impact drove him sideways through the mud.

Revan scrambled to his knees, then to his feet.

He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, clearing the mud that was clogging his lips and nostrils.

’Every creature that has ever existed, built by God, built by man, built by whatever the hell made this thing, has a flaw. No exceptions. Perfection doesn’t exist. Not in this world. Not in any world. If it breathes, it has a weakness. If it thinks, it makes mistakes. And if it fights using a pattern, that pattern can be read.’

He steadied his breathing. Raised his sword.

And for the first time since this nightmare started, he didn’t wait for the next attack.

He watched.

The way a libero watches a setter’s hands before the ball is even in the air.

In volleyball, the entire game of deception lives in the setter’s body. Their eyes look left. Their shoulders angle left. Every signal they broadcast screams left, and then the ball flies right.

A rookie chases the body language and gets burned. Every time. Without fail. Because the rookie is watching the wrong thing.

You don’t watch the setter. You watch the ball.

More specifically, you watch the setter’s fingertips at the exact moment of contact. That’s the only part of the body that can’t lie. The shoulders can fake. The eyes can fake. Even the hips can fake. But the fingertips have to go where the ball goes, because physics doesn’t negotiate.

This creature was a setter.

The pressures from six directions, the voices, the heavy commits that looked lethal, the feints that felt real, all of it was the setter’s body language. Flashy. Loud. Designed to make Revan react to where the attack seemed to be heading.

But the real strike, the one that actually drew blood, the one that actually connected, always arrived somewhere else.

It came from the direction Revan had just left open. Every time he parried left, the real cut came from the right. Every time he dodged backward, the real hit arrived from the front. Every time he covered high, something sliced low.

It wasn’t attacking him from six random directions. It was reading his defensive reaction and delivering the payload to whatever gap he created by defending.

It was spiking to the open court.

And just like volleyball, the solution wasn’t to chase the fake. It was to stop reacting to the setup entirely and focus on the one thing that couldn’t lie.

’That fucking thing isn’t attacking me. It’s attacking where I’m not. Which means if I stop giving it a gap to exploit, if I stop reacting to its bullshit fakes and just stand still, it has to come to me.’

But that was only half of it.

In volleyball, a libero who could read the setter was useful. A libero who could read the setter and choose where to leave the court open was something else entirely.

Because if you knew the spike was always going to the gap, then the gap itself became the trap. You open a hole on purpose. You invite the spike. And right behind that hole, your hands are already waiting.

Revan shifted his weight. Dropped his left shoulder. Let his sword drift to the right side of his body, a lazy, exhausted-looking guard that left his entire left flank gaping wide open.

An invitation.

’Come on. I know you can see it. Big, juicy gap, right there. Left side. My broken ribs. Your favorite spot.’

**

Just as expected, the creature took the bait.

The air tore open on his left. A violent, shrieking rush barreling straight for his broken ribs. Right into the kill zone.

Revan didn’t close the gap. He widened it.

His left shoulder dropped further. His torso twisted right. To any observer, it would have looked like a man flinching away from a hit he couldn’t avoid, a broken fighter instinctively shielding his wounded side.

The creature accelerated. He felt the displacement thicken as it committed fully to the open court, throwing everything it had into the killing blow aimed at his exposed ribs.

And in the space between the creature committing and the strike landing, Revan reversed.

His left foot snapped backward. His torso uncoiled in the opposite direction, whipping his right arm directly across the path the creature had already committed to. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Not a slash aimed at where the creature was. A slash placed where the creature was going to be.

The blade caught it mid-charge.

CLANG!

The impact nearly tore the sword from his grip. The edge bit deep into dense, heavy mass. He didn’t even have to follow through. The creature’s sheer momentum did the tearing, dragging itself across the steel like a man sprinting chest-first into razor wire.

Finally, the scream of a living creature echoed from the fog, a high-pitched monster’s shriek.

Whether it was an artificial monster like the ones before, or a real monster from this cursed place.

The displacement exploded away from him. Violent. Panicked. The creature ripped itself off the blade and thrashed through the fog, its invisible mass tearing the white apart in every direction.

Wind hit Revan from three sides at once.

"Aw, did that hurt?" Revan rasped, his voice rough and mocking. "That’s what you get for pissing me off right out the gate. Come on, don’t be shy now... I want to hear that sweet voice of yours again."

Revan shifted his stance immediately. He didn’t bother resetting the same trap. A creature stupid enough to fall for the same bait twice wouldn’t have survived in the Dead Zone.

’This ugly bastard will definitely keep its distance now. It’s shocked, and probably feeling a little scared. A trait like this is just the natural instinct of a living creature. Make a careful note of that.’

Which meant the open gap was dead as a strategy.

If Revan kept wasting time trying to bait a creature that had already seen through the trick, his remaining aura would hit zero. And when the diversion ran dry, the only mana left to extract was the portion keeping his organs running, his life force.

He’d done it once before, against Vargos, and the price had nearly killed him.

After that, he’d be swinging with muscle alone. And muscle alone wasn’t going to cut anything on this creature.

’Two chances. Five if I’m lucky. Whatever the number, it doesn’t matter. Make them count.’