Heir Of Azathoth : EXtra's Limitess EvOlution-Chapter 31: Mechanics Of The Hit & Hurt Box

The church was thrown into motion almost immediately.

People were displaced from their usual duties, corridors flooded, halls that should have remained quiet suddenly swarmed.

The andestine structure itself, which looked less like something constructed and more like it had been carved whole out of a single gargantuan block, now felt alive with movement.

Voices echoed. Footsteps overlapped.

Authority shifted hands too quickly to track.

If I had to estimate, there were nearly a thousand people present.

Not an exaggeration. And even then, they barely made a dent in the sheer scale of the church estate.

Imagine A thousand bodies, swallowed by stone.

Naturally, no one took my words at face value.

They couldn’t afford to.

Confirmation followed.

A rank-verifying trial which was nothing dramatic on the surface, no grand spectacle. I was escorted into a secluded chamber, one that felt wrong the moment I stepped inside. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

The air was heavy, dense with something sinister, as if the room itself resented being used for such a purpose.

I stayed there and time passed, ultimately that was all.

And that was enough.

The truth was confirmed, quietly passed upward to people I did not meet, and names I did not hear.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the process itself, but something else entirely.

The author of Path to Unmentioned never bothered to give a clear or logical explanation for any of this, no structure and logical explaination.

Just wild concepts layered with life-threatening implications, despite logic supposedly being his entire identity.

I found that... irritating.

However, it was only after that tiresome procedure that I was finally granted space for myself, along with the freedom to associate only with people I deemed necessary.

I would have preferred a one-on-one conversation with the higher ranks, if only to cut through the layers of formality and implication, but none of them were actually present within the establishment.

What I was left with instead were crash-battles of conversation, fragments of authority passed down through intermediaries who clearly didn’t enjoy being the messengers.

At the very least, I had them confirm it.

Twice.

That the news would remain sealed within the church, that it would not spill beyond its walls, would not dare to find its way into the mouths of outsiders.

"...What a relief."

The words left my mouth plainly. Flat, even.

I had intended them to carry satisfaction, maybe a hint of excitement, but they came out stripped of both, as if my body hadn’t quite caught up to the emotion yet.

I triggered my skill once again.

My gaze settled first on the sword, then shifted to the dummy standing patiently ahead.

Whatever my ability was, it was far from simple.

At least, that much had become clear in the short while since its awakening.

The more I used it, the more it resisted being neatly defined, slipping past assumptions I hadn’t even realized I was making.

That was why I had asked for an empty room.

Not for secrecy or comfort.

Focus.

If I let my surroundings stay crowded, I wouldn’t understand a thing.

Countless outlines shimmering through my vision would only blur together, like a horde of ants spilling over one another.

Noise without meaning. I needed something isolated. Something cooperative in its stillness.

And what else fit better than a ragdoll, and a hall to beat the hell out of it.

I exhaled slowly, letting the room settle into silence, and picked up the sword.

Like from the event before, I could see two outlines bordering it, the red one hugging the frame closely, the blue one surrounding it as a second layer.

Compared to the dummy itself, the blue outline was noticeably thicker, while the red was simultaneously thinner, almost fragile in how tightly it clung.

I took the sword in hand, my gaze piercing straight through the ragdoll rather than resting on its surface.

I traced the outlines instead.

Noted how both layers remained almost evenly distributed along its form.

Then I swung.

A wide arc, controlled, and restrained.

The tip of the sword cut cleanly through empty air and dug into the blue outline.

Almost pierced it. Almost, but halfway through, it stopped.

It halted without resistance, without sound, not even grazing the red layer beneath it.

I hadn’t even put much force into the swing.

I withdrew the sword and examined the section I had struck.

There was nothing to see.

No dent. No scratch.

The surface there was smoother than the rest, untouched, as if nothing had ever happened at all.

"Hmm... as expected."

The words slipped out quietly as my attention returned to the outlines themselves.

It wasn’t enough to reach the outer layer.

It never was.

"It really requires piercing the blue outline and touching the red," I muttered, then corrected myself, the thought settling into place. "Or rather... the hurtbox."

The realization didn’t excite me. It grounded me.

For convenience, and likely because that was what they were meant to be called in the first place, I assigned names to them without ceremony. The blue outline, the hitbox.

The red one beneath it, the hurtbox.

Names that fit their roles cleanly, without excess.

I tightened my grip on the sword.

Then I swung the sword in a wide arc once again, this time with much more strength than before.

Enough to force the blade through the blue outline, to finally pierce past it, and sift into the red beneath.

The resistance was different.

The hitbox gave way first, cleanly, almost mechanically.

But the hurtbox did not end there. It stretched deeper into the body, pulling along with the blade, as if the concept of damage itself demanded follow-through rather than surface contact.

The sword plunged further in than it had any right to, the red outline bending inward, yielding where the blue one had already been left behind.

I retrieved the blade and looked at the point of impact.

This time, there was something there.

A slash ran across the ragdoll, clear and undeniable.

From one end to the other.

Deeper than before, roughly the width of a finger, the metal split unevenly instead of remaining smooth, as if the object itself now acknowledged having been struck.

So, it was about reaching that layer.