God of Systems: Maker of Heroes and Villains

Almost an hour later, Keith smiled at the team in front of him which was from the Art Church.

"Thank you for agreeing to spar." he said and Caleb hurriedly nodded beside him.

The leader of the team gave them a curt nod, "No worries. We hope that our newbies can also gain some experience with this."

Brandon patted Keith's back, "Go for it, and try to last long. That guy there has an ability similar to mine."

Keith silently walked into the ring and got into a fighting stance, crouching down slightly with one arm loosely outstretched and the other close to his face, the fingers facing outwards in a claw like way.

The guy in front of him made a constipated expression and two seconds later, a thin layer of yellow snake scales formed on top of his body. From just one glance, Keith couldn't make out how thick or strong these scales were, so he felt slightly nervous.

"Let's learn from each other." the snake man said and he walked forward, looking slightly overconfident with his long strides.

Once he covered enough distance, he sent his foot swinging towards Keith's face, which was grabbed instantly with the hand that had it's fingers pointed outwards like a claw.

"That was quite obvious." Keith commented as he used his other hand to grab the snakeman's leg, "And now, time to eat some sand!"

He pushed himself upwards and used all his strength to try and lift the snakeman. His plan was to lift him up and smash him down onto the sand, but the only thing he managed to do was make him lose his balance and fall sideways.

".... I wish I was stronger." he commented as he let go of the guy's leg.

Snakeman got up and this time, he faced Keith seriously, "Yeah, you're weak. But apparently I have a really bad fighting sense..."

Keith did not expect this, but he nodded, waiting for him to act, which he did. Punches and kicks flew forward, most of them hitting Keith effortlessly while the others missed by a small margin.

Snakeman was simply just punching randomly, but thanks to Keith's lack of fighting experience and weak physicality, he was put at a disadvantage.

After a few seconds of getting hit, he decided to give up on defence and went bonkers on punching snakeman. The instant he let down his guard, he got punched right in the face. Even though it hurt like shit, he sent a punch flying back at snakeman, making him stumble backwards.

Seeing his reaction, Keith finally remembered something important.

'Oh wait, let me reduce my pain sensitivity.' he thought and used his sensitivity control to reduce the amount of pain he could feel. It pushed it down to almost nothing, but stopped before hitting the "no pain" mark.

He needed to feel something.

The snake skin did not cover the guy's face and thanks to this, Keith was able to make him feel pain. He had the option to increase the guy's sensitivity to pain, but decided against it as his goal here was to learn and gain some fighting experience, not to kill or gravely injure someone.

Both of them punched and kicked each other, but everyone around the ring noticed the difference in Keith. He was barely reacting to snakeman's hits and always retaliated with his own strike.

The snake skin wasn't too tough. It wasn't like Brandon's stone skin, which was able to negate all direct unarmed attacks by regular humans. Kicks, punches and any kind of direct unarmed hits did not harm him in any way.

But the snake skin wasn't the same. It was like having an extremely thin chainmail on his body. It helped with reducing the damage received, but that was all it could do. It didn't give him any kind of physical boost, and nor did it give him any kind of regeneration.

Thanks to this, Keith's hits were effective even though their damage was slightly reduced. It was the same as a billion ants being able to kill an elephant. His punches were weak, but he could hit a lot more once he stopped feeling pain.

His regeneration helped him out, but it was not enough to keep up with the damage his body was taking at the moment.

As minutes passed, he felt more and more tired. And as he got more tired, he began to feel pain in various parts of his body.

Once this reached a certain point, he took a step backwards, "I give up."

"Heh." the snakeman said as he fell to his knee, but Keith on the other hand did a foolish thing. He brought his sensitivity back to normal, curious about how much damage he took, only for the sudden influx of signals to send his brain into an overdrive.

His eyeballs rolled backwards while his body went absolutely stiff as he fell backwards.

"Oi." Brandon said and he rushed over to Keith's side, shocked by the sudden change of events. Unfortunately, they had no healers in their team so all they could do was carry some water and splash his face.

Keith slowly opened his eyes, "Ugh... I went too far." he grumbled and tried to stand up, only to feel intense pain in his abdominal area. This was the same with most of his upper body. Luckily, the snakeman didn't hit Keith's legs too much so there wasn't too much pain there.

Even though his legs were relatively fine, was just unable to stand up thanks to his abs feeling like hard rocks. His muscles refused to move, so after a few tries, he just gave up and looked at his team with a pained expression.

"Looks like I won't be able to do much for the next few days... unless there's someone here with the ability to bring me back to normal."

Clara placed her hand on his chest with a serious look on her face, "...."

She stared at him for a few seconds and looked up at Amelia, communicating with her friend through her eyes alone.