I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1366: New Entrants [part 2]

Revant seemed to be enjoying himself watching Jeci, but his sinister grin spread even wider when he turned his head over to Lynus.

Unlike Jeci, Lynus was a more ferocious force on the battlefield, carrying a wrath that would probably make the soldiers think ”Hey, did I ever offend you, or something?” When he dealt with a single soldier, he dealt with them more than necessary. His fighting style was crude and disastrous, all bludgeoning force and overkill. The once demure and elegant Lynus who had been stolen from his home was long gone.

All that remained of him now was a moving mass of anger and wrath. Lynus was angry at everything. He was angry at the way the earth smelled, angry at the way the soldiers looked, angry at how they wielded their weapons and the way they shouted when they charged at him. He was angry at the dirt beneath his feet and the wind that blew against his face. The kind of anger that had nothing to do with the enemy in front of him and everything to do with a world that had taken too much.

And when they came like that, he welcomed them with a hurricane of strikes. He twirled like the wind and blades flung in every direction, cutting down anything within arm’s reach and beyond it. Seeing him this vicious on the battlefield made Revant reminisce about his younger days. After all, there had been a time when he too was disgusted by the whole world, when he was depressed and hated everyone and everything. He remembered standing over a field not unlike this one, cutting down men whose faces he never bothered to look at, not because he had a reason to kill them but because they were there and he needed something to break.

Make no mistake, he still did. Now, though, he had found purpose and priorities.

Revant stared down at him for a while and shook his head slightly.

’He will learn with time...’

Both of them had talent. Jeci’s was insidiously devastating, and the dark enigma they had received as a Heritage Item only added to their ferocity. Lynus possessed it too, but he had vehemently refused to rely on it, even right to Revant’s face. Jeci, at least, knew she had no choice but to accept the power it offered. She needed everything she could get.

Lynus, though? That guy was arrogant. And seeing how he was performing despite that arrogance, Revant could almost understand it.

His talent worked like a liquid that solidified on contact, something with properties resembling mercury, though the young man himself insisted it wasn’t. According to Lynus, the material was poisonous to the body. He had refrained from using it excessively because he valued nonsensical codes like honor and integrity. Apparently, killing an enemy with poison was beneath him.

All Revant could do hearing him talk like that was shake his head.

Those codes were the main reason for Lynus’s own stagnation. Revant had long since deemed such things useless. Integrity and honor only mattered in a world that had been carved out of integrity and honor in the first place. The world they existed in now ran on the backs of those who had betrayed their own mothers and used them to gain a higher level of power. It was a facade, and that facade had bled into its inhabitants.

Lynus trying to be different was commendable, but it was going to become a problem. They were eventually going to fight people who treated concepts like honor as nothing more than exploitable weaknesses. At his current level of restriction, Lynus was already fearsome enough. But enough for now was not enough for what was coming.

Revant shook his head at the young arrogant man once again. This was why he preferred Jeci. Even though Lynus was stronger by a considerable margin, Jeci had far more ferocious potential. She wasn’t even a Sage and she was already fighting at speeds comparable to theirs. More importantly, when power was offered to her, she took it. No hesitation, no philosophy, no deliberation about whether the source was clean enough for her conscience. She simply consumed what was given and turned it into carnage. That was the kind of instinct that survived.

Lynus carved his way through the battlefield, silvery wings of metal splayed behind his back, his sword slicing across the ranks of soldiers as he whizzed through them. Blood trailed through the air in his wake. His strikes were too fast to follow most of the time, and when he surged forward, there was no shield strong enough to stop his advance.

He crushed the shield in front of him with his foot alone. The soldier must have felt every bone in his arms shatter from that single impact. The shield itself, as if not registering the damage fast enough, held its shape for a moment. The soldier’s eyes went wide above the rim, his mouth open around a scream that hadn’t arrived yet. Then the shield broke apart into large pieces all at once, and the scream finally caught up with the pain.

Metal shattering beneath the force of a kick. Revant found that genuinely interesting.

The soldier tore away from his position and went cartwheeling across the ground, crashing into several of his comrades. Lynus’s sword flew through the air in a cruel arc and tore through the metal armor of the nearest Reimgardian soldier with ease. It caught him across the shoulder, leaving his torso severely mangled, blood spraying from the wound like a gruesome shower.

Lynus spared the devastation no second glance and flew forward, a blur of speed and metal. Those he passed without swinging at were not pardoned either. His wings were sharp metal in form, and he could extend or retract their length at will. His passage left a wake of blood and falling bodies in both directions.

When he landed in the center of a formation where the strongest soldiers had concentrated, men who immediately locked their shields together into a wall of overlapping steel, Lynus didn’t even slow down. The wall held for exactly one rotation. His sword hit first, cracking the formation open from one side, and his wings followed through from the other, scattering shields and the men holding them like debris in a storm.

The force he wielded was strange and unbefitting of his lean frame.

It made the soldiers confused, bordering on terrified, especially when they were being cut down before they even saw what was coming. The two forces that had been added to the battlefield in such a short time were making a visible difference against the vast mass of the Reimgardian army, an army that had initially seemed like it would never thin no matter how many arrows struck them.

Moreover, it wasn’t like the rain of arrows had stopped because of the entrants. In fact, another massive downpour of white lights was already falling on the soldiers again.