I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1378: The Resolve Of A Fraudster [part 4]

Jeci was evolving her approach, she was doing a redistribution. Everything she had been spreading outward, the weakening field, the perception web, the ambient suppression, all of it pulled inward and concentrated into a single purpose.

She was trading range for density. Giving up the battlefield control that had been herding him, helping her dull his thralls, and feeding her information about his movements, all of it sacrificed and compressed into raw, concentrated force channeled through her weapon and armor.

It was a cold, calculated gamble made by someone who had recognized that the approach which worked against soldiers would not work against a Sage, and who had decided, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, to change everything.

Zebelon felt the shift. The ambient pressure of her darkness vanished from around him and for a moment his movements felt cleaner, his senses sharper, his connection to his remaining thralls stronger. But looking at her now, at the dense black aura that clung to her like a second layer of armor, at the spear that seemed to drink the light around it, he understood what she’d done.

She hadn’t weakened.

She’d compressed.

Jeci ripped the spear from the ground and closed the distance in a single stride that cracked the earth beneath her foot. The speed was different now, sharper, and Zebelon brought his wave-blade up to meet her thrust.

The weapons connected and the sound they made was wrong.

A deep, resonant crack, like something tearing at a fundamental level. The wave-blade shuddered in Zebelon’s hands and his eyes widened because for the first time in this fight, he felt his weapon being pushed.

Jeci pressed. The spear ground against the wave-blade and darkness poured from the contact point, crawling along his sword toward his hands. He wrenched the blade free and stepped back, shaking the residual blackness from the steel.

She didn’t let him breathe.

Thrust, sweep, reverse, overhead. Each strike hit harder than the last because she wasn’t spreading her power anymore, every ounce of it was channeled through that crimson tip, and the wave-blade that had been catching and trapping her weapon before was now being battered by strikes that carried the same density of darkness that had previously covered half the battlefield.

Zebelon parried the thrust, blocked the sweep, redirected the reverse.

The overhead he caught on his blade and the force of it drove him down to one knee.

The Commander’s eyes burned with something that had nothing to do with amusement. He surged upward with a roar, his essence flooding through the wave-blade, and the weapons locked between them. His face was a foot from her visor and he could see nothing behind it except that remorseless red light.

”You’re burning yourself out.”

He snarled through gritted teeth, his muscles straining against the impossible pressure she was exerting.

”Everything you’ve pulled in, you can’t sustain it. You’ll collapse.”

The red light in her visor didn’t flicker.

And from within the armor, for the first time in their fight, Jeci spoke.

”Then finish me before I finish you.”

Her voice was flat and empty betraying nothing of the kind of face she had hidden behind that helmet.

Zebelon shoved her back and came at her with everything he had, the wave-blade singing through the air with enough force to cleave stone, and Jeci met him strike for strike.

Of course, she wasn’t his equal. A Savant could not match a Sage, and nothing she did would change that fundamental truth.

But she could make it cost him.

Every block she caught drained her reserves further but also forced him to commit harder. Every thrust she landed, even the ones his armor turned aside, carried that concentrated darkness that bit into his essence like acid. Every second the fight continued was a second she was learning, adapting, closing gaps in her technique that had been there at the start and were simply gone now, burned away by the ruthless efficiency of a mind that treated its own body as a weapon to be used until it broke.

She caught his blade on her spear shaft and drove forward, inside his guard again, and this time instead of the butt of her weapon she threw her shoulder into his chest. The darkness on her armor detonated on contact, a concussive burst that staggered the Commander backward.

He recovered and came back swinging.

She deflected. Countered. Got hit. Got hit again. Kept coming.

Her armor was thinning. The darkness that had been dense and concentrated was growing translucent in places, the vile black giving way to glimpses of the woman beneath. Her movements were slowing, not from lack of will but from lack of fuel. She was running on the very bottom of her reserves, fighting a Sage at an intensity that even veteran Savants would have abandoned minutes ago.

And still she did not stop.

She adapted one final time. The spear work that had been powerful and direct became something else entirely, fluid and deceptive, no longer trying to match his force but instead slipping around it. She let his strikes whistle past her by margins so thin that the wind from his blade moved her hair, and she punished every miss with a counter that carried the last dregs of her concentrated darkness. Small cuts and shallow marks. Nothing that would stop a Sage.

But marks nonetheless.

One on his forearm. One across his ribs. A third that nicked the skin of his neck, just barely, and left a trail of black that faded almost instantly.

Zebelon touched the mark on his neck and looked at the faint residue of darkness on his fingers.

He looked at Jeci.

She was barely standing. Her armor had thinned to almost nothing, wisps of shadow clinging to her frame like smoke. The spear in her hands trembled. The red glint in her visor was dim, almost gone.

But she was still in her stance.

Still facing him.

...Still ready.