I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1383: Unbreakable

Commander Zebelon rolled his neck once and exhaled through his nose.

”Alright.”

He closed the distance in a single step.

The wave-blade came down and Jeci raised her spear to meet it, but the collision was not a collision. It was demolition. The spear caught the blow and Jeci’s arms folded, her knees buckled, and the impact drove her straight into the ground. The earth split beneath her in a ragged circle and dust erupted outward in a violent plume.

Before the dust could settle, Zebelon swung again.

Horizontal and brutal, with no technique or artistry, just the raw essence of a Sage put behind a blade that weighed more than most men could lift. Jeci pulled herself sideways and the wave-blade carved through the space she’d occupied, shearing a trench into the ground that ran six meters before it stopped.

She rolled to her feet and he was already there.

The pommel of his sword drove into her gut and folded her in half. The air left her lungs in a soundless rush and she staggered, and Zebelon brought his knee up into her visor. The impact rang like a struck bell. Jeci’s head snapped back and her body followed, tumbling backward across the broken ground, her spear slipping from her fingers for the first time in the entire fight.

She hit the dirt on her back, slid and stopped.

Zebelon waited patiently for her to stand.

Jeci’s hand found the shaft of her spear. Her fingers closed around it, and she pulled herself up.

The armor across her midsection was cracked. The visor had a fracture running from the left temple to the chin, and through the crack, one eye was visible. Dark-circled and bloodshot but completely calm.

Zebelon tilted his head.

Then he hit her again.

The wave-blade caught her spear mid-guard and ripped it aside, and the return stroke slammed into her ribs with enough force to lift her off her feet. She went airborne for a full second, spinning, and crashed into a pile of rubble that had once been part of a fortification wall. Stone collapsed around her as dust bloomed into the air.

He walked toward the rubble with the steps of a man approaching something he expected to find broken.

The rubble shifted.

A hand emerged, dark armor cracked to the elbow, the gauntlet missing two fingers worth of plating. It gripped the edge of a stone slab and pulled, and Jeci dragged herself out of the debris with her spear still clutched in her other hand. She coughed once. Blood hit the inside of her visor and ran down the crack in thin lines.

She planted the spear and stood.

Zebelon’s expression changed. The cold professionalism that had replaced his earlier amusement gave way to something else. Something that might have been irritation, or might have been the very early stages of respect, buried deep enough that he would never admit it existed.

”You’re a fool,” he said flatly. ”I’ve broken four of your ribs. I can hear them grinding when you breathe. Your armor is failing. Your essence is nearly spent.” He pointed his wave-blade at her. ”You are going to die here if you don’t lie down.”

Jeci spat blood through the crack in her visor. It hit the ground between them in a thin red line.

She raised her spear and grinned like a mad woman.

Zebelon’s jaw tightened.

He came at her without restraint. Not the measured combinations of the opening exchange, not the testing probes of a superior fighter gauging an inferior one. He swung to kill. Every stroke was designed to end the fight, every angle chosen to bypass her guard and break what was left of her body.

The first swing she deflected. Barely. The spear shaft screamed against the wave-blade’s edge and her footing slipped, dropping her to one knee.

He kicked her in the chest while she was down.

The impact cratered her breastplate inward and threw her backward, her boots leaving the ground entirely. She hit the earth hard enough to bounce, rolled twice, and came to rest face down in the dirt.

She didn’t move for five seconds.

Then her fingers twitched.

She pushed herself to her hands and knees. Blood dripped from the crack in her visor, pooling in the dust beneath her. The darkness around her armor was almost gone now, thin as smoke, barely clinging to the fractured plates. Her breathing was audible, wet and ragged, each inhale accompanied by the grinding sound Zebelon had described.

Broken ribs pressing against things they shouldn’t be pressing against.

She got one foot under her. Then the other... then she finally stood.

Zebelon stared at her. The wave-blade hung at his side, its undulating edge stained with the residue of her darkness.

”Why?”

The word came out harder than he intended. There was genuine confusion behind it. He had fought stubborn opponents before. He had fought desperate ones, reckless ones, ones who would rather die than surrender. But those fighters always burned. Their eyes were wild, their movements frantic, their refusal to fall driven by some blazing emotion that pushed their bodies past their limits.

Jeci wasn’t burning.

She was simply standing. The same way she had stood at the beginning. The same cold red glint behind the cracked visor. The same balanced grip on the spear. The same empty, mechanical readiness that had nothing to do with courage or defiance or rage and everything to do with the simple, terrifying fact that she had not yet decided to stop.

He closed the distance and swung for her head.

Jeci ducked. The wave-blade passed over her and she drove forward, inside his reach, and jabbed the butt of her spear into his wrist. His grip loosened for a fraction of a second. Not enough to disarm a Sage, not even close, but enough for her to drive the crimson tip toward his face in a thrust that carried every remaining ounce of darkness she possessed.

Zebelon caught the thrust on his palm.

The crimson blade bit into his skin and stopped. Blood welled around the tip, his blood, but he held it there, the muscles of his arm barely straining. The concentrated darkness on the blade hissed against his essence and died, smothered by the sheer volume of power a Sage could bring to bear.

He looked at her through the space between spear and palm.

”You cut me,” he said quietly.

Then he wrenched the spear sideways, yanking Jeci with it, and brought the wave-blade across her body in a devastating horizontal slash. The blade caught her from hip to shoulder and the remaining armor shattered along the line of impact, fragments of darkness scattering like broken glass. The force of the blow flung her across the field. She hit the ground, bounced, hit it again, and finally came to rest in a crumpled heap thirty meters from where she’d been standing.

This time the silence lasted longer.

Her spear was twenty meters behind her. The armor had collapsed to almost nothing, bare patches of skin visible through the ruined plating, her shoulder exposed, her left leg unprotected from the knee down. The visor had cracked completely and half of it had fallen away, revealing the lower half of her face. Pale skin streaked with blood. Lips pressed into a thin, colorless line.

There was no expression on her face.

She reached behind her back and found the ground. Pressed her palm flat and pushed.

Her body rose an inch, collapsed. Rose again. And collapsed.

On the third attempt, she got her elbow under her.

Zebelon watched from across the distance and something cold settled into his stomach.

Men and women who had reputations and legacies and were entitled to believe they could match him. He had broken every one of them and not a single one had gotten up more than twice.

This woman was on her seventh time.

And the look on what was left of her face hadn’t changed once.

He walked toward her. The wave-blade dragged along the ground beside him, its undulating edge cutting a shallow furrow in the dirt. Around them the battle still raged, thralls and Drifters clashing across the field, but this particular patch of ground had become something separate. A space that even the thralls seemed reluctant to enter.

Jeci pulled herself to one knee. Then one foot. She swayed, steadied, and looked around for her spear.

It was too far away.

She raised her fists.

Zebelon stopped walking.

He didn’t stop walking because suddenly Jeci was very intimidating or threatened him in any manner.

But it just so happened that as Jeci raised her fist, he felt a very boundless and profound presence wash over the battlefield. Something he often only felt when he was standing next to the first Prince or first princess.

He turned slightly to the southern edge of the battlefield where Jerimoth was fighting.

It was quite far but not anything a man like him couldn’t see from this distance.

His eyes narrowed dangerously as turned there.

’Jerry...’