Blade Over Magic

Chaos VIII

The ant swiped its limb horizontally, a red line appearing on Xander’s torso, intending to bisect him in half.

Yet before it could, he suddenly ducked, and the area behind him was suddenly cleaved apart.

After Aubrey had sent Xander all the relevant information, he more or less understood the mechanics of the red lines.

To put it simply, the lines weren’t limited by distance. Rather, once the ant made the swiping motion, they would appear within the desired region in space, and consequently, would cut through their target, negating conventional durability.

It’s how the ant was able to slash through the artillery batteries despite being so far away. However, this ability had some limitations.

First, it had to have the target within its field of vision, and considering that ants already had pretty wide fields of view, this wasn’t a huge limitation.

Second, it couldn’t just make the lines appear with its mind. It had to slash at its target for them to appear.

And third, there was a brief delay between the appearance of the red line and the actual slash. It’s why Zeke was able to save Sparrow from getting sliced in half even though the red line had already appeared on her body. And it’s the same reason why Xander was able to avoid the same fate with a timely evasion.

Taking a step, he made use of Vibration Traversal to appear in front of the ant in an instant. The ant’s limbs were already raised, and without any reservations, it unleashed a storm of slashes, mixing in its regular raw strength along with the devastating red lines.

In response to this, Xander simply made use of Flowing Tide.

All of a sudden, the movement of his sword and body turned almost... fluid, and a trail of water followed his sword as he moved. The onslaught of attacks was devastating, and yet like the gentle yet unstoppable flow of the tide, Xander manager to calmly redirect every slash from his body, taking no damage whatsoever.

At the same time, the ant felt numerous parts of its shell take direct hits. Xander didn’t just deflect the storm of hits, he actually countered!

The ant’s shell didn’t receive any direct damage, but the strange sensation from before permeated the spots that were hit, and while it was only by a little, the discomfort definitely felt worse than before.

Forcing its way through the counter, it slammed its limbs down on Xander, intending to crush him with raw strength. He was too close to accurately deflect the force, so he would have to block it head on.

But reality proved different.

Xander got on a knee and held his sword above his head, so it seemed like he would take the blow head on. Yet just as the ant’s limbs landed, he angled his blade to the side by just a bit, and at the same time, the frequency of his blade changed. As such, the strike was suddenly redirected to the side sharply, destroying the ground in that direction and throwing the ant off balance, as it clearly hadn’t expected that result.

Xander capitalized on this opportunity. Using his position, he shifted his stance and swung his blade in an upward arc, orange flames trailing behind it as it struck the underside of the ant’s head.

Rising Sun.

The ant’s head snapped upward as it staggered back, and Xander changed the orientation of the blade as he aimed downward, his stance shifting as smoothly as butter.

This time, he swung down with even more speed and precision, a silver-blue arc of pure Mana forming a beautiful crescent as his sword descended.

Crescent Moon.

His blade went across the chest of the ant, and the creature took a few steps back before coming to a stop. It stared at Xander for a moment, then it looked down at its torso.

From its chest to its hip, a long gash could be seen in its shell. It didn’t penetrate all the way through, and compared to the damage it had taken against the Captain’s suicide attack, it was lacking as well.

But the fact remained that Xander had damaged it.

The ant was still for a moment, then, suddenly, its aura deepened. It leaned forward, and Xander suddenly felt a sense of deja-vu upon seeing the stance. It was one that had left quite a deep impression on him.

The stance Sparrow took whenever she was about to rush forward.

The ant rushed forward, becoming a ’red flash’ and appeared in front of Xander at an absurd speed, instantly dwarfing anything it had shown before. It’s limb thrusted straight towards Xander’s heart.

However, as though he’d expected it, Xander was already moving backwards when the ant charged. But he wasn’t dodging.

Instead, his sword was extended in front of him, its tip perfectly aligned with the tip of the ant’s limb.

The latter pushed against the former, but instead of Xander’s blade getting blasted out of his hand or his body getting thrown away, a resonant sound reverberated as visible waves spawned from the point where both tips met.

The ant suddenly found the power it had poured into the thrust get negated, the thrust losing its momentum.

Yet its body still rocketed forward, and if things continued as they were, it would smash into Xander and break apart his body.

But that’s when Xander made used of the force he’d negated. His body rotated and went over the speeding figure of the ant, making it miss him entirely while it barreled forward for nearly a hundred meters before stopped abruptly.

It slowly turned to face Xander, ignoring the stinging sensation behind its head. When Xander flipped over it, he still swung his sword and caught the back of his head before the ant fully left his range.

It regarded him for a moment before arriving at a conclusion.

Among the many things Xander did which perplexed it, it was how he kept reacting in a timely manner to its speed. Its base speed alone was already beyond everything it had encountered so far, Sparrow included, and Xander was slower than Sparrow in terms of raw speed.

It suspected initially that Xander had a similar form of observation as Aubrey, allowing him to react the instant it displayed an intention. Yet after mimicking Sparrow’s speed, he’d still managed to react and even counted its attack.

That was something not Aubrey could manage effectively, not to mention that she never faced it when it copied Sparrow’s speed.

So what exactly had Xander done?

Well after this last attack, it had a guess.

Xander... wasn’t reacting to it using conventional means.

For starters, it noticed that he wasn’t relying only on his sight. He stared at it, sure, but that last attack it used was beyond his visual perception. It knew this because it watched Xander as he negated the attack, his gaze was unfocused, meaning he wasn’t actually looking at it.

This made it suspect that he was using some strange extra-sensory means to react to its attacks.

And... it was actually correct. Well, half-correct.

Xander’s perception was one of his defining traits. Its how he was able to slice through mana convergence points even before he created the Resonance State. Yet it still paled in comparison to what Aubrey could do.

So how dud he do it?

Simple, by sensing vibrations.

After using vibrations for so long, Xander had slowly eliminated the need to make contact with an object to sense its vibrations. Such a thing was actually one of the requirements needed for him to use Vibration Traversal freely.

As such, just like how he could sense the ambient mana in the surroundings like normal mages. He could also sense the vibrations of his surroundings passively without needing to concentrate as deeply as before.

But even without that fact, he was on the ground, and so was the ant. He could sense its vibrations using the ground as a medium as well, but that was besides the point.

The part the ant had missed was the information Aubrey had sent Xander. In such a short time, he’d analyzed the way the ant fought and had already built a model in his head.

So every movement that ant made which had been ’recorded’, like the onslaught of slashes from before, Xander already had the corresponding countermeasure. And for new things it did, like copying Sparrow, he reacted using vibrations while also adding the new information to the model in his mind.

In this regard, Xander’s thought process almost resembled Aubrey’s concerning how he handled the consequent information. The only difference was that, well...

He could actually apply it.

The ant took a step, and it appeared in front of Xander, but the latter was already upside down, the thrust of the ant going between his legs while he countered with a Frost Flower Thrust.

The icy winds swirled around his blade like flower petals and concentrated at the tip which smashed into the knee joint of the ant.

It lost its balance and fell, its momentum still carrying it forward. But Xander didn’t wait for it to get up this time.

Rather, he used Vibration Traversal to get out in front of it and quickly used the Water Screen—Frost Flower Thrust combo.

The ant’s body arrived just as Xander trusted through the water screen.

Ice Breaker

The sheer concussive force of the shattering ice was concentrated into a singular point just as the ant arrived.

Its own momentum coupled with the attack met in the middle, and a muffled blast sounded as it was thrown back several meters.

It quickly regained its balance and stood, then paused and looked down.

Just above its hip where the attack had struck it, its chitin hadn’t just been damaged. There was an hole in that region of its body.

It wasn’t too deep, yet the pain was very real.

It looked up, and once again, Xander stood there holding a stance. Not uttering a single word, just coldly staring at it with his eerie green eyes.