Blade Over Magic

Chaos X

Xander intended to use a follow up attack to deal more damage. But before he could, the ant suddenly raised its head and shrieked with the remainder of its jaw.

The sound wasn’t just loud, but carried a physical presence, as everything in the vicinity—Xander included—was pushed away from it violently.

Xander flew back over a dozen meters before flipping to mitigate the force. He made sure to retrieve his longsword before he landed.

At this point, the ant’s frustration was starring to boil over. Xander didn’t check any of its boxes, and the more they fought, the more of a disadvantage it fell into despite dwarfing him in stats.

Hence, like the child that it was, it did the thing almost all living creatures with a sliver of sentience had the instinct to do when they sensed that they were losing.

It flipped the metaphorical game board.

Raising its good leg, it stomped on the ground as hard as it could. But it didn’t attempt to focus the power at all. Hence, the result was that the ground suddenly cracked apart violently and exploded, sending massive chunks of rock high into the air. It was a scene reminiscent to when mountain exploded and the ants came swarming out.

Before he knew it, Xander found himself high in the air while barely balancing on a piece of rock the side of a bed.

Now, normally, it would take a few seconds or so for all the debris to fall back down. After all, gravity never stopped existing. And that was indeed the case.

However, even while slower than it, Xander was still incredibly fast. And this fight had long entered the realm of ’Moments’ rather than ’Seconds’.

Hence, being in the sky like this put him under several disadvantages.

He looked up just in time for him to see the ant swinging its bladed limbs in wide arcs, the wings on its back suspending it in the air.

Red lines appeared all over the place in a frenzy, and Xander relied purely on instinct and pattern recognition to evade them effectively as he jumped from rock to rock.

Even though it looked like a tantrum, the ant had played its cards well, as being in the air like this put Xander in quite a pickle.

For starters, he hadn’t mastered Vibration Traversal to the point where he could use the air as a medium. As such, being away from the ground meant that the skill was essentially unusable. After all, the earth fragments weren’t that large, so using the skill on them wasn’t very effective. But that wasn’t all...

Now that the battlefield had effectively been changed, the ant suddenly had access to two advantages. First was the distance. Without Traversal, Xander had a far harder time closing the distance. On top of that, it made use of another thing it had.

Flight.

Unlike Xander, the ant could fly, and it was currently making full use of that advantage.

Like a mouse avoiding countless cages, Xander moved from rock to rock as his surroundings were shredded. The ant wasn’t just static either. It flew through the air, taking advantage of its speed to fly out above, below, or infant of Xander to unleash the red lines without getting close enough for him to turn the situation around.

Moreover, as time passed, another things became apparent.

The ant’s use of mana and its demonic energy was climbing sharply.

Now, it wasn’t just controlling its strength better, it was also more precise, and from time to time, its usage of the red lines would shift. They would go from static slashes to more fluid shapes dragging across large areas. It resembled the fluid movement Xander displayed when he used flowing tide.

Such an intense onslaught caused Xander to receive his first injury.

A particular tight net of lines descended on him, and he twisted, turned, stepped, and flipped around. The movement looking like a dance. But this dance wasn’t infallible, hence, he was eventually cut across the back, blood immediately soaking his armor.

And that’s when Xander ran out of footholds.

His next step hit air. The ant had destroyed all the rocks in this game of cat and mouse, and now Xander was in the air with no way of moving.

The storm of slashes descended on him. At this point, the ant was sure he had no way of evading. But through it all, it saw something that made it pause.

He nodded slightly.

Not despair. Not shock. Anger. Or any emotion that could be considered volatile.

Rather, he looked as though the current situation was reasonable.

Like it made sense for things to develop in this direction.

Just as it was pondering on this, it saw the swords.

Swords that hadn’t been there before suddenly emerged out of Xander’s spatial ring. And somehow, rather than just falling to the ground, they actually shot upwards, like they were being controlled by invisible strings.

...

Actually, they were indeed very thin strings at their handles.

Instead of moving to defend Xander, they actually advanced towards it even in the face of the red storm. This perplexed the ant. But it had learned its lesson. Rather than contemplate why it made no sense on paper, it acted.

It changed the orientation of its flight and dove straight down at the incoming swords behind the red storm.

Yet, just as the two sides were about to meet, it saw Xander thrust his blade at the bottom sword, and his figure vanished.

At that same time, the red storm met the first sword... and Xander just happened to emerged from the first sword, passing through the red storm right as the weapon got destroyed.

Moreover, the ant was already in front of this sword, believing it was safe behind the red storm.

So it was once again face to face with Xander.

But rather that attacking it, he twisted his body out of the way, just in time to avoid an invisible ripple that blasted into the ant like an inverted meteor.

Its mind went blank as it wondered what just happened, its body briefly spiraling midair. But just as it tried to stabilize itself with its wings, it suddenly felt a familiar, yet unfamiliar sensation.

It was the sensation of space being cut.

And all of a sudden, it could no longer feel its wings.

Having landed his spatial cut successfully, Xander swung his longsword again. Green winds condensed around it before shooting out in a wide arc. Slamming into the ant and blasting it down.

Tempest Stream.

The ant hit the ground hard, and the small pieces of rock followed, falling around it.

It pulled itself out of the small crater it created while wondering what just happened.

And, well, a few things did.

It had been right to send Xander into the air. It was also correct to destroy his footholds so he couldn’t evade. Thus, preventing him from using his most effective means of evasion. After all, Xander couldn’t use Traversal in the air.

But it lacked a key piece of information.

Xander couldn’t always use it through the ground normally either, and he needed his string+sword combo to do it effectively.

So it hadn’t anticipated that he would take out what was essentially an obsolete form of a skill and use it that way.

Then there was the invisible force that struck it. For that, one should look at the sequence of events clearly. Xander sent the blades upwards, not at the same time, but one by one, creating a line. Then, just as he used Vibration Traversal, he also thrusted the blade in his hands at the bottom blade.

This wasn’t random. Rather, it was a clever use of Rupture Thrust, a skill that made destructive vibrations become stronger the longer they traveled.

Xander emerged from the topmost sword just as it reached the red storm which allowed him to avoid getting shredded, and he moved his body so the Rupture Thrust that was just a microsecond behind him would smash into the ant accurately, throwing it off balance and temporarily halting its charge.

This gave him the perfect chance to attack, and he did so using his spatial slash to remove its wings and send it back to the ground.

A display of truly brilliant Battle IQ.

Xander landed on the ground and exhaled. While his plan worked, it also got most of his stored swords destroyed. Meaning he only had his longsword, Zweihander, and Gladius. The latter two being unsuitable at the moment.

The ant stood, but its posture was unstable due to its damaged knee. But despite this, it seemed even more dangerous than ever, and Xander was keenly aware of the fact that the current him would probably get speed blitzed even with all of his skill.

So he stopped holding back.

Taking a breath, he entered a stance, and with a thought...

He entered the Resonance State.