I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1365: New Entrants [part 1]

A tall, alabaster-skinned man with black hair and blue eyes stood on the roof of the tower. The ship itself carved through the air, its concrete bow dividing the wind of its own volition, carrying on at a sufficient speed.

There had been a slight delay in arrival. He’d had to stop at Drywall and deal with the things threatening to swallow the place, but Revant had finally arrived at his master’s order.

He looked down with a fond smile on his face. Smiles rarely appeared on Revant’s face, and when they did, they looked evil instead of accommodating.

Scanning the cacophony below, Revant glanced at the two on the ship’s deck. There were more people there, but only two of them caught his gaze.

These were the two who had approached him a few weeks ago and demanded that he teach them. He had taken them as students and wanted to test what he had taught them, so his silent gaze spoke volumes.

Lynus and Jeci caught that gaze and turned forward, each stepping to the opposite edge of the ship, facing each side of the cacophony with unreadable expressions.

Jeci’s hair was longer now, reaching her shoulders and flying wild. Her dark circles persisted, and as she opened her hands, a red spear manifested into her grip. Her shadow turned to a pool threatening to swallow her whole, but instead, something spread across her body from her legs.

She flew from the bow of the airship with one simple motion, the vile armor covering her entire body and face in the span of a breath, leaving only a dangerous red glint in the embrace of her visor, which looked like nothing but darkness.

As Jeci landed on the ground, a terrifying shockwave spread outward and several soldiers were sent into the air like weightless dolls.

She twirled her spear and charged forward, darkness trailing her.

The first soldier didn’t even see the spear. He saw the darkness, the shape barreling toward him, and the red glow where eyes should have been. Then the crimson tip punched through his chest and out the other side, and Jeci didn’t stop. She ripped the spear free as she passed, spinning the shaft across her back and catching it underhanded in a motion so fluid it looked rehearsed by something inhuman.

Three soldiers rushed her from the left. The first swung his blade down in a committed arc, and Jeci stepped into it, not away. The shaft of her spear caught the sword at its base, redirected it into the ground, and the butt of the weapon cracked the soldier’s jaw before his blade had finished its arc. She pivoted off that strike, whipping the spear around her waist like it weighed nothing, and the crimson tip opened the second soldier from hip to collar. The third hesitated. One step backward.

Jeci didn’t give him the second.

Her spear drove through his shield, through the arm behind it, and pinned him to the man behind him that he’d stumbled into. Two bodies on one thrust. She tore the weapon free and darkness bled from the wounds instead of blood, wisps of black curling off the steel like the spear itself was rotting everything it touched.

There was something deeply wrong about the way she moved. It wasn’t fast in the way that skilled warriors were fast. It was smooth in a way that made the body reject what it was seeing. Every motion flowed into the next without pause, without reset, without the natural hitch of a human body changing direction. The spear never stopped. It rolled across her shoulders, whipped around her forearm, stabbed and retracted and swept in an unbroken current of violence that turned the weapon into an extension of the darkness trailing behind her.

A formation of eight soldiers locked shields and braced.

Jeci planted her foot and the ground cracked beneath it. She drove the spear into the center of the shield wall with both hands, and the formation didn’t break, it caved. The impact folded the center two shields inward, crushing the men behind them into the soldiers at their flanks. Before the formation could recover, she swept the spear low, taking legs from three of them in one arc, and as they fell she was already past them, already killing the ones behind.

The darkness that trailed her wasn’t just a visual effect. Where it touched, soldiers’ movements slowed, their reactions dulled, their footing failed them. Men stumbled over nothing. Swords swung a half-second too late. Eyes couldn’t track her through the black mist that clung to her like a veil, and by the time they adjusted, the crimson point had already found them.

From the rooftop of the ship, Revant watched.

His fond smile hadn’t faded. If anything, it had deepened, and that only made it look more sinister.

Jeci carved a corridor through the Empire’s ranks. Not a path. A corridor. Wide enough that the soldiers on either side recoiled from the edges of her darkness, pressing into their own lines to get away from whatever that thing was. The ones who had seen her land were already retreating. The ones who hadn’t seen her yet could hear it, the screaming, the wet sounds of the spear doing its work, the unnatural silence where her darkness fell and swallowed sound itself.

She stopped for a moment at the center of a clearing she’d made. Bodies around her. Red spear dripping. Visor glowing that terrible red through the dark, turning slowly, scanning.

A mounted officer broke from the rear line and charged her with a lance. Heavy horse, heavy armor, committed. The kind of charge that ran through infantry like paper.

Jeci didn’t dodge, she waited instead. And at the last moment, she stepped to the side with the minimal distance required, let the lance pass her visor by inches, and drove her spear through the horse’s neck as it passed. The momentum of the charge did the rest. Horse and rider collapsed forward, tumbling, and Jeci was already walking through the dust of their fall, stepping over the dying animal without looking down.

That was what terrified them. She never looked down. Never checked her kills. Never glanced behind her. Every soldier she cut through was already forgotten the moment the spear left their body, and her visor was already fixed on the next one.

There was no anger in the way she fought. No battle rage, no bloodlust. Just a cold, mechanical procession through their ranks that carried all the warmth of a plague moving through a village. The soldiers of the Empire had seen cruelty before. They had dealt it. But cruelty required emotion, required a person behind the violence who wanted to hurt.

Whatever was behind that visor didn’t seem to want anything at all.

The soldiers nearest to her corridor broke ranks first. Then the ones behind them. Fear spread faster than the darkness did, and soon an entire flank of the Empire’s formation was folding inward, men pressing away from the thing with the red spear and the black mist, choosing the chaos of a broken line over the certainty of standing in her path.

Jeci didn’t pursue the ones who ran. She kept walking forward, steady, relentless, cutting through anyone still standing in front of her with that same unbroken rhythm.

From above, Revant finally turned his gaze to the other side of the ship where Lynus had jumped.

’Not bad at all.’

He looked back at Jeci’s trail of destruction. The fond, evil smile twitched.

’But she’s the one who listened.’

Then he turned to Lynus’s direction.