I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1374: The Resolve Of An Angry Bird

The closer Jeci and Lynus got to the Commander, the stranger the thralls became.

At first it was subtle. Two soldiers stumbling into each other and not separating. Their limbs tangling, their bodies pressing together with a wet, grinding sound that had nothing to do with the impact of collision.

Then three more collapsed into a heap and instead of rising individually, they rose as one. A mass of arms and legs and twisted armor plating, six eyes blinking out of sync, three mouths opening and closing without sound.

Lynus carved through it before it could fully form. His sword cleaved the thing from what might have been its shoulder to its opposite hip, and the halves fell apart into their original bodies.

But even as they separated, they were already crawling toward each other again.

’They’re merging...’

Jeci observed it without slowing her stride.

She was right.

Ahead of them, the thralls were no longer fighting as individuals. They were pulling toward one another like iron shavings to a magnet, flesh and bone knitting together in ways that made the stomach turn.

Two soldiers fused at the torso, sharing a single pair of legs but swinging four arms, each holding a weapon.

Five more collapsed into a mound of writhing limbs that compacted and stood as something that barely resembled a human anymore, a hulking mass of fused armor and overlapping faces, wielding a shield the size of a door that had been formed from three smaller ones crushed together.

The battlefield had changed.

What had been an army of individual thralls was becoming something else entirely. The closer they got to Zebelon, the denser the fusion became. Bodies merged with increasing speed and coordination, as if the Commander’s will grew stronger in proximity, pulling his soldiers together like clay being shaped by invisible hands.

A fused thrall lunged at Jeci, four arms swinging in staggered sequence so there was no gap between strikes. She deflected the first blade with the shaft of her spear, ducked beneath the second, sidestepped the third, and drove the crimson tip through the center of the thing’s chest.

It didn’t stop, two of its arms grabbed the spear’s shaft and held on while the remaining two swung at her head.

Lynus hit it from behind like a wrecking ball.

His sword carved through the thing’s back and his wings spread wide, the sharp metal edges slicing through the arms that gripped Jeci’s spear. The fused thrall broke apart into its component bodies, and Jeci ripped her weapon free before they could reform.

”Go,”

Lynus’s voice was tight with an anger that had settled into his bones so deeply it had become indistinguishable from calm.

Jeci didn’t need to be told twice.

She surged forward and Lynus threw himself into the fused thralls that were converging from both flanks. His wings extended to their full span and he spun, a whirlwind of sharpened metal that shredded everything within reach. Bodies flew apart, armor crumpled, and for a moment the path ahead of Jeci was clear.

But the thralls were learning. Or rather, Zebelon was learning.

The next wave didn’t come at Lynus individually. They came already fused. A wall of merged flesh and steel, eight bodies compressed into a single battering ram that charged with the combined weight of all of them. Lynus planted his feet and met it head-on, his sword biting into the mass, but the sheer momentum drove him back through the dirt, his boots carving furrows in the ground.

He snarled and pushed, muscles straining against the weight. His wings stabbed into the fused thrall’s sides like twin blades, puncturing through armor and flesh and emerging from the other side. The thing shuddered but didn’t stop. Its many arms reached for him, grabbing at his sword, his wings, his shoulders.

Lynus ripped himself free with a violent twist and took half the thing’s torso with him. But more were coming. Bigger ones. A mass of twelve soldiers fused into something that moved on too many legs and swung a weapon that looked like three swords welded into a single cleaving edge.

’Fine.’

He threw himself at it.

This was where Lynus lived. Not in the elegant swordplay that Revant tried to teach him, not in the careful application of technique and strategy. In the raw, animal fury of meeting something terrible and tearing it apart with his bare hands if he had to.

This what a self, an ego he had discovered thanks to Northern and the days of mining red crystals and having to learn how to adapt to their brutal killing intent that was out to cut his throat at every swing of his axe.

Lynus’s sword became a blur. His wings lashed out like whips, cutting and stabbing at anything that got close. When a massive arm swung at his head he didn’t dodge, he cut the arm off at the elbow and used the opening to drive his blade into the fused thrall’s center mass.

It grabbed him.

Seven hands closed around his arms, his torso, his wings. The fused thrall lifted him off the ground and slammed him down with enough force to crack the earth beneath him.

Lynus hit the ground and tasted blood, but he was already moving, his wings shearing through the hands that held him as he rolled free and came up swinging.

He glanced forward once. Jeci was already fifty meters ahead of him, darkness trailing behind her like a banner.

’Good.’

Lynus turned back to the horde of fused thralls that were closing in around him and smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man who had been angry at the world for so long that violence had become the only language he was still fluent in.

”Come on, then.”

They answered onto him... and came.

Meanwhile Jeci drew closer to the center of the battlefield... closer to the Choirmaster of these undying cacophony... to Zebelon.