I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1375: The Resolve Of A Fraudster [part 1]

Jeci moved forward and did not stop.

The fused thralls that blocked her path were dealt with in passing. Her spear never slowed. It rolled across her shoulders, swept low, stabbed high, and everything it touched was either severed or thrown aside. The darkness that trailed her was doing its work. Thralls that stepped into it moved as if submerged in water, their reactions dulled, their coordination broken. The fused ones fared worse. Their many limbs fell out of sync, arms swinging at different speeds, legs stumbling over themselves. The fusion that gave them strength became a liability when the darkness stripped away whatever will was holding them together.

Some simply fell apart on their own, collapsing back into their component bodies and lying still for a few precious seconds before Zebelon’s control wrenched them upright again.

Jeci was close enough now to see the Commander clearly.

He stood at the center of his remaining forces with his arms folded, watching her approach with the same expression one might give an insect walking across a table. Mild curiosity. Nothing more.

”Oh?”

His voice carried across the chaos.

”They sent the little one.”

Jeci said nothing. She drove her spear through a fused thrall that was still trying to form itself, scattering the bodies before they could fully merge, and pressed forward.

Zebelon tilted his head. The thralls between them grew denser, the fusions larger. A creature of twenty or more bodies rose in her path, a grotesque wall of limbs and armor that towered over her. It swung downward with a fist the size of her entire torso.

Jeci’s spear met it.

The impact sent a shockwave through the ground beneath her feet. Her boots dug trenches in the dirt, the force threatening to drive her into the earth, but she held. The darkness around her pulsed outward, and the massive fused thrall shuddered. Its arms went slack for just a moment, joints loosening, the cohesion of its merged bodies faltering.

Jeci tore her spear free and leaped. She drove the crimson tip into the thing’s chest and ripped downward, splitting it open from sternum to groin. Bodies spilled out of the wound like cargo from a burst crate, flopping to the ground in a heap of disconnected limbs.

She landed on the other side and kept moving.

The closer she got the more she felt her talent reaching outward, the sphere of suppression expanding from her body like a pulse. It was invisible, intangible, but its effects were immediate. The thralls within range began to slow. Not just from her darkness, but from something deeper. The strings that connected them to their Commander were fraying. Their movements became jerky, uncertain, like puppets whose operator was losing grip on the threads.

And Zebelon felt it.

His folded arms loosened. The mild curiosity on his face shifted, just slightly, the way a man’s expression changes when he steps on something sharp. It wasn’t pain, rather it was... Irritation.

”Ah.”

He looked at Jeci properly for the first time.

”A suppression type.”

The thralls closest to him stumbled. One collapsed entirely, the reanimation failing as Jeci’s talent ate at the essence fueling it. Another tried to swing its sword and found its arm wouldn’t obey, the limb dropping to its side like dead weight.

Zebelon’s jaw tightened.

”Annoying.”

He raised his hand and the thralls between them surged forward in a final desperate wave, all of them converging on Jeci at once. But they were weakened now, their movements sluggish, their coordination shattered. Jeci’s spear turned through them like a scythe through dry grass, and the darkness in her wake finished what the blade started.

She broke through the last of them and skidded to a halt ten meters from the Commander.

The suppression sphere was fully upon him now.

Zebelon’s expression had changed completely. The playful cruelty was gone, replaced by something colder and far more focused.

He could feel it.

The pull on his talent, the way it resisted his commands, the way the reanimation that had been effortless now required concentration. He flexed his fingers experimentally and frowned at what he found.

”You’re weakening my hold.”

It wasn’t a question.

Jeci planted her spear in the ground beside her and stood in the silence her talent had carved. The thralls around them were falling apart. Fused ones lost cohesion and collapsed into piles of still bodies. Individual ones dropped where they stood, the essence animating them no longer sufficient to keep them moving.

Behind her, the battlefield was shifting. The others would feel the change. The undead that had been pressing them were growing weaker, slower, easier to put down.

But here, in this ten-meter space between Jeci and the Commander, none of that mattered.

Zebelon studied her for a few seconds. His eyes slowly drifted to the vile armor that covered her body, the red glint behind the visor, the darkness that pooled at her feet and spread outward like a living thing.

Then a frown suddenly tightened his brows as he saw the uncanny resemblance.

He let out a strange and loud laugh.

”Hahaaahahaaa!!!”

Then he gave Jeci a condescending look.

”So you’re the frauds. One with a talent that suppresses other talents nonetheless, how interesting...”

Then a scowl appeared on his face.

”A Savant.”

He said the word like it tasted sour.

”They sent a Savant to suppress a Sage. Either they’re desperate, or they think very highly of you.”

Jeci pulled her spear from the ground.

”Does it matter?”

Zebelon stared at her for a long moment. Then the amusement drained from his face entirely, and what was left behind was the expression of a man who had commanded armies, buried cities, and killed things far more dangerous than the young woman standing before him.

His voice was low and quiet.

”No. I suppose it doesn’t.”

He drew his sword.

The air between them went dead still. Even the distant sounds of the battlefield seemed to fade, swallowed by the weight of two people who had decided, in the same instant, that the other needed to die.

Jeci settled into her stance, the crimson spear leveled at his chest, darkness bleeding from its tip like smoke from a dying fire.

Zebelon held his blade loosely at his side, his posture deceptively relaxed, his eyes locked on the red glint behind her visor.

”Let’s see how long your little trick holds against a proper Sage.”