Chapter 216: Shadow to Shadow

The skill sat in his mind like a new language.

Void-Step. Beginner tier. But knowing a skill and using one were two different things. Gale-Step had taken Holden weeks to master. It had become instinct, a reflex that no longer required conscious thought.

Void-Step was only three seconds old in his mind.

He needed to test it.

Holden stood in his wrecked bedroom and looked through the broken window at the battlefield below.

No-Man’s Land was still muddy. Still raining. Late afternoon had turned the sky from grey to charcoal, and the shadows across the battlefield had grown longer.

Shadows were the key. Void-Step didn’t simply move him from one place to another. It moved him through the shadow plane. He dissolved into dark mist, passed through the space between light and darkness, and reformed inside a shadow of his choosing. The shadow had to be within his line of sight and no more than fifty meters away. It also had to be a real shadow, not simply a dark area. The difference mattered. A shadow was created when an object blocked light. A dark area was simply a place where the light wasn’t very bright.

His 10,000x processor had already cataloged the difference.

Now it needed to test the skill.

Holden equipped the Void Mantle. The fabric settled over his shoulders, erasing his presence from the world. Opening the window, he was met by cool, wet air carrying the smell of mud and the faint metallic tang of distant Miasma.

His eyes moved downward. Three stories below, the fortress wall cast a long shadow across the muddy ground.

Holden focused on it. His 10,000x processor locked onto the shadow’s coordinates, calculated the distance between his current position and the target, then mapped the energy pathway needed for the displacement.

He took a step.

The world dissolved.

His body came apart like mist rising from warm ground on a cold morning. One moment he was standing in his bedroom, and the next he was a cloud of dark particles, drifting without shape. He passed through the window frame without touching it, through the rain without disturbing a drop, and through the air without leaving a trace.

His boots touched the mud.

The fortress wall’s shadow wrapped around him like a coat. He was standing exactly where his processor had targeted, three stories below his bedroom window and fifty meters from the fortress gate.

Total elapsed time: 0.3 seconds.

He hadn’t opened the door. He hadn’t walked down the stairs.

He had simply ceased to exist upstairs and begun to exist downstairs.

"Okay," Holden said, standing in the mud as rain struck the Void Mantle and bent around him. "That is definitely my new favorite trick."

He tested the range next. A fallen siege beast forty meters away had left a large shadow across the ground. Holden focused on it and stepped.

Shhp.

He appeared beneath the dead beast’s shadow, its massive body looming overhead while its iron armor rusted in the rain.

Another shadow caught his attention. A nearby crater had a dark band stretching across its edge. Thirty meters.

He focused and stepped.

Shhp.

Holden appeared inside the crater, ankle-deep in mud. Looking back, he could see the fallen siege beast forty meters away. He had crossed the distance in the time it took to blink.

The range limit was real, though.

He tried targeting a shadow beyond fifty meters, a dark patch near the eastern ridge. His processor locked onto it, calculated the pathway, and returned an error.

[Void-Step Range Exceeded. Maximum displacement: 50 meters.]

Fifty meters wasn’t enough to cross the battlefield in a single jump. But it was enough to cross it through a chain of jumps, moving from shadow to shadow like a stone skipping across water.

Holden started moving.

Shhp. Shhp. Shhp.

Shadow to shadow. Crater to trench. Trench to fallen beam.

He crossed two hundred meters in six jumps, each displacement taking less than a second.

Then he found the patrol.

Three hundred meters from the fortress wall, a squad of Abyssal Brutes moved through the forward trench in a loose formation. There were five of them. Their eyes burned a dull, angry red, while dark fluid dripped from their open mouths and hissed whenever it struck the mud.

Tss. Tss. Tss.

Rank 2.

All five of them.

Strong enough to threaten the fortress soldiers, but weak enough that Holden could kill them in his sleep.

Still, killing them wasn’t the point.

Testing Void-Step was.

A shadow stretched across the trench floor where the wall blocked the afternoon light. The lead Brute was walking through it, and the shadow behind the creature was clear and within range.

Holden focused and stepped.

Shhp.

He appeared behind the lead Brute, close enough to smell the corruption covering its body. The thick, sulfurous stench made his nose wrinkle. The creature’s back was turned to him, its shoulders rising and falling with each breath.

It had no idea he was there.

Holden drew his sword. The Solar-Forged blade appeared silently in his hand, without fire or light.

He swung.

Shhhk.

The blade passed through the Brute’s neck. The iron plates protecting its body didn’t cover the throat, leaving the corrupted flesh exposed.

The Brute’s head came off.

For a moment, the body remained standing. Its arms still moved, and its legs took another step as if nothing had happened. Then the body seemed to realize what had happened and collapsed.

The head struck the mud.

The body followed.

The four remaining Brutes turned.

They saw the head and body but didn’t see Holden.

He was already gone.

Shhp.

Holden stepped into the shadow cast by the falling body. The remaining Brutes scanned the trench, their red eyes sweeping left, right, up, and down as they searched for whoever had attacked their squad.

They found nothing.

The second Brute growled, the low rumble making the mud beneath its feet tremble. It took a step toward the body with one massive fist raised, searching for the attacker.

Holden targeted the shadow behind it.

The Brute’s own body cast a long, deep shadow across the trench floor in the dim afternoon light.

Shhp.

He appeared behind it.

Shhhk.

The Solar-Forged blade found the exposed neck.

The head came off.

The body fell.

Three left.

The remaining Brutes spun around. They had heard the body hit the ground, and now they roared in panic and anger. Mud slid from the trench walls as their red eyes darted across every shadow and dark corner, searching for something they couldn’t see.

They couldn’t find him.

Holden wasn’t hiding behind cover or crouching in a corner. He stood in the shadow of the second Brute’s corpse, three feet from the nearest living creature, completely invisible.

Shhp.

Behind the third Brute.

Shhhk.

Thud.

Two left.

The fourth Brute panicked. It stopped searching and started running, as it tried to reach the end of the trench and escape whatever invisible thing was killing its squad.

Holden targeted the shadow cast by the Brute’s own legs.

The creature was running, which meant its legs were moving. That made the shadow shift constantly, leaving only a narrow window for the jump.

His 10,000x processor didn’t care how narrow the window was.

Shhp.

He appeared behind the running Brute, matching its speed and moving with it inside the shadow of its own legs.

Shhhk.

The sword found its neck.

The head came off mid-stride.

The body continued forward for three more steps on pure momentum before finally collapsing.

Thud. Splat.

One left.

The fifth Brute had stopped moving.

It stood in the center of the trench, surrounded by the headless bodies of its squad. Its red eyes were wide with fear as it turned in slow, desperate circles, massive fists raised and its iron-plated body trembling.

It was looking for something. A shape. A movement. Anything that would reveal where the threat was coming from.

There was nothing to find.

Holden wasn’t moving. He stood in the shadow of a fallen trench beam thirty feet away, perfectly still.

The Brute let out a small, frightened whimper.

Holden stepped.

Shhp.

He appeared inside the Brute’s own shadow, directly behind it and close enough to touch.

The creature sensed something. Some primal warning told it that something was standing behind it, and it began to turn.

Too slow.

Shhhk.

The head came off.

The body fell.

Thud.

The trench went quiet.

Rain filled the silence, pattering against the mud and corpses. Dark fluid pooled beneath the Brutes and hissed softly as it mixed with the wet earth.

Tss. Tss. Tss.

The System tallied the kills.

[Abyssal Brute (Rank 2, 7-Star) Defeated! x5!]

[+3,000 KP each!]

[2x KP Booster Active! KP Doubled!]

[+6,000 KP each!]

[Total: +30,000 KP!]

Holden looked around the trench at the five headless bodies and the shadows that had carried him from one kill to the next like stepping stones across a river.

Void-Step wasn’t Gale-Step.

Gale-Step was speed. Void-Step was something else entirely.

With Gale-Step, an enemy could track him, follow his movement, or predict his trajectory. With Void-Step, there was no trajectory.

There was only a departure point and an arrival point.

Nothing existed between them.

He was untouchable.

Not because he was fast enough to dodge an attack, but because he no longer occupied the space where dodging was necessary. He existed in a shadow for the brief moment it took to strike, then disappeared again.

Dissolved.

Between places.

Between moments.

Holden focused on his bedroom window, three stories above and fifty meters away, right at the edge of his range.

He searched for a shadow.

The fortress wall cast one across the courtyard. The cobblestones created small shadows between them, while the window frame left a thin strip of darkness across the sill.

He chained them.

Shhp.

Courtyard shadow.

Shhp.

Window sill shadow.

Holden was back in his bedroom.

It was the same room he had left three minutes earlier. He hadn’t opened the window, crossed the courtyard, or climbed the stairs.

He had simply appeared.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Holden dismissed his sword and pulled up his System interface.

[Multiplier: 10,000x]

[KP Booster: 2x Active]

[Fighter Rank: Rank 3 (7-Star, Hidden)]

[Skill: Void-Step (Beginner)]

His eyes settled on the skill listing.

Beginner.

The mastery path stretched ahead of him. Beginner to Master. Master to Perfect. Perfect to Ultimate. Ultimate to Transcendent. Each tier would increase the range, reduce the energy cost, and improve his precision.

At Beginner, he could teleport fifty meters.

At Master, the range might double.

At Perfect, he might be able to chain jumps without the 0.3-second dissolution time.

At Ultimate, the shadow plane might become a weapon in itself.

But that was for later.

Right now, Beginner was enough. It had allowed him to kill five Rank 2 Brutes in fifteen seconds without being seen.

Beginner was already terrifying.

Holden looked out through the window at the battlefield. Shadows stretched across the mud, the trenches, the fallen beasts, and the fortress walls.

They were everywhere.

In every trench.

Behind every wreck.

A network he could travel.

The war had just changed.

Not because he was stronger, but because he could now be anywhere at any time without warning.

Every shadow on the battlefield was a door.

And every door led to the same place.

The enemy’s throat.