Chapter 298: Letting go

The darkness behind the blindfold had no blindspots that she could take advantage of, but the oppressive silence was far worse.

​Emily stood motionless on the cracked flagstones of the subterranean amphitheater, every nerve ending in her body singing with tension.

Her chest rose and fell with quiet, measured breaths.

"Listen...where is he..."

"Where will the attack come from..."

Without her vision, the cavernous space expanded infinitely in her mind, transformed into a featureless void where sound and movement lost all context.

​"Feel the displacement of air around you with your Talent," Merlin’s voice drifted toward her, echoing off the stone walls.

She was already trying to do that.

"Feel the static charges in the atmosphere with your lightning. When I strike, do not look for what’s going to happen in the future. Instead, focus your senses entirely on the present."

His auditory displacement ability was seamless.

The man’s manipulation of the air and sound throughout the entirety of the ampitheatre was nothing short of sublime.

Merlin’s voice seemed to float down from the vaulted ceiling several feet above them.

​Emily’s instincts flared, the strain of the impending threat pushing her to the edge.

"Where is he..."

"Remain calm..."

She could feel the burning urge to use seer vision at the back of her mind.

"Here goes nothing..."

A moment later, she gave in to the instinct.

Beneath the tenebrous fabric, her eyes suddenly burned with emerald firem

A moment later, three distinct mental phantoms bloomed into reality against the black fabric of her blindfold.

In the first vision, a razor-thin stream of blue lightning tore through the air striking her across her left flank.

The impact sent her flying several feet into the air, her body spamming violently from the streams of current running through it.

She somberly gulped a breath shifting her head warily.

"No, not that one... it can’t be that one..."

​A second phantom version of Merlin appeared behind her, his hand flattened into a dangerous palm thrust coming straight for her back.

The impact hurled her across the floor, knocking the wind outward of her lungs and left her gasping painfully for breath.

​In the third iteration, Merlin casually flicked his hand stirring an elusive gust of wind into existence.

The small gust quickly surged into a fiercesome gale that swept her feet out from right under her.

​"He’s behind me!" Emily thought, leaning into the actions of phantom two.

In the next breath, she swung her weight onto her forward leg, instantly compacting the air and gathering a blade of wind in her palm to counter thrust behind her back.

​

Then—she struck empty space.

The instant her momentum shifted, a heavy, solid force slammed into her exposed right shoulder from the opposite direction.

"Damn it!"

She offered no resistance to the blow allowing the brutal momentum behind it to propel her backward.

Still...

The air left her lungs with a sharp gasp as she went skidding several feet across the grit of the stone floor, her boots grating violently against the rock before she caught her balance.

​"Wrong," Merlin’s voice came casually from the front—where she had originally been facing.

"Again."

​Emily gritted her teeth, wiping a bead of sweat from her cheek against her sleeve. The black silk blindfold remained firmly tied over her eyes.

Her shoulder throbbed where his blow had clipped her.

"Damn..."

She felt thevair around her ripple violently as Merlin quietly moved across the floor, using the spontaneous gusts of end to obscure his movements from her senses.

"You mimicked the auditory cue on the left, but you shifted your killing intent to my back," Emily muttered, her chest heaving as she recalibrated her stance.

"You made me think you were teleporting."

​"I made you think, period," Merlin corrected dryly, his lips curling into a wry smile.

"And that — was your first mistake. A true combatant does not think during execution, they perceive and respond."

" When you rely on sight or mind-reading, you are reacting to light and thought—both of which can be falsified. But physical matter cannot lie about its position in real time."

​He took a step forward.

The sound was intentionally silent, but the physical reality of his movement shifted the atmospheric pressure in the room by a miniscule fraction.

"Listen to the room, Emily," Merlin instructed softly, his voice drifting from everywhere at once.

"Air is a medium. When I move, I push air out of my way. That air must go somewhere. Your wind talent makes you a part of that air. Stop trying to control the breeze and instead — become the surface of the pool."

​Emily closed her mouth and slowly inhaled.

"Listen..."

Emily deliberately suppressed her seer vision, forcing the flickering phantom images to recede into the dark quiet of her mind.

She had grown so used to the comforting feeling of instinctively knowing what was going to happen that for a split second, it was terrifying. But at the same time it was crippling her.

The feeling felt like stepping off a cliff in complete darkness without knowing if there was ground below.

Merlin had called it a crutch, but now, it was time to let it go.

And so she didn’t.

She extended her wind outward as an invisible, razor-thin web radiating in every direction.

Simultaneously, she allowed tiny, microscopic discharges of static electricity to dance along the fine hairs on her arms, turning her skin hyper-sensitive to any shift in the air.

​A tense silence settled over the training cellar. Then a subtle count down began.

​One second passed. Then a second.

​"There!"

​

​It was a sudden, subtle compression of the wind web, a few feet to her left, accompanied by a thin drop in electrical resistance as Merlin activated his ability.

In this hypersensitive state sgw could feel the current gathering into a single point in space.

Without a missing a beat, Emilybstepped forward, slightly shifting her head to the left.

"The current was a feint!" She thought.

A streak of air whistled past her right ear, close enough to rustle the loose strands of hair around her neck.

Before the strike could retract, Emily channeled static electricity around her down into her left heel, planted her foot, and drove a swift, deadly palm strike toward the point of air displacement.

"Got you!" She thought, her lips curling into a smug grin.

This time her palm didn’t hit empty air. It struck the firm, reinforced barrier around Merlin.

​A shockwave of compressed wind explodes between them, almost blowing her hand back and sending a soft ripple through the air of the underground chamber.

​Silence returned to the subterranean chamber.

​Emily stood frozen, her palm still stubbornly pressed against the solid resistance of Merlin’s arm, her chest rising and falling with a heavy, measured rhythm.

Slowly, she reached up with her left hand, untied the knot of the black silk blindfold, and pulled it down around her neck.

​The torchlit cellar snapped back into view. Merlin stood directly in front of her, his silver eyes looking down at her hand against his sleeve.

His expression was as unreadable as ever, but the corners of his eyes lacked their usual sharp critique.

​"Better," Merlin said quietly

​Emily lowered her arm, flexing her fingers as the residual static current dissipated into her skin.

A dry, exhausted chuckle escaped her lips. "Better? I actually touched you. I thought you were going to tell me my footwork was all wrong!"

"Your footwork was definitely all over the place," Merlin noted casually with a wry smile.

He turned his back and walking across the basalt ring.

"And your posture was overly rigid upon contact. If I had chosen to discharge a burst of current from within my barrier, your wrist would be sprained."

​"Right. Of course," Emily sighed, reaching up to adjust her glasses. She wiped a streak of sweat from her brow, feeling a dull ache in her muscles.

"God forbid I get a full compliment."

Compliments breed complacency," Merlin said.

"And complacency in the Veilrend Games ends in a wooden box. You have made progress, Emily."

He turned back to face her, his silver eyes scanning her face with cold precision.

You are thinking about him again," Merlin said flatly.

She pulled a cloth from her belt and began wiping stone dust from her training gear.

"I’m focusing on my training."

Merlin paused near the top of the stairwell, his silhouette framed by the amber crystal-light of the upper corridors.

​"The Veilrend Games are not a stage for you to prove yourself to Morgan Thane," Merlin said softly.

"They are the stage where the world discovers who you are. Remember that when you step into the ring."

​Without waiting for a response, her insufferable master turned and vanished into the upper halls.

Emily stood alone in the center of the quiet, scorched amphitheater. She looked down at her hands, at the faint, stubborn blue sparks dancing between her fingers, catching the light of the torches.

​She closed her fist tight, smothering the sparks beneath her skin.

​"I know who I am," she whispered to the empty stone walls.