I Can Copy And Evolve Talents - Chapter 1377 The Resolve Of A Fraudster [part 3]
Chapter 1377 The Resolve Of A Fraudster [part 3]
The armor’s darkness fed her information. She could feel the way Zebelon’s weight shifted before he moved. She could sense the arc his sword would take by the tension in his shoulders.
Small things.
Things that a less perceptive fighter would never notice, things that even a Sage might not realize he was telegraphing. But Jeci noticed everything, and she forgot nothing, and every exchange taught her something new about the way this man fought.
The wave-blade carved toward her midsection. She had seen this exact combination before, twenty seconds ago, and she had taken a hit from the follow-up rising cut. This time she didn’t block the horizontal sweep. She stepped into his guard, inside the reach of his sword, and drove the butt of her spear into the underside of his jaw.
Zebelon’s head snapped back.
It was the first clean hit she’d landed. It was not devastating to a Sage, but it was clean. His teeth cracked together and for a fraction of a second his eyes went unfocused.
Jeci didn’t celebrate, she pushed..
The spear came around in a blinding thrust aimed at his throat. Zebelon recovered faster than any human should have been able to, batting the spear aside with his forearm and countering with a brutal pommel strike that caught Jeci in the sternum and sent her sliding backward through the dirt, her boots carving twin furrows in the ground.
She stopped and straightened. The darkness around her rippled and resettled.
‘Again.’
Zebelon’s smile faltered. And it wasn’t because the hit had hurt him. A Savant couldn’t truly hurt a Sage with a strike like that. It faltered because he recognized what he was looking at.
He had fought many opponents who were weaker than him. Most of them eventually revealed themselves. The desperate ones became reckless. The clever ones became predictable. The stubborn ones became rigid, doubling down on what they knew because fear wouldn’t let them adapt.
Jeci was doing none of these things.
She was getting better. Right now, in the middle of their fight, she was learning. The combinations that had pushed her back a minute ago were being deflected now.
The wave-blade’s deceptive reach, which had caught her three times in the opening exchange, was being read accurately. Her footwork was tightening with each passing second, and the darkness she commanded was becoming more deliberate, more targeted, less of a spreading field and more of a weapon in itself.
He lunged forward and swung hard enough to split stone.
Jeci didn’t block, she redirected. The shaft of her spear caught the flat of the wave-blade and guided it past her, and in the same motion she turned the redirect into a thrust that punched the crimson tip into the gap between his pauldron and breastplate.
The armor held… barely.
A thin line of red appeared on Zebelon’s shoulder and the Commander glanced at it with an expression that was no longer amused.
“I see.”
He shifted his grip on the wave-blade. Making it wider and lower.
It seemed like he had decided to get serious and to stop testing.
The essence around him surged quietly like a terrible pressure that settled over the battlefield like the weight of deep water. The air around the wave-blade distorted, the curved edge taking on a faint shimmer that made Jeci’s darkness recoil from it instinctively.
This was the gap between them… Raw power.
A Sage’s essence could do things that a Savant’s simply could not answer, and Zebelon had decided to stop pretending they were in the same league.
He swung.
The wave-blade tore through the air and Jeci blocked it with her spear, and the impact was different this time. Her arms didn’t just shake, they buckled. The ground beneath her cratered. The spear’s shaft groaned and the crimson blade at its tip shuddered as if it might shatter.
He swung again. Same arc, same angle, no deception. He didn’t need deception anymore, just force.
Jeci caught it again. The furrow in the earth behind her deepened as she was driven backward. Her armor rippled and the darkness around her thinned further, burning itself to absorb the kinetic overflow from the strikes.
A third swing came and this one she couldn’t fully catch. The wave-blade punched through her guard and raked across her chest, tearing a gash in her dark armor that exposed the faint glow of the soul-forged material beneath. The impact threw her sideways and she hit the ground rolling, her spear dragging through the dirt as she used it to arrest her tumble.
She rose immediately. The gash in her armor was already closing, darkness knitting itself back together, but slowly. Slower than before. She was burning through her reserves.
Zebelon watched her stand and subtle wariness shifted behind his eyes.
He had hit her with strikes that would have ended most Savants. Clean, decisive, Sage-level blows designed to break bodies and shatter weapons. And this woman simply stood back up, her visor still showing nothing but that cold red glint, her spear still steady in her hands, her posture betraying nothing, not pain, not exhaustion, not fear.
He spoke, humor leaving his voice now.
“You don’t know when to stop.”
Jeci planted her spear into the ground. The darkness beneath her surged.
It didn’t spread this time. It condensed. The thin film that had been crawling across the battlefield reversed, pulling inward, gathering around her body and her weapon like a second skin. The armor thickened. The crimson glow in her visor burned brighter. And the darkness that clung to her spear coalesced along the blade’s edge until the weapon looked less like a spear and more like a fissure in the world itself.
The Commander’s eyes stayed on her blanking, he shook his head with a little pity and said with a cold voice.
“You think that will change anything?”
Jeci did not respond to him… instead her gaze burned with a red glint that grew more malicious. And she pointed her darkened spear towards him.
