Revan closed the distance.
He hurled himself forward at an angle, deliberately cutting across the creature’s orbit. The trajectory was intentional, aid at a point along its circling path that would force it to make a choice: hold its loop and let Revan intercept, or break away and move.
It broke.
The displacent veered right, accelerating to widen the gap.
Revan veered with it.
The creature adjusted. Changed direction. Tried to swing around behind him.
Revan followed the rain.
The mont the creature moved, its synchronization with the rainfall stuttered. A fraction of a second where the pattern of drops hitting mud was disrupted by sothing large passing through them at speed.
Three ters to his right. A patch where the downpour thinned for a heartbeat.
He swung.
The blade cut air. The creature had already shifted.
But that was the point. The swing was never ant to connect. It was ant to force the creature to dodge, and dodging at speed ant breaking its rhythm with the rain.
Revan was herding it the sa way it had been herding him five minutes ago.
More disruption. Two ters behind him.
Revan spun and slashed low.
CLANG.
A glancing blow that numbed his wrist but confird position.
’Found you, you slippery bastard.’
The creature snarled and pulled back.
Revan stepped forward into the snarl, thrusting his blade. The creature sidestepped, but the thrust pushed it left, and left was where Revan’s next step was already going.
He planted his foot and drove his shoulder straight into the space the creature had retreated to.
His shoulder slamd into sothing warm.
His broken ribs scread. White flashed through his vision. But for one instant he was TOUCHING it, pressed against invisible flesh, and his sword arm was already moving.
A tight, elbow-range stab. Six inches of black steel into whatever was directly in front of his chest.
The creature scread. Point-blank. So close that Revan’s left eardrum popped with a wet crunch that turned the world lopsided.
’How’s THAT for a greeting, you piece of shit?’
Sothing caught his right hip and threw him sideways. He hit the mud rolling, ca up with the sword, ears ringing.
He expected the creature to flee.
As he had thought earlier, the scenario in his head didn’t always match reality.
The displacent surged back at him. Fast. Furious. A straight-line charge directly into his guard.
Revan clenched his jaw.
"—!"
CLANG!
The impact drove Revan back three steps. His boots carved trenches in the slurry. Before he could reset, a second blow hamred his blade from the left, spinning him ninety degrees. A third caught the flat of his sword from above and nearly drove him to his knees.
"Shit, couldn’t you just run away?!" Revan shouted in frustration. "Shouldn’t you have figured out that if I keep chasing you, my stamina will just burn out anyway?!"
Of course, any creature that agreed with what Revan said would have a minus brain, with an estimated IQ of only twenty.
Revan had just demonstrated that slow, synchronized movent could be tracked through the rain. The creature understood imdiately. If stealth no longer worked, the answer was speed and violence.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
Three strikes in under two seconds. He parried the first, redirected the second using viscous Aura through his torso, and ducked the third.
’You figured it out that fast? I spent ten minutes bleeding to learn your pattern, and you rewrote yours in ten SECONDS?’
The creature pressed harder. A low sweep aid at his ankles. Revan jumped. Sothing clipped his right shoulder midair, sending him tumbling sideways.
He rolled through the mud and ca up swinging. The blade t resistance. The creature snarled and pulled back, but only for a heartbeat before launching another barrage.
From angles Revan couldn’t predict because there WAS no pattern anymore. Each strike arriving from wherever felt right in the mont.
’Clever girl. You stopped using a pattern because you know I read patterns. So you went random.’
Block. Spin. Redirect.
’But here’s the thing about random.’
A strike from behind. Revan sidestepped, let it pass, and drove an elbow backward into the space the attack had co from.
Thud. Sothing solid. The creature grunted.
’Random ans you can’t plan either.’
Another from the left. Revan caught it on his blade, let the viscous Aura channel the force through his hips, and whipped a counter-slash into the creature’s flank.
The blade kissed flesh. Shallow. The creature yelped.
What Revan was doing underneath the chaos was sothing far simpler than reading a pattern.
He was setting a tempo.
Every parry at the sa speed. Every redirect at the sa timing. Every counter-slash at the sa interval after the block. He was feeding the creature a rhythm. His OWN rhythm.
The creature didn’t notice. It was too focused on overwhelming Revan’s guard through unpredictable violence to realize that while its attacks were random, Revan’s responses were chanical. Identical. Repeating.
Block. Redirect. Counter.
Block. Redirect. Counter.
Forty seconds. Forty seconds of brutal, close-range exchanges in the mud and the rain.
And then the creature’s attacks started to sync.
The way a person walking beside soone else will gradually match their stride without aning to. The creature’s random strikes began to arrive at intervals that matched Revan’s response timing. Pulled into his tempo.
’Got you.’
The next attack ca from the right. On beat. Exactly where Revan expected it, exactly when he expected it, because he had spent forty seconds teaching the creature when to swing.
He didn’t block.
He stepped forward and drove the sword straight into the gap the attack had opened.
SHUNK.
The blade sank four inches into sothing dense that gave way under the pressure.
The creature convulsed. The scream was singular, raw, enormous.
And then it ripped itself free and ca back swinging.
’ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW?!’
Sothing hit Revan across the chest. He flew backward, hit the mud, slid. Scrambled up. The creature was already on him.
CLANG. CLANG.
Revan parried both, but his arms nearly gave out.
A strike caught his dead left arm. The impact spun him sideways. One knee hit the slurry.
From the ground, he swung upward. A wild, scything blow.
CRACK.
The blade connected with sothing structural. Sothing load-bearing broken under the edge.
The creature staggered. Its displacent lurched sideways, listing hard.
It struck again. Weaker. The displacent wobbling on the follow-through.
’YES. That’s a joint. Or whatever the fuck you use for joints. How’s that feel, huh? Not so fun when YOUR leg doesn’t work, is it?’
Revan rose to his feet. Aura channels flickering. Left arm dead. Left ear ringing.
But the creature was limping.
And Revan was still standing.
’Your move, ugly.’
The creature didn’t flee.
The displacent lurched away, circled, ca back around. Tried to flank. On one working leg.
’Oh, you stubborn son of a bitch. I can respect that. I HATE it. But I can respect it.’
Revan tracked the uneven gait through the rain. Every heavy step on the damaged limb produced a distinctive disruption.
The creature tried to compensate. Shifted weight to the uninjured side. For a few seconds the displacent beca harder to read again.
’Smart. Redistributing weight to mask the limp.’
But slower. And slower ant Revan could close the gap.
He sprinted.
The creature abandoned its compensated gait and ran. Revan was already inside two ters.
He dropped into a slide. Swept low.
The sword caught sothing at the sa height as the previous hit. The creature scread and its displacent collapsed. For one second, stationary. Mass pressed into the mud.
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