The knight charged.
One mont it was standing fifteen ters away, and the next it was crossing the distance in a single explosive stride that cracked the ground and sent a cone of displaced fog blasting outward.
Anticipating the strike, Revan imdiately threw his weight sideways.
The knight’s sword carved through the space his torso had occupied a heartbeat ago. The black blade passed so close that the lightless fire licking its surface singed the torn fabric on his chest, and the displaced air hit him like a wall, spinning him half a rotation before he caught his balance.
’Damn it,’ Revan cursed inwardly. ’It actually burns? I thought it was just a cheap trick to scare people.’
The knight didn’t stop. It pivoted on its forward foot with a fluidity that sothing that large had no right to possess and swung again, a wide sweeping arc that ca from Revan’s left and aid to bisect him at the waist.
Revan brought his sword up to et it.
The collision should have shattered his arms. He’d spent the last hour fighting a creature that hit hard, and every block had rattled his bones and numbed his fingers.
This thing was in a completely different class. The force behind the knight’s swing would have launched him across the field and broken whatever the fog creature hadn’t already broken.
But the gauntlet pulsed.
The cold energy that had been flowing steadily through his left arm surged. In the fraction of a second before the blades connected, Revan felt his body pull a thread of Aura from his core, the way it had done a thousand tis in fifteen years of combat, an automatic diversion that every trained warrior perford without conscious thought.
"...?"
But what ca out was different from what he was used to.
The thread entered the gauntlet and sothing inside the tal grabbed it, compressed it, spun it through the grooves carved along the surface at a speed that made Revan’s entire arm vibrate.
What erged on the other side was the sa Aura, carrying the sa signature, but amplified. Doubled. Tripled.
The thin trickle that Revan’s exhausted body could barely produce was fed through the gauntlet’s channels and ca out the other end as a torrent.
The amplified Aura flooded his left arm in an instant, overflowed into his shoulder, raced across his chest, and hit his right arm just as the knight’s blade t his own.
CLANG.
The impact drove Revan backward, his boots carving furrows in the dirt.
’What the hell was THAT?’
Unfazed
The knight retreated to gain leverage and struck again, this ti from above, a massive overhead cleave that would have split Revan from crown to groin. He sidestepped, let the blade crater the earth beside him, and swung his blade into the knight’s exposed flank.
The gauntlet pulsed again.
The edge of revan blade connected with the knight’s armor and actually bit. The black tal dented inward. The dark flas shuddered around the point of contact.
The knight staggered a step and a half.
And for the first ti since it appeared, it made a sound. A low, resonant grunt that vibrated through its helm and into the fog.
’Holy shit,’ Revan thought, his eyes widening. ’That was one hell of a powerful strike.’
The gauntlet was doing sothing that shouldn’t be possible.
The knight recovered and ca at him again. Faster this ti. A three-hit combination, low-high-thrust, each strike flowing into the next with a precision that spoke of centuries of practice.
Revan parried the low, ducked the high, and twisted sideways to let the thrust pass under his arm.
The gauntlet fed him amplified Aura with each movent, responding to the demands his body made automatically, filling the gap between what he needed and what he had.
As the knight readied its next strike, he countered. A short, rising cut aid at the gap between the knight’s helt and breastplate.
The knight tilted its head. The blade scraped along the edge of the helm, throwing sparks of lightless fire, and missed the gap by two centiters.
’I can fight this thing. I can actually fight this thing.’ A fierce grin broke across his face. ’This artifact is incredible. You are seriously amazing.’
For the first ti tonight, Revan was hitting above his weight and landing. The gauntlet was turning every trickle of effort into a river of output, and the river was strong enough to make his broken body competitive against sothing that should have been impossible to face.
But the wheel always turns.
That elation faded as Revan began to feel the artifact’s side effects.
It started as a tingling in his chest. Light at first, almost pleasant, like the buzz of adrenaline after a hard sprint. Then it sharpened.
The amplified Aura wasn’t just flowing through his arms. It was racing through his entire circulatory system, following the pathways that connected every channel in his body, and it was moving FAST. Faster than his body was designed to handle.
The Aura hit his heart on a pass between his left arm and his core, and the muscle seized for a quarter of a second.
Revan grimaced.
’It’s like forcing a raging river through a fragile pipe. The pressure is going to tear apart from the inside.’
Indifferent to the expression on Revan’s face. The knight swung.
Revan quickly parried and the amplified Aura surged through him again, and this ti the current hit his spine on the return trip and his left leg went numb for half a second. He stumbled, caught himself, and barely dodged a follow-up that would have taken his head.
’Shit. Every ti it activates, the current runs through a different path. The Aura is looking for the fastest route through my body and it keeps finding new ones. Heart. Spine. Brain stem. Lungs. It’s like being struck by lightning over and over, except the lightning is coming from INSIDE.’
The knight pressed forward.trying to corner him.
Revan parried again and again.
Until the surge passed through his diaphragm and he choked mid-breath, his lungs locking for a full second before releasing.
’I can’t keep using this at full output. If the current hits my brain or stops my heart for longer than a second, I’m dead. Fuck, I hate to admit it. The artifact isn’t trying to kill . It’s just too powerful for the body it’s attached to.’
He gritted his teeth and kept fighting. Adjusted.
Started controlling the flow consciously, pinching it, slowing the current, trying to limit how much Aura the gauntlet amplified per burst. Less input ant less output ant less speed through his organs.
It worked. Partially.
The surges beca smaller, the side effects dropping from debilitating to rely painful. But the reduced output ant his strikes were weaker, his blocks less solid, and the knight began gaining ground.
It drove him backward. Step by step. Strike by strike.
The advantage Revan had enjoyed for the first thirty seconds was evaporating as he throttled the gauntlet to keep his heart beating.
’I need a middle ground. There has to be a sweet spot where the amplification is high enough to fight and low enough to not fry my insides.’
Revan sighed heavily.
’Finding that sweet spot while fighting for my life. Easy. No problem. Just another Tuesday.’
Revan psyched himself up. He had lost count of how many tis he had done it, but it was sothing he had to do to keep fighting.
That self-encouragent worked—right up until the blazing black figure did sothing that made Revan freeze.
The knight raised its sword high above its head.
The dark flas on the blade intensified, condensing along the edge, and Revan recognized the motion because he’d seen Sylvia do sothing identical a hundred tis. It was concentrating its energy for a single, devastating blow.
’Dude, don’t the enemies I face always play dirty?’
The blade ca down.
"FUC—"
Revan raised Volkar’s sword to block and felt his body do sothing he hadn’t told it to do.
The gauntlet didn’t just pulse. It ROARED.
The cold energy inside it erupted through every channel in his body simultaneously, Aura flooding outward from every pore, every nerve, every inch of skin. His vision went white. His heartbeat vanished into a frequency too fast to feel as individual beats. The air around him thickened and warped and turned black.
The knight’s blade ca down to et his sword, but stopped an inch apart, suspended by a violent surge of opposing forces. It was as if a wall of impenetrable energy stood between the blades, forbidding them from touching.
The force behind the blow, the concentrated, devastating power of sothing two tiers above him, hit the edge of revan blade and went nowhere.
The shockwave that should have shattered Revan’s skeleton instead radiated outward, cracking the earth beneath his feet in a perfect circle.
Revan stood in the center. Unmoved. His body wreathed in sothing dense and dark and vibrating. His eyes, both of them, had gone completely black.
’...Huh?’
He could feel it. The energy wasn’t just amplified anymore. It had transford.
The cold current from the gauntlet had rged with his own Aura and beco sothing else entirely, sothing that coated his skin and filled the air around him and bent the fog away from his body in a two-ter radius.
He knew what this was.
He’d done it once before. On a train.
The technique that only two students in Class A had ever achieved. The Final Phase of a warrior’s developnt.
Aura Manifestation.
Reviews
All reviews (0)