"How... How did you break out of my illusion?!"
The girl’s shocked voice reached Ezekiel just as he ca to realize he had been struck with Spiritual magic. ’Such affinities are genuinely rare though. You have to hand it to the Institution for being able to attract individuals like her.’
He glanced down at his gauntlet, noting the dim azure energy still glowing from the array lines embedded in its structure. ’I’m still running on mana then.’ A smirk settled on his lips as the realization landed. "And what possible reason would I have to tell you that?"
An annoyed expression crossed the girl’s face. She wiped the blood trailing from her nose — a backlash from her opponent’s forceful escape from her mindscape illusion — a thread of alarm woven into her irritation despite herself.
It was rare, even among opponents of her rank, to encounter a mind so resistant to her ntal spells. Rarer still to find one so fortified that she had to pour every thread of her concentration into maintaining the integrity of the illusion.
Had it not been for that single complication, she would have simply ensnared him, closed the distance while he stood frozen, and ended the match cleanly. But his mind hadn’t just resisted being pulled in — it had pushed back with enough force that she felt the illusion threatening to unravel if even a single variable was miscalculated.
That was what had rooted her in place as well. Sustaining the spell demanded a ridiculous expenditure of both mana and ntal energy just to sustain his captivity. She had eventually accepted the reality of his ntal strength and adapted — settling on a new route to victory. Knocking him out within the dream. It wouldn’t incapacitate him in the physical world, but it would sever his control over his own limbs for at least a dozen seconds. More than enough ti to close the gap and finish the match.
Ezekiel had reached this sa conclusion, the smirk still sitting easy on his face as he regarded her. ’Unfortunately for you, my gear has multiple physical properties that you simply cannot account for in your illusion — because you can only replicate what I’ve shown you.’ The smirk sharpened as the dim azure light in his gauntlet swelled while he eased into a slight crouch. "Sadly, you forfeited your only chance to win this the mont I broke your first illusion. Every one after that will be transparent to ."
A blink later, the chanic was behind her, gauntlet drawn back and ready. Yet before he could swing, his eyes flickered — then brightened sharply — as the world around him ca apart at the seams like a mirror swung against a wall.
When his vision steadied, he was still crouched in the sa position, smirk undisturbed, staring across at a girl whose nose was now bleeding for the second ti. "Give up."
"Never." She gritted her teeth and unsheathed her twin swords. "The skills I showed within my dreamscape aren’t fake."
"Let’s see how long they hold up in the real world then." By the ti the last word left his mouth, Ezekiel was already on her, gauntlets blazing with azure light.
The girl’s eyes widened slightly as the force crashing into her swords nearly numbed her fingers outright. She retreated, using her footwork to bleed off the impact.
He gave her no room to breathe — pressing forward, his punches carving through the air in wide arcs that displaced the wind around them. To the audience, the girl looked like a small vessel caught in the middle of a raging sea. And yet she continued to slip and counter every blow he threw, refusing to be swept away by the raging waves.
The sharper observers had already worked out that she was no longer trying to defeat him outright — she was bleeding his stamina.
(Ez, she’s still running so kind of interference. Your punches are coming up off-target every swing.)
Sothing snapped into alignnt the instant Laura’s voice arrived. Ezekiel’s eyes cut to the girl, and a slow, knowing smile climbed his face. "You really don’t run out of cards, do you."
A faint light activated within Ezekiel’s visor as he threw another punch. The girl responded with a subtle shift of her body, reading the trajectory — yet the punch didn’t adjust to follow her movent.
A confident gleam settled in her eyes as she calculated how long before her opponent’s output degraded. That calculation ended abruptly when his fist bent mid-flight in a sharp, sudden arc and drove into the side of her waist.
The girl let out a startled yelp as the force tore through her last-second mana defenses and drove into her side. The pain that followed nearly overwheld her entirely — she found herself unable to move any of her limbs, though she managed, barely, to keep from losing consciousness.
Ezekiel stood over her, gauntlets still blazing with azure light. "That’s a genuinely ingenious application of Spiritual magic. You abandoned the subconscious battle entirely and shifted to targeting my perception instead. Had it not been for my visor’s particular function, I’d have been none the wiser. My senses aren’t refined to the point where I could rely on hearing and sll alone to compensate — and I suspect you could have fooled those too, given enough ti."
"T-Then... how?" The question scraped out of her, strained, as she tried and failed to move her limbs while despair began to seep into the edges of her mind.
The chanic flashed a wide grin and tapped his visor. "Thermal imaging. It tracks the heat signature your body releases. Your spell can deceive what I perceive — but it cannot deceive my machines."
"What... what a... useful piece of equipnt... Do you really... think that far ahead for everything?"
He shrugged. "Preparations for anything and everything — that’s the policy. It was a good fight, though."
With enough asured force, Ezekiel pushed the girl off the stage, a carefree smile spreading across his face as the referee called his victory.
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