When The System Spoi Chapter 95 - Ninety Five

Chapter 95: Chapter Ninety Five

Since the Twin Stars of Destruction had moved—the action that marked the beginning of the spar—two minutes had passed.

In two minutes, the class of geniuses had been welcod to another tier of combat.

Nyssara had been the first to notice.

For the first ti since she had awakened, she was pinned. Not held—her limbs were free, her body unbound—but the space around her had beco a cage. This was not spatial magic, not the teleportation locks she had faced. This lock had no seams. It had simply decided that she would not move, and she did not move.

She had finally understood why she felt she had no chance of survival against her professor.

How could she survive when her ability—the source of her confidence, the reason she had never feared being cornered—ant nothing?

But that was not the issue at hand. Her friends were still fighting. How would they manage without her?

Rhaegar would have to find another plan.

---

Things did not always go according to plan. If they did, life would be boring.

Locking Nyssara out of the fight had not been within my expectations. I had assud he would overpower her, or outmaneuver her, or simply crush her with his strength. I had not assud he had the capacity to pin her in place—to nullify her ability entirely, not through force but through sothing colder, more absolute.

Well. It did not matter. We would have to face the challenge without her.

Even now, he simply stood there, staring at us, waiting for us to co to him.

How much pride did he have?

Rhaegar looked to Sam and Daemion. The truth was clear: Dean and Kenshin’s brute force approach had shown itself ineffective. Sam and Daemion would be the ones who mattered now. Their abilities—precognition and spatial control—were the only tools that might close the gap.

Rhaegar nodded at the group. It was ti to begin round two.

---

Pride.

A word. A notion. A thousand perspectives.

One could call it a vice. One could speak of thin lines between healthy pride and its shadow. Zeke would simply laugh at them all.

He was immortal. He had been granted a system by what he had been told was a cosmic lottery. He possessed talent that people would kill for. He had endured tribulations that would have broken anyone else, and he had erged at the top—not the top of the world, because that would be boring, but at the top of himself.

Do you understand the self-worth one would develop with such paraters?

There was another attribute of pride, quieter than the others: a feeling of satisfaction derived from one’s own achievents. Zeke had found himself in a new world, with nothing but his wits and his gifts, and he had held strong. He had influenced the people around him for the better. What would have taken others years to achieve, he had accomplished in two—and he had done it as a lazy bum.

Was he not worthy of pride in his work?

He was.

And that was how traits worked. Nox had explained it: natural traits and traits from runestones. Natural traits, to be shown in a status window, had to exist in the person already. The Tower did not invent them. It simply acknowledged them, gave them quantifiable expression, and—sotis—boosted them.

Zeke had had pride in his bones long before he t Karys. Pride that refused to be pinned by anyone. Pride that gave the Tower no choice but to accept it.

Even if he locked the trait, the personality remained. He was the embodint of pride. That was why the highest rank a ’sin’ could achieve had been granted to him.

His cold stare. His impassive nature. His disregard of their plans.

He had earned all of it.

When he watched the children plan in the silence of the Crucible, he simply waited. He let them sche, let them coordinate, let them believe they might have a chance. Then he waited for them to attack—so he could show them the disparity.

When Zephyr opened his portal and weapons began to pour through via [ntal Armory], Zeke simply planted his feet and moved.

---

Zephyr braced himself as he activated his ability.

He was the sniper now. His collection of cataloged weapons was respectable—B Rank at best, nothing that would threaten a saint, let alone this man—but he could not afford to stand idle. He fired.

The weapons left the portal in a storm of steel and enchanted wood. Arrows. Bolts. A throwing axe that spun end over end. They crossed the distance in a heartbeat.

Zeke disappeared.

He reappeared in front of Zephyr, close enough that Zephyr could sll the ozone clinging to his coat.

Kenshin was already there.

Samuel had seen the teleport coming. He had sent their most physical combatant to intercept, and Kenshin did not hesitate.

"Round two, teach."

The punch was a line—straight, fast, carrying the weight of [Heavenly Restriction] behind it. Zeke tilted his head. The fist passed his ear, close enough to stir his hair.

Then he paused.

Pressure blood across his body—invisible, omnidirectional, squeezing inward from every angle at once. [Pressure Sovereign]. Seraphin had joined the fight.

Not just Seraphin. Sam’s hand was outstretched, his focus narrowed to a point, and Zeke felt the weight of his will pressing against his own. [Psychic Dominion]. Not enough to control him—nothing would be enough for that—but enough to make him pause. Enough to hold him still.

Kenshin did not waste the opening.

His flurry was not a combination. It was a storm. Each punch landed—Zeke’s guard absorbed what it could; his body absorbed the rest. The impact drove him back a step. Then another. The final blow caught him in the chest and sent him sliding across the white floor.

One would wonder: why had Kenshin pushed him away? Would that not break the pressure and the psychic hold?

Sam had the answer. Zeke’s finger had twitched. Within seconds, he would have freed himself. The push was an instruction from him.

As Zeke landed, ten figures descended on him.

Virelle’s [Echo Bodies] flooded the space around him—ten copies, each with her full physical strength, each sharing her mind, each attacking from a different angle. They punched. They kicked. They grabbed, pulled, shoved, trying to pin him in a storm of limbs.

Zeke dodged. He slipped between them, through them, past them. But there were too many, and they were too coordinated—the psychic link feeding them predictions from Sam and Daemion, every movent anticipated, every escape route already occupied.

In the chaos, Dean and Kenshin closed the distance again. Aelric’s bones extended through his skin, sharp and white, ready to pierce. Daemion’s eyes tracked Zeke’s every micro-movent, feeding data to the link. Zephyr’s second wave of weapons scread toward the lee.

Virelle’s fist connected with Zeke’s jaw.

He turned his head—slowly, deliberately—and looked at her. Her hand was still pressed against his face.

He smirked.

And in that instant, her body simply ca undone. Not torn. Not exploded. Not burned. She unraveled—skin, bone, breath, the very idea of her—into a silent pile of components that had never been told they belonged together.

[Instant Dismantling]. A sub-ability of [Sunder]. Whatever he touched, he could take apart.

Zephyr’s weapons reached him. The first arrow touched his sleeve and beca splinters. The second bolt brushed his shoulder and beca a cloud of dust. The axe—the throwing axe that had been enchanted to never dull—grazed his palm and simply ceased to be a coherent object.

Zeke swung his arm in a straight line.

Four Echo Bodies, running toward him, were severed from top to bottom. The cut was invisible, soundless, final. Their upper halves slid from their lower halves, paused for a heartbeat, and dissolved into mist.

[Unseen Severance].

Zeke walked forward.

Behind him, five lances of ice materialized—each one the length of a man, each one spinning with a sound like grinding stone. They hovered for a mont, aiming, waiting.

SHIIINzzzKSHHH.

The lances launched. Four aid at the remaining Echo Bodies. One aid at Virelle herself.

Virelle tracked their trajectories. There was no escape. No gap between them wide enough to slip through, no angle that would leave her untouched. The lances had been placed too perfectly, spaced too precisely.

Thankfully, this was only a simulation.

She closed her eyes and waited.

Portals opened in the path of the lances.

Daemion had used his ability to create portals that would absorb the lances to his connected dinsion.

But what about him?

Zeke appeared behind him.

Not a teleport. Not a dash. Simply—elsewhere, then here, with no transition between. His hand settled on Daemion’s shoulder, light as a falling leaf.

"Tag. You’re it."

Zeke activated both sub-abilities simultaneously.

Daemion froze.

The hand on his shoulder was not heavy. It was not hot or cold. It simply was, and its presence ant that he was already dead. He had been dead the mont he chose to save Virelle. The lances had been bait. The portals had been anticipated. And he had walked into the trap with his eyes open.

’Run,’ Sam had scread in his mind.

But what use was running? He could not escape the professor’s grip. He had already used the teleportation sub-ability; he could not phase into intangibility while he was still absorbing the lances into his dinsion.

Had this been a ploy? Targeting Virelle knowing that he would respond, knowing that his response would leave him vulnerable?

Terrifying.

Daemion’s mouth ford half a smile.

Then the world inside him ceased to exist.

No force. No pain. No sound. Only a silent, invisible blade that passed through every defense he had, severing them at the root. And his body, obeying the dismantling touch on his shoulder, simply fell apart into its fundantal components—like a puppet whose strings had been simultaneously snipped and whose wooden fra had rembered it was only sawdust waiting to happen.

The group paused.

’What is going on?’ Rhaegar asked. The question was for himself, but the psychic link carried it to all of them.

He was not moved by Daemion’s death. They had been told—repeatedly, emphatically—that death in this space was not real. What troubled him was how easily Zeke had dismantled their plan. They had finally cornered him. They had believed, for a mont, that they had found a winning angle.

Sam’s [Future Reading] had given them the blueprint. They had predicted Zeke’s attack on Zephyr. They had positioned Kenshin to intercept. They had locked Zeke down with pressure and psychic force. They had known it would not last—seconds, at most—but seconds had been enough. Sam had seen Zeke’s finger twitch, had warned Kenshin, had told him to push rather than pin, to send Zeke toward Virelle rather than let him break free in their midst.

It had worked. With Daemion and Sam feeding predictions through the link, Virelle’s ten bodies had overwheld Zeke’s ability to dodge. They had not hurt him—not aningfully—but they had held him. They had bought ti for the heavy hitters to close in.

Then it had spiraled.

One might ask why Sam’s [Future Reading] had not been active earlier. Why had he not seen Zeke’s intention to target Virelle, to bait Daemion, to end him?

The answer was simple: the ability had to be activated. It was not indefinite. And the tax scaled with the target.

He had been reading Zeke. Of course he could not maintain it continuously. Of course he could not see everything.

He had seen the teleport. He had scread his warning. Daemion had heard it.

But reading the future was not useful when you lacked the strength to change it. It beca, at that point, simply seeing the inevitable.

And Daemion’s ’death’ had been inevitable.

Zeke had exploited their weakness. He had killed one of their heavyweights. He had trapped another—Nyssara, still pinned, still helpless—for the duration of the fight.

The battle had just beco harder.