He Who Fights with Monsters 5

2

The force from the blast sent the person who used the ability flying, along with another of the bronze-rankers. It didn’t kill them, but Jason knew for himself how disorienting that blast could be. It would give him some breathing room with the other three who, like Jason, were protected as the blast hit the gelatin wall. Gobbets of harmless ballistics gel rained thickly as the wall exploded.

As the fight resumed in the wake of the blast, Jason’s cloak protected him from some attacks, although its shadowy substance was also negatively impacted by the light. Its true value was to obscure his true body position, causing many attacks to simply miss. He had long ago incorporated unexpected movements into his technique, with hours upon hours of flexibility and balance training. Between that and his cloak’s ability to spread out and dance to Jason’s whims, it was tricky to pinpoint his body’s exact location at any given moment.

Jason’s magical senses tracked incoming magical attacks before they were made. This included conjured and magical weapons, while mundane weapons would be useless. Sensing where the attacks would be, he was constantly moving to where they wouldn’t, never stopping still.

He seemed impervious to attack, moving like a ghost through projectiles and weapon swings. Part of it was that he truly did avoid many blows. Another part was that his cloak masked the blows that did land, and he gave no indication of being harmed.

For his part, his dagger flashed out to land again and again. His shadow arm extended at need, giving his dagger no less reach than the guy with the spiked ball and chain. It flailed like an unattended hose with the water turned to full, yet in the seeming randomness, his dagger bit flesh time after time, riddling the enemy with afflictions.

Jason also pulled out the hydra whip he looted from his very first bronze-rank monster, wielding it with a second shadow arm. The semi-autonomous heads thrashed wildly as they lashed out with savage teeth. The whip couldn’t pile on bonus afflictions like the dagger, but a single special attack could be delivered once for each of the five heads. The targets were somewhat random amongst whichever enemies were in range, but that was only a minor disadvantage.

The whip could also be used to intercept attacks. As it had the hydra’s property of regeneration, it quickly recovered from most damage. Only the fire attacks of one of the bronze-rankers and the searing light from the silver-ranker’s attacks left lingering damage.

Jason largely left the silver-ranker alone. Thanh hung behind the others, making ranged attacks instead of diving in, which was exactly what Jason wanted. He only made occasional feints in Thanh’s direction to keep him on his toes. So long as the silver-ranker didn’t plant his feet to play rapid-fire turret, Jason could handle it. He was careful, luring the bronze-rankers into interrupting the silver-ranker’s sightlines, even intercepting some of his attacks.

Jason had seized the momentum of the battle and was not letting go. The enemies’ problem was not that they didn’t know how to fight; they had clearly received meticulous combat training. The problem was that combat training was derived from Earth methodologies. The way they moved, the way they fought, even the way they thought was based around the paradigm of a baseline human, with the powers incorporated as an addendum.

At iron-rank, that wasn’t too much of a liability, but bronze was the point where an essence user truly became more than human. If they continued to think and fight like a human at that point, they were tossing away their potential.

Jason had been trained as an essence user from the ground up. The confluence of his attributes, perception and powers comprised a series of force multipliers, the results of which demonstrated exactly what made Farrah and himself so valuable to the Network. It wasn’t just improved meditation techniques to get people off cores but a holistic method of going from ordinary warrior to magical weapon.

Jason’s enemies suffered a disconnect between their powers, their physical abilities and the way they sought to use them. They looked buffoonish next to Jason, who was combining and interweaving powers. He relied on his enhanced perception over his ordinary senses. His every motion made use of his superhuman agility and flexibility. Each physical attack was delivered with an appreciation of the power he could put behind it and the strain his body could take in landing it.

His enemies had the potential, but they squandered it. They were humans using superhuman abilities while Jason was a superhuman, through and through. The results were stark. Even without shadows or pulling out his familiars, he gave the bronze-rankers a brutal education on the differences in approach.

Even so, a less-than-stellar silver-ranker was still a silver-ranker. The ability to banish shadows truly was an impediment to Jason, even if it wasn’t the defining factor his opponent had anticipated. Like his subordinates, Thanh squandered much of his potential, but a silver-ranker had far more potential to squander.

Thanh was a ranged attacker, staying back and flinging beams of light and crystal shards in Jason’s direction. He clearly wasn’t as secure as he should be in his silver rank resilience, wasting his silver rank strength. If he had moved in hard on Jason with his superior strength, toughness and reflexes, he could have at least prevented Jason from going wild on the bronze-rankers. Instead, Jason used the bronze-rankers as cover and shields to intercept Thanh’s ranged attacks.

The ability to use the bronze-rankers as human shields was just the beginning. Jason loaded them up with afflictions, hitting them with spells even as he danced amongst them. They were incubators for the afflictions building up, each one charging the protective power of Jason’s amulet.

Despite his superiority, Jason went far from unscathed. As many hits as he avoided, there were just too many enemies. Much of his fight was about minimising hits that couldn’t be dodged. The relatively weak-but-rapid attacks from the silver-ranker alone packed a dangerous punch against Jason, even in his magic armour.

If Thanh had challenged Jason without the bronze-rankers, he would have had a very good chance of winning. With silver-rank powers, silver-rank attributes and the ability to deny any shadows, he had no shortage of advantages. The bronze-rankers seemed like another advantage but they were, in fact, the equalisers.

More than just being human shields, the key reason the bronze-rankers were liabilities to their leader was that they allowed Jason to endure hit after hit. Each affliction Jason incubated on the bronze-rankers added a shield to Jason’s amulet. Not only did his Amulet of the Dark Guardian give a weak shield for every affliction he delivered, each shield that was broken became a healing effect.

As Thanh punched through the shields, they transformed into healing that was added to Jason’s own life-draining power. His Leech Bite attack drained health to further top him off and, when that wasn’t enough, his Feast of Blood gave a large burst of drain-healing. If it still wasn’t enough, he drained the afflictions from a bronze-ranker. His Sin Eater power turned every affliction he drained into ongoing recovery of health, stamina and mana, while leaving holy afflictions in place.

With each bronze-ranker that he drained, Jason’s regeneration grew stronger. The downside was that as each enemy succumbed to the holy afflictions burning them from the inside out, it became easier for Thanh to land hits.

Once the bronze-rankers were all dead, there were no more obstacles to Thanh’s attacks. In spite of this, the precision of his attacks dropped as his frustration rose. Jason’s armour was ragged and he should have died a dozen times over. Instead, he had fed on the life force of the bronze-rankers and used them to build up an absurd level of regeneration. If Jason didn’t have them to use, Thanh’s chances would have been far better.

Despite all of that, defeating a silver-ranker was no mean feat. Even if Thanh was getting sloppy, Jason was out of human shields and Thanh’s attacks were outpacing his healing. Jason focused on trying to take down Thanh, but the man had a number of slippery movement powers. It slowed down his attacks to use them, but it didn’t stop them altogether.

If not for extensive training with the lightning-quick Sophie, Jason would have been at a loss to counter the man’s speed. As it was, he wasn’t landing hits. He struggled to apply as much pressure as he could, employing every trick he knew for combating faster opponents. The key was finding the limitations of their speed, which hopefully they had.

Jason’s pressure exposed Thanh’s weakness, which was a need to slow down when making rapid, sequential shifts in direction. It not only made him easier to pin down but accelerated his exhaustion, even as it decelerated his speed.

Energy attrition was not wildly effective against Sophie, whose endurance almost matched Jason’s, but Thanh lacked her absolute dedication to speed. While any silver-ranker’s endurance was formidable, Jason could sense Thanh slowly but surely tiring. For his part, Jason was like Sophie in being an endurance fighter. The same effects continually restoring his health were keeping his mana and stamina topped off.

Jason’s goal was to exhaust the silver-ranker, forcing him to pause long enough that Jason could employ his most powerful weapon. If he could spray the silver-ranker with Colin, Jason’s leech swarm familiar, it would move the fight into the end game. This man clearly knew Jason’s tactics, however, and would be aware of his most dangerous ally. Jason knew Thanh would not let himself be caught out easily. Only by forcing the situation could Jason use Colin effectively, and missing would mean the silver-ranker could easily avoid the sluggish familiar.

Things were not going Jason’s way; Thanh had his own plan. While Jason was trying to run out the clock of Thanh’s mana, Thanh wanted to overwhelm Jason’s health regeneration before that happened. The silver-ranker had the attribute advantage, and with the bronze-rankers gone, the fight was slowly turning in his favour.

Amongst Thanh’s suite of powers was a burst of ultra-speed, such as Sophie, Rufus and Danielle Geller all shared. Thanh appeared to lack any big-hit powers to maximise the burst of speed, but it allowed him to cue up an array of projectiles to fire the moment the power ended. From training with Rufus and Sophie, Jason recognised the telltale blur and threw himself out of the way, but there was no truly dodging that level of speed. Each time it happened, Jason was ravaged with attacks. The only blessing was that each use was a devastating drain on Thanh’s mana.

As Thanh landed hit after hit, Jason felt the jaws of death growing ever closer. Rather than let them feast, Jason chose to turn the tables and feast on death instead. He paused, startling Thanh enough that a light beam missed wildly as Jason chanted out a spell.

“As your lives were mine to reap, so your deaths are mine to harvest.”

Ability: [Blood Harvest] (Blood)

· Spell (drain).

· Cost: Low mana.

· Cooldown: None.

· Current rank: Bronze 6 (09%).

· Effect (iron): Drain the remnant life force of a recently deceased body, replenishing health, stamina and mana. Only affects targets with blood.

· Effect (bronze): Affects all enemy corpses in a wide area.

The bronze-rankers were half-rotted away with necrosis and half dissolved by the transcendent damage of holy affliction. Jason had not used his finisher on any of them. Thanh watched in horror as the blood-red glow of their remnant life rose from their bodies and was siphoned away, a series of bloody trails moving through the air and seeping into Jason’s body.

Thanh’s senses told him that under the ragged armour and bloodied skin, Jason was more than just physically recovered. Jason’s mana and stamina had already been diminishing far slower than Thanh’s own and now both pools were completely replenished.

Thanh was not yet fully exhausted but had thrown no shortage of mana at Jason in the form of magical attacks. The damage from his hyper-speed burst attacks had been undone, leaving only Thanh’s mana deficit behind. As he watched Jason fully restore himself using the ruined carcasses that had only minutes ago been his team, Thanh’s will broke.

Jason felt the moment his opponent’s morale crumpled—the man’s aura turned to glass. Jason slammed his own aura down like a hammer, shattering that glass to pieces just as Thanh had been activating a movement power in an attempt to flee. Instead, his aura, now a paper tiger, collapsed under Jason’s assault.

Thanh felt a sensation unlike any he had experienced, like a knife pressed against the throat of his soul. He could sense that it would dig in if he moved even the tiniest bit in the wrong direction, flooding him with fear.

Thanh froze on the spot, hearing footsteps slowly approach from behind on the gravel road. His aura no longer banished the shadows, but motes of light flew out from Jason’s cloak to bathe the road in starlight.

“I think we need to return to our previous conversation,” Jason said, his voice a glacial inexorability. “Tell me why you violated the International Committee’s edict.”

“I don’t know,” Thanh said. “The Hanoi branch director just told me to capture you.”