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He deflected her blade to the side and was moving in to kick her knee when a second version of her weapon chopped out at his leg.
Reflexively, Matt shifted all the filigree that made up [Cracked Phantom Armor]’s second layer to reinforce the exact area that the attack was about to strike. Queen may have been fast, but he’d been fighting faster foes than himself since even before he could double the potency of his perceptions on command. Her attack rebounded off 1,200 mana perfectly positioned to block it, though even then it very nearly broke through his primary defensive ability. In retaliation, Matt brought his own sword down on the smaller woman after stepping forward to close the distance.
Queen slipped to the side as if the ground was ice while chopping upward at his extended arm.
Matt was forced to retreat, cutting off his armor’s second layer and redistributing its mana to [Mage’s Retreat] and [Sharp Mind] for maximum speed, and he didn’t stop until he was out of her reach and had a moment to recuperate. [Lesser Regeneration] and [Endurance] both flared up, relieving his physical strain and refreshing his mind, allowing him to consider his options.
He cursed internally.
Queen was still a better warrior than he was.
But he wasn’t just a warrior.
He was so, so much more.
Susanne swore internally as Quill retreated.
After hearing his Talent, she hadn’t expected to beat him in a battle of strength, but she hadn’t expected to be so substantially outmuscled, even with [Mana Strength] reserving a fair portion of her mana.
Her AI did the math for her, and she realized she had to adjust her battle strategy to treat Quill like a Tier 13 swordsman.
As he retreated, he started throwing [Mana s***h]es as if they were going out of style. It reminded her of Quill’s endless fireballs when she was fighting him in the tournament.
Knowing his Talent explained how the man was able to cast so many spells and make so many talismans, but the endless waves of attacks still stood out to her as just unfair.
She blocked, dodged, or cut each of them apart as she raced after Matt trying to force him into a standing battle. But he kept retreating and was just so stupidly fast. She had to bend space to just barely keep up with him, and even when she matched him using [Dash], he just sped up even further, forcing her to drop her skill to avoid draining all her mana only a minute into the fight.
She noted that he was very good with his Concept, able to hover just half an inch over the ground and speed himself up, even in retreat. Not a lot of people below Tier 15 could do that. While there was no technical restriction on moving in any direction with a Concept, humans’ natural instinct was to move slower in a direction that they normally couldn’t.
But she was better, she could already tell. Matt used his body and mana well, but for all his skill, she had just spent the last three years learning all the tricks she could pull with her Concept from Carol.
She’d been taught by the best, and it showed. And for this fight, she’d need to go all-out.
She used her Concept to compress space and shortened the distance between Matt and herself, skipping and dodging the final few [Mana s***h]es.
Susanne brought her blade down on Matt and tried to cut through his incredibly hard armor but found that he had cast [Sword Doppelganger], and a mana version of his longsword blocked her attack.
She remembered how the skill had felt three years ago, and was once again surprised, but this time by how much more solid and durable it was now. As she focused on making her manifestation sharper, she brought her main blade around while creating a second copy to strike out at Matt’s true blade as it descended.
Before she had met Carol, creating the second copy of her blade was all done on instinct, and difficult to keep active. But now, it was second nature, albeit only for a few seconds at a time. Her Concept was meant to empower a single sword that she always had active, so pushing it to create two blades felt…odd.
She activated the enchantment on her bracer and a blast of air surged out to strike Matt, sending him flying, but he was only knocked back a few feet before his Concept began halting his movement. She felt where his Concept tried to affect reality and struck out at it with her greatsword.
Carol had explained it to her in simple terms when she asked why stabbing one of Adam’s illusions had hurt him, and it all came down to her Concept.
Any weapon Concept could make a weapon manifestation, but in the end, they weren’t real blades. That came with a few drawbacks, like the fact they couldn’t be enchanted or over-Tiered, but they had their own advantages.
Concept manifestations weren’t real. That meant they could strike out at things that a normal blade couldn’t hit.
Like illusions.
Or someone else’s Concept and its workings.
When she cut the edge of his Concept as it was trying to stop his momentum, Matt was again sent flying as all the force he was resisting hit him at once.
She was already closing the gap as he slammed into a wall, and she pushed her second sword to cast [Mana s***h] in the last moment before it vanished again, while her main blade cast [Wind Cutter]. The air spell was incredibly sharp and was perfect for bypassing hard armors.
Susanne was almost on him when her spiritual sense felt something wrong, and she retreated out of instinct. Matt was standing there with his blue sleek armor as if nothing was wrong, even without the more ornate portions that seemed to reinforce the skill.
Instead, between them was a five-foot-wide and seven-foot-tall wall of mana.
Her AI recognized it before she did. [Bulwark].
A Tier 20 skill.
After a moment, she caught herself. It synergized with his Talent well enough that it probably was one of his tournament rewards, if not one of the Cracked skills that he’d likely gotten as a reward from King Frederic. She’d gotten two herself, after all. Still, that meant he potentially had one more Tier 20 skill on-call, though she was confident that he wouldn’t have any more than that.
- Writer
