Chapter 185: Abyss versus Ren

Here’s the Chapter:

"Move," Ren said.

She did not respond.

Her eyes stayed on him with the flat patience of something that had been told to stand there and had no personal opinion about any of what was about to happen.

He dashed forward.

The sword came around in a clean horizontal arc aimed at her shoulder, fast enough that most things would not have had the time to register it was coming let alone respond.

She blocked it.

He did not see how.

One moment the sword was moving and the next it had stopped, and something had stopped it, and when his eyes caught up to what that something was it was her forearm, raised and turned, and the sword had hit it and not gone through it the way a sword through an arm should go, and the impact had felt wrong, like hitting something that had been made to not be cut.

He pulled back to counter.

Her foot hit him in the chest.

The force of it was not the force of a kick from a person her size. It was significantly more than that, and the math of how her frame produced that output was not something he worked out before he was already moving backward through the air at a speed that the cave entrance was not going to slow him down on in any useful way.

He went through it and out into the open air and hit the ground outside rolling, coming up on both feet in a crouch with his sword still in his hand and his chest registering a complaint.

He looked up.

She was walking out of the cave entrance toward him.

He raised his jaws and fired.

The chaos flame breath came out in a sustained stream directly at her, wide and continuous, the kind of attack that covered enough space that moving around it was not a simple proposition.

It hit nothing.

She was gone.

He felt her presence before he located it, a displacement in the air to his left that arrived with no warning, and he turned toward it but not fast enough. Her kick landed on the side of his head and the world tilted and he was moving sideways through the air again, his wings snapping out on reflex to arrest the movement, beating hard twice to get him level before he hit anything.

He hung in the air and looked at her standing below him.

"Fast," he said, and he was not talking to her.

He came down.

He came down hard and fast and aimed, sword leading, and she simply was not where she had been. She appeared two meters to the right and the vacuum she had displaced pulled at the air around her like the space was catching up to where she had been, a brief distortion that collapsed inward and then released.

He redirected mid-descent and she was gone again.

She appeared behind him and hit him across the back with both hands together, the impact driving him downward and he hit the ground palm first, managed to convert it into a roll, came up on his feet and immediately had to move sideways from the kick that came in at his ribs.

It caught him anyway.

The vacuum behind it added force to the contact, the compressed air releasing on impact, and he felt the difference between a hit and a hit augmented by a space vacuum and confirmed they were not the same thing.

He ran the information through his head while moving, while keeping himself ahead of her next appearance by a margin that was not comfortable.

She was not stronger than him.

She was not hitting harder than things he had tanked before.

She was simply faster than his ability to fully track, and that speed was doing everything. Every attack carried the vacuum effect, every block caught him off guard because he did not have enough time to prepare for it, and the speed meant she could disengage and reappear anywhere in the space around him before he could lock in a response.

He needed to slow her down.

He planted his feet.

Both hands went out and the gravity manipulation expanded from him outward in a field that covered everything within thirty meters in every direction, the density set to three times the normal weight of the world.

He felt the field take hold.

She appeared beside him a half second after it landed and he saw the difference immediately. The blink was still there but it was slower, the reappearance slightly delayed, the vacuum displacement smaller because she was working against the field while she moved.

She was still fast.

She was not as fast.

Her hands changed.

The transformation moved through them as she oriented back on him, the fingers extending and reshaping, the skin hardening and darkening into something segmented and sharp, each finger becoming a blade that caught the light as she raised both hands and came at him.

He met her.

Sword against spider blade hands, the contact producing sparks, and she was fast enough even in the gravity field that he had to work for every exchange, his blocking tight and his footwork deliberate, reading where she was going to move and being there before she arrived.

She slashed high with the left and he ducked under it and answered with a shoulder check that she turned with, redirecting his momentum sideways and bringing the right hand around in a sweeping arc that he barely got his forearm up to block.

The blade hands dug into his forearm and drew blood.

He answered with a headbutt that landed square on her forehead and bought him enough space to step back and assess.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

Then they moved at the same time.

What followed through the forest outside the cave was the kind of fight that left marks on the environment rather than on the participants, the trees around them accumulating damage with every exchange, bark stripped and trunks cracked where attacks had missed and found what was behind the intended target instead.

She came at him with both blade hands working in fast alternating patterns, each one aimed at a different angle, and he blocked and parried and gave ground when giving ground was smarter than absorbing the hit, using the forest itself to channel her approach, stepping behind trees to force her to commit to one side before she could reappear on the other.

The gravity field moved with him.

She slashed and he caught the blade hand on his sword, redirected it into a tree, and pulled his elbow back hard into her ribs. She took the hit and the vacuum collapsed around the point of contact, the force releasing outward, and they both took the shockwave.

He used it.

He had learned the pattern of the vacuum by this point, the way it built before she moved and the slight tell in her positioning that came just before the displacement, and he started anticipating rather than reacting, moving to where she was going to be instead of where she was.

She appeared and he was already there.

His sword caught her across the arm before she had finished resolving out of the displacement and for the first time in the fight the hit landed clean and she registered it, her arm pulling back, the blade hand retracting slightly.

He pressed.

He came in with sustained pressure now, not giving her the room to blink out cleanly, staying inside the space where the vacuum needed more room to build than she had, and the exchanges became faster and tighter and she was still working against the gravity field and the combination of both was finally doing what he needed it to do.

She blocked three strikes cleanly.

He broke through the fourth.

The sword got past her guard with a force that he had been building into the approach for the last several exchanges, and the impact drove her backward, her feet leaving the ground briefly, and before she could recover he was already there, sword reversed, driving forward.

The blade went through her shoulder and into the tree behind her.

She was pinned.

She did not scream. She looked at him with the same flat expression she had been wearing since she stepped out of the cave, and the blood ran down the blade and dripped from the bark, and Ren stood in front of her breathing hard, the gravity field still running, the forest around them carrying the evidence of everything the fight had cost both of them.

He looked at her.

She looked back.