Chapter 1197. Burning Through Your Life Force to Chase a Shadow

Chapter 1197: 1197. Burning Through Your Life Force to Chase a Shadow

Evelyn didn’t just move; she tore through the fabric of reality. Her body blurred out of ordinary perception in an instant, leaving behind only a faint, haunting afterimage of pale blue light that streaked across the debris like a comet’s tail.

In less than a tenth of a second, she reappeared directly behind Xerollion. There was no wind-up, no warning, just a fist driven toward his exposed spine with enough kinetic force to pulverize solid granite.

BOOOM.

Xerollion spun on his heel with preternatural grace, his body reacting before his mind even registered the threat. He caught the strike on his forearm.

The collision was cataclysmic. A visible shockwave rippled outward from the point of contact, sending loose masonry cascading from the ceiling like deadly rain.

CRACK THUD.

The ground beneath their feet spiderwebbed from the sheer pressure of the halted momentum.

Evelyn did not pause to assess the exchange. She couldn’t afford to.

She vanished again immediately, her speed pushing the limits of her own cardiovascular system. She reappeared from four different angles in less than two seconds—a whirlwind of blue light and lethal intent.

Left hook, high roundhouse, gut thrust, and spinning elbow, each strike aimed to exploit the split-second openings created by her own velocity.

She was trying to use her raw speed to compensate for the terrifying chasm in physical power between them.

’Too fast,’ Xerollion thought, his mind racing to match her rhythm. ’She’s not just running; she’s vibrating through the air.’

His Foresight read the pattern of her movement with increasing difficulty. Her velocity made her predictions slippery, like trying to catch smoke with bare hands.

Every time he locked onto a trajectory, she shifted mid-stride, forcing him to sharpen his precision to a razor’s edge.

Beneath the surface, his Full Potential Adaptation began to hum, working like a furnace to process her unique acceleration patterns, converting her raw mechanism of speed into data he could reliably anticipate.

She wasn’t done. She wasn’t even close.

Mid-stride, Evelyn reached down and tore a massive chunk of a broken column off the floor. With a grunt of exertion, she hurled it directly at Xerollion’s head.

As the stone flew, she vanished, closing the gap behind the projectile.

Xerollion’s instincts flared; he swatted the stone aside with a casual open palm strike. CLANG, but it was exactly what she wanted. His attention flicked toward the debris for a fraction of a heartbeat.

In that heartbeat, she struck.

She drove a knee upward toward his ribs from below, a low, vicious strike aimed at his solar plexus. The strike was so fast that it nearly slipped beneath his guard entirely.

THUD.

Xerollion caught the knee against his forearm instead of his ribs, but the impact was so violent it sent a visible tremor through the corded muscle beneath his sleeve.

"Too slow," Xerollion muttered.

He answered with a short, brutal counter—a piston-like jab. Evelyn’s eyes widened; she barely managed to weave around it, but the edge of his fist clipped her shoulder.

SHLUCK.

The force spun her half a step off balance, her boots skidding across the blood-slicked stone.

But Evelyn didn’t fight the spin; she weaponized it.

Leveraging the centrifugal force from her stumble, she whipped back around, her body coiled like a spring. Her elbow shot upward, but she wasn’t aiming for his chest or his throat.

She aimed directly at the center of the mask covering his face. This was the first attack that carried something more deliberate than simple damage; it was a surgical strike, a probe designed to pierce his mystery.

Xerollion noticed the intent instantly. The moment his tactical mind registered her target, he tilted his head back by a hair’s breadth.

WHOOSH.

Her elbow whistled past the edge of the mask, missing by millimeters. The displaced air pressure from her strike was so intense she could feel the phantom wind of it against her own knuckles.

Xerollion straightened his posture, his breathing still unnervingly controlled.

For the first time since the slaughter began, something sharper and colder entered his voice.

"Interesting," Xerollion said.

The detached boredom was gone, replaced by a predatory focus. "You’re not trying to hurt me anymore..."

"You’re not trying to kill me... You’re trying to see something."

Evelyn didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop.

Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, and her muscles screamed with the buildup of lactic acid, but she pushed through.

She was already moving again before the last sentence had fully left her lips, her form blurring once more as she refused to give him a single second to settle into his new rhythm.

"I want to know who you really are," Evelyn spat, her voice raw with defiance. "Everyone else in this corridor is too broken to ask..."

"Too terrified to look... But I’m not." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Evelyn became a creature of pure motion, a blue streak of vengeance that refused to acknowledge the impossible gulf between them. She came at the mask twice more in rapid succession, her movements becoming more complex, more deceptive.

The first strike appeared to be a vicious palm thrust aimed at his throat, but mid-flight, her fingers splayed into a grasping claw, a feint designed to tear the mask free.

The second was a desperate, full-body lunge that abandoned all defensive caution in favor of raw, unadulterated velocity.

WHOOSH.

WHOOSH.

Both times, she struck air. Xerollion simply wasn’t where her hands expected him to be.

He didn’t dodge with theatrical flair; he shifted those last few crucial inches through nothing more dramatic than flawless, economical footwork and a read on her intent that arrived a fraction of a second before her muscles even fully contracted.

To Evelyn, it felt like fighting a ghost made of iron.

On the third attempt, she committed everything. Her fist screamed toward the mask, the displaced air whistling like a blade.

SNAP.

Xerollion’s hand shot out. He didn’t block; he intercepted.

His fingers clamped around her wrist an inch from the mask’s edge. The sudden halt sent a shockwave up her arm that made her teeth rattle.

He held her there, motionless, not with crushing force, but with a terrifying firmness that signaled the absolute end of her gambit.

"Not today," Xerollion said.

His voice was almost gentle, a soft murmur that sounded obscene amidst the wreckage and the blood. Before she could even process the humiliation of being caught, he released her wrist and stepped back, effortlessly gliding out of her reach.

"You’ll have to settle for suspicion a while longer."

Evelyn gasped for air, her lungs burning like she had swallowed molten glass. Her heart hammered against her ribs THUD THUD, THUD THUD, and her vision swam.

She felt exposed, raw, and utterly powerless.

Xerollion watched her, and for the first time, a spark of genuine interest flickered behind the mask. She was the fastest thing he had personally exchanged blows with since that cataclysmic fight in Kaeleth’s domain.

There was a specific, cold pleasure in this—a small pocket of genuine challenge buried inside an engagement that had otherwise felt like nothing more than clearing debris from a path.

"Your speed is impressive," Xerollion said.

He ducked beneath another strike, a spinning back fist that came from an angle so improbable it should have been impossible to predict. He moved like water, flowing around her attack without breaking his stride.

"But speed without sufficient power behind it only tires you out faster than it tires me..."

"You are burning through your life force to chase a shadow."

Evelyn said nothing. She couldn’t afford words.

The time for talking had died with Apollo.

Instead, she answered with a roar of pure magical output. She began to weave considerably stronger strikes into her combinations, each blow carrying a crackling aura of azure energy that shattered the stone floor where they landed.

CRACK BOOM.

The air around her began to hum with lethal static.

The soldiers watching from the shadows gasped. They had fought alongside her for years, but they had never seen this.

They had never seen this monster.

For two years, Evelyn had lived behind a self-imposed prison. She had deliberately capped her own output at forty percent, a discipline born of a deep, paranoid caution.

She knew what she carried; she knew that to unleash her full strength was to invite attention she wasn’t ready to handle. But watching Apollo fall, watching Elliot be broken like a child’s toy, that caution hadn’t just evaporated; it had been incinerated.

’No more holding back,’ she thought, her inner voice screaming over the roar of her own blood. ’No more hiding...’

’If I die, I die as what I truly am.’

She pushed past the seventy percent mark.

FWOOOOOOOM.

The transformation was instantaneous. The corridor’s remaining torchlight didn’t just flicker; it stretched and blurred into long, agonizing streaks of amber wherever she passed.

Her movements were no longer just fast; they were violent distortions in space. Each step she took left a cratered imprint in the stone.

The blue light trailing her wasn’t a faint afterimage anymore; it was a blazing comet of azure mana that threatened to ignite the very oxygen in the room.

The pressure in the corridor spiked so sharply that the ears of the nearby soldiers began to bleed.