Chương 40: The Supreme Titan

The place opened onto something that used to be a palace, laid on its side like a shelf someone had knocked over, and the first thing I actually focused on was a hand. A real one. Fingers still curled around a hilt that wasn't there anymore, the knuckles swollen in a way shadow bodies never got, because shadow bodies didn't swell, they didn't do any of the things flesh did when it stopped being alive. It took me a second longer than it should have to understand these weren't going to dissolve.

Fire smoke hung low over everything. Debris scattered the way debris scattered after something had actually happened here and not just been staged to look like it had. This was the aftermath of a real fight, recent enough that the smoke was still moving. I pulled up my stats before I let myself take in more of it, because looking at numbers was easier than looking at the hand again.

[Name: Carlos] [Race: Devas] [Level: 29] [Class: Mage] [Class Rank: Apprentice (Advancement Pending)] [Skill Points Available: 48] [Titles: The Regressor | Pathfinder | Master of Many Paths] [ATTRIBUTES] [Strength: 34] [Agility: 31] [Vitality: 55] [Intelligence: 134] [Wisdom: 39] [Perception: 16] [Affinity: 121] [RESOURCES] [Health: 268 / 310] [Mana: 220 / 300] [Stamina: 31 / 100] [Arcane Burst] [Rank: 2] [Cost: Variable] [Effect: Releases accumulated mana outward in a single burst. Can be overcharged with mana allocation.] [Spellfist] [Rank: 2] [Cost: Mana/Stamina split] [Description: You have abandoned the need for staves, chants, and rituals. Your body itself has become a conduit for mana. Your hand can become the weapon.] [Current Output: Rank 4, chain discharge, 2-meter threshold] [Mana Circulation] [Rank: 1] [Cost: Variable, high] [Effect: Draws mana into an object continuously. Sustained field. More expensive than discharge, more destructive at range.] [Wormhole] [Rank: 4] [Cost: 180 mana] [Cooldown: 4 minutes standard, 8 hours floor skip] [Effect: Spatial traversal. Creates a temporary connection between two points.] [Secondary: Spatial Storage, sub-dimensional storage] [Concoction] [Rank 2] [Cost: Stamina + Mana] [Ignite] [Unranked] [Cost: 80 mana] [Compressed plasma burst, evolved from Arcane Burst] [Lux Incantation (Divine-Adjacent)] [Rank 1] [Cost: 180 mana] I went through the list twice, checking rankings I already knew by heart, because this wasn't going to be a fight I could walk away from if something was miscalibrated. Not a kind one.

But one I'd learned more from than almost anything else in fifty-two thousand deaths, if I was being honest, and I wasn't in the habit of being honest about that particular fight with anyone, myself included. Petra was behind me. I could hear her boots shift on the broken tile, weight moving from foot to foot the way she did when she was deciding whether to say something. Something moved in the distance. Far enough that it was still just shape, not detail.

I pulled a stamina vial out of storage, something I'd cobbled together on the walk here with Concoction and whatever scraps were left in my bag, not a real potion, more of a compressed suggestion of one. Drank it anyway. [STAMINA: 78 / 100] Overflow bonus. I'd take it without asking why. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. No mana-heavy spells this time. Not even Spellfist, not yet, and definitely not Channel Investment.

I needed to know the sword was still there in my hands the honest way, the way that didn't route through anything a title had handed me. I owed the thing walking toward us that much, whatever else was about to happen. I looked back at Petra.

"Do not interfere," I said, pointing the azure blade toward the smoke where the figure was going to clear in a few seconds.

"No matter what you see. If I go down, you run. She'll respect that, more than she'd respect you dying next to me." Petra's jaw worked like she wanted to argue the point and then didn't, which was new for her.

"You've done this before," she said. Not really a question. More like she was testing the shape of it out loud.

"Every time," I said, and left it there. A foot came out of the smoke first. Polished black armor, joints hung the way a marionette's joints hung, strings you couldn't see but could feel in the way the limb moved a half-beat off from where a real shoulder would carry it. The wrongness wasn't in any one piece. It was in the gap between the motion and the weight, like whoever built it had studied the idea of a body without ever once watching one move under its own power. I dropped into a low stance.

Knees bent, weight forward on the balls of my feet. She taught me that stance, a long time ago, on a floor I didn't think about much anymore. I focused the azure blade in hand. No mana. I couldn't afford to lean on shortcuts here, not with the numbers I was carrying. My health sat at two hundred sixty-eight out of three hundred ten, and at level thirty on floor fifteen I should have had double that easily, more if I'd gone berserker. I let the thought pass through without stopping on it. No use dwelling.

Old habit, carried over from the monk runs, a passive I still ran without meaning to. Empty thy mind, I whispered. It didn't land the way it used to. [Enemy Identified: TITAN, THE DARK KNIGHT] [LEVEL: 50] Twice my level, same as it always was. That wasn't the real problem though. The real problem sat underneath the number, in layers, the same way the World Eater had layers you couldn't see from the outside until you were already inside them. It kept walking. I tried to remember the sequence.

Left, right, right, two steps, parry, turn, duck— It dashed. My thoughts cut off mid-count. I stepped left, felt the pressure of the slash before I saw the blade itself, no real opening in the follow-through, armor clacking on threads I couldn't see that were somehow controlling the right arm, and my skin burned where the black aura came close enough to touch, even without contact. Old memory, surfacing uninvited. A tug at the corner of my mouth, the ghost of a smile I hadn't asked for. I stepped right.

The next strike came through as pressurized wind, sharp enough to open skin without the sword ever making contact, and it tore a line clean through my sleeve on the way past. No armor on me, not the kind that mattered here. Every hit counted twice as much as it should have. I had to fight this the way I'd have fought at ten percent vitality, same calculus as the World Eater. Get hit clean once and the fight was over before it started. Left. Right. The rhythm shifted.

I was running on instinct by then, past the point where I was choosing anything consciously. Two steps forward, inside the trajectory of the downswing, summoned the blade back into my hand mid-motion where I'd dismissed it a second earlier to move cleaner, and the familiar weight settled into my grip like it had never left. Parried. The impact formed a crater in the ground where I'd been standing. An opening. I cut into the seam in the armor and the blade skidded off, left nothing but a scratch.

It switched the sword to its off hand. Horizontal slash, I ducked under it, came up on the other side and drove the blade through the gap in the plating clean, the kind of strike that should have finished it right there. It stopped moving. I was beside it, knees still bent from the follow-through, close enough to feel the heat coming off the black aura. That should have done the job. It moved anyway, exactly the way I'd half expected it might, and the system caught up a beat late.

[Stamina: 98 / 138] More than I'd budgeted for. I was actively suppressing Mana Circulation the whole time, hadn't let a drop through the channel, and my strength stat still sat well under where it needed to be for a fight like this. Long night ahead. I braced for it. A flurry came in fast, explosive, and I felt the air shift a half second before the first impact landed, moved off my spot before I'd finished feeling it. The ground erupted where I'd been.

Happened twice more in quick succession before I found stable footing again, stepping two paces inside the blast radius, well past where the debris was still climbing into the air behind me. Parried. Slashed. Caught a graze along the ribs for it. Something clipped the hem of my shirt on the return swing, tore the fabric clean through. Sweat started at my hairline and I let it stay there.

Nothing I couldn't work through, but harder than it looked from the outside, and if I hadn't already died on this exact floor more times than I could count, I'd have been finished three exchanges back. I breathed. Took what little window the pattern gave me, the only kind of rest a fight like this offered anyone. Settled into a different stance, blade tilted off to the side, weight rebalanced. I needed to raise the ceiling on this. There wasn't room left in the current approach.

I dropped into the old samurai stance from the warrior branch, the one from before any of this started, back when the sword had been the only thing I had. And had ever known...