Jeci and the mander clashed upon each other and all her lesson for the past few months since she joined Northern was immediately put to test.
mander Zebelon was as fierce as a warrior as he was a mander.
The man wielded a sword that was slightly longer than normal, while it could have been easily grouped as an Odachi, it wasn’t. It was long and instead of a straight blade, the blade looked like it had been carved out of inspiration of a wave.
And the sword itself was a daunting foe.
Put in the hands of a vicious mander? Those two were a malicious cohort. And they immediately unleashed hell on Jeci who was wielded her crimson spear.
Even though hell broke loose upon her, Jeci fought like she was molded by its flames. Instead of pushing back she tore forward with undulating dark waves burning asides everything around her.
Her malevolent armor, fake or not was a fragment of evil that seemed to have been crafted by the very hands of the shadows, perhaps evil too had a bit to do with it.
The darkness moved around her surroundings like a sentient being, it had a superficial blade too and could cut down the soul easily.
But the thralls that mander Zebelon could still throw at her even though they were locked in a vicious tandem of strikes were soulless, so it was not so effective.
However, that was not the armor’s only boon. It also fed Jeci a high level of perception. She could sense people ing the moment they touched the darkness that flowed around her.
And the darkness themselves weakened the movement without making her opponents realize they were being weakened.
So the thralls that mander Zebelon was manding into their battle wasn’t a bother at the very least.
Even though her talent ability was suppressing his ability a great deal, he still managed to have a handful of grip of several thralls. Although that was being dealt with by the group who were far behind.
The limitation of course was because the man was a Sage and Jeci was a Savant... a new Savant so to say.
She spun her spear and drove it forward like a lance.
The crimson tip screamed through the air and mander Zebelon caught it on the flat of his wave-blade, angling the curved steel so the spear slid along its length and veered past his ribs.
The motion was effortless, practiced. A man who had deflected a thousand thrusts from a thousand different weapons.
He countered immediately.
The wave-blade came around in a sweeping horizontal arc, its undulating edge cutting a strange path through the air that made it nearly impossible to judge its reach. The blade seemed to extend and retract as it moved, the peaks and troughs of its wave-pattern catching the light and distorting the perception of distance.
Jeci pulled back. But not fast enough.
The tip of the blade caught her across the shoulder, screeching against her dark armor and leaving a thin furrow in the surface.
Giving her a reminder that she was fighting a Sage.
Zebelon pressed forward, his sword flowing through binations that were built not for elegance but for killing. Low sweeps that forced her to jump, immediate rising cuts that punished the jump, sudden reversals that turned defense into offense before the opponent realized the exchange had shifted. Each strike came from an angle that the wave-blade’s shape made difficult to predict, the curved edge arriving a fraction sooner or later than the eye expected.
Jeci blocked the first bination cleanly. The second pushed her backward three steps. The third ripped across her forearm and the darkness there rippled, absorbing the damage but thinning visibly.
She said nothing. No grunt of pain, no hiss of frustration. She simply adjusted, planting her rear foot wider and lowering her center of gravity.
The darkness around her stirred.
It crept outward from her feet, crawling across the broken ground in slow tendrils that mander Zebelon noticed and stepped out of. He recognized the threat. The moment the darkness touched him, his movements would slow and his senses would dull, and a Sage who was dulled was just a strong man with a sword.
So he didn’t let it touch him.
He closed the distance before the darkness could spread, his wave-blade ing down in a vicious overhead that carried the weight of a man who had spent decades swinging steel. Jeci caught it on the shaft of her spear with both hands, and the impact drove her feet into the earth. Cracks spidered outward from where she stood. Her arms shook. The wave-blade’s teeth bit into the metal of her shaft and held, the undulating edge gripping where a straight blade would have slid free.
That was what made the weapon so dangerous. It caught things, held them. It punished any weapon that tried to slide along its length, because the wave pattern created troughs that trapped edges and shafts alike.
Zebelon wrenched sideways and nearly ripped the spear from her hands.
Nearly.
Jeci’s grip held. She twisted her entire body with the pull instead of resisting it, converting his force into rotational momentum. Her spear came free and she whipped it around in a low arc that forced Zebelon to hop backward, buying herself a half-second of space.
He was smiling. His voice carried easily over the sounds of battle behind them.
"Not bad, better than I expected from a Savant. You’ve got a good teacher."
Jeci didn’t respond. Didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken.
She came at him again.
This time, she changed. The attacks that had been direct and mitted became probing. Short thrusts that tested his guard, quick withdrawals that denied him the chance to trap her weapon, feints that masked the real intent of her footwork. She was reading him with the cold patience of something that learned by being cut.
Zebelon answered each probe with minimal effort. He didn’t need to work hard. The gap between them was real and he knew it, and knowing it allowed him to be economical while she spent energy she couldn’t afford to lose.
But the darkness kept spreading.
It pooled around their feet now, a thin film of black that Zebelon kept stepping out of and Jeci kept feeding forward. Every time he retreated from it, she closed the gap. Every time he circled, the darkness crept to fill the space he’d abandoned. She was herding him, not with speed or strength, but with patience and geometry.
And her perception was sharpening.
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