Chapter 462: Bishop Medallion [II]
Ivan groaned internally, shifting his grip on his trident.
“Listen, lady,” he panted through clenched jaw, “I sense a lot of animosity radiating from you, and I’m really not looking to get turned into sashimi today. It’d actually be kind of funny, since I can breathe underwater like a fish. But can we just agree to walk away for today?”
The girl’s answer was a breakneck charge.
She launched herself like a rocket. Her sharp, scythe-legs cut through the humid air in a whirlwind spin.
Ivan somehow managed to snap his trident up just in time, catching her left blade right along the central tine with a deafening CLANG!
“Damn it!” Ivan snarled before twisting his wrists to redirect her momentum, slamming her back-first onto the muddy turf before him.
But the girl didn’t falter. She used the impact to roll forward and spring off the ground, basically executing an awkward frontflip that nearly disemboweled Ivan right then and there.
He scrambled back, incensed and exasperated. “Seriously?! Scythe legs?! What kind of nightmare freakshow did Samael assemble for this Sector?!”
“The kind that’s going to carve your guts out, noble!” she snarled and bounded off a nearby boulder, ing at him again in a flurry of low, sweeping kicks that forced Ivan onto the defensive.
Her bronze blades blurred into a razor-sharp hurricane.
Ivan gritted his teeth, his arms shuddering as he parried strike after strike. Spark showers illuminated the gloom of the dark forest around them with every block. “I don’t have time for this!”
He wanted to eliminate as few Ebony Cadets as possible, but this girl wasn’t giving him much choice here.
High overhead, Viktor was still blasting one laser beam after another, but for each tentacle he cut down, two more grew to take its place.
On top of it, the steam was rising and starting to obscure Viktor’s own line of sight now.
If Riener gets a clear shot at the sky, Viktor is done for, Ivan realized with a jolt of panic.
Tired of playing nice, he dug his boots into the mud, preparing to eliminate his opponent in the very next exchange.
And he would’ve done that… if not for a loud cry that reached his ears.
“Watch out, Ivan!” Irina. His girlfriend. Even over the deafening screams of pain and clangor of blades, she sounded panicked.
Quickly, Ivan whirled around and found the reason for her alarm. A vicious dagger was ing straight toward his heart.
He tried to raise his trident, but he was a split second too late, his footing bogged down in the waterlogged mud.
Shit!
Bracing for the cold bite of the steel, Ivan instinctively took a step back— only for the dagger to bump into an invisible barrier that rippled like liquid glass inches from his chest.
With its momentum pletely deadened, the blade stopped, and so did the figure who held it. A dark-haired, black-eyed girl.
Ivan immediately recognized her as Veyna Rosen, another Top Cadet.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” he growled his annoyance before lashing out with the butt of his trident.
The invisible barrier dropped at the exact right moment, allowing the heavy shaft to go straight for Veyna’s jaw.
But out of nowhere, the girl suddenly disappeared.
Her form dissolved into the darkness, leaving Ivan striking at empty air before she emerged out of his own shadow behind him and drove her second dagger into the small of his back.
Or at least, she tried to.
Before the sharp tip could pierce his leather armor, another invisible barrier flared into existence, absorbing the force of her strike.
Veyna’s dark eyes narrowed in frustration. She decided to leap back to create distance… but the watery ground beneath her feet turned slippery as ice.
She lost her footing for a fraction of a second, which was all the time Ivan needed to spin on his heel and deliver a brutal sidekick to her ribs.
The heavy leather boot connected true, and Veyna was sent tumbling across the marsh until she slammed into the ining scythe-legged girl, sending both of them crashing into the mud in a tangle of limbs and scraped metal.
Not wasting this golden opportunity, Ivan drew a Card from his Arsenal and threw it at the two girls. As they were about to stand back up, the Card burst into a flash of blinding white light.
Veyna and the scythe-legged girl both shrieked, clutching at their burning eyes, concussed and disoriented.
But that would neither keep them down for more than a second, nor would it give Ivan any meaningful opening.
So instead of wasting any more time on them than he already had, Ivan started for the epicenter of the battlefield.
There, the battle had devolved into plete chaos.
Riener Tovak was still an absolute force of nature and he wasn’t in any mood to stop.
His thrashing tentacles whipped through the air, swatting aside spells and smashing through defensive barriers. His serrated bone spikes glinted malevolently through the thick steam.
Viktor was still bombarding lasers from the sky, continuing to punch the rising haze… but the sheer speed of Riener’s regeneration was grotesque.
The severed tentacle nubs would pulse with dark, viscous fluid before sprouting brand-new tendrils within seconds. It was madness.
How was this guy the same rank as everyone else?
Casey was there too now. She was pushing back the silver-haired guy with the Bishop Medallion but was also being forced to keep half her attention on dodging Riener’s wildly flailing tendrils.
Every time she tried to slip through his defense to deal a decisive blow to the Bishop, a massive tentacle would crash down, splintering trees and tearing large gouges into the earth.
But she still looked so calm— which Ivan found both impressive and insane.
Casey’s curved shashka flowed like a pendulum through the billowing steam.
She gracefully ducked underneath a sweeping blow from one of Riener’s thick tentacles, the wet wind of its passage snapping her hair back.
In the very same motion, she swung to cut down a fireball aimed at her face, her blade parting the flames into two harmless streams of sparks.
There was no wasted movement, each attack seamlessly flowing into the next.
And perhaps because she was such a capable fighter, Ivan didn’t have to wait long to find a window to make his move.
Casey sliced through a fire lance, swiveled under another, moved in, and drove the point of her shashka toward the silver-haired boy’s chest.
The boy threw up a hastily conjured barrier of roaring blue flames — a desperate move meant to buy himself even two seconds of breathing room.
That was it.
Ivan thrust his trident downward into the muddy marsh. As if on cue, a surge of pressurized, geyser-like water erupted right beneath the silver-haired boy’s feet, throwing off his balance.
The wall of roaring blue flame wobbled and collapsed as its Caster lost his focus.
The geyser blasted him up in the air, leaving him pletely exposed as Ivan whipped his trident forward and hurled it like a javelin through the falling spray.
The three-pronged weapon nearly caught the silver-haired boy full in the chest before he could even re-orient his feet.
Thankfully, a shadowy blur dropped from the canopy above and whisked him away. The Bishop Medallion clattered into the mud with a dull thunk, its link severed the moment the boy was eliminated.
Ivan’s trident went on to embed itself into one of the towering poles of the wooden barricade and cracked it open, splinters raining down as the lodged weapon quivered there like a tuning fork.
Ivan exhaled in relief, then immediately sucked in a sharp breath upon noticing five enormous shadows falling on Casey.
THWAAAAM—!!
Five of Reiner’s thickest, most bloated tentacles plummeted from the canopy like falling pillars. Their slick, dark surfaces glistened under the orange glow of the burning woods.
And before Casey even had a chance to spring away, she was buried pletely under them.
The colossal impact shook the entire clearing, sending a towering wave of mud and steam rolling in every direction.
Ivan gasped, shielding his face from the spray of water and pulverized earth. He really thought he had witnessed a death. If an Instructor didn’t save Casey, there was no way she survived.
…He thought wrong.
A shrill, high-pitched ringing noise cut through the heavy thunder of the collapsing forest.
Then, five hairline cuts appeared on the dark, slick hides of the writhing tentacles. The cuts widened… and all five of the massive appendages were split apart at once.
The severed halves slid cleanly away from one another before being blown away by a violent shockwave of condensed air pressure.
Ivan blinked against the deluge of blood and mud to see Casey Torr Snowrite standing in the center of a ginormous crater.
Her curved shashka was held low at her side.
The air around her was warped by a dense, vibrating heat haze generated from the sheer kinetic energy of a draw-slash so blindingly fast it had cleanly bisected thousands of pounds of mutated flesh before the pressure could even register.
She didn’t spare any notice to the severed, convulsing tentacle halves dissolving into black sludge behind her. She just slowly lifted her gaze to meet Riener Tovak’s dark eyes.
And the next thing Ivan knew, Riener was lying unconscious on the ground with Casey standing tall over him, her blade pressed against his throat.
It had taken her a single stride — a stride so quick that Ivan couldn’t even properly prehend its speed — to end the Sector’s most terrifying monstrosity.
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