Veil.
The internal energy every true swordsman possesses.
It is born from a swordsman's will, spirit, and the countless hardships they endure. The nature of those trials shapes the nature of the Veil they awaken.
Take someone hot-headed and irrational. Someone who always rushes into danger without thinking, never stopping to understand the situation before acting.
Their Veil may take the form of fire — violent, relentless, burning through everything that stands in its way... provided they possess the strength to do so.
Then there's someone who takes everything in stride. Always cheerful. Always moving forward, no matter what life throws at them.
Their Veil may resemble the wind — swift, free, and impossible to restrain.
Of course, personality alone isn't enough.
A swordsman must also possess exceptional mastery over the blade.
Only when mastery of the sword and the strength of one's soul become one can Veil be wielded to its fullest.
Some swordsmen spend their entire lives chasing it...
...only to die before ever awakening it.
The true sign that someone has reached the pinnacle of Veil is when their very existence begins to change the world around them.
Guess I've got to give credit where it's due.
My sister can use Veil to some extent. I thought it would be easy to imitate with enough practice, but it isn't anywhere near as simple as it looks.
I suppose my experience from my previous life doesn't count.
This body has never walked the path required to awaken Veil.
I shouldn't be surprised.
After all...
Veil isn't something you learn. It's something you earn.
───
After I used Surge on Onyx, everything became dark. As if the sun decided to cut off all its light and the world consumed any last trace of it.
The only thing I can make out is the celestial bodies above the planet.
Then right in front of me, Onyx's entire body begins to radiate golden light.
It's as bright as the morning sun, but I can still see him to some extent.
It's like in a world draped in darkness, he is the only light that cuts through it.
Neither of us moves.
I brought up Veil earlier because it's the only thing that explains all this.
I don't detect any mana. Qi isn't something Onyx knows about.
Besides, I don't think either of them can do—
I quickly stop myself from finishing the thought. It would be ironic considering what I'm doing right now.
Speaking of that, I need five more minutes to activate this.
So this isn't really a good situation for me.
Still though, I wonder. What type of life has he lived to have a Veil like this?
The light he emits isn't warm. Even the coldest winter sun carries some degree of warmth. But this light doesn't carry anything. It presses. The same way water presses against a deep sea explorer who has gone too far down.
Four minutes and forty-seven seconds.
I lower my stance.
Lightning Qi caused the most damage out of everything I've thrown at him. But there's very little of it left in the battlefield. I had to go up just to gather enough for Surge a moment ago.
There's still some near the ground, but it's scarce. Barely worth calling a reserve.
I'll improvise.
Dragon's Breath has the ability to combine different elemental attributes and release them as a single, concentrated breath attack. So with that in mind — since Qi is literally elemental particles — I should be able to use Dragon's Breath and combine them the same way. Run the skill on Qi instead of mana.
Only one way to find out.
I exhale once. Then inhale.
Every ambient Fire Qi and Lightning Qi particle within my range begins to respond. I draw them inward towards my mouth. They gather at the back of my throat. Fire Qi far outweighs the Lightning Qi, but it'll have to do.
From the corner of my eye, a notification flickers.
[ Notice : Different energy source detected for mana-based input skill ]
Oh. Guess the system noticed.
But the skill is still running. Or at least something is happening. This is the first time I've used Dragon's Breath at all, and the first time I've tried feeding a system skill with Qi instead of mana, so I don't have a baseline for what "working correctly" is supposed to feel like.
For now I'll assume this is close enough.
Four minutes twenty-three seconds.
The Fire Qi and Lightning Qi compress at the back of my throat, pressing into each other. At first I don't feel anything. Then the burning starts — not painful, just present, a heat working its way up from the base of my throat that tells me the combination is holding. The Lightning Qi crackles between it, sharpening the whole thing, giving the Fire somewhere to accelerate toward.
I hold it for a second. Two.
Just as I'm about to release it — Onyx takes a step.
A single golden line spreads from the sole of his foot and races across the ground toward me. Fast. Faster than I expected from something that started as a footstep.
I Glitch.
The blue fractured world appears once more as I pass through it like the wind.
I reappear several meters to the side. The golden line stops exactly where I was standing half a second ago.
The ground begins to shake.
The space between where I was and where Onyx is starts to crack. Not the way stone cracks under pressure — the way a mirror cracks when something strikes it wrong. Clean lines spreading outward from a single point, branching and branching again until the entire section of battlefield between us looks like shattered glass.
Then it collapses.
The fractured space folds inward and opens into a void. No bottom. No edges I can see. Just an endless dark tear splitting the battlefield in two.
I stare at it for exactly one second.
Then I gather everything I have left in range — whatever Fire Qi and Lightning Qi is still accessible from this position — Glitch into the air above, and release Dragon's Breath directly at Onyx.
It doesn't look like fire. It doesn't look like lightning. It doesn't look like anything I have a name for. The Fire Qi gives it mass and heat and a color somewhere between white and the absence of color entirely. The Lightning Qi sharpens it, pulls it into a line, gives it a trajectory so straight it looks drawn rather than fired. It tears through the darkness like a needle through fabric — illuminating everything in its path as it goes, the only light in a world that has run out of it.
For a moment, it looks like it might actually reach him.
───
The boy finally moves.
He flickers into the air — that strange fragmented movement that doesn't travel so much as it simply arrives — and then he opens his mouth.
What comes out is not mana. Onyx can tell immediately. His Veil reads energy the way a drain reads water — anything that flows toward him gets consumed without resistance. Mana, heat, kinetic force building toward him, sound in certain frequencies. His armor handles the rest.
But this is something else. Something that doesn't register as any of those categories until it's already in the air between them.
Abyssal Dawn.
It is already active. Has been since the moment he released it.
The darkness surrounding them isn't the ability itself. It is the visible consequence of everything else being consumed. Light vanishes first — it always does — but light is simply the most visible thing to disappear. What's actually taken place is something deeper than that.
Energy in its most fundamental sense, stripped from the air and the ground and anything that comes within range.
The boy's attack tears through the battlefield. The...whatever it is, whatever he made it from — illuminates the darkness as it travels, a narrow column of shifting white-gold light crossing the void between them.
Onyx watches it come.
He does not move. He does not raise his blade. He simply watches, the golden light of his Veil radiating outward in slow, constant waves, and waits for the attack to reach the edge of his range.
It does.
The moment it enters the field of his Veil, the light begins to dim.
Meter by meter, the column narrows. The white-gold shifts, loses coherence, starts to come apart at the edges the way a flame comes apart in wind — except there is no wind, only the quiet, absolute hunger of Abyssal Dawn pulling the energy out of it piece by piece.
Inch by inch.
The column shrinks. Dims. Unravels.
Then it's gone.
Not scattered. Not deflected. Gone — as if it never crossed the distance between them at all.
Onyx straightens.
The boy is still in the air. Both mismatched eyes fixed on the space where the attack disappeared. The gold eye steady. The blue one — the one that carries something that isn't entirely his — unreadable.
For the first time since this fight began, Onyx forms a thought about the boy that isn't tactical.
He has thrown everything he has at me.
He's not just trying to injure me, he's actively trying to kill me.
And yet Onyx still stands there.
Still watching.
Still thinking.
Onyx's grip tightens on the hilt of his sword.
Chaos. He is sure of it. This child is pure chaos. And chaos, left unchecked, unmakes everything it touches.
He must die.
Now.
He lifts up his sword and raises it in the air. The sword begins to radiate the same golden light as Onyx's body.
The edges turn from an ebony black to a deep gold, as spirals of his Veil wrap around his sword like cloth.
Without another thought, he swings his blade and a golden arc splits the air.
───
I'm still trying to recover from the shock of my attack being gone.
How? What happened? It was making its way towards him... so why did it just vanish. It can't be the armour. It can only nullify mana-based attacks. The cracks on the armour prove it. Maybe... maybe the skill itself didn't work. Maybe it really can't handle Qi-based attributes.
Thoughts upon thoughts, theory after theory, assumptions upon assumptions all begin to pour into my head.
I manage to pull myself together long enough to see the golden arc mere inches away from me.
It's so close I can practically feel the heat radiating from it.
With not a moment to spare, I Glitch myself hundreds of meters away from my position in the sky.
When I look down, Onyx looks like nothing more than a candle in a dark room.
The arc continues to make its way towards the battlefield.
It splits the ground, destroys corpses, mountains and even the rivers of fire before finally continuing upwards into the dark sky.
I watch it climb until it is nothing but a distant line of gold.
It passes through one of the celestial bodies in the sky.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then a golden line appears across the planet and it splits.
There's no shockwave, no explosion, no sound I can hear. Just a clean split through the planet.
The two halves drift apart while a golden light pours out from the middle.
Then the light dims, and is consumed by the darkness of Onyx's Veil.
...what just happened. With a single strike he... he.
My eyes may have seen it but my mind refuses to accept the reality of what just happened.
With a single swing, he managed to sever a whole planet.
Any confidence I had that my plan would work has now been significantly lowered.
But I've come this far. So I can't stop now.
Maybe there's a counter to his Veil, something I can exploit. There has to be a flaw somewhere.
Three minutes, sixteen seconds.
If i want to find a weakness, I better do it now.