"A pleasure, huh?" Elias muttered, one eyebrow raised. "Your tastes are pretty weird."
The masked man didn't reply. He just waved a hand, like swatting a fly.
That's when the space around Elias warped.
It was as if reality itself, along precise geometric lines, contracted to crush him. The ground at his feet cracked in a star pattern, sinking several centimeters under incredible pressure.
Elias simply bent his knees—a tiny movement—and the terrible crunch turned into a low groan of compressed earth.
"You can block that too. Interesting," the masked man commented.
Elias tilted his head sideways, and a long gash appeared on his cheek, like a razor slice. A drop of blood beaded.
Then another cut on his forearm. A third shredded the shoulder of his coat.
He closed his eyes. For a fraction of a second.
When he opened them, his short sword was already moving.
Cling! A burst of sparks flared a meter in front of his face, where he'd struck empty air.
Clang! A second one on his right side, blade meeting invisible resistance with a metallic clash.
Vshh-tchak! A third at ankle level, a slashing blow deflected into the ground.
One step back, a torso tilt, a slight wrist flick. But every micro-movement answered an unseen assault. Sparks crackled around him like an aggressive star shower, betraying dozens of spectral blades trying to shred him.
"I'm really curious how he manages to see them," the masked man murmured.
Elias spun, his sword tracing a perfect horizontal arc.
A sharp crack, like breaking glass, rang out.
Fifteen meters away, space blurred. For an instant, a ghostly silhouette—translucent, made of millions of faceted lights like a giant insect—was visible. An amalgam of arms, blades, pincers, all formed from crystalline energy.
The specter fractured where Elias's sword had struck, then dissolved in a hiss.
The barrage of invisible attacks stopped dead.
Elias exhaled, wiping blood from his cheek with his sleeve. "Your little ghosts are a pain to dodge. I actually had to focus. You know how exhausting that is?"
But the masked man ignored him.
He turned his white mask toward Borin, still slumped against the mound a hundred meters away. A slight twitch of his finger.
"No," Elias growled.
He stomped the ground with his heel.
BOOM.
A focused shockwave—a cone of pure force—shot forward at the speed of sound between him and Borin. It targeted nothing visible. It swept the straight line between the two points.
And it hit something.
The air exploded midway. An invisible, lethal projection vaporized in a flash of dissipating energy. The gust ruffled Borin's hair but left him unharmed.
The masked man looked up. "You're really not going to make this easy, are you?"
"I'm just trying to avoid endless paperwork," Elias sighed. In two strides, he was back beside Borin, hoisting him roughly. "This guy weighs a ton and he's bleeding all over my only decent coat. But alive's better than dead."
The masked man raised both hands, palms facing Elias.
The air vibrated with an unsettling visual distortion. The space between them began to ripple.
A perfect sphere, one meter across, formed around Elias and Borin. Inside, light twisted, colors bled into absolute gray, and sound died.
Elias looked around, his skin gray in the warped light.
"Seriously?" he said, voice muffled by the distortion. "Overkill much."
He raised his free hand.
The gray sphere… hesitated.
Then it started shaking. Luminous cracks—cold steel-blue—spread across its surface, radiating from where Elias stood.
CRAAC!
The sphere shattered into fragments that hissed away. Elias stepped out, coat shoulder slightly frayed, a trace of blood at the corner of his lip. He was breathing a little harder.
"You…" The masked man lowered his hands. "Who are you?"
"Elias Mercer. Captain, Jaeger Company. File B-12774. Behind on retirement contributions. And a guy who's really going to miss his episode."
"Enough games," the man snapped.
He vanished.
An acceleration so violent it left a sonic tear in the air. He was on Elias in an instant.
His hands were his weapons. Every motion sliced the air with a high-pitched whistle. Elias parried, his short sword a silver blur in the dim light. The clashes were so fast they merged into one continuous roar.
Clangclangclangclangclang!
Elias gave ground, step by step, weathering the storm. But he saw everything. Every feint, every trajectory shift, every micro-tremor in his opponent's muscles signaling the next strike.
And he was faster.
He didn't just block. A slight wrist pressure here, a kick to unbalance posture there—forcing the masked man to follow his rhythm, wasting energy on attacks that never landed.
Frustration bred a mistake. A tiny opening after an overly aggressive flurry.
Elias's short blade slipped under a guard raised too high, ignoring an elbow feint, and shot straight for the center of the white mask.
The masked man realized—too late—he couldn't dodge. Survival instinct made a drastic call.
He sacrificed his left arm.
He threw it across the blade's path.
Elias's sword pierced the forearm clean through with a wet, metallic crunch—but the force and intent were deflected. Instead of piercing the mask, the tip stopped a centimeter from the white surface.
The masked man leaped back, wrenching his arm free with a horrible crack. He landed thirty meters away, staggering. His left arm hung limp, a clean hole through it. Thick black blood dripped onto the ground.
"What… have you done?" he asked, voice off-key for the first time.
"Nothing special," Elias said, flicking blood from his blade.
The masked man stared at his arm, then lifted his gaze to Elias.
"You're not just a B-class captain. You're not even an S. You're…"
Elias scratched his head, looking genuinely annoyed. "Yeah, well, listen. With a resume like that, I really can't let you walk away to go telling tales."
The masked man laughed. "So you'll kill me? Try."
Space began to weep around that point, tearing into silent black filaments.
The black point imploded—into a sphere that expanded, swallowing light, sound, heat, space itself.
Elias didn't flinch.
When the void reached him, he *cut* it.
He stepped forward—one pace, then two—straight into the annihilation zone. His silhouette blurred, flickering as if oscillating between multiple states of existence.
In three steps, he crossed the destruction sphere.
He emerged on the other side.
The blade came down.
And stopped.
A millimeter from the mask's surface.
Elias sighed and lowered his weapon.
"Let's stop here."
"…Why?" The question came in a breath.
Elias glanced at Borin slumped over his shoulder. Then at his own coat, soaked red.
"Because I've got maybe five minutes before this big idiot bleeds out completely. You're out of tricks, and if I want to kill you now, it'll take time and energy I don't have." He fixed the masked man with a stare. "Plus, something tells me killing you would bring me more trouble… worse than extra paperwork. I hate that."
The masked man fell silent. Then a strangled laugh escaped him. "You… you're letting me go? After all this? You know I'll report everything I saw. You'll be one of our top targets."
Elias shrugged. "Nobody knows what tomorrow brings. Maybe you'll die in a traffic accident on the way home. Maybe your boss will be pissed and turn you to ash. Maybe I'll win the lottery and retire to an island." He checked Borin's faint pulse. "Today, I've got a colleague to save, a shower to take, and a show to catch up on. The rest… that's future Elias's problem. And I kinda hate future Elias."
With that, he turned and walked away.
The masked man watched him go, his limp arm dangling at his side.
"You'll regret this, Elias Mercer," he murmured.
"Probably," Elias replied without looking back. "But not today."
Space warped around the masked man one last time. His silhouette blurred, dissolving into gray light particles sucked into a micro-dimensional rift that closed with a muffled pop.
Elias looked at Borin, then the indifferent sky, then his bloodstained hands.
"I hate this. I hate this fucking day."
He adjusted Borin on his shoulder.
"And I hate you too, Borin. You're gonna owe me a lot of drinks after this."