“Except he’s not real. No soul. Just a program. A very, very complex program, but a program.” I shake my head. “Trust me, I know.”
“How?” Mikito asks.
“My Skill,” I say.
It had been rather fascinating, using the Skill while triggering Extra Hands. I’d been able to view the process the System used to create my Mana doppelganger, watched how his body was formed. Even his physical body was, for all intents and purposes, non-existent, a replica constructed of Mana itself. That Mana could duplicate the entire process of life so easily was fascinating, especially since it almost seemed as if it hungered to do so. The body was biologically sound, as far as I knew—though how far that went, I wasn’t certain.
The memories I get, they’re edited. Portions. Not real. More like bullet points or flashes of insight.
“We’re getting off track here. We can discuss John’s lack of ethics with regard to his doppelgangers later,” Harry says. “I’m more curious about what we’re going to do about the information we’ve acquired.”
“That’s why we’re here to discuss it, no?” I open my hands. “It seems they’ve got multiple attack units out. Some high-Level Advanced Class teams, some Master Class teams too I’d bet. And whatever it was that took out my doppelganger.”
“Not whatever. Who,” Ali speaks up.
We turn to the Spirit, who is looking troubled. He shifts his hands and security footage blooms. The video comes from multiple angles, providing full details.
It’s a good thing too, since the fight itself is over in seconds. My doppelganger is moving down the street, Soul Shield active, Greater Detection in play. It doesn’t matter though, because his assailant doesn’t try to hide. Instead, he walks right out into the middle of the street, throwing his cloak back and striking a wide-legged pose. Gold edging on his armor glints and sparkles in the streetlamps, showing off his pink skin and small tusks.
Memory stirs, a flash of emotion from the doppelganger’s memory. Arrogance. Towering arrogance.
“Halt! In the name of the Galactic Council, you are ordered to stop your activities and come back with me,” Kasva, the Champion of the Council, says.
Irvina residents are scrambling, leaving as fast as they can as a sixth sense tells them to get the hell out. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to be around when a pair of Heroics fight either.
“Yeah, no. Why don’t you just fuck off?” my doppelganger snaps.
“Well, I tried.” Kasva shrugs.
And then he moves. One second, Kasva’s hundreds of meters away from my Hand. The next, he’s right next to him and swinging. Kasva calls forth a double-bladed sword, one with blades jutting out from both sides and each blade as thick as a good-sized tree. It’s what I’d call an anime weapon—too large and weighty to be practical for anyone who didn’t have the boosted stats of a Combat Classer in the Advanced stages.
My doppelganger brings out his own weapon, a simple sword that’s unenchanted but of good make. Standard wear for your average Erethran soldier when they don’t have a Soulbound weapon. It doesn’t even last a second as Kasva’s blade cuts right through the weapon, the Soul Shield, then halfway down my Hand’s body. A savage yank rips out the blade, detaching my Hand’s arm in the process.
A part of me wanders about all the lost limbs I keep getting. Involuntarily, I look at my regrown hand and flex it, a phantom pain briefly making an appearance before the System and my higher stats push them aside.
Of course, my Hand is like me. Pain isn’t something that stops us—not after all this time, not with the sheer number of defenses the System has built into our minds against it. The remaining hand pushes forward, a Chaos mine aiming to attach itself to Kasva’s body.
It fails, because Kasva isn’t there. He’s moving fast, faster than almost any other fighter I’ve dealt with that isn’t a pure Speedster. He’s also smart, having already started shifting the moment his attack was finished.
Another cut, another dodge that misses. The mine goes off, raw Chaos energy spilling into the environment and tearing at the pair of bodies. It forms into ropes of intestines that sizzle upon contact with ground and flesh. It doesn’t kill, it damages, but it doesn’t end there. Another sword is conjured by my doppelganger, cutting at Kasva, but again, it’s dodged.
And another cut, this one bisecting my Hand’s head. It flops to the ground, rolling away. The body stays for a second before it disperses, bloody bits breaking up as Mana is taken back by the System.
“Disappointing. But at least we learned something new.” Then Kasva looks up, right at where one of the security cameras is recording. He’s smiling but there’s a blankness to his eyes, a cold finality that reminds me of large predators, the kind that lie waiting rather than stalking you. “You’re going to have to do better if you want to beat me. You’ll need to stop holding back, Redeemer.”
Then the recording cuts off, leaving us in silence.
“Welp, I don’t need to change my pants. Not at all,” Harry says into the silence. “Now, if you’ll just excuse me for a second…”
***
Harry returns to us discussing what we saw of Kasva and his abilities. Perhaps most prominent of all was one simple fact.
“He wasn’t using any major Skills.” Mikito frowns. “You sure that’s all you have on his Skill use?” That question is to Ali, who nods. “Then I’m leaning toward a passive build.”
“Like Bolo?” I say.
“Yes. With maybe a couple of Heroic Class Skills held as trumps.”
“Can we find out what they might be?” I ask.
“Already tried, boy-o. Not possible. The Council clamped down on that real hard.”
I’m not particularly surprised. What we’ve seen of his Skills speak to a lot of passives. Not just in terms of damage dealt or speed, but also in high attributes. Higher than normal for certain—or else he’s learned to adjust the flow and guidance of his attributes to just speed. Which might be possible, but I consider it unlikely. After all, we still have to leave some level of control to the System to stabilize the physical world around us. Or else we’d burst into flame, shatter the ground, or heck, slip and fall on our faces.
“There’s something strange about the way he moves,” Mikito says softly, shifting the fight again. She replays the part where I—my Hand—tried to clamp the Chaos Mine onto Kasva’s body and lets it repeat.
“He’s smart enough to know to not be there when I’m going to attack.” I shrug. “Means he’s trained.”
“No.” Mikito shakes his head. “Look at his momentum, the way he shifts. If he really thought you’d attack that line, he wouldn’t have put all his weight down. He actually has to force himself into a new line to dodge…” Mikito looks at me, a half-smile forming. “You’ve actually gotten pretty good at that.”
“That?”
“Anticipating movements and momentum,” Mikito says. “See how he shifts there? It’s like he suddenly realizes what you’re going to do and shifts to adjust. Rather than planning for the shift beforehand.”
“You can plan for that?” I say.
“I can,” Mikito replies confidently. “I do.” She lets the rest of the short fight play out. “He doesn’t. I think he’s got a future forecasting Skill.”
I frown. “You sure? That doesn’t look like his kind of build…”
“Bought. Or maybe it’s part of the Council Champion. Might make thematic sense,” Ali points out.
“I thought those Skills aren’t very useful?” Harry cuts into the conversation. “At least, that’s what most fighters tell me.”
“They aren’t,” I say. “Normally.”
“It’s the problem of attributes. You need both a high Perception ability to ‘see’ properly and a high Intelligence attribute to understand what you’re seeing without going insane,” Ali says. “In normal circumstances, people like the Oracles and the like either get cryptic prophecies that are provided to them as a whole, or they see the prophecies as visions and end up trying to explain them as either bad poetry or too straightforward words. Since they can’t ‘see’ fully, often those kinds of prophecies are hard to understand. Or trust. On top of that, of course, it’s all a matter of guesstimation off current known events. It’s not ‘true’ future seeing.”