Free Web NovelChapter 32: He Wiped The Floor With Him
Aidan opened with Ruinspiral Point.
The copy didn’t answer with the same. It answered with something better.
A lattice of Epoxy snapped into the air between them, threaded through with Nether, and Aidan’s decay-lance drilled into it and stuck. The adhesive caught the spiral, the rot turned inward on itself, and his own technique died halfway across the mirror, unmade by a counter he had never thought to build.
’What.’ Aidan’s eyes went wide. ’That’s not one of mine. It made that.’
He didn’t have time to sit with it.
He went in close, knuckle dusters blazing, Blood and Bleed and Break in every strike.
The copy met the first punch and, on the second, did something new. It laced its own guard with a film of Attraction tuned to his blood aspect, and every Bleed strike he threw curved off-line, dragged a hair sideways by a pull keyed to the exact energy he was using. His fists found nothing but air a fingerwidth from where he aimed.
’It’s building counters. Live. For my specific attacks.’ Aidan’s breath caught. ’Not mirroring me. Out-inventing me.’
He switched to Wind, blurring for speed.
The copy exhaled a lattice of Spiral Flow into the space around itself, a still-air maze that shredded his momentum the instant he entered it, and turned his own Spin against his balance. He stumbled out the far side slower than he went in.
He raised a Gale-Blood Wall.
The copy hit it with a technique that was pure Nether shaped into a needle, a thing designed for one purpose, to find the blood binding in his wall and rot only that. The wall didn’t shatter. It dissolved at the seams and fell apart in his hands.
’Every defense I raise, it makes a key for. On the spot.’ He backed across the black glass, mind racing. ’Faster than I can change what I’m doing.’
He threw everything.
Spiral Fan Blade, Blitzer Burst, a screaming volley of Magic Bullets, Air Pressure Blast, every technique he owned in every combination he could improvise.
And for each one, the copy created an answer that had not existed a second before. Not a block. A counter. A purpose-built technique drawn from the same aspects, aimed at the exact weakness of the exact thing he’d thrown, unraveling one after another after another.
The Magic Bullets met a curtain of Epoxy that swallowed them and flung them back glued into a single mass.
The Blitzer Burst met an Attraction sink that ate its speed and left him standing still and exposed.
The Air Pressure Blast met a spiral vent that split it in half around the copy and sent both halves raking past Aidan’s shoulders.
It was relentless. Aidan wasn’t trading blows anymore. He was being answered, completely, technique for technique, and none of his got through while the copy’s counters kept landing. freeweɓnovel.cøm
’I’m not fighting me,’ Aidan realized, something cold opening in his gut. ’I’m fighting what I could be if I were always three steps ahead. It has my aspects and it’s using them to build things I haven’t thought of yet.’
Suppressed. That was the word. He was being suppressed, ground down, given no opening, no rhythm, no half-second of initiative to seize. Every time he reached for something, the counter was already forming.
His Mana burned low. The copy spent less, because a counter shaped for a specific attack cost far less than the attack it beat.
That was the trap of it. Aidan had to invent under pressure, wide and expensive. The copy only had to invent the one narrow thing that turned each of his inventions off, and it did it faster, every single time.
He tried to go off-script. He built a technique on the fly, something ugly and new, blood and lightning and nether fused raw.
The copy watched it form and built the counter to it while it was still forming, and shut it down before it left his hand.
’It’s reading the technique out of the aspects as I make it.’ Aidan’s arms dropped, chest heaving. ’I can’t even surprise it. It sees the shape before I finish.’
The copy stepped in.
It didn’t gloat. It just ended it. A single technique Aidan had never seen, Nether folded into Attraction into a point, drawn straight to the core of him, unspooled out of the copy’s hand and struck him clean.
His Divine-10 Health held his life. It did nothing for the rest. The counter tore through everything he tried to raise against it, because it had been made, half a second ago, specifically to do exactly that.
Aidan hit the black mirror hard and stayed down.
The copy stood over him, wearing his face, breathing easy.
"You kept reaching for what you already knew," it said, in his own voice, almost gentle. "I just kept building what beats it. That’s the whole zone."
Aidan stared up at himself, dumbfounded.
He hadn’t been out-decided. He’d been out-created. The copy had taken his own aspects, the same tools, the same mastery, and invented faster and sharper than he could, one perfect counter at a time, until he never had a move left that worked.
’It out-played me,’ the thought landed flat and stunning. ’With my own kit. It’s a better version of me at the one thing I thought was mine.’
The black glass rose up to take him.
[Your reflection has fallen. You have been defeated in the Shared Zone.]
[The other player’s reflection fell first. You are cast out of the raid.]
...
Aidan opened his eyes.
Green wilderness. Wild spirit energy in the air. The flat rock, the hills, the exact spot he’d left from.
He sat there whole and unhurt, the raid gone from around him like it had never been.
For a long moment he didn’t move. He just ran the fight back, again and again, and every time he reached for a technique that would have worked, he saw the counter form to meet it before he finished the thought.
"...Huh," he said out loud, to no one.
He’d gone in certain of one thing above all. That nobody understood his aspects better than he did. That his creativity with them was his edge. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
He came out knowing something had used them better than he ever had.
’Beaten at my own game,’ he thought, and a slow, stunned grin pulled at his mouth despite everything. ’By a version of me that just does it better.’
Then, quietly, he started to laugh.
Because now he knew exactly what he had to beat.
