Leon sprang back several steps, more reflex than conscious choice. His legs found distance on their own, his body retreating exactly as far as it needed to keep its balance. The echo of the impact still rang in his skull, along with the brutal awareness that if he'd been a fraction of a second late, his blade wouldn't even have made it into the attack's path.
The purple shadow vanished.
It didn't retreat. It didn't flee in any visible way. It was simply no longer where something had been hitting with enough force to nearly rip the sword from Leon's hands. Now Leon stood in the middle of a torn-up square, a dead mantis at his feet, blood on his boots, and a cluster of people behind him who had no idea something was moving through the same space, something they couldn't even see.
His heart kicked up, skirting the edge of panic, but before his breathing could fall apart, his passive skill slammed into place almost violently. A familiar, icy pulse shot through his mind. It didn't erase emotion.
It sorted it.
It shoved fear aside and left only a clean, razor-focused tension on top.
His knees bent a fraction.
The muscles in his legs, back, and shoulders tightened all at once, like his entire body had shifted into a listening mode. Leon stopped staring at any single point. He began scanning the space not with his eyes, but with attention, counting breaths, catching tiny changes in sound, the movement of air, anything that might betray the position of something moving faster than his vision could track.
Valeria stood off to the side, calm, arms loosely crossed. Seeing his reaction, she nodded with something like approval. What he'd done was exactly what you were supposed to do against an opponent you didn't yet understand, don't charge, don't panic. Wait for it to make a mistake.
Out of the corner of her eye, she looked at Krzysztof.
He stood motionless, still pale, wearing the same expression that didn't quite show relief, remorse, or triumph. And even though no one, Leon included, seemed to be thinking about what Krzysztof had done moments earlier, Valeria had seen it perfectly. Still, there was no disgust in her gaze. No contempt. She'd watched people do far worse just to survive one more day, and the world of the Essence Record didn't reward morality.
It rewarded results.
The purple shadow struck again.
This time Leon saw it, not clearly, not fully, more like a sudden distortion, as if someone had sliced the air with a razor-thin streak of color. At the last instant he twisted his wrist and raised his sword exactly where the blow fell. The blade crashed into something hard, and the impact drove him back several steps until his boots squealed on asphalt and his shoulders burned from the overload.
For a brief, unnaturally long heartbeat, they were locked together.
And Leon saw it more clearly.
The shape was animal, yet wrong in a way that made his skin crawl. It resembled a marten, but only from a distance, like someone had taken a familiar silhouette and stretched it cruelly, warped it, reinforced it. The body was long and unnaturally slim, almost serpentine, skimming low to the ground at a speed that didn't match its mass at all. Muscles shifted beneath the skin like taut cables, ready to explode with every movement. The fur, which should've been brown or gray, was a deep violet, as if it had been scorched by energy, and in places the skin beneath showed through, pulsing with a faint, unnatural light.
Its legs were too long, ending in claws that didn't look like an animal's claws so much as something halfway between bone and blade, curved, sharp enough that the motion alone seemed to cut the air. Its head sat low, elongated, its mouth packed with small, densely layered teeth. And its eyes, tiny, glossy, glowing the same purple, never lost focus for even a moment, tracking every minimal shift Leon made.
It didn't growl or hiss like a normal animal.
It produced a thin, trembling sound, something between rapid breathing and a vibration that resonated in the air, so Leon felt it more in his bones than in his ears.
And then it disappeared again.
Leon took another step back, breathing hard, the tension refusing to leave his muscles. He spat to the side without taking his eyes off the empty space in front of him.
"Isn't this… insane?" he muttered under his breath, more to himself than anyone else. The idea that something could be that fast, that untouchable, was hard to swallow even for someone who'd been an ordinary student yesterday. "I'm several times faster than the average person and I still only catch it at the last second…"
His grip tightened on the hilt until his knuckles went white.
Leon held himself rigid, fingers crushing the sword's handle. He tried to keep his breathing steady, but his body betrayed the truth faster than his thoughts, his shoulders throbbed from the repeated impacts, and a familiar, dangerous tremor began to creep into his legs, the warning sign that the balance between focus and exhaustion was starting to wobble.
The beast didn't give him a second.
The violet marten flickered in and out at the edge of perception, appearing on his left, vanishing low to the ground, striking from behind so fast Leon registered only the jolt and the scrape of claws sliding along his coat. He felt every hit, each one strong enough to shove him a step or two, yet the coat absorbed the force, leaving only deep, ragged gouges in the fabric, as if someone had raked it with a blade.
The coat, pulled from a Brown Box, was proving exactly what owning a rare-class artifact meant.
But Leon knew perfectly well this couldn't last forever. Even the best artifact wore down. Even the toughest protection eventually yielded under enough destructive force.
A few meters away, Valeria watched with growing interest, and something in her gaze that was edging toward impatience. She could see what Leon still refused to admit to himself: he had no plan. He was fighting on instinct, moving correctly, but blindly. And the only reason he was still standing was the coat, an artifact cushioning mistakes instead of fixing them.
She raised a hand, pressing a finger to her lips in thought, and with the other she casually supported the weight of her chest as if it were the most natural pose in the world. For a moment she simply watched, measuring the rhythm of the fight, Leon's reactions, and how thin the line was between still alive and too late.
"I really did end up liking this kid…" she murmured under her breath, almost amused by her own thought. Then her expression sharpened. "…but if this keeps going like this, the kid's going to die."
She considered for another moment, not in moral terms, but in the rules that governed the Essence Record, and decided what she was about to do wasn't direct physical interference, wasn't a reward, wasn't breaking the world's balance. It was a small nudge for someone who already had everything he needed, he just wasn't using it yet.
A faint smile touched her lips as she spoke, mouth parting slowly.
"You can still spend your free stat points," she said evenly. "The ones you got from leveling up. Put them into Agility."
Leon heard her voice as if she'd suddenly appeared right beside him, leaning close to his ear, even though he could still see, out of the corner of his eye, that she was standing several meters away. It was soft, quiet, almost a whisper, yet it carried cleanly over the sounds of battle, sending an involuntary shiver through him.
Then his eyes widened as understanding slammed into place.
"Status!" he barked, almost a shout, taking half a step back and snapping his sword up, more to buy a fraction of a second than to truly block the next strike.
The window appeared instantly.
He didn't even look at it before speaking.
"Everything into Agility."
No hesitation. No long-term calculation. Right now only one thing mattered, surviving the next few seconds.
The system responded.
[Agility (AGI): 45 → 73]
And the world changed.
Not as a rush of raw power. Not as the euphoria of greater strength. Something subtler, and somehow more terrifying.
It was as if someone had increased the resolution on an image that had always been slightly blurred. Leon felt his body move faster, yes, but more than that, he saw faster.
The violet streak stopped being a streak.
When the beast lunged again, Leon saw it for the first time as it truly was, not a flash of color, not a shadow, but a defined animal in motion, muscles coiled, claws poised to strike, eyes locked precisely on his throat.
The hint of a smile vanished from his face.
Replaced by cold focus.
"So that's what you are…" he murmured, dropping his center of gravity and setting himself exactly where he needed to be. "I can finally see you."