Aijack lay like a fallen monument amid the shattered stones, his breathing a shallow, uneven whisper. light bled through torn armor and pooled beneath him as if trying to crawl back into his chest. Oban and Klien moved as one—Klien first, dropping to his knees with hands that trembled but were steady enough to check pulse and dress wounds. Oban's face was a mask of raw color: grief sharpened into a blade.
"Keep him safe," Oban said, voice low and steady although it shook. "I'll take Nijack. Don't—don't let him die."
Klien's eyes flashed. He pressed a palm to Aijack's brow, then reached for the small sigil he'd kept hidden beneath his cloak—the dimensional key. "I'll get him to the living world," Klien said. "Go. Finish this."
Oban's chest tightened until he felt the metal at his ribs. He stood, and the air around him answered—an electric hum like a silent chorus. The system materialized not as a whisper but a cathedral of light: a vast AI interface blooming around him in transparent planes. Data streamed in columns and lattices, each line a calculation; icons pulsed like heartbeat markers; a central monolith displayed his vitals, threat matrices, and a large, pulsing node labeled VAMPIRIC BLADE — READY.
The system's voice had no tone but every meaning: efficient, cold, immediate. Diagnostics scrolled—latency, attack vectors, regenerative probabilities—and a live overlay sketched Nijack's tendencies in sharp red. Micro-arcs of instructions hovered near Oban's limbs, tiny arrows suggesting angles, timing, torque. The battlefield contracted into HUD windows, and for a blink Oban felt unnaturally calm—like a soldier whose world reduced to the point of aim.
"You will pay for this," he said, and the words were a vow.
He pulled his vampiric blade free. Crimson light bled from the edge; veins of raw energy crawled along the steel. The blade thrummed in his grip, hungry and alive. Rage rose in Oban like a tide. He surged forward, all the instruments of his body guided by the system's surgical suggestions.
Nijack laughed, a sound that tore like acid. He slid aside with a predator's grace, shadow folding around him. "Let's see how you take me, child," he jeered, and the earth responded—black rifts opened as shadow-monsters crawled up like roots breaking soil. Each spawn was a blot of night with gaping maws and too many eyes; they surged in a tide meant to swallow.
Oban moved like a red storm. The vampiric blade cut clean through the first wave—iniquity of light against the void. The system rewired his stance in microseconds, optimizing each swing, calculating every recoil. Yet Nijack was not merely summoning monsters; he was threading the battlefield with traps of darkness, masking angles, redirecting Oban's momentum with looks and a whisper of intent.
At that instant, Klien finished the sequence. The dimensional key flared, a silver seam tearing reality; he wrapped Aijack in a soft glow and pushed him through. The scent of rain touched the air—the living world swallowing the wounded with urgent mercy. Klien slid after him at the edge of the seam, closing it with hands that shook harder now with relief.
Back on the plain, without Aijack's light to anchor him, the fight tightened to a single, hungry point between Oban and Nijack. Nijack struck with a predator's calm—fast, precise—then, with a casual cruelty, grabbed Oban's wrist as if to prove a point.
"Pathetic," Nijack snarled. "This isn't enough to stop me."
Those words were a flare across Oban's vision. The system's measured calm whined like a machine in the background; Oban's pulse became a drum. Something cold and bright and absolutely furious snapped loose inside him. He twisted, a motion less of thought than of reflex, and wrenching with brutal force he reversed the grip. Bone fractured with a wet crack; Nijack's hands tore free from his arms and hit the ground in a dark spray.
Nijack only smiled as shadow began to knit. Void stitched wet, black tissue back together—hands phasing into existence like a trick. The regeneration was the point of his arrogance: no wound held for long, no strike stayed.
Oban's response was a storm. He blurred, every strike a calculation of lethal geometry. He cut through Nijack's torso, slashed his shoulder, carved arcs that painted the air with crimson. Each hit fed the vampiric blade's hungers; the system logged evo-charges in pulsing numbers: EVO: 28%… 51%… 76%. Oban felt his speed climb in the spine and calves; fibers in his armor hummed, joints micro-adjusted. He was changing—becoming sharper and more terrible in the way the blade demanded.
But Nijack kept rising. Each wound mended with the practiced ease of a creature that had seen centuries. Oban's strikes landed and were undone, like writing washed from a page. A hollowness crept into him until Nijack, laughing soft and cruel, whispered, "I am absolute. You cannot kill what cannot die. You are a child with a toy."
The system chimed a new, tempting note.
A bright holo unfurled before Oban:
[UPGRADE AVAILABLE — VAMPIRIC BLADE: ASCENSION.]
A schematic of the blade rotated, overlaid with rune-lattice and a promise: deeper cut, repair-suppression, increased symbiosis. The choice flashed like a heartbeat. No cooldown. No delay. Upgrade or do not.
Oban did not hesitate. He tapped the accept panel with a thumb that felt like ice and fire at once. The blade burst into a cathedral of red—the light hot enough to make his eyes water. The air around him thrummed; his aura flared until the plain itself seemed to step back.
[The HUD rewrote itself: EDGE +230%,]
[REPAIR SUPPRESSION: ACTIVE, SYMBIOTIC LINK: COMPLETE.]
He struck again.
This time the blade did more than cut flesh. It bit at the seams of Nijack's regeneration, the runes gnawing at the glue the void used to stitch its host back together. Nijack's healing stuttered like a machine with a blown fuse. For the first time, fear painted his face—quick, sharp, almost human.
"What did you do to me?" he rasped, clutching at a wound that refused to close.
"Nothing," Oban said, voice soft as a verdict. "Just a skill." He didn't gloat. There was no joy—only the cold clarity of the mission. "Right now— I will end you."
Nijack tried to call shadows, to pull more monsters from the ground, to slip between spaces. But the vampiric blade's new edge bled those doorways dry; repair attempts failed at the molecular seam. Nijack's form faltered, regeneration spasmed, and then, with a scream that split the air into shards, the void could not glue him back.
Oban's final strikes were surgical, not showy: a clean cut through arrogance, a downward slash that separated shadow from flesh. Nijack fell, the darkness around him sputtering as if a lantern had been snuffed. The battlefield exhaled.
Oban stood amid the settling dust, chest heaving, blade cooling to a faint ember. He turned toward the thin seam where Aijack had been taken—toward the living world and the fragile heartbeat they'd managed to save. The system's HUD dimmed but did not disappear; it logged the cost, the upgrade, the new weights worn by a youth who had crossed a line.
He sheathed the vampiric blade slowly, feeling every fragment of what he had done settle into him. There were no triumphant cries—only the lingering echo of promises kept for a friend who lay still in another world. Oban breathed, tasting iron and rain, and the plain felt impossibly large around him.
For the moment, the fight was over. But the upgrade had left its mark—on the blade, on the system, and on Oban's soul. He had chosen, and the world would answer to that choice.
To be continued.