Wis'adel's attack was something the cloaked man seemed to have expected all along.
He dropped his body low, and the beam skimmed over his scalp, blasting a deep crater into the rock wall behind him.
His steps never stopped. He closed in at once, his short blade sweeping horizontally.
Wis'adel twisted aside to dodge, but the edge still scraped across the symbiotic suit, slicing a small opening through it. Pale skin showed through beneath.
She retreated with the motion, trying to pull back and widen the gap between them, but the cloaked man's follow-up was even faster than she had anticipated.
His next kick slammed into her lower abdomen.
Bang!
Wis'adel was launched backward, crashing hard into the rock wall. Pebbles and dust rained down around her.
She didn't even have time to catch her breath before his knife was already in front of her face. Instinctively, she jerked her head aside. The blade brushed past her cheek, leaving behind a thin line of blood.
She drove her knee toward his stomach, but he blocked it with an elbow and followed up with a punch straight into her shoulder.
Pain exploded through her. Wis'adel let out a muffled grunt, gritted her teeth, and dropped her body low as the energy rail along her right arm began to gather power.
But the cloaked man was faster.
He stomped down on her forearm, forcibly interrupting the charge, and stabbed down with his knife at the same time, driving it into her thigh.
"Agh!"
Wis'adel cried out in pain, but in the very next second, warmth spread from the wound. The symbiote covering her body had already started emergency treatment, sealing the bleeding and repairing the damage.
The cloaked man yanked the blade free and stabbed down again. She rolled away with all her strength, and the knife plunged into the ground.
Taking the chance, she kicked out at his knee, using the force to push herself three steps away and lifting her right hand to charge again.
But the cloaked man was already lunging at her.
There wasn't time to aim.
Gritting her teeth, Wis'adel just jammed the barrel against his shoulder.
Boom!
The dark red beam punched through him at point-blank range.
A bloody hole exploded open in the cloaked man's shoulder, and the impact staggered him backward.
He looked down at the wound, frowning slightly. But when he raised his head to look at Wis'adel again, his eyes had turned even colder. Blood ran down his arm, yet his movements remained steady, and the hand holding the knife did not tremble in the slightest.
Wis'adel used the opening to widen the distance a little, gulping down air. Her wounds still hurt badly, but at least they weren't worsening.
She stared at the figure slowly approaching her, thoughts racing.
His strength suppressed hers.
In terms of speed, she could barely keep up, but he always seemed able to predict her movements.
Their levels of experience weren't even close.
Every time she tried to charge a shot, he interrupted her at the most crucial moment. The only reason that last blast had hit was because she'd rammed the barrel straight into him.
But an opportunity like that wouldn't come easily again. Next time, he'd be even more wary.
"What a pity."
The cloaked man finally spoke, his voice low and hoarse.
"To have this kind of ability at your age is no small thing. Dying by my hand can only be called your bad luck."
He tightened his grip on the knife and advanced one step at a time.
Wis'adel glared at him, body taut as a wildcat cornered with nowhere left to run.
Then, suddenly, You Yi's voice sounded in her mind, unusually serious.
"I've got an idea."
Wis'adel froze for a moment.
But the seriousness lasted less than a second before his voice cracked in exasperation.
"If you can't handle it, let me log in already! Watching you get beaten like this is costing me a fortune! I only just managed to save up a little stock, and I've dumped every last drop of healing into you! Do you know how hard this has been for me?!"
"All right."
"You take over."
Wis'adel didn't refuse.
"How?"
If the fight continued like this, she really wasn't confident she could win.
And this life wasn't hers alone anymore.
You Yi froze too, clearly not expecting her to agree so readily, without the slightest resistance.
"Oh? You trust me that much?"
"Less talking, more—"
She never finished the sentence.
Because in the next instant, her consciousness suddenly seemed to be pulled out of her body.
The feeling was strange. She could still sense everything her body felt—the pain of her wounds, the itching as they healed—but she could no longer control any part of herself.
Her fingers no longer obeyed her.
She couldn't control her eyelids.
Even her breathing was no longer hers to command.
She had become a spectator.
And then the body wrapped in the black symbiotic suit moved on its own.
First, it lowered its head slightly and looked at its own small hands, still marked with faint calluses.
Then it rolled its shoulders and neck, producing a few soft cracks.
"Feels good. Been a while since I had a human body."
The words came out of her own mouth.
It was still Wis'adel's voice, but the tone was completely different.
The cloaked man had only just adjusted his breathing when this was the sight that greeted him.
That wounded little brat had suddenly examined her own body for no reason, and now even her stance was completely different. Gone was the tense, coiled posture from before. In its place was something loose, easy, almost lazy.
The cloaked man stopped in his tracks.
He stared at the child in front of him, his brow slowly knitting together.
Something was wrong.
Everything about her felt different now.
Especially her expression—half-lidded eyes, the faint curl at the corner of her mouth, the way she looked at him like a predator looking at prey.
An indescribable sense of wrongness crawled up the cloaked man's spine.
He had thought he'd already gotten a basic grasp on this brat's fighting habits.
Now, all of a sudden, he wasn't sure anymore.
"Hey," the little brat said, voice drawling lazily.
"You had your fun beating me up just now, didn't you?"
"Now it's my turn."
The moment the words fell, she suddenly dropped her center of gravity.
The cloaked man's pupils contracted sharply.
No—
Too fast!
No, not faster. The speed was the same as before, still the speed of that brat.
And yet the angle and motion of that single step gave him the illusion that an attack could come from anywhere at any moment.
His instincts screamed at him.
He slashed out reflexively—
But she had already changed direction in advance, gliding around the arc of his blade and driving a fist into the gap beneath his ribs.
Bang!
The cloaked man let out a muffled grunt and staggered back two steps.
He recovered his balance immediately and swept his blade backhanded—
But she moved as though she'd known he would do exactly that, ducking beneath it and kicking him behind the knee at the same time.
He dropped to one knee. Before his knife could even finish the swing, another punch smashed into his face.
The cloaked man rolled with the impact to bleed off the force, widening the gap between them, and stared at her in alarm and uncertainty.
This wasn't right.
Not right at all.
Her strength hadn't changed, yet her technique was on an entirely different level from moments ago, as if an entirely different person had taken her place in the blink of an eye.
Every strike she threw landed exactly where it hurt him most.
The instant he moved to swing, she was already slipping into the dead angle of his force.
When he tried to block, she would stop short in advance and switch directions.
When he tried to counterattack, he found his movements constrained at every turn, every single move read through before it was even completed.
It felt as though she knew exactly what he was about to do—
And understood it better than he did himself.
You Yi rolled his neck once, then looked at the cloaked man's wary face, the smile at the corner of his mouth deepening.
A symbiote differed from humans in more ways than appearance alone.
There was also information processing.
His consciousness wasn't bound by human physiological limits. He had no brain. In its place was another, far more efficient structure, one whose speed in gathering, processing, and responding to information vastly surpassed that of these Terran lifeforms.
During those few minutes when Wis'adel had been fighting the cloaked man, You Yi had already recorded, analyzed, and broken apart all of it—his habits, his rhythm, every tiny tell that preceded each move.
At this point, in You Yi's eyes, the man might as well have been fighting in his underwear.
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