[Remaining Mana: 11%]

The knight was still trying to rise when Revan hit it again.

Its gauntleted fingers had barely found purchase on the cracked stone, one knee lifting from the ground, when the second shockwave slammed into its torso and sent it skidding backward through the fog. Pieces of chest plating scattered across the earth like shrapnel.

The third came before the knight’s body stopped moving. A spring-loaded strike aimed at the sword arm that buckled the elbow joint and made the burning blade dip toward the ground.

"Three for three bro, are you kidding me?! Can you just surrender and let me take the win early?!" shouted Revan.

The knight roared and swung from its knees. A desperate, wide-angle slash that forced Revan to duck and roll. He came up inside the knight’s guard, too close for swords, too close for anything except what he was about to do.

He drove his palm into the knight’s abdomen, directly below the broken chestplate. The spring released through his right arm and the shockwave punched a dent into the armor deep enough to see from across the clearing.

The knight doubled over. For one heartbeat, the seven-foot burning giant was bent at the waist, helm at Revan’s eye level.

Revan headbutted it.

The impact rang through his skull like a cathedral bell. His vision whited out and came back red. Blood poured from a new cut on his forehead. The knight’s helm cracked along the visor line.

"I’ll give you that, asshole!"

The words ripped out of him raw and ragged and soaked in adrenaline that had long since passed the threshold of rational behavior. Revan was grinning. Wider than before.

revealing blood that had completely covered the white of his teeth.

To anyone watching, it looked like the smile of a madman. But there was a twisted logic to his madness.

[The Silent Sin]

He was a fighter who grew stronger through damage.

The more his body broke, the sharper his mind became. The closer he got to death, the faster his brain processed information. A paradox that defied conventional combat theory, a warrior whose optimal performance state was the edge of total systemic failure.

The gauntlet’s side effects, the hemorrhaging, the cardiac interruptions, the neural surges that would have incapacitated any other warrior, were doing something unexpected to his brain chemistry. The constant flood of amplified Aura through his cranial channels, filtered through the Phase Reversal barrier, was triggering a sustained adrenaline cascade that pushed his cognitive function into a state that medical texts described as "terminal lucidity."

In this state, Revan’s brain was not thinking. It was calculating. Numbers, angles, distances, force vectors, mana percentages, pulse timings, structural weaknesses in the knight’s armor, all of it streaming through his consciousness simultaneously, each variable updating in real time with every exchange.

The cost was visible. The blood from his nose was darker now, thicker, carrying fragments of ruptured capillaries from deep inside his frontal lobe. The Phase Reversal barrier was holding, but it was holding against a flood, and the dam was showing cracks.

[Remaining Mana: 9%]

The knight recovered. Straightened. The cracked helm tilted downward, and through the widened visor, the violet furnaces of its eyes burned with something that had shifted from caution to fury.

It charged.

The speed was different now. The knight had been fast before, but it had fought with the measured precision of a seasoned warrior. That was gone. What replaced it was raw, unleashed violence, each swing arriving with the full weight of the armored body behind it, each step cracking the stone beneath its feet.

Revan met it head-on.

Left palm strike to deflect the incoming blade. Right shockwave into the knight’s elbow joint. The armored limb buckled. Revan spun inside the opening, drove his knee into the knight’s midsection, and followed with a gauntlet-enhanced elbow to the side of the helm.

The knight’s head snapped right. It swung blind. Revan ducked, slid between its legs, and hammered the back of its knee with a spring-loaded right hook that buckled the joint and sent the knight to one knee.

"COME ON! IS THAT ALL?!" Revan spat a wad of blood onto the cracked stone, making the mockery even more humiliating.

As if answering the mockery.

The knight’s free hand caught Revan’s ankle and pulled. His feet left the ground. The world inverted. The knight swung him overhead like a ragdoll and slammed him into the stone.

"Khhh—!"

The impact crushed the air from his lungs and something in his left shoulder made a sound that bones should never make.

Before he could process the pain, the knight drove its sword downward.

Revan rolled. The blade punched through the stone where his chest had been. He scrambled sideways, came up on one knee.

The knight ripped its sword free and thrust. Straight. Fast. The burning blade aimed at his heart.

Revan twisted his torso. The blade missed his heart.

But not his shoulder.

The sword punched through his left shoulder from front to back, the burning edge sliding through muscle and sinew and emerging from behind in a spray of dark blood. The lightless fire seared the wound edges even as it made them, cauterizing and destroying simultaneously.

Revan screamed. A sound torn from somewhere deeper than his throat.

[Remaining Mana: 8%]

The knight pushed the blade deeper, pinning him to the stone, savoring his screams like a beautiful melody.

But Revan wasn’t going to be its entertainment.

He grabbed the blade with his gauntleted left hand. The black metal of the gauntlet met the black fire of the knight’s sword and the contact point erupted in sparks that scattered across the stone like dying stars.

’The channel through my shoulder is shredded. Half the pathway is gone. But half is still there, and half is enough if I push hard enough.’

He held the blade. Stopped it from going further.

And then he pulled himself forward along the steel, dragging his impaled shoulder closer to the knight’s body, closing the distance inch by agonizing inch until his right fist was in range.

’4.8 window. Two synchronized pulses. Quadruple output.’

"Eat this, you ugly fuck!"

He threw the punch.

The shockwave hit the knight’s cracked helm at four times amplification.

The helm shattered. Fragments of black metal exploded outward. The dark flames on the knight’s face scattered and died.

For the first time, Revan saw what was underneath.

A face. Humanoid but wrong. Skin the color of ash. Features that might have been handsome once but had been compressed and warped by centuries of burning, the flesh pulled taut over bones that were too sharp and too symmetrical. The violet eyes, without the helm to frame them, were enormous and bright and full of something that Revan recognized.

Rage.

Bottomless rage.

The knight screamed into his face—a terrifying, multi-layered shriek that echoed like a legion of voices crying out in unison.

Instead of cowering in fear, Revan screamed back.

"I’VE HAD WORSE!"

He ripped himself off the blade. The withdrawal tore his shoulder open further and the blood that came out was hot enough to steam in the cold air. He staggered, caught himself, and charged right back in.

[Remaining Mana: 7%]