My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy-Chapter 185: Mounting the Counter

She advanced with each word, her form splitting around the edges as Refraction Control blurred her image into three, then five. It wasn’t perfect—shadows flickered at the wrong angles—but it was enough to throw him off. He shifted his weight slightly, trying to track her real position, but the pull from the veins under the arena floor dragged at his balance again.

The hum was louder now. Less like background noise. More like something alive. Something pressing against him.

His shard stuttered behind his ribs.

He blinked. The edges of his vision dragged slightly behind his movement. Focus stuttered, then snapped back. The plasma dancing across her spear had started to split again—unstable, flickering like a frayed circuit. He caught the way it curved mid-swing, how the heat wasn’t holding a straight path anymore.

It wasn’t just her power shifting.

Her rage was breaking it apart.

The shard flared, and the world dulled around him.

Color bled from the air in an instant. The haze vanished. Sound dropped into a low hum. Elias blinked once as the grayscale world settled into place—sharp lines, flattened shadows, everything still except the glow. Red dots flared across Kikaru’s frame like pulse points. Wrists. Knees. A faint one at her shoulder.

His breath steadied on instinct. Everything slowed.

"Dot—springs," he murmured.

She moved before the command finished. Steel coiled up from the sand, twisting against the arena’s energy pull. Their shape held, barely. Kikaru’s movement blurred into a streak—fast, but not clean. One spring clipped her ankle mid-air. Not enough to stop her, but just enough to stagger the landing.

She touched down off-balance.

Elias moved.

The rod formed in his hand mid-stride, a length of solid steel with no polish. Just weight and reach. His grip adjusted automatically as he stepped in low, targeting the flickering point on her arm. freēwēbnovel.com

The swing landed with a sharp crack, the impact vibrating through his forearms.

Kikaru’s arm recoiled, spear stuttering. Plasma peeled away in sparks, scattering like a snapped conduit. Her body twisted with the force. Her stance widened. Not collapsed—but broken just enough.

She gasped. The sound wasn’t loud, but it cut through.

Her Ikona dimmed behind her, golden light pulsing unevenly. One hand reached for the ground to steady herself, but she didn’t fall.

Elias didn’t press the advantage.

The crowd didn’t exist. Not in this space. Not in this version of the fight.

"You’re wrong," he said, voice tight, the rod trembling slightly in his hands. "I didn’t bind you to control you. I did it to keep you safe. To protect Junjio’s father. That’s all it was supposed to be."

Kikaru’s eyes didn’t widen. They narrowed. Her expression shifted by degrees—past rage, past disbelief. It landed somewhere that hurt more. The kind of pain that sat behind everything else.

He remembered her voice in the pod hallway. The way her hand had grabbed his sleeve. We’ll get out together, Elias. Don’t fall behind.

And now—this.

She didn’t answer. Just straightened her back, jaw clenched tight. The plasma snapped back into shape around her spear, but it looked wrong now. Angled. Wild. Like it didn’t want to hold.

She stepped forward. The ground scorched beneath her

"Safe?" Her voice didn’t rise. It dropped. Frayed, jagged at the edge.

"You took my choice, Elias. My trust."

Her Ikona surged before the last word left her lips. A beam of plasma snapped toward his chest, sharp and instinctive, no hesitation behind it.

Elias threw himself sideways. Sand ripped at his hands as he hit the ground hard. He didn’t stop moving. Dot reacted before he could speak—her glow flashed, and a mesh of steel cords burst from the floor, tangling Kikaru’s shield arm mid-lunge.

It slowed her. Barely.

He scrambled back up, fingers slick with blood. His knees didn’t want to lock. His breath came in halves now—shallow, uneven. The grayscale haze of perception had faded again, leaving the full weight of exhaustion pressing against the corners of his vision.

He braced a hand on the ground, pushed to his feet. Every time he tried to fix this, it just tore open worse.

The arena pulsed around them.

A low vibration shuddered through the sand. Beneath his boots, the veins in the stone flared—first with color, then with pressure. Elias staggered one step before catching himself. The floor had hardened. The sand wasn’t loose anymore. It resisted motion like wet clay starting to set.

The hum sank into his chest. Not loud. Just steady. Inescapable.

He gritted his teeth. The shard in his chest felt slower now, like something had jammed in the conduit between will and response.

Kikaru stumbled too. Her stance shifted. The tip of her spear flickered, its plasma wavering off-rhythm. Light stuttered at the edges of her armor, her Ikona tugged out of alignment by the same force.

Refraction Control glitched around her silhouette, and for a second, he saw her fully. No blur. No double image. Just her—chest rising hard, sweat breaking down her jaw.

The arena wasn’t just watching them now.

It was testing them.

Elias’s fingers curled around the grit as he adjusted his footing. He could barely feel the sand anymore through the blood caked along his palms.

"Dot," he rasped. "Redirect lattice."

Her hum kicked back up, sharper this time. Steel and fiber twisted out of the sand in a sharp arc, wrapping into a wide, angular shape. The structure curved along its edges—catching the residual plasma from Kikaru’s last strike and angling it back toward her.

The beam snapped backward.

Kikaru saw it too late. It clipped across her shoulder, drawing a sharp hiss from between her teeth as she jerked away, heat curling off her arm.

The veins below them flared again, brighter.

And the ground got heavier.

The beam snapped backward.

It hit the redirection angle head-on and curled, its energy folding in on itself as it arced back toward her. Kikaru turned, too late to dodge. The blast scorched across her shoulder in a clean diagonal. Her armor didn’t catch it. The force staggered her back a full step, and her shield lifted too late to follow through.

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