Getting Stronger By Marrying And Investing In Abandoned Villainesses

Here is what Theo did, and afterwards he could not have explained the decision because there had not been one.

He stopped pulling away from the spear.

He put his right hand on the shaft and hauled himself forward along it, and the point came further out of his back and the pain went somewhere white, and he got his face to within a foot of the Legatee’s, close enough that the reach on that eleven-foot weapon stopped meaning anything at all.

Up close the thing smelled of wet iron and old cloth. Its breath came out through a mouth that had been a soldier’s mouth once, and it did not know what to do with a man who had walked up the shaft at it.

And in the dark inside the belfry, where the louvres cut the last of the evening into strips, Theo’s shadow lay along the boards past the Legatee’s feet.

He looked at it.

He had been looking at shadows for two nights. He had been falling into them and coming out of them and learning where one ended and the next began, and had been using them as a door of sorts.

If there was one thing Theo felt he had understood about his affinity to the shadows, it was the way they answered to him. Of course, mastering Shadow Sword also made that somewhat easier.

The Sword Technique was another topic entirely, one that Theo knew he needed a well of experience to access.

But right now, a very fascinating thought came to his mind.

’If the shadows can take me from point A to point B, what’s stopping them from taking my slash from point A to point B...’

It was a daring thing to try to do but Theo had an inkling, one that told him it was possible. So, Theo struck at the Legatee, so obviously that the creature was going to shrug off the attack with its swelled skill. But the darkness around them did not deliver it.

Just like Theo had proposed and controlled, with the same feeling of when he entered and exited the shadows, he tore the cut out of the sword in the last moment. The shadows that coated the blade obsidian vanished like smoke, and appeared in the dark lying across those boards, and went through both of the Legatee’s ankles from behind.

[Sub-skill created: LONG SHADOW]

[Long Shadow: The cut dissolve and resolve a cut in the shadows. Reach is the same with the distance limit of Shadow Movement.]

[Shadow Sword mastery has increased]

The thing came down onto the platform and the spear came out of him as it fell, and Theo made a sound he was not proud of and got his back against the bell frame with his left arm hanging useless. The boards under him went warm and then wet, and he could feel the hole in his back opening and closing when he breathed.

The Legatee crawled at him with a spear it could no longer stand behind.

But before it could do anything more, Theo took its head off with a clean swipe.

[Your body has Adapted to blood loss]

[Your body has Adapted to a superior technique]

[+6 Physical Power]

[+5 Combat Skill]

[+4 Speed]

[Limitless Flow: mastery has increased]

[Warning: Physical strain approaching threshold]

’Get up.’

Below him the crash of masonry arrived at the base of the tower and did not stop, and the whole belfry leaned about four inches to the west. Dust came up through the boards. The bell shifted in its frame and touched the rim of its own housing, and made a small sound, and then a bigger one.

The axe one did not climb either.

It took the tower off at the knees.

Theo went out through the louvres as the floor went, and he did not aim at anything, and he came down through a slate roof two buildings over and through the ceiling under that and landed on a kitchen table which did not survive it.

He lay in the wreck of somebody’s kitchen with the taste of copper in his mouth and listened to the bell hit the street outside, once, enormously. There were plates on the floor around him that had been on a shelf a second ago. There was a pot on the stove with a cloth folded over the handle, put there by somebody who had left in a hurry and meant to come back.

Then he got up, because there was nothing else on the list.

The second one was a completely different problem and it took Theo four minutes to understand how badly.

The spear had reach. That was one thing and it had one answer and he had found it.

The axe had none. It was ten feet of nothing but mass, a soldier gone wide and round with the Inheritance in it, and it did not feint and it did not measure and it did not care where Theo was standing, because it did not swing at Theo. It swung at the place, and the place came down crashing. A shopfront went. A cart went. The corner of a house went, and the two floors above the corner came down after it in a slow sag, and the thing walked out of the dust of all three without breaking step.

So Theo from a distance used Long Shadow, placing several cuts across its body and mainly targeting the lower body to disrupt its power.

However, the thing kept walking.

’What?’

Theo used the subskill again, throwing several chains of strikes through the shadows. But it was ineffective, only causing shallow cuts. The dark opened where he told it to open and the cuts landed where he sent them, and the meat under them simply closed up again over that much fat and that much armour.

His brows pulled together with irritation and he vanished, coming out from the shadows behind the creature.

As he appeared, he stabbed his sword straight into its fat knee. And the bulwark beast finally stopped. Theo for a moment was happy and then realized he shouldn’t have smiled.

He tried to move though, but the creature’s twisting was insane. It literally tore off its upper body to place a devastating slam of its axe across Theo’s head.

Theo had seen it coming, what he wanted to do was remove his sword, however that suddenly became a difficult thing to do. It was stuck in the monster’s fat leg, and in the same space, the axe came upon him and slammed right into his head.

It produced a metallic sound that disturbed the night and Theo went skidding across the street about a hundred kilometers, crashing through dilapidated stores and tumbling through the ground. He came to rest against a kerb with one arm folded the wrong way under him and a shelf of somebody’s roof arriving on his legs a moment later, and for a while the street had two of everything in it.

The large round Legatee was already chasing him, and another one, thin and tall with a sword, had left its position, running after Theo.

The rest were shredding apart the wall of bodies that halted the advance towards the Sixth Wall.