Alexia

I don’t win.

I very much don’t win.

Despite the good start to the battle, with him taking me seriously this time around, he quickly takes me by surprise when he rushes straight at me and slams his fist right into me. With a strange screen coating his fist like those panels.

And I’m sent flying before crashing into the ground with quite a few other bits of reality slamming into me afterwards.

But just like always, I teleport away and adapt. Reverting the damage.

Then I return to attacking him while pushing as much energy as I can into my scythe. Shattering one panel after another as he repeatedly slams his fist into me. The two of us trading blows one after another.

I even manage to bring him to the very start of his, I’ll call it second phase, where he creates that armor over his body.

Only for him to warp reality around him, letting him teleport right in front of me before reality just sort of glitches out all around us.

And just like that, I feel my entire body being stretched out in every direction until I’m torn to shreds.

With only the sound of his voice echoing once more in my head, “Seven more.”

I suck in a breath when I reappear in the first trial once more. Only to collapse down to my knees as I pant from the pain that I just felt. Even if it was just for a moment.

My head eventually jerks upwards to glare at the Architect. But all the man says is, “Let’s start.”

Just like the previous attempts.

Damnit, this is getting annoying.

Really fucking annoying.

I don’t bother walking over to him, nor do I bother watching a single thing he does in this. Instead I move my scythe and slam the butt of the weapon into the ground in order to help push me to my feet.

And without hesitation, I begin to fiddle around with it. Putting energy into the weapon, making it glow, and even using spells with it to see if anything gives me any good results.

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But after a while, I realize something.

Something important.

My eyes widen and I close my eyes, just grasping the weapon with both of my hands.

Then I let instinct fully take over.

I feel my hands moving, my energy flowing, and see a bright purple and blue light trying to shine through my eyelids.

But I don’t open them.

I just keep moving, focusing all of my attention on what my body is driving me to do based solely on instinct. With no thought involved in my movements.

As my role pushes me forwards.

I spin the scythe around, just barely avoiding cutting into myself as I do so fluidly despite not having much of any practice in using a war scythe. At all.

And when I finally reach the crescendo of my performance, I open my eyes and swipe the scythe straight in the direction of the wall of the Architect’s chamber. Leading to a massive arc of quantum energy with a unique bit of black coloring mixed in along with a massive wave of energy right behind it rushing out of my blade and slamming into the wall.

Erasing the wall entirely and continuing outside of the area I’m in.

I pant in exhaustion after that, falling down to my knees while damn near hugging my scythe.

Just watching as the attack continues tearing through the quantum realm outside of this chamber. Ripping apart monsters and reality itself.

What I find interesting though is that the arc part of the attack seems to go straight for anything living in the attack’s wake. Like a sort of homing missile of sorts.

I continue panting as the attack slowly leaves my sight, seemingly never running out of steam. And eventually I get my own steam back in the form of my stamina returning before I climb back to my feet.

Then I try to repeat that attack.

Except with my eyes open. Because I can’t exactly aim if I don’t have my eyes open.

And it proves to be rather difficult to pull off while trying to focus on what I’m doing.

So after failing miserably once, I go ahead and do it a couple more times with my eyes closed as the Architect is focusing on initializing the galaxy he’s working on. No doubt wondering what the hell I’m doing, considering that his memories don’t seem to be entirely there in terms of past trials but also not entirely missing.

I keep practicing until the Architect finally finishes initializing the galaxy. Then I find myself watching his battle again.

And this time I watch everything he does while trying to imagine how I would counter it all, instead of just watching.

But just like the last times, he doesn’t do the exact same things. He does one new attack that I’ve never seen before, that involving him quite literally glitching a meteor from space to slam into all of the corrupted monsters on the ground.

Proving that he really can just glitch anything from anywhere.

Which also proves that he is stronger than me in the pure power sense. Even if he doesn’t have as much directly offensive attacks using his own energies and resources.

Meaning I’m going to have to go in a roundabout way to kill him.

Maybe take him by surprise with that one big attack at the start and have the arc continue chasing him around. Because I doubt he can block it, and with the homing feature, it won’t stop chasing him.

Hopefully.

The problem is that I’ll have to have the opportunity to use that attack. And I doubt he’ll give me the time it takes to do it. Since it takes nearly twenty seconds to prepare it.

Plus I’m still not good at doing it with my eyes open to aim.

I honestly get the feeling he would be a much higher level than me if he were in the System.

A thought that has me gritting my teeth.