My vision dimmed as I pushed my time perception to the limit of my senses. Out of desperation I tried to sink my power into the ice below my feet, and was surprised when it did. I dashed forward using my power to stop me from slipping on the ice, and sent my power ahead of me to sink into Chantelle.

It took a few moments for my power to travel through the ice below me and to Chantelle, and I noticed Rat start to move around to my back. His dash backwards had nearly equalled my own speed, and he was still moving extremely fast. His speed was comparable to when I was using a tenth of my strength, as fast as I could move and replace the energy in my muscles without blacking out to the pain.

It must be the aspect that the Winter God mentioned. My power finally reached Chantelle, and there was still some resistance against it as I soaked it into her. Not nearly enough to stop me, but more than the two other people that I had healed so far. There wasn't enough time for a detailed scan, so I took a rough snapshot of what was wrong.

The blade had cut through the front half of her neck, slicing through both veins and half of her wind pipe and vocal cords. There was blood entering her lungs and there was air inside of the veins going to her heart and the arteries going to her brain.

The air was the most immediate problem, followed by blood loss, then finally the blood in the lungs and shock. I only had the parallel healing program as well. I was less than half a second from reaching Chantelle, enough time to form a prioritised repair model using pieces from my model overlaid onto the sparse model I had of her. Estimated time for a complete heal, five seconds once I'd reached her.

Rat was out of my vision at my side, moving to my back. My combat model predicted that he would stab me in the back half a second after I'd reached Chantelle. I revised the repair model for Chantelle, just remove the air and patch over the cut blood vessels as much as possible in the half second I would have. I could feel that Chantelle was in shock but after I triggered the repair program she was just in pain. Waves and waves of it.

It was only mildly distracting, not debilitating as it was when I was feeling it for myself.

I had sheathed my sword at some point so I drew it again crossing it in a parry behind me to stop the sword my sound sense was telling me was stabbing forwards towards my back. It would have gone through my spine and then my heart, but instead slid along my blade as I turned around to face Rat.

I locked blades with him and used half of the energy in my muscles to shove him backwards. He was thrown two meters back, and I stepped forward to maintain contact with our blades. Rat started to send cold down through his blade and into mine. My power was bouncing off of his enchanted blade, so instead of fighting it with heat, I slid my blade down so that the top quarter of my blade was touching his and then sheared my blade from a longsword into a shortsword.

Rat didn't overbalance noticeably, but the now free end of my blade was pushed towards me. I reached up with my left hand and threw the blade at the center of Rat's chest, who was retreating. He turned his body to the side, completely dodging the blade and extended his sword in a thrust back towards me.

I turned with a half step, forcing him to change his thrust into a swing. He had the range advantage with my now shortened sword. However, the sword that Rat was using was one of my trick blades, that had several deliberate structural faults. With my power reinforcing the blade there was no way that the blade would break. But I highly doubted an enchanter who was told to keep the sword sharp would have focused on anything except the edge of the blade.

I calculated the exact structural flaw at the base of Rat's blade, which would leave him holding a dagger. I swung up at the perfect angle. And the blade of Rat's sword sheared exactly as I was aiming for. I had to step backwards to avoid getting more than the superficial light slash through my chest that I was left with.

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Which left the large length of Rat's sword blade available for him to copy the trick I had used on him earlier, grabbing it and throwing it towards my chest. I didn't have the room or time to dodge, so I brought up my left hand and slapped the blade downwards hard, burying almost its entire length into the ice of the floor.

With Rat now at a range disadvantage I was trying to press him. Each time I got close to landing a cut on him he would redirect my blade. I couldn't step in close to him because at the closer range his dagger was the better weapon. I realised almost too late that he was circling around to get between Chantelle and I. He took a step backwards and to the side moving closer to her, and instead of circling to find an opening I stepped in the opposite direction and in towards him.

I pushed him back away from Chantelle as I reached my left hand into my pocket. When he redirected the next swing of my sword, slashing into my body with his dagger, I brought up the throwing blade I had pulled from my Pocket Dimension. I caught Rat by surprise and slashed through the tendon on his right wrist.

He grabbed the hilt of the dagger with his left hand from the destroyed grip of his right and dashed backwards away from Chantelle and I. He was looking behind me and smiling condescendingly, as though he had already won. I glanced behind me and saw Chantelle coughing up blood.

I was out of time. I threw my throwing blade at Rat and crouched, preparing to put everything into my next attack. Rat easily swatted the blade out of the air, and settled in a fighting stance waiting for me.

I was faster than he was, but he was more efficient in his defence. I would need to be convincing to pull this off. I used the full strength of my legs to dash towards him, moving faster than either of us had all fight. I had my left hand out for balance, palm up and obviously empty.

I raised my sword up and when I came within range I swung it down with all of the strength of my right arm, on a path to cut Rat completely in half. Rat started to step to the side, raising his right hand he timed it perfectly to backhand the blade of my sword while it was still thirty centimeters above his head. Combined with his step the path of my blade would just barely miss him. He raised his dagger with his left hand and stabbed forward and down at my head. I ducked my head to the left, and his dagger tracked to follow.

Both of his hands were occupied, and his full attention was on stabbing his dagger through my right eye.

I traced the path that his dagger would take. It would lead to an acceptable loss of functionality. I started to shut off the blood vessels going to the parts of my head that would be affected as well as I could and angled my left hand into an uppercut with my fingers extended, using the full strength of my left arm.

My attack moved faster than Rat's, and my scalpel sharp fingernails went through the underside of his jaw at the same time as his dagger went through my eye. By the time the crossguard of the dagger hit my face, leaving a few centimeters of the dagger sticking out the back of my skull, my left hand had burst through the top of Rat's head.

His brains ended up splattered on the ceiling six meters above us. As he fell he dragged his dagger down and to the side of my skull, and I moved my head to control the path and minimise the damage. I still had the momentum of my charge so I ended up bodyslamming into him.

My legs and arms were exhausted, and I was bleeding heavily from my head. I was going to collapse onto the ground anyway, as my legs weren't going to hold me up, so I loaded up half a second worth of healing and triggered it. After the pain ended I stood up and rushed to Chantelle. She was bleeding from the neck again, her coughing up the blood from her lungs had torn the quick repairs I had done and blood was again going down her airway when she was trying to breathe.

She was drowning in her own blood, but it would be a minute before that killed her, so I spent a few seconds making sure I would only need to do major repairs once. I gripped her hand and triggered the parallel repair program. Six seconds later she let out a groan and then gasped in a breath of air.

I checked her out with my power, and everything seemed to be working. My consciousness on my biological side started to dim and wink out. My head was still bleeding, though less now that my heart had stopped. With Chantelle fixed I triggered the repair program for myself. Just as it was activating it sent me an estimate of eight seconds to fully healed.

We had both survived.