The Black Blur

"You won't get past me, young man," the man said. "I am Tregnama, Scourge of the Black Shadows, the Black Blur. I will find a way to kill you, and then I will kill your little Venufian slave girl."

"My what?" Fate asked, lowering his sword and staring at Tregnama like he had grown a second head.

The black-clothed man gestured to Cait. "Her. She is from Venufia, is she not? Emperor Ythmun enslaved her people thousands of years ago."

Fate exchanged a glance with Cait. "That's pretty racist, bro," he said. "We're not even from this planet."

"Oh." The man frowned once more. "What does 'racist' mean?"

"It means-" Fate blinked as the man disappeared, a knife now sticking out of his throat from behind. He turned to find Tregnama standing behind him, a grin on his face as his knife lit up. Fate took a swift step back as the knife blurred as if Fate was looking at it without glasses. The wind buffeting his face said that the knife was vibrating at an insanely high speed.

The man jabbed at Fate again and again, Fate stopping his intangibility and blocking with his sword. A Manifest Knife fueled by a Personification's Divine Energy was sure to hurt him, incorporeality or not.

The man picked up speed, striking so fast that Fate couldn't keep up, receiving several nicks here and there as he parried what he could. The knife wielder was too close for Fate's Miao Dao to be used effectively.

"Ah, so this is your weakness," the man coldly, the tone not matching the smirk on his face.

"Are you sure you want this one?" Cait said with a smile as Fate earned a cut on his cheek.

'No, I got it." Fate grunted as the knife slid into his ribs, cutting through his Styx armor with ease. He grinned behind his mask, storing his sword in its ring and grappling Tregnama. The man struggled as Fate squeezed tighter and tighter, headbutting him a few times to disorient him.

"Get off of me!" Tregnama yelled, shoving Fate backward with a telekinetic push. Fate threw up a telekinetic barrier at the last moment to dissipate some of the force and rolled to his feet, summoning his sword once more as he cast around for his opponent who had vanished once more.

He felt a breeze to his back, whirling his sword around in a brutal horizontal slice that Tregnama dodged with ease. The long-haired man stepped forward, although it appeared more like teleportation, jamming his knife at Fate's throat.

Fate spun his sword clockwise, smacking the blade away with his own before flowing into a diagonal chop. Tregnama blurred, the Miao Dao seemingly passing through him just like Fate's power before he launched another flurry of strikes, stabbing so fast that there appeared to be tens of knives heading toward Fate.

Fate was forced to take several steps back, coming to a stop when his back hit a wall. He spared a dangerous glance behind him, finding the castle wall to his back.

He pressed his back firmly against the wall, deflecting fewer and fewer strikes as he focused on protecting just his heart, face, and throat. He became a human pincushion, the knife stabbing him pretty much everywhere, dropping him to a knee when the slippery bastard cut his Achilles tendon.

Fate felt another breeze, his eyes lighting up with an idea as he cast out with his aura. Finding what he was looking for, he turned intangible and rolled through the appearing Tregnama, jumping to his feet and bobbing around several strikes as his wounds slowly healed using the Divine Energy his opponent had so graciously given him.

When he was fully healed, he went on the offensive, blocking dozens of attacks and counterattacking with his own lethal strikes. Steadily, he racked up the same number of hits that his opponent had, Tregnama growling in frustration as Fate whirled and sliced whenever the man tried to flank him. Fate still took hits, but now he wasn't a punching bag.

"How the hell are you doing that?!" Tregnama yelled in frustration, stabbing at Fate's eye with the speed of lightning.

Fate took advantage of the man's momentary lack of judgment to catch his wrist, stabbing at the man's throat several times until he finally struck true. Tregnama gurgled, blood spilling down his neck.

Fate twisted his sword, cutting the man's free hand off when he tried to attack with it, then latched onto the man with his Divine Grasp, slamming him into the castle wall. Tregnama tried to fight back with his own Divine Reach, but Fate's Divine Grasp's caustic quality was barely enough to even the playing field.

Judging by the shove from earlier, Tregnama was capable of about eleven hundred pounds of force, just slightly less than Fate's own. But due to the Level disparity, Tregnama's Divine Grasp would still be able to overpower Fate's with sheer quality, the higher-tier energy capable of eating away at Fate's.

The leeching aspect of Fate's Divine Grasp effectively neutralized that by sapping the energy's inherent strength, leaving Fate with around two hundred pounds of Divine Reach to leverage. More than enough to keep the lightweight man pinned to the wall.

Tregnama jerked his arms and legs, trying to escape Fate's grip. Fate stalked forward, pressing the edge of his blade against the Personification's neck. The man stopped struggling, knowing any wrong move would cut his throat open. "Your Divine Energy," Fate said.

"What?" Tregnama panted, eyes constricting as his fight-or-flight response was robbed of both choices.

"Your Divine Energy. My eyes couldn't keep up with you, but I could sense your aura as you moved. It might as well have been a bell around your neck, telling me which direction you were coming from just a split second before you arrived.

"Then it was just a matter of guessing where you would stab based on the position of my blade and adjusting accordingly, a task made easier by the fact that your aura always took the shape of your attacks right before you executed them. Probably to deal with wind resistance. I got a few nicks at the start, but I'm nothing if not a quick learner. Anyway, my rant's over. Time to die."

He leaned into his blade, wrenching it forward and taking Tregnama's head clean off. He stepped back and let the corpse fall to the ground, dropping to a knee as he rummaged around in the man's pockets.

"What are you doing?" Cait asked.

Fate pulled a key out, showing it to her. "Easier than breaking doors down." He stood, dusting himself off he made for the gate. "Alright, let's go kill another monarch."