Chapter 249: Camouflage

He was human in all the ways that humans were recognizable.

The person had two arms, two legs, a face and his skin was the colour of anyone who had grown up as a human.

His dark hair were pulled back at the nape. Clothes that could have passed as a fashion designers new experiment.

Everything was as normal as it could have been, but.

… It was the eyes that broke it.

His irises were a normal dark brown.

The problem was the three vertical slits running through each of them, from lid to lid. These were not cracks or scars.

They were his pupils. Three overlapping pupils in each eye, opening and closing in slow, asynchronous blinks like gills. When all three were open, his gaze had a depth to it that made it difficult to hold for long, as if you were looking into something that had more layers than a human mind was meant to register.

He was a Tainted demon.

[Ghost Blade] had not seen him.

It saw everything that existed where it was supposed to. It saw movement and intent. To this date… only a few things had been able to fool Ghost blade and it was scary.

The man smiled and showed too many teeth.

“So,” he said. “You are Ishiki.”

His voice was ordinary, just there was this rasping edge to his tone that made it feel like it was coming from the depth of his throat.

“Heh.” The sound that came out of him next was not quite a laugh. More like an exhale. He tilted his head slightly. “You don’t feel so strong.”

Ishiki said nothing.

He was standing with Sorrow’s Edge held low at his right side, the purple along the blade a steady, unwavering luminescence.

[Ghost Blade]’s map showed six remaining Xenons at various distances, four of them were the Superior Xenons.

He took a breath.

The demon rolled one shoulder, a loose, almost disinterested movement, and then stepped back once.

And vanished, instantaneously — one moment a man stood in the ruins with three-slit eyes and a half-formed smirk, and the next moment the space he had occupied contained only broken ground and dark air.

[Ghost Blade]’s perception flickered.

Then went silent where the demon had been.

Ishiki’s eyes narrowed. ’This… this is not invisibility. Invisible things are actually still there, so Ghost blade can assume them… it is as if he is mixing with the surroundings as a non living thing! ’

He made a decision and deactivated Ghost Blade.

The sensation was abrupt. The peripheral black and white map in his mind collapsed.

He suddenly felt a sharp pain in his head. His ears picked up the wind, the groan of settling rubble somewhere above him, the distant intermittent sound of Shiro’s controlled fire.

He let Sorrow’s Edge breathe, the Jian had a very straight forward backlash and that was the fact that it overexerted one’s senses to a level that it might make most people’s head explode.

But he was not most people. In his years of carrying this sword he had learned perfectly how to tackle this. It was something only he could do… or so he thought at least.

He had discovered that activating Ghost Blade along with Sorrow’s Edge was like trying to hear a whisper in a room where someone was already speaking.

Ghost Blade was louder. It drowned the Jian out.

The sensation that spread from the grip up his arm was not warmth, it was something closer to pressure, the feeling of a room being occupied even when the occupant was silent and still.

The sword did not show him anything… instead It gave him presence.

And somewhere to his left, at roughly eleven o’clock, something was present.

He didn’t look at it.

He turned his body forty degrees to the right instead, presenting his left side to that eleven o’clock position, Sorrow’s Edge loose in his right hand. He stared at a point in the middle distance and kept his posture deliberately unconcerned.

’Come on.’

The air at eleven o’clock moved.

It came like a fist.

He saw it in the last instant as a distortion — a compression of the air in a rough human-fist shape, moving at the speed of a committed punch, aimed at the side of his head.

He ducked under it and stepped into the space behind it in the same motion.

His left hand came up and found the arm attached to the fist by feel, by the pressure Sorrow’s Edge fed him. He grabbed it and pulled, redirecting the momentum.

Then he planted his right foot and drove his left knee up.

The impact connected with something that felt like kicking a reinforced post. The demon was solid. Ishiki felt the force travel back up his leg and into his hip joint.

But the demon staggered.

His camouflage flickered — a half-second window where colour returned to the outline of a man, the three-slit eyes briefly present — and then the concealment reasserted itself and he was gone again.

Ishiki straightened.

The ache in his knee was irritating.

’So, he uses camouflage.’

He turned the concept over once, clinically. The skill was noy just visual. The skill suppressed his presence, even the ambient displacement he should have generated just by existing in a space.

It was the most complete invisibility skill Ishiki had encountered up until now. It was a shame he wouldn’t be able to copy it.

’Interesting.’

The demon’s voice came from somewhere to the right, recalibrated to ten o’clock now.

“You can feel me.” It wasn’t a question. “That’s a problem,” the demon said.

“Yes,” Ishiki agreed.

He shifted Sorrow’s Edge in his grip, very slightly, and let the ghost of a smile work its way onto his face.

“You know,” he said, “I have a better trick.”

He activated Ghost Blade in its full power. The actual use of the skill was to make the wielder turn almost not visible to the naked eye.

Ishiki’s perception extended outwards to a staggering 500 meters. He saw Shiro fighting three remaining Superior Xenons on his side.

It mapped everything else.

The demon went still. The three-slit gaze swept left and right, tracking the space where Ishiki had been standing.

It found him. His outline was there. His clothes were visible.

But it kept sliding.

Every time the demon’s focus settled on him, Ishiki was slightly elsewhere… existing in the space between one observed position and the next.

The demon’s three pupils contracted, all six irises tightening, cycling asynchronously, trying to lock.

They couldn’t.

The more he tried to focus, the worse it became. Ishiki’s shape was there in the ruins — distinct enough that he could not be called invisible, present enough that he could not be dismissed… but entirely impossible to hold.

“What…” the demon blurted out.

His three-slit eyes moved through their asynchronous blink pattern twice, and then found nothing. Cold sweat dripped down the demon’s back.

“What are you,” he took a step back and hit a wall.

It was no longer a rhetorical question.

Ishiki was blurring between existence, like a ghost.

“What a pity…” The voice entered the demon’s right ear. “I wanted your skill!” This time in his left.

He turned around and saw the whole world spinning around him. No… it was his head that was spinning.

And… and his body was standing still without a head!

[You have Slain a Tainted Demon]

[You have received 3,000 Data Fragments]

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