The swap took thirty seconds. Wave Motion vanished from my active roster. Death-aspected energy settled into my consciousness like ice water spreading through my veins. It felt wrong in a way the clean, spiral power of Wave Motion never had. Wrong in a way that was fundamentally different from Sensory Hijack’s subtle manipulation of perception.

This was darker. It tasted of old copper on my tongue, that metallic sharpness you get from biting your cheek hard enough to draw blood. My molars ached like they’d been filled with lead. The energy carried violence in it, not potential violence but violence as a fundamental property. It didn’t want to hurt things. It wanted to end them.

I turned to face the nearest training dummy—standard humanoid target, six feet tall, covered in synthetic material that changed color when struck. The impact sensors across its torso and limbs were supposed to help students measure force and accuracy. Mine was about to get some very confusing data.

I raised my right hand and tried to figure out what the hell Reaper’s Edge expected from me.

The response came fast. Death mana gathered in my palm like black smoke with weight, with substance, with that same wrong feeling radiating from it. Cold slid across my skin. Sharp, like touching broken glass in the dark. The energy tasted of metal and decay, carried the hollow echo of something that belonged in a grave, not in the world of breathing things.

It pooled there for maybe three seconds before it stopped being energy and became matter.

The weapon formed smaller than I expected. Not the massive war scythe Addison used to carve through enemies like she was harvesting wheat. This was manageable. Practical. A kama. The handle stretched about eighteen inches, wrapped in some kind of dark leather that felt warm despite the ice-cold energy it channeled. The curved blade looked like someone had taken crystallized shadow and hammered it into an edge.

The metal—if it even was metal—didn’t reflect light. It absorbed it. Drank it down like a black hole given physical form. Looking directly at the blade created the visual impression of a tear in reality, a hole where something fundamental about the world just stopped working correctly.

The blade felt perfectly balanced in my grip. Light enough to wield with one hand, heavy enough to deliver meaningful impact. The edge looked sharp enough to cut through steel, though I suspected that was more supernatural property than physical metallurgy.

I approached the training dummy and tried a basic slash across its torso.

The kama cut through the reinforced material like it was tissue paper. The synthetic covering parted with a sound like tearing silk, exposing the foam padding underneath. Where the blade made contact, the material didn’t just split—it withered. The edges turned black and brittle, as though the weapon carried some kind of entropy effect that spread beyond the initial point of contact. The material looked diseased, corrupted by something fundamentally wrong.

The dummy’s impact sensors flashed red, then orange, then settled into a steady amber glow that indicated significant structural damage. A normal training weapon would have left a shallow mark, maybe triggered a single sensor to confirm contact. This had carved a trench three inches deep and left the surrounding material looking like it was rotting from the inside out.

"Holy shit."

I stepped back, studying the damage with a mixture of fascination and unease. Even at Copper rank, with my pathetic mana reserves and complete lack of training in scythe work, the weapon had performed like something genuinely dangerous. The death aspect wasn’t just aesthetic flourish designed to look intimidating. It actively degraded whatever the blade touched, turning a simple slash into something that would keep causing damage even after the initial cut. The wound continued to spread on its own, consuming healthy material in a slow cascade of decay.

I tried a thrust at the dummy’s center mass.

The blade punched through the reinforced covering and sank four inches into the foam core before I pulled it back. The entry wound immediately began spreading. Black tendrils of decay radiated outward from the puncture like infection taking root, consuming the synthetic material in expanding circles. Within seconds, an area the size of my fist had turned dark and brittle around the wound. The damage progressed independently of any additional action on my part, as though the weapon had planted seeds of destruction that would continue growing until they ran out of material to consume.

The Death Mark effect. Even at Copper rank, wounds inflicted by the weapon carried a debuff that prevented proper healing and continued causing damage over time. Against a training dummy, that meant progressive material degradation that would eventually compromise structural integrity across the entire torso section. Against a living target, it would mean bleeding that wouldn’t stop. Wounds that refused to close. Pain that intensified rather than fading as the body’s natural healing response fought against something fundamentally opposed to life itself.

I ran my thumb along the kama’s handle, studying the way the blade seemed to drink in the ambient light around it. This was a weapon designed for one purpose: killing things that were hard to kill. The death aspect didn’t just cause damage. It prevented recovery, weakened defenses, turned minor injuries into persistent problems that would compound over the course of a prolonged engagement.

I spent the next ten minutes working through basic attacks, trying to understand how the weapon moved and what it could accomplish. Slashes carved trenches. Thrusts created spreading wounds. The curved blade caught and redirected force in ways that felt almost intuitive, as though the weapon itself guided my movements toward more effective angles of attack.

But there was more to the ability than just weapon manifestation.

I stepped away from the increasingly damaged dummy and tried to access the secondary functions Addison had demonstrated during our encounter. Reaping Dash. The short-range teleportation that let her close distances and escape unfavorable positions.

The ability responded, but weakly. Where Addison’s version allowed fifteen-meter jumps through space itself, my Copper-rank interpretation managed maybe five meters and felt more like an enhanced leap than true teleportation. I appeared behind the dummy in a blur of motion that left afterimages, but the effort drained a significant portion of my remaining mana and left me slightly dizzy.

Better than nothing. Definitely useful for tactical positioning. But nowhere near the devastating mobility tool Addison wielded.