Chapter 20: Chapter 20: [Perfect Copy] — Assassin

The Assassin went very still.

It was the particular stillness of a person looking at something that shouldn’t exist. His eyes moved across my stance — the weight distribution, the grip, the angle of my shoulders, the way I held the broken blade pieces like they were daggers rather than a ruined sword — and I watched him process what he was seeing.

His own form. His own posture. Reflected back at him without flaw.

"What," he said. Just that. Not a question so much as a sound that had escaped before he could stop it.

I didn’t answer. I let [Perfect Copy] finish its work.

The skill was something I’d chosen because I understood what it was — a passive that was chosen alongside [Infinite Adaptation]. Where [Infinite Adaptation] adjusted and healed, [Perfect Copy] went further. It didn’t just incorporate technique. It replicated the entire physical architecture of a fighting style — the muscle engagement, the mana flow pattern, the instinctive micro-corrections that experienced fighters made without conscious thought.

I had used it partially on Zion during the academy assessment. Only partially — because Zion was faster than my body could safely handle at the time. Trying to fully replicate his speed would have destroyed my legs before I finished the first exchange. So I had taken the form and left the force, which gave me something useful but incomplete.

This Assassin was D-rank. Strong for D-rank, clearly experienced, with a developed style that had genuine depth to it. But D-rank was D-rank. My body could handle what his body could do.

Which meant, for the first time, I could use Perfect Copy the way it was actually meant to be used.

I moved.

The Assassin moved to meet me — reflex, training, the automatic response of someone whose body knew how to fight even when their mind was still catching up. His daggers came up. Mine — the broken pieces of my blade , held reverse-grip to compensate for their length — met them.

Strike for strike.

Not similar. Not close. Identical in force, in angle, in the distribution of mana through the point of impact. I matched him the way a mirror matches, without lag, without interpretation, with the exact quality that I had observed across every exchange since the fight began.

I had been copying him the entire time. Every counter had been data collection. Every moment I let him think he was winning had been the [Perfect Copy] skill running its process, and now the process was complete, and the person standing across from the Assassin was, to every sense he had developed across however many years of training, himself.

I watched the shift happen in him. The way the confidence that had been steady throughout the fight began to develop cracks — not from fear, not exactly, but from the specific disorientation of a fighter whose instincts, which had never failed him before, had stopped giving useful information. Every time he tried to predict my next movement, he got himself. Every anticipation he’d built on his own pattern was being used against him precisely because it was his pattern.

He stepped back.

One step. Involuntary. His breathing had changed.

I pressed forward at the same pace he retreated, maintaining the exact distance, matching the exact rhythm. The aura he had worn at the start of the fight — that professional calm, that implicit certainty — I wore it back at him.

How is this possible? I could see the thought working through him. How can someone copy someone so perfectly?

I gave him his answer in the language he understood.

I flash stepped — except it wasn’t flash step.

I was gone from in front of him, and the Assassin’s eyes moved immediately to track where flash step would take me, because he knew flash step, had seen me use it, had calibrated his responses to it. His head turned left. His weight shifted to respond.

I came from below.

The broken blade — the smaller piece, short enough to move like a proper dagger in my grip — passed through the gap his own footwork created, the gap that I knew was there because I had just been standing in his body and felt where it was open.

I was at his shoulder. Close. The kind of close that meant the fight was already finished.

"Wrong," I said quietly, close enough that only he could hear it. "It was shadow step."

He didn’t fall immediately. His body took a moment to agree with what had happened, the way bodies sometimes do when something final occurs. He turned his head slightly toward me.

"You can even copy skills," he said. There was no accusation in it. Just the flat, almost wondering acknowledgment of someone who had spent their whole fighting life assuming certain things were impossible, and had just discovered one of them wasn’t.

He went down.

I straightened and turned to face the arena.

It was not a clean scene. The first round had done what first rounds in places like this always did — it had been brutal and indiscriminate and had left the floor looking like something that would take a significant amount of effort to clean. Of the nearly two hundred fighters who had started, the surviving ten were finding each other by the simple process of being the ones still standing.

I was one of them.

I looked at the Assassin’s face for a moment before moving away. He had been good. Genuinely good, with a developed style and real intelligence as a fighter. In any normal context he would have been a difficult opponent. That wasn’t nothing.

I filed away everything I had taken from the exchange — the vanishing step mechanics, the mana concentration technique, the full combat architecture of his style — and let it settle into the deeper layer of my skill where copied things lived until I needed them.

My mind moved to the mechanics I’d just used. Flash step and shadow step are related but distinct, I thought, moving through the arena toward a clear space. Flash step runs mana through the feet, syncs with the ground itself, shortens distance by compressing the space of a single step. That’s why it demands precise control — the synchronization has to be exact or the movement breaks. Shadow

step uses a similar core principle but removes the physical step entirely. The user merges partially with their own shadow, then flicks outward toward the target’s shadow. No step, no ground contact, no displacement of air. That’s why it’s quieter. That’s also why it needs darkness affinity and significant training time — the shadow merger has to be stable or the technique collapses mid-execution.

I understood both now. Carried both.

Young warrior, said a voice. Do you care for a spar?

I turned slowly toward the sound.

The voice was calm. Unhurried. Not the voice of a fighter or an official — something older than either. Distinctly, unmistakably, coming from a direction where there should not have been anyone standing.

I kept my expression neutral and looked toward it.

Here we go, I thought. This is where the night gets complicated.

(Sorry for the vanishing step and Shadow step mistakes if there are anymore errors you could Inform me anytime)