Chapter 23 - A Gifted's True Form

A Gifted's True Form

    We had gone over many times on how to kill Heaven’s Wrath without anyone dying, and with only one Gifted.

    We did NOT factor a Legendary True Gifted into that equation.

    Heaven’s Wrath weakness was actually his own attack. When reflected, he became slightly weaker, and could be stunned and therefore, attacked. This happened on occasion periodically too. He lost his sun-like shield quickly too, not quite frail but not overwhelmingly defensive. The only reason he was a Legendary True Gifted was his ability to teleport, which was extremely annoying.

    Drako had some advantages. His shield was always active, so it was actively reflecting. It was also always ‘attacking’, so he could easily overpower him. He was also more powerful, and also had much more experience.

    Paradox, however, was smiling, and I saw that she wasn’t going to let Drako win easily. Drako turned in the opposite direction of where Heaven’s Wrath stood, and shot a beam of water towards the sky, hitting nothing. At first, I was confused. There was little to no way he was actually confused on where he stood, was there?

    Heavens Wrath used his shield to split open Drako’s shield, and put the two balls of light on his back, and he then teleported away, smirking. They then proceeded to explode. Drako cursed, returning his shield to its former power. What was going on?

    Then it clicked. Paradox was just playing around with him. She was probably using an illusion and changing what he saw into whatever she felt like. There was probably an illusion of Heaven’s Wrath somewhere, flying about and taunting him. Drako knew she could create illusions, and that uncertainty would crush him. He didn’t know that the attacks were real, if what he felt what real, he couldn’t trust what he saw at all. His senses lied to him so long as Paradox was here.

    I had to step in, quickly. There was no way he would survive against two Gifted, especially not one Legendary True Gifted and one Unique Gifted. Either Paradox wanted him dead, or wanted to force him into a corner, making sure he had to use his full power to corrupt him. If she could defeat him, nothing would stand in her way of global domination and destruction. Drako seemed to be the last obstacle in his path, as Eliza was AWOL for the moment, so Drako and I would have to kill them on our own.

    I thought quickly. I had to create a distraction, a diversion. SImply speaking, I had to stand up to the strongest Gifted alive. Even more simply speaking, I had to commit suicide.

    This was plain stupid. It was also going to be *amazing*. I’d always wanted to die in a valiant, heroic way, so why not start now, by saving Drako?

    Marie looked at me from under the rubble as I began to get up, and she didn’t have to call me an idiot; her eyes said it all. Well, I might die, but at least maybe I could look super cool as I got obliterated. I summoned a bunch of shields into the ground, and I thought about how to go about what I envisioned.

    I let my mind take over what happened next. I put one of my arms up, and let the shields rotate around me, creating a terrifying view of flaming rocks turning around me, like some kind of God. Allowing myself one quick glance back, Marie was pointing one hand towards me, and a green and blue mist surrounded me, faint but recognizable if looked at it carefully. Must be some semblance of her healing powers she was gifting me, allowing me to have a secondary power to land on, incase my shield failed.

    I looked forward again, focusing on Paradox. The air around her warped, and I imagined that she was keeping her power as contained as possible, allowing as little as possible escape her grasp. She wasn't doing a great job, her power seeping away and creating a powerful aura around her. She was just so *powerful.* How would I go about doing this?

    I orbited the shields around me, making them go faster and faster. Then, once they could barely be seen from how quickly I was rotating them, I sent them all smashing towards Paradox.

    'Smashing' was generous. More like, vaporized against her. She didn't even flinch. She just turned towards me.

    "Hello, Tan."

     I stopped dead in my tracks.

    "... Wha… what did you just call me?"

    "It's what your girlfriend called you. It caught on during your highschool years. You were pretty popular, and the name was known throughout the school. Well, till it was inevitably blown up. You were coming out of class, and suddenly, *everything changed.* Isn't that right, Stanley?"

    *Stanley.*

    She knew me. She knew my name.

    "How!? How could you possibly know?! How *do* you know?"

    I summoned a shield, which fizzled with some unknown power. Paradox gasped, but in that moment I was too upset to pay attention. I smashed it towards Paradox. Forget her powerful aura and abilities that should've deflected it, my shield made contact with her. She yelped, a sound full of surprise and pain.

    She lifted an arm and summoned a vortex of energy. I wondered whose attack it was. Well, only for a while. My shield was dismissed, and I wondered why, because I had not done it. I didn't have much time to wonder, as the attack smashed into me with full force.

    This was going to get brutal.

    She summoned another vortex of power, and the shield that I had placed again, just simply *left*.

    What the hell was going on?

    "Like Damien, you truly underestimate me, Gifted. I can mimic powers completely, the energy that hits you is undeniable. There is no illusion in the powers that hurt and injure you. I am a supreme being that you simply cannot understand. But you can understand what I am about to tell you; You are not leaving this battlefield alive."

    This wasn't entirely untrue. But I wasn't going down without a fight. I had barely felt both attacks, so Marie's healing must be doing some good work. I didn't know how long the healing would last, or how much abuse it could take before it was unable to sustain me. But I decided not to push my luck, and began thinking about how to overwhelm her.

    Surprise was out, she could basically read my mind. Or at least had some precognitive ability. She also could dissolve my shield, but didn't have any of her own attacks. She was a defense oriented Gifted, very much unlike every other Gifted I had met. I could try using my shields in ways I had never tried.

    I *was* an idiot. I was going to use my powers in ways I didn't even know they could work, not even knowing how they worked in their most basic sense, and expected my powers to work exactly as I wanted them to.

    I was *so* dead.

    Summoning three shields, I formed them into long poles, and sent them smashing against Paradox. Again, she evaporated them. She rammed her elbow into my face this time, then hit me with a double handed hit. I crashed into the ground below, but I had intended for this to happen.

    I had allowed myself to be vulnerable and leaned on the fact that Paradox seemed to love seeing her victims suffer, while also being methodical with her killing. I watched intently as my attack neared her, paying strict attention to how my shield reacted to whatever she was using against it, trying to find a way to cancel her cancelling of my attacks.

    My shield reacted oddly to the attack. My shields seemed to shrink back onto themselves. It fizzed, faded, then proceeded to collapse into itself, sending a small amount of energy in all directions.

    She was disguising her attacks, trying to fool my shield and myself on what exactly we were dealing with. It was just a glorified light attack, the one thing my shield could not withstand.

    Light attacks are not to be confused with sunlight, or normal visible light either. Herrera had described this in detail as well.

    *Light attacks aren't just 'light' or 'sunlight' or even the ability to control either. It's a little more complicated than this. Light attacks will generally gather photons from the area around the CEC [known as the Center of Energy Concentration.] Classified as such, light attacks are strongly strengthened from sunlight, yes, due to the greater amount of excited photons directly hitting the surface. It's not entirely dependant on the sun though, so it's not a Conditional attack [an attack that required a certain situation or time to manifest and occur].*

*Light attacks are set under a Low Attack categorization [Little to no usability in battle]. They have low impact rate, limited TAR [True Attack Range, a set of calculations and measurements which dictate how long and over what distance an attack is able to be controlled by the user], and a low usability rate in most fights. It's easy to accumulate a powerful attack, but again, it isn't very useful.*

*That is, until it comes to the Voltaic Shielding.*

*Voltaic shielding reacts strangely to light attacks. It doesn't reflect the attack, and instead absorbs it. Once the attack it absorbed, the shield cannot expel or destroy the energy, despite its matter disintegration abilities. The shielding begins to overload itself, before the shield is inevitably self destroyed. Light attacks can be extremely useful in fighting shielding enemies.*

*This doesn't mean you should get cocky though. A shielder killed a light Gifted once, but never told anyone how it was done. It's very much possible to kill light enemies as a Shielding Gifted apparently. I wouldn't try it myself though.*

    The fight became a dance. Paradox shifted and wove her attacks into double helix shaped attacks, which smashed into my shielding and nearly evaporated it. One of the attacks got through and burst into my kneecap. I bit down on my lip hard, fighting the urge to groan. A small groan did escape my mouth as I prepared an attack of my own.

     My shielding did not give me much of a selection to choose from. My attacks were limited to what they could contain and control within them. And light attacks wasn’t one of the things my shield could control.

    However, I realized that slowly, I began to get tired, and everything began to get blurry.

    My shield flickered once, and her knee flew straight into my face, making my sight explode with colors and nearly knocking me out from the pain. I couldn’t focus on my shield, and as such, she was able to punch me in the stomach, then fly behind me and drive an elbow into my back. She smirked, and then summoned a fiery ball, most likely hoping to incinerate me.

     *Now*

     I summoned a shield on the energy, and then constrained the shield into a smaller shape. The rapid change in space caused the energy to acutely increase in power, and since she was still powering up, the ball was concentrating more and more energy.. Then, I mentally *flipped* the shield inward, causing the energy to be pushed and pushed into a smaller and smaller space. It went bright red, and then white. All this happened in about a second.

     I removed the shield, and the power immediately expanded, the energy exploding outwards right into Paradox’s face.

     I was shocked.

     Paradox lost it for a second, unable to control the energy. She stared at me, shocked and temporarily stunned from the concussive force of the explosion. I had been spared, my shield had gone up just in time.

     But she had suffered no damage.

     Her body was pristine, there was no sign of the explosion that had occurred not 2 feet away from her. However, her figure shifted, like a glitch effect. What had she done?

     I didn’t really have time to think, as in the next moment, she had shaken off the attack.

     "*Sit. Down. Child.*"

    She dissolved my shield in a moment. She went right up in my face, and her eyes blazed with absolute rage. She raised her hand, and slapped me so hard, I smashed into the ground below. I bounced up a little, and she rammed her knee into my stomach, pinning me to the ground.

A wheezing gasp escaped me. She raised her leg again, and I dodged neatly out of the way. I leaped away, trying to gain some distance and think of a plan. She followed me closely, surrounding her hands with light energy, so my shielding would be useless. I would have to fight back.

I started punching back, following her attacks closely and blocking her incoming hits. She was obviously stronger, her punches stinging me on my arms and hands. I pushed her back for a second, and I tried for a swing. She dodged easily, and went back on the offensive. She would wear me down and then wipe the floor with me, I was sure. My useless shielding would do nothing to help me now.

I grit my teeth, hoping, however futilely, that I could somehow beat her. She caught my side unguarded, kicking me hard. I reached towards where she'd hit me unconsciously, and she drove a fist into my face. She stepped on my foot, pinning me in place as I slouched forward, exhausted and hurting. Then a spiraling, whirling ball of energy was forced into my face. Before I could even react, the ball exploded, and I screamed, nearly blacking out from the pain.

I landed a few feet away, my back crashing on the hard, crumbled floor. I was surprised I was alive, much less conscious. I heaved myself forward, falling onto my hands and knees, gasping loudly, blood dripping down from my face and onto the floor. I couldn't breath, so I pinched my nose and watched as blood poured out as well. My eyes were a fiery haze, as I finally looked up to see Paradox walking towards me.

There was no rush to her gait, this immortal being that approached me. It was the walk of the invincible, the pace of her who could not be defeated.

She stopped in front of me, towering above and looking down at me, at the entire world. My breathing slowed, my heartbeats calmed. I stood slowly with great effort, my crumpled, broken figure at contrast with her divine complexion.

She looked into my eyes, and I stared into her deep, mesmerizing gaze. Like a mice before a cobra, her violet, beautiful eyes entranced me. There was no remorse, no waver in her resolve. Only a cold, calculating gaze met my tired, exhausted look.

She reached her arm to the side, a large, feline paw with claws that gleamed menacingly having materialized. The claws swirled with green, white energy that I understood was nature and light energy, encompassing them.

There was no use to blocking. It was done. It was over. I had lost.

She lashed at my chest, and my life flashed before me. The wound tore open, and I somehow held in a scream.

I fell to my knees in front of her, grasping at the gaping wound. Paradox called off the weapon, and called forth another weapon, a near invisible blade. I understood immediately why the energy felt familiar. Fitted from my own shield. How ironic.

I had heard the stories. Paradox could fight on an even ground with anyone, learning more the longer she fought. When the fool who dared oppose Paradox finally succumbed, Paradox would use their own weapon to kill them. It could be looked upon as a great honor, or a mocking of the defeated fighter. She would keep the power to herself, to use in any future fights.

This would be no different, I realized, as she stabbed through my torso.

    I screamed in anguish. She pushed harder, and tears began seeping from my eyes as I cried harder. She didn't stop, didn't stop pushing, until I pulled away from the blade, slouched to the side, and finally fell to the floor, bloody and broken

I had lost. I was going to die. I had failed Eliza. Drako. I wasn't our last hope, but I couldn't see anyone beat her if I had lost so easily.

Then something clicked in me. Something dark and powerful encroached inside me.

    *Take this power.*

    In that moment, I obliged. There was nothing to lose, after all.

    The dark energy began escaping the carefully placed mental barriers I had established from the start. The energy invaded my rationale, my thoughts and emotions. I could feel it traverse my body as it gained control of the entirety of my system. This wasn't what I had in mind.

    *No. Please no.*

    I begged mentally as I realized what I had done. I had given an evil force in me full rein of my system. I had allowed it to tap into my inner strength, but at the cost of the control my very being.

    With the amount of evil that dissipated into me, my power grew exponentially. I felt powerful like never before. There was nothing that I couldn't do.

    Sadly, I wouldn't be able to control what I wanted done.

    This was the last coherent thought I had, before it completely took hold of me.

**Next - Chapter 24**

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