I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1216: Yesterday’s Paragon

The Patriarch’s response was a shriek of pure rage.

His form dissolved into a murder of crows—hundreds of them, each one a fragment of his essence. They swarmed Northern from every direction, a black cloud of talons and beaks and death energy.

Each crow could attack independently. Each one shared the collective’s awareness. Destroy one, and the others continue. Destroy a hundred, and he’d reform from the survivors.

’Distributed consciousness,’ Northern thought, watching the black wave descend. ’Like a hive mind, but more elegant.’

”That’s actually clever,” he admitted aloud. ”Distributed consciousness. No single point of failure.”

The murder descended, blotting out what little light remained in the Dark Depths.

Northern raised both hands.

[You’re using Sun’s Legacy - Sola Nova]

A supernova-level detonation of pure solar fury erupted from Northern’s body—a perfect sphere of annihilation expanding outward at impossible speed. The light was blinding. The heat was absolute.

The murder of crows hit the expanding wall of light and burned.

They evaporated. Shadow made flesh met heat that existed to erase shadow from reality itself. The result was instantaneous and complete—each crow burning away in a flash of solar fury, leaving nothing behind. Not even ash.

Ninety percent of the crows ceased to exist in the first second.

The remaining ten percent scattered desperately, reforming into the Obsidian Crow fifty feet away. The Patriarch’s form was smaller now—diminished, weakened. Patches of his body were translucent, barely holding shape. Like a sketch someone had started erasing.

He was panting. If a crow could pant.

Northern lowered his hands. The light faded, leaving afterimages dancing in the darkness. He looked completely unbothered—not a single burn mark, not even warmed by the detonation he’d been at the center of.

’Temperature manipulation is useful like that.’

”You’re running out of essence,” Northern observed clinically, his voice carrying across the distance with perfect clarity.

”That last technique cost you, what, thirty percent? And the reformation probably took another twenty. You’re operating at half capacity now.”

He started walking. Still on air. Each step perfectly level, as if climbing invisible stairs toward his prey.

”And we both know you can’t regenerate properly in your own domain because you’re using too much essence to maintain the domain while fighting.”

Northern’s smile grew sharper.

”You’ve trapped yourself.”

The truth of it was almost amusing. The Patriarch had built this perfect hunting ground, this accumulated darkness of forty-nine generations. And now it was a cage he couldn’t escape without abandoning everything.

The Patriarch tried to flee.

His wings beat frantically, carrying him upward toward the chamber’s ceiling. If he could break through, reach open sky, gain space to recover—

Northern appeared in front of him.

Just... appeared. One moment he was below, the next he was blocking the Patriarch’s escape route with his arms crossed.

[You’re using Eclipsing Dread - Eclipse Step]

”Going somewhere?”

Northern’s hand shot forward.

He grabbed the Patriarch’s beak, fingers wrapping around it like steel vises. The Obsidian Crow thrashed immediately, wings beating with desperate fury. His talons raked at Northern’s arm, tearing through clothing, scraping against skin with the force of masterwork blades.

They left scratches.

Just scratches.

Northern looked at the shallow marks on his forearm with mild interest.

’Huh. He actually broke through the reinforcement. That’s... new.’

”Huh. You actually managed to break skin. Good for you.”

[You’re using Infinite Iteration]

The scratches closed. Cells iterated back to their undamaged state, time rewinding in miniature across his arm. In two seconds, his arm was pristine again—like the wounds had never existed.

The Patriarch’s eyes reflected pure terror now.

Northern’s grip tightened. The beak—made of materialized essence and death energy—began to crack under the pressure. Hairline fractures spread across its surface.

”Let me explain something to you,” Northern said.

His voice was calm. Educational, even.

Which somehow made it worse.

”You and I are both Paragons. Same rank. Similar soul core development. In theory, we should be relatively equal in a fight.”

He paused, considering.

”Or actually, you should be stronger, since you’ve been a Paragon for quite a while and I just became one... what, yesterday?”

He twisted. The beak cracked further, the sound like breaking stone. The Patriarch’s shriek was muffled by Northern’s grip, but the pain in it was unmistakable.

”But theory and reality are very different things.”

Northern swung.

He used the Patriarch’s own body as a weapon, slamming the massive crow into the ground with enough force to create a crater. Stone shattered beneath them. The impact echoed like thunder through the Dark Depths, and the entire domain shuddered from the violence of it.

The Patriarch tried to dissolve into shadows again, tried to slip away into his element...

Northern’s other hand pressed against the crow’s chest.

[You’re using Oblivion’s Mark - Absolute Lock]

The Patriarch’s talent stopped.

Just... stopped working. The ability to transform, to split, to manipulate shadows—all of it seized up like a frozen machine. Like someone had simply switched off his power at its source.

The crow’s eyes went wide with panic.

’There we go.’

Northern leaned closer.

”From here on out, it’s going to be pure despair for you.”

His voice was still calm. Matter-of-fact, even.

”I will make you regret laying a hand on my father. Your supposed greatness? I will reduce it to nothing. I will bring you down to the status of a miner, breaking red rocks in the dark.”

But his eyes burned with cold fire.

”Pray I find my mother alive and well. Because if I don’t...” Northern’s voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. ”Then you will wish I had just killed you here.”

He lifted the Patriarch by the beak again, held him suspended in the air like a caught fish. The massive crow thrashed weakly.

And then Northern threw him without any regard for his wellbeing.

The Obsidian Crow flew like a javelin across the domain. He crashed through several of the wavy stone terrains, each impact sending out shockwaves. Stone exploded outward. He kept going... rolling across the ground at terrible speed, tumbling end over end until he finally crashed into the black plains of the domain with enough force to leave a trench.

The domain shuddered. Its carefully cultivated structure began to crack at the seams.

Northern walked after him. Casual. Unhurried.

The Patriarch stumbled to his feet in what looked like a massive underground cavern. His crow form was flickering now—shifting between bird and human, unable to maintain stability. Like a dying light bulb.

He tried to summon the domain’s power again, drawing on the accumulated darkness of generations. Shadows reached for Northern like grasping hands. Death energy coalesced into spears, each one sharp enough to pierce steel.

[You’re using Full Impact - Reversal]

Every attack reversed mid-flight. The shadows turned on the Patriarch instead, binding his own wings tight against his body. The death energy spears struck him, piercing through feathers and flesh.

He screamed.

Northern kept walking, his footsteps echoing in the crumbling space.

”The funny thing about domains,” he said, as if teaching a lesson to a particularly slow student, ”is that they’re extensions of the owner’s will. When the owner’s will breaks...”

He gestured around them.

The Dark Depths was crumbling. Cracks spread across the ceiling like spiderwebs, racing outward from some central point of failure. The accumulated darkness—forty-nine generations worth of carefully cultivated death energy—was dissipating like morning fog under sunlight.

”...the domain breaks with it.”

The Patriarch collapsed to his knees. His form shifted fully back to human now—naked, bleeding, covered in burns and cuts. His hands were still useless from Northern’s earlier strikes, hanging at odd angles.

He looked up at Northern with eyes that held no fight left.

Only fear.

Northern stopped in front of him. Looked down at this broken thing that had once been the pride of an ancient assassin clan.

’Forty-nine generations of accumulated power. And it ends like this.’

He took him by the hair and slapped his face with enough force to send him tumbling. The Patriarch rolled across the crumbling plains like a discarded toy, unable to stop himself. By the time he crashed into a stone formation, the domain was already fracturing beyond repair.

The entire space shattered like glass.

Reality reasserted itself violently. The Patriarch’s body crashed onto a pillar in the real world, destroying it completely. Stone rained down around them.

They were back in the cavern underground beneath the clan’s grand palace.

The Dark Depths—forty-nine generations of work—was gone.