The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 473: Fight against the nyphorite – 3

Strikes arrived from positions Yan hadn’t been in when the strikes began; the grey form’s positional precision created combat space that conventional spatial understanding struggled to map in real time.

Jolthar’s telekinesis worked constantly, not catching specific attacks but maintaining a dynamic field of force around him that degraded any strike’s delivered force regardless of angle, accepting that he couldn’t predict specific trajectories and compensating by making every trajectory cost more than it would against an undefended target.

He was taking hits. Not full ones – the telekinetic field and his own movement absorbed and deflected them – but partial impacts from Yan’s committed strikes accumulated in ways that full misses didn’t. His left side was complaining. His right shoulder had received something that would develop into significant bruising within the hour.

And Horgath was telling him that the chaobane disruption on Yan’s left side was reaching the fault lines.

It wasn’t there yet; soon it will be there. It’s a matter of time.

He needed one more clean contact on the same region; the chaobane threads were already pushed deep enough that another strike in that location would find the compromise in Yan’s layered energy structure and introduce the contradiction that made accumulated power work against its owner.

But Yan knew that too. He wasn’t ignorant of that fact.

The amber eyes tracked Horgath’s positioning with the specific attention of something that understood the threat wasn’t the physical blade but the blade’s ability to exploit the work already done.

Every defensive decision Yan made now prioritized protecting the compromised left side, accepting exposure elsewhere to keep that region away from Horgath’s reach.

They circled, each looking for what the other was preventing them from getting.

Jolthar felt the reserve expenditure.

The telekinetic maintenance was continuous drain. The chaobane channeling through Horgath required sustained output.

The two forms he’d used had pulled energy that his depleted system was providing from reserves that weren’t fully replenished. Not critical yet. Getting toward concerning.

He needed to finish this with the next significant technique rather than the one after it.

“Phantom Curve,” he said quietly, and moved in the opposite direction from where the name’s previous application had suggested the movement would go.

The third form’s defining characteristic was misdirection — not in the blade’s delivery but in the user’s positioning.

The technique began with a movement that committed fully to one angle, created the genuine preparatory energy signature of a strike arriving from that direction, and then used a specific redirection of chaobane energy through the body’s own circulation to deliver the actual strike from a different position entirely.

The chaobane energy moved through Jolthar rather than simply riding the blade, creating an internal circuit that allowed his physical position and the blade’s actual delivery angle to briefly contradict each other.

Yan read the committed movement and positioned to protect the left side from the angle the movement suggested.

The actual delivery arrived from twenty degrees further right than the preparatory signature had indicated, the chaobane circuit having redirected at the last available moment, and Horgath’s edge found Yan’s left side not from the expected direction but from the gap that protecting the expected direction had opened.

Contact. Full contact. The blade edge against the compromised region for the critical fraction of a second that the chaobane needed.

The disruption threads that had been working at Yan’s layered energy found the fault lines they’d been reaching for, and Horgath delivered the specific frequency into them with everything the accumulated contact depth had built toward. If it had been normal aura or magical attacks, the effect wouldn’t have been this heavy.

Yan made a sound.

Not pain — something adjacent to pain, the sound of a system encountering a contradiction it couldn’t immediately resolve, the layered energy structure at the left side beginning to work against itself as the chaobane turned its accumulated power into the source of its own disruption.

Yan’s left arm dropped.

Not injured in a conventional sense — the arm was intact, the grey skin unbroken — but the energy connections between the left side’s fault lines and the rest of the cultivated structure were actively contradicting each other, and movement that required those connections to be stable was currently unavailable.

Yan stepped back, and this retreat was larger than the previous one, more urgent, the amber eyes recalculating with genuine intensity for the first time since the engagement began.

“Chaos Resonance,” Jolthar said and didn’t give Yan time to prepare.

The fourth form wasn’t a single strike but a rapid sequence — seven movements delivered in approximately two seconds, each one short and targeted, each one building on the chaobane disruption the previous contact had deepened, the resonance aspect of the technique using the vibration frequency the fault lines were now broadcasting to find sympathetic frequencies in adjacent structural layers and introduce disruption there too.

The chaos in the technique’s name referred not to the chaos energy Jolthar used with Vorthak but to the cascading quality of the disruption — one fault line destabilized created the conditions for adjacent fault lines to destabilize, the resonance propagating through Yan’s layered energy structure faster than the layers could compensate.

Four of the seven strikes landed cleanly on the compromised region.

The other three Yan managed to intercept with its still-functional right arm, accepting the chaobane contact on the blocking limb as preferable to letting all seven reach the cascading fault lines on the left.

It was the right decision in the moment and the wrong decision in the aggregate — the right arm was now beginning to accumulate chaobane disruption of its own, not as deep as the left side’s damage but present, the threads finding purchase in the energy structure and beginning their patient work.

Yan’s movement quality had changed.

Still formidable, still faster than anything else Jolthar had fought today, but carrying the slight compensation patterns of something working around regions it could no longer rely on completely. The precision was slightly reduced, the positional decisiveness slightly less absolute.

They were both running on depletion now.

Jolthar could feel the chaobane techniques pulling from reserves that were answering with the sluggishness of a system being asked for more than comfortable delivery allowed.