Gunmage-Chapter 25: The Knight and its Shadow

When the sword pierced through Ozan's chest, Lugh felt his heart stop. It wasn't just Lugh, the entire group stood frozen, lungs tight, hearts hammering against ribs.

The brutal intrusion of the sword left behind a chilling vacuum, a sense of finality.

Their strongest, their anchor, had been felled in a single strike. It was a grim testament to their utter helplessness. The equivalent of stamping a death seal on all of them.

"I don't want to die... I don't want to die..."

Emil's voice, a broken, repetitive plea, cut through the silence. The boy's body was trembling, tears streaming down his face as he muttered hysterically.

Dain stood like a statue, his gaze fixed on the fallen Ozan, while Lyra... Lyra was a whirlwind of terrifying purpose.

"What in the abyss is she doing?"

Lugh hissed, his voice filled with disbelief.

Lyra's dagger, once a tool of defense, now became an instrument of self-inflicted torment. With a sickening, wet squelch, she dragged the blade across her tattooed arm, inflicting it with wounds that ran in strange patterns.

Blood flowed down her fair skin and the runes carved on her own flesh began to glow with an eerie, internal light.

Her eyes, usually warm and gentle, now burned with something feral, something primal. She let out a scream. Lugh thought it was a scream from the motions of her neck and mouth, but no sounds managed to escape.

Then, a wave of unseen force, a shockwave that rattled their very minds, crashed against the knight who remained still and unmoving. Like the rocky shores resisting the raging sea, the knight stood solid, unaffected.

As for the others—

Lugh fell to the ground, a painful cry escaping his lips as his head throbbed with excruciating pain. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Aldric and Dain fared no better, their bodies convulsing violently, while Emil's sanity teetered on the edge.

"What... what was that?"

The shared question echoed in their minds, a desperate plea for understanding. But they were given no answers.

The messily carved runes on Lyra's mutilated arms glowed brilliantly and her hair, a cascade of auburn, began to twist and slither, expanding in length and size, becoming a living, predatory thing.

It surged, a tidal wave of hair, lashing out at the knight with the force of a thousand whips. The air crackled with the sound, a deafening echo in the oppressive silence.

The knight, unmoved by the initial blast, now turned its full attention to Lyra, it moved, and its body became a blur of deadly precision.

Lyra quickly responded, he hair increased in volume, like waves of the ocean, they covered every inch in front of her, surging towards the knight. And everything around it

"Is she still a human?!"

With a voice laced with terror, lieutenant Dain ran for his life. Knowing he wouldn't be fast enough, he scrambled towards Ozan's lifeless form, snatching the enchanted dagger from his limp hand.

"Sorry, buddy, but I'll have to take this back."

The mass of hair was upon him, a living storm of auburn. He parried and slashed, his movements frantic, his breath ragged.

"Sergeant, stop! You'll kill us all—"

His sentence was cut short when some strands of hair coiled around his leg. It yanked him into the air and slammed him on the ground, hard.

Lyra was already lost, consumed by the alien magic surging through her veins.

Lugh and Aldric scrambled to avoid the deadly tendrils, their hearts pounding in their ears.

The knight, however, moved with an unnerving calm. Some strands of hair, thick as a man's arm, whipped towards it, the air whistling with its passage.

The knight raised its gauntlet, and the hair struck with a deafening bang, creating a shockwave that sent tremors through the ground.

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The hair coiled around the knight's arm and legs, attempting to bind it, but with a flash of purple light, the enchanted sword cleaved everything away. Clearing a five-meter radius.

The knight advanced, a relentless force of death, moving through the dense forest of reddish brown with terrifying ease.

The hair struck from everywhere at once, occasionally hitting hard like whips, sometimes solidifying and stabbing forth like lances. Other times, they lost their density and floated around, aiming to snag and entrap their targets. The attacks were angled, varied, and relentless.

However, despite their speed and ferocity, the knight remained completely unscathed as it moved forward in steady steps, indifferent to whatever was thrown at it.

If this continued, then in a few short moments, Sergeant Lyra would end up no different from Ozan.

"I can't let that happen"

Lugh thought, the words—

"Strength is insufficient to seize victory"

—still hammering away in his mind. But what could he do?

"Lyra... she doesn't have a shadow"

Aldric whispered, his voice barely audible.

Lugh's gaze snapped to the floor. The hair, a writhing sea of auburn, cast no shadows. He also didn't have a shadow, same was the case for every single one of them.

But the knight... its shadow was abnormally large, towering, and overbearing. An unnatural darkness that stretched behind it like a cape.

Lugh gritted his teeth, his hand trembling as he tore away the cloth covering his right eye.

A searing pain ripped through his skull, a white-hot agony that threatened to shatter his mind. His vision fractured, flickering between two realities.

One was the world he knew, the world of light and shadow. The other was pitch black, yet crystal clear. Like a mirror of the real, yet utterly distinct.

The shapes were the same, the environment was the same, the people were the same, and yet the two images did not overlap. He was looking at two separate worlds at the same time.

His mind reeled, his senses overloaded. Lugh was paralyzed, momentarily unable to comprehend what he was seeing. He gritted his teeth but the pain was unbearable, a crushing weight that threatened to drown him.

And then, he saw it.

The knight's shadow in the real world was black, a void. But in the shadow world, it was white, a glaring, unnatural anomaly.

He watched the knight swing its sword multiple times before it happened in reality. Projections of everyone's movements appeared before it even occurred in the real world.

Lugh felt like his brain was lagging. He was seeing the future, a fractured, agonizing glimpse of what was to come.

The pain was a fire in his skull, but Lugh forced himself to move, to act. He broke into an unsteady run, his eyes firmly fixed on the knight—

—and its shadow