Travis recovered his composure before Erik reached him, and his hand swung up to intercept Erik’s arm, blade extended. He cut through Erik’s arm with ease, but it didn’t phase his brother in the slightest, his swing continuing on as if the arm was still there. And with a flash of cornflower yellow light, it was. The restored arm slammed into Travis’s helmet and rocked his head to the side.

It didn’t do any damage, not really. The punch had more force than a normal blow from an unshrouded, but it wasn’t the devastating impact that some shrouded could deliver. For a moment Travis wondered if Erik was messing with him, but he discarded that thought. Considering the transcendent level of healing his miraculously transformed shroud was capable of, it was more likely that it didn’t offer much in the way of offensive power.

With that in mind, he slammed an open palm into his older brother’s chest and blasted him with another wave of compressed force. This time, he didn’t pack it so tightly, so instead of blowing a hole in his body it shot Erik away from him at blistering speed.

“Ok, what the unshrouded hell am I supposed to do about this?” He muttered to himself.

{}

As his head exploded for the fourth or fifth time, Erik almost sighed. He was rapidly growing bored with this. He’d thought this new opponent would relieve his boredom, but the guy or gal in that armor had decided to go the most boring route possible.

They kept blowing up his head. Without it, Erik had to rely on his aura senses to know what was going on, and everything other than his defensive sense wasn’t very good. He wasn’t Caeden or Lily who could observe more detail through their investigative sense than a human eye could ever hope to see. All he got were some vague shapes and directions.

The only thing truly guiding him was the constant threat the armored revolutionary registered as in his defensive sense. But that didn’t give him any knowledge of the environment or any obstacles between them. Defensive sense wasn’t meant to be used to hunt out an opponent, it was a defensive sense. It only really worked when alerting him to incoming attacks, not a detailed positional information about the person throwing the attacks.

Erik was left mostly stumbling around as his head was repeatedly destroyed just as fast as he could regenerate it. He wasn’t doing a very good job at getting closer to his attacker, as they just backed up whenever he managed to stumble toward them.

So, he wasn't’ getting much of anything done. Then again, neither was his opponent. Erik hadn’t been lying when he’d said he was topped up on shroud. Plus, Healing was a tier 1 infusion type shroud. It wasn’t great at healing anything far away from him, and worked best on things he was touching. That also meant it was amazingly powerful and efficient when he used it on himself.

When you took into account how much his reserves had increased during his time in the Blade Forge, Erik was confident in keeping up this level of healing for hours. Maybe even days. He’d never stress tested how long he could maintain healing himself at this level. But the amount of drain he felt on his shroud at the moment was only slightly more than his regeneration rate, so it was hardly taking anything from him.

Still, Erik could admit that the revolutionary had managed to effectively stop him from attacking back. But he also wasn’t going to get anywhere just taking Erik’s head off. And Erik wasn’t as vulnerable as he’d made himself sound.

One thing that Caeden had helped him with in the Blade Forge was testing his Healing shroud for any weaknesses, of which they’d found several. Various types of energy and concepts could inhibit his regeneration rate, if not completely turn it off. In addition to that, if Erik’s entire body was continually destroyed for an extended period of time, he could die. But it required several minutes of soaking his location with enough energy to prevent even a scrap of his body from regenerating, something Erik didn’t think this revolutionary could do.

There was one weakness that Erik didn’t have to worry about in this fight. If his shroud was invaded and then occupied, the shrouded occupying him could block his ability to heal and kill him easily. But he wasn’t fighting a shrouded, so it wasn’t an issue at the moment.

A more pressing problem was his lack of damage. If he was being honest, Erik could put a lot more into dodging the hits being thrown his way and likely get his head back. But it wasn’t worth the extra shroud he’d expend infusing himself enough to pull it off. Because for as amazing as it was at healing him, his shroud couldn’t do shit to enhance his strength. What little physical enhancement it could do was far more costly than the healing he was currently doing.

Erik wasn’t a thinker, he wasn’t a strategist. That was Caeden and Lily’s job. He was a healer and a hitter. And right now he really needed some strategy. He would be able to do a lot more if he had Binding, but Laekna was still Incarnated and keeping the arena protected. If he dismissed her manifestation that would leave all those people exposed and vulnerable.

So, that was off the table for the moment. And that left him with Healing and, technically, Stitch. Now, Erik could do a lot with Stitch, but he couldn’t repair an exploded head. If he switched the domain he was using, he’d die unless he could get away from the constant head-exploding attacks.

When pushed into a corner, literal or metaphorical, Erik fell back on what he did best. Not die. And that meant relying on his defensive sense to get him out of trouble. And that’s exactly what it did. After another head splatter, Erik suddenly felt the sense of danger diminish to his left. Without hesitation, he dove in that direction.

He found himself smashing through a partially cracked window into a building that was miraculously still mostly standing. The unexpected move seemed to have caught the revolutionary off guard, because Erik head reformed in a scant few seconds without another splatter.

Of course, whatever luck Erik had, it wasn’t the good kind. Unbidden, the building chose that moment to start collapsing on him. But Erik had already switched his domain, and thousands of white strands filled the space, holding the entire structure up.

And that was when the armored head-exploder burst down through the ceiling, trying to get the drop on him. Maybe before he’d joined the Academy, the danger of the falling building would have hid the second source from his senses, but Erik had refined his defensive sense into something wholly different at this point. He knew the revolutionary was coming practically as soon as they did.

Freewalking overtook Erik’s body as strands pulled him aside and contorted his body to avoid blasts of force, bullets, and blade swipes while his opponent did everything he could to hit him. Still, Erik didn’t get a scratch. He might have picked up some fancier tricks, but dodging danger with Stitch was something he’d been doing since he was a child. He’d only gotten better at it over time.

The lack of damage seemed to frustrate his attacker, as they started throwing around more and more destructive attacks. But before they could get around to throwing out something that Erik truly couldn’t dodge, he stepped through the doorway of the building, letting it collapse around the revolutionary with a cheeky wave as he dismissed the Stitch threads holding it up.

Of course, Erik didn’t actually expect it to do any damage. It was a single story shop, not a large structure, which was probably why it was still standing before he crashed through its window. The lower profile let it avoid a direct hit from the explosive barrage. That also meant there wasn’t much weight to drop. And that armor seemed more than up to the task of protecting its wearer.

No, Erik just wanted to piss them off.

It worked perfectly, as an armored figure burst from the rubble, flying right at him. Erik smoothly sidestepped the clumsy blind charge. As they flew by, Erik slammed out with a fist propelled by far more Stitch than he ever would have dared use before his evolution.

BOOM-CRUNCH

The blow caught the armor in the chest. Not ideal, since that was where the plating was thickest. Still, it tossed the revolutionary across the rubble-covered ground and put a sizable dent shaped like Erik’s fist right where their heart would be. Erik was pretty sure he’d broken a few things in that suit too, if the sound was anything to go by.

Erik laughed while switching his domain to regrow the arm he’d just obliterated. That much Stitch under that much tension wasn’t something his body could handle. “Well, that worked even better than I thought it would. Man, I knew you were inexperienced in combat, but that was a super obvious bait my guy. Or gal, I guess. No idea who you are in there, but I do know you’re in there. You’re no Etherman, that’s for sure. None of them would have fallen for such a cheat shot.”

He shouted his words across the broken ground as the revolutionary levered themself up from where they’d landed. Erik wasn’t too surprised to watch the portion of armor he’d damaged glow and begin to repair itself. Armor that advanced had to have a repair function, otherwise, what was the point? If it was intended to fight shrouded, the maker had to know it was going to get busted up eventually.

“Well, come on over here and lets see if we can’t get a few more dents in that can you’re wearing. I haven’t peeled it off you yet after all!” Erik waved them over, arms wide.

{}

Travis shook himself, trying to take a deep breath and wincing. That blow had dented the 853 hard enough to bruise his chest before the auto-repair started. Normal breathing seemed fine, but anything heavier than that throbbed with every breath. Worse, the suit had no method of healing him, only itself. He was stuck dealing with the injury until he could end this fight.

And that was looking less and less certain as time went on.

He’d underestimated his brother, Travis was willing to admit that much. He’d expected him to be the same person he’d grown up with. That was naive and short-sighted, two things that seemed to be Travis’s anthem at this point. It should have been self-evident that Erik would become stronger. Travis himself had grown by leaps and bounds, why wouldn’t Erik change?

So, this wasn’t nearly as simple as he’d hoped or believed. But that didn’t make it unsalvageable. It was unfortunate that Erik both seemed to know of his inexperience somehow and had managed to capitalize on it. How he could know something like his combat experience level and not know it was Travis in the Model 853, he couldn’t even begin to guess. Some shrouded bullshit most likely.

Taking the blow he’d received as a lesson to be learned in self-control, Travis took a moment to slow down and get ahold of himself. He’d let Erik’s dodging get under his skin, and it’d cost him a dent in his armor and bruise on his chest. Considering the power behind that punch, Travis had gotten off lightly and he knew it. He was immeasurably lucky that it’d caught him on the thickest part of the 853’s armor.

Or more like Erik’s shit luck had worked in his favor.

In either case, Travis took a moment to acknowledge that he was in a bad situation, mainly revolving around Erik’s survivability. From what he could tell, based on Erik’s dive through that window and his delay in healing his destroyed arm, his brother couldn’t use Stitch and that yellow-green shroud at the same time. A splinter, then.

From what he understood, most shrouded Erik’s age couldn’t form splinters, but it wasn’t unheard of. Travis found it hard to believe that his brother would be one of those rare exceptions, but he wasn't about to question his own eyes.

That meant that Travis simply had to come up with a viable answer to Stitch and this other shroud. He needed to exploit the weaknesses of each, or place Erik in a situation where he couldn’t easily switch between the two, as there seemed to be a momentary delay when he was changing from one to the other.

That was easier said than done, but Travis had a few ideas. His original idea of continually destroying Erik’s head when he was using the yellow shroud seemed to work. That was why Erik had to dodge his attacks to transition. So that meant he just needed to come up with a way to deal with Stitch.

“Fine, if you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you!”

Travis’s eyes widened and he raised his arm while triggering his armor’s energy shield. Not a moment to soon, as Erik’s fist blasted into the invisible barrier an instant later with a meaty smack and the crunch of bone. When he was using Stitch, Erik’s mobility and attack power skyrocketed.

But his regeneration plummeted, Travis noted as he looked at the mangled mess of a fist his brother had left after that attack. Spotting an opening, he flung his other hand out, firing a force blast around the still raised energy shield. It was a universal barrier, so Travis’s attacks couldn’t pass through it, but his HUD let him see it while Erik couldn’t. Making the shield omnidirectional made it much stronger than the unidirectional bubbles the etherships used.

Travis grit his teeth as several white strands pulled his brother out of the way of his blast even as other strands swarmed his hand, pulling it back together. His healing might be lower, but that level of mobility made up for it. At least, it did against someone as unskilled as Travis. He was self-aware enough to acknowledge that he wasn’t using the Model 853 to its full potential. Or even use the weapons he’d wielded effectively.

But not every solution needed to be solved with force blasts and energy blades. Travis had stuck to them because they were the easiest weapons to use, not because he didn’t have other options. So, he rolled his wrist and deactivated the energy shield while aiming at Erik. A spray of purple goop splattered out in a massive cone, far faster than Erik could escape such a broad range.

“Eww, gross.” Erik spat and shook his limbs, trying to get the sticky mess off himself. “What the heck is this?”

Travis smirk as he snapped his fingers and the goop burst into flames.