He opened his eyes.
With a grunt of effort, Bradley lifted his Katana high. Dark spirit energy, thick as tar, coiled around the blade, compressing into a visible shell of power. He brought it down in a devastating vertical slash.
The air itself seemed to tear. A massive wave of pure black energy, taller than the corridor and wide enough to fill it, erupted from the blade. It didn't so much cut through the ceiling and floor as it erased them, a calamitous force of annihilation that moved toward the spears. It didn't clash; it devoured. The raging black energy consumed the hundreds of blood spears, vanquished without a trace.
The wave continued its relentless path, aimed directly at the Nurse. It moved with such impossible speed that she only registered the attack after it had already passed clean through the space she occupied.
BOOM!
The entire wing of the school shuddered.
The Nurse looked down, her mind struggling to comprehend. She touched her right side. Her fingers met nothing but empty space and the warm, slick flow of blood. From her right shoulder down to her hip, a massive portion of her torso was simply gone. Her organs, glistening and pulsing, spilled out from the cavernous wound onto the floor.
"Keuk!" She choked, a fountain of blood erupting from her mouth. Her hands scrambled, trying futilely to shove her intestines back into the hollow cavity. The pain was astronomical, a fire that burned through her spiritual core.
This was wrong. A wound like this should have begun sealing instantly. But it wasn't. Her regeneration was sluggish, agonizingly slow. "Huh? Why? Why can't I heal?!" she screamed, her voice cracking with panic and pain.
Bradley began walking toward her, his steps slow, deliberate, and radiating an aura of absolute, unshakable control. He stopped a few meters away, looking down at her struggling form.
"You see," he began, his distorted voice almost conversational, "there's something uniquely nasty about my spirit energy." A faint, cold smile touched his lips. "It's parasitic. If you're wounded by it, it gradually inhibits a spirit's natural healing. You've been so greedily absorbing my attacks, closing your wounds without ever purging my energy. So, as you healed, you were unknowingly letting my energy seep deeper into your system, corrupting your regenerative abilities from the inside out."
Her eyes widened in dawning horror, the pieces clicking into place. "So... all those hits you took... the beating... it was all part of this?!" she stammered, disbelief warring with fury.
"Of course," Bradley said simply. "I'm not arrogant enough to face a centuries-old monster without a plan. The beating was genuine—your skill is immense. It just took a long, long time for the poison to take hold in a system as robust as yours." He let out a low, twisted laugh that echoed unnaturally in the shattered quiet. "Your blood-bending caught me off guard, I'll admit. But I survived. Hahahaha."
"Hehehe... how cunning," she chuckled weakly, a bitter respect in her tone. The game was up.
She now understood the direness of her situation. Her blood supply was finite, and what remained was tainted, its potency diluted by his corrosive energy. With a grimace, she conjured a thick paste of blood, slapping it over the massive wound in a temporary, unstable seal. From the stump of her missing right arm, a new limb and a long, wicked spear, both constructed entirely of fresh, untainted blood, erupted into being. She stood, unsteady but resolute, and pointed the crimson spear at him.
Bradley understood her intent. Ranged attacks were now a wasteful luxury. She was conserving her remaining blood for a final, close-quarters stand.
"Come," Bradley invited, his voice a flat challenge.
She pressed her feet into the shattered floor, leaving small craters in the concrete. She became a red blur, appearing at his left flank in an instant, the blood-spear thrusting toward his ribs with refined, lethal technique.
Clang!
Bradley's katana met the spear in a shower of black and red sparks, parrying it with effortless grace.
She pulled back, the spear becoming an extension of her will. She spun the haft, the blade whipping low in an attempt to hamstring him. Bradley deflected it with a horizontal slash. Katana met spear. Darkness clashed with Crimson.
He had initially thought it a desperate move—a spearman closing distance with a swordsman was often suicide. But he quickly saw his error. She did not fight like a conventional spearman; she fought like a master of the blade who happened to be wielding a spear. Her style was fluid, beautiful, and brutally efficient, the spear leaving intricate red streaks in the air as it moved.
She unleashed a flurry of attacks: probing thrusts, sweeping slashes, and deceptive stabs. Bradley blocked and parried the majority, but a few of her strikes slipped through, leaving thin, bleeding cuts on his arms and torso—a testament to her centuries-honed skill. She and the spear moved as one, a seamless dance of death. Every time Bradley thought he saw an opening, she fluidly covered it, as if her defense was an impenetrable, shifting wall.
They became twin forces of destruction, their movements a blur of impossible speed and power. The very floor buckled and cracked under their feet. The air groaned and shrieked with each collision of their weapons. Their hands were invisible, moving faster than sight could track.
Bradley's katana technique, while not as flawlessly polished as hers, was brutally effective. Every slash was economical, every parry precise. He did not waste a single motion.
Suddenly, their speed escalated again. Their forms blurred, then vanished entirely, leaving only afterimages that flickered and died. They were no longer visible to the naked eye. The only evidence of their battle was the constant, brilliant shower of red and black sparks that erupted randomly throughout the vast, ruined space, and the successive, thunderous CLANGS of their clashing weapons.
"If it's a contest of weapons, you will lose," her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "I have never been bested."
"Sorry to disappoint," his distorted voice countered, seeming to come from all directions at once. He abruptly shifted from a defensive posture to a savage, overwhelming offense. "But your winning streak ends tonight."
"Cocky," she clicked her tongue, matching his ferocity, her defense seemingly impervious as she effortlessly blocked his relentless assault.
But as the exchange wore on, a gnawing, terrifying suspicion began to grow in her mind.
Before, when she had exploited the slight openings in his guard, she had drawn blood. Now, every time she saw a gap and lunged for it, he was already there, his blade perfectly positioned to parry. It was happening too consistently to be luck.
It is as if he is learning... The thought was a whisper of dread. Then, her eyes, visible for a moment in a clash of sparks, went wide with horrified realization.
She was right. Bradley wasn't just fighting; he was studying her.
N-no way... is he mimicking me? The concept was absurd. What kind of monster is he?
He definitely needs to be killed; letting such a monster grow is no good.
His attacks were evolving in real-time. They became sharper, more refined, incorporating subtle feints and provocations he hadn't used before. The Bradley of this minute was a completely different fighter from the one of the last—he moved with the ingrained instinct of a veteran who had seen a thousand battles.
How could he learn from a spear-wielder while using a sword? The answer was simple, and terrifying: he was a prodigious copycat. He wasn't just mimicking movements; he was absorbing the underlying principles—the footwork, the weight distribution, the timing, the feints—and instantly adapting them, translating the essence of her spear technique into a deadly, personalized sword style.
He was stealing her knowledge, her centuries of experience, and making it his own. He was a mirror that reflected back a improved version of his opponent.
Fighting him was a losing proposition. It was like dueling your own shadow, a shadow that learned faster and struck harder with every passing second.
She was now being pushed back. Thin, bleeding cuts began to appear across her arms and torso with increasing frequency. The stress was immense. How could a child, in mere minutes, bridge a gap of hundreds of years of practice?
To make matters worse, her movements were becoming heavier, as if invisible chains were slowly wrapping around her limbs, sapping her speed and strength. It was Bradley's parasitic spirit energy, seeping into her system through every new cut, steadily weakening her from within.
I will lose if this continues, she thought, the admission tasting like ash.
She parried a particularly heavy slash and used the momentum to leap backward, desperately trying to create distance. Bradley gave her no quarter. He closed the gap in the space between heartbeats, a predator unwilling to release its prey.
"Where are you going?" he asked, his voice a sinister purr right beside her ear. He gave her no time to breathe, his katana already descending in a new, more complex onslaught.
Sparks flew as their weapons met again and again. Bradley, having fully analyzed her rhythm, spotted a minute opening in her guard. He altered his grip and slammed his katana down in a powerful, perfectly-timed horizontal chop.
The Nurse blocked, but the impact was tremendous. The shock traveled up her arms, numbing her fingers. Her grip on the blood-spear loosened for a fraction of a second.
It was all Bradley needed. He spun on the ball of his foot, his body a blur of motion, and delivered a devastating roundhouse kick, his boot connecting squarely with her chest.
The air left her lungs in a pained gasp. She coughed up a spray of blood and was hurled backward, crashing through the already shattered remains of a large window. Her body tumbled through the cold night air before landing with a heavy *thud* on the snow-covered football pitch below.
Bradley descended after her, landing as lightly as a shadow. He had snatched a small mesh sack from the rubble on his way down. He dropped it onto the pristine white snow with a soft rustle.
"Now, now," he said, his void-like eyes fixed on her struggling form. "Let's play football, shall we?"
"What nonsense are you talking about?!" the Nurse snarled, pushing herself up onto her elbows, her blood-spear reforming in her grip.
He calmly sheathed his katana and pulled a single white-and-black ball from the sack.
"The rules are simple," he explained, his tone chillingly casual. "I kick. You defend. You're the goalkeeper."
Before she could even process the absurdity, Bradley's leg became a blur. There was no wind-up, just an explosive release of motion. The ball vanished from his foot and reappeared in the distant goal net, the sound of it hitting the ropes a delayed thwump.
"Damn," he said, sounding genuinely annoyed. "I was aiming for your head."
Confused, she tried to stand, but her foot slipped on something slick and unyielding. She fell face-first into the snow with a grunt. Pushing herself up, she looked back and saw she had slipped on a length of her own glistening intestines. Her eyes dropped to her stomach. There was now a clean, soccer-ball-sized hole where the ball had passed straight through her.
"Arghhhhhhhhhhh!" The scream that tore from her throat was one of pure, unadulterated agony. She shouldn't be able to feel pain like this, not from a physical wound. But Bradley's corrosive energy had stripped away that immunity, leaving her raw and vulnerable to every sensation.
"Come on now, get up," Bradley chided, dribbling another ball with his foot, the motion deceptively gentle. "We're not done."
Her eyes were wide, pupils dilated with pure, animal terror. "Y-you are insane!" she shrieked, scrambling backward in the snow, leaving a smeared trail of crimson.
"Yeah, I get that a lot," he replied, his distorted voice flat. "But I really wouldn't stay on the ground if I were you."
Dark spirit energy, visible as a swirling vortex of black light, concentrated around his right foot. He drew his leg back and kicked the ball with the force of a siege weapon.
The ball tore through the night, parting the snow in a long, clean furrow. It moved not like a sports object, but like a cannonball, its trajectory a straight, unwavering line directly toward her head.
SPURT!