Edge Vasher, scion of Skill-Eater, and Yussuf the Red, leader of the Crimson Claws, faced each other on the field of battle.

  Both warriors were radiating magical might like a pair of nuclear reactors. Edge had more mana at his disposal, but Yussuf’s skills had reached higher ranks, leaving the men evenly matched in that moment.

  However, the warlord’s evolution had granted him a permanent infusion of power, while Edge’s ultimate only had 45 seconds left on the clock.

  His future, the fate of the settlement, and the destiny of everyone he loved would be decided during that fleeting handful of heartbeats, and Edge didn’t waste a millisecond.

  Able had been planning to back him up, but the deputy was cut off when Yussuf’s crew returned. The stage-two jailbirds spread out to engage Puppet Town’s elites, leaving Edge and Yussuf surrounded by a ring of open space.

  Even with Overdrive turbocharging his powers and the potions pumping through his veins, he couldn’t afford to be struck by the jailbird’s magic. While he could keep the wind blades from obliterating him by using all his skills combined, they caused severe internal damage, and taking a hit to his organs could cripple or kill him outright.

  If I don’t dodge them, I’m going to die before I land another blow.

  The problem was the fearsome attacks were only one step shy of invisible—just a faint ripple passing through the air. And since Yussuf only fired them off from short range, there was only a fraction of a second between the moment when his spells took shape and when they landed on target.

  However, given the circumstances, Edge didn’t have much choice other than to close the distance and do his best to get out of the way.

  All this passed through his head in a fraction of a second, during which he turned into shadows and Leapt. He accelerated his advance with a powerful gust from Maelstrom, which was easy to maintain since Yussuf’s magic couldn’t disrupt its elemental mana.

  As he launched himself toward the Claws’ leader like a rocket taking flight, he manifested an iceblade in both hands, holding them in front of his body to shield his head and torso. He Leapt again the second his boots hit the ground, gathering more momentum and renewing the Durability bonus Shadow Play provided. Meanwhile, he Hardened his body while flaring the skill as hard as he could.

  Combined with Mantle and Fear, it was the quickest he’d ever moved, but it wasn’t fast enough.

  Just before he arrived at Yussuf’s position, another wind attack erupted from the convict’s hands. It caught both iceblades and exploded, transforming them into fading shards of arctic mana.

  Edge didn’t take any damage with his other protections in place, and he used a combined blast of wind and water to stabilize his momentum, turn on a dime, and come streaking back in for another try.

  He remanifested both crystalline swords along the way, watching for the telltale shimmer of the warlord’s magic taking shape. The instant he saw it, he used water and wind to adjust his course while trapping Yussuf within a miniature tempest to keep him off balance.

  He slipped past the next pair of spells with inches to spare and brought both iceblades down in a streaking arc, Double Slashing as he changed back from shadow form.

  Yussuf blocked one strike with his sword and took the second on the back of his armored wrist. The Elemental Blade cut through leather and bit into the tissue below, leaving a patch of frozen flesh behind.

  Dead certain that if he faltered now, the warlord would finish him off with a wind barrage, Edge redoubled his assault, dodging and Slashing like mad while using every skill in his collection to keep himself alive.

  His avatars were pitching in, but they were reaching the point of exhaustion. Boosting his skills wasn’t something they could do very often, and that limit was fast approaching. He managed to avoid the Claw’s magic during the next frantic exchange, but the man’s sword was another story.

  He used Maelstrom to disrupt his opponent’s equilibrium while enhancing his own maneuverability. Even still, Edge got hit by two out of every three slashes. If the weapon struck his joints, he was going to lose a limb, since he couldn’t move while covering them with scales at the same time. Thirty seconds until Overdrive cuts out. I need to find a way to break through his guard.

  “I don’t know how you’re still standing,” Yussuf spoke for the first time in what felt like ages in the adrenaline-drenched melee. “That much power shouldn’t be possible at stage-two, especially for someone who’s far from the peak.”

  He paused to parry an iceblade, then lashed out with a swipe that almost cost Edge his head. “Regardless of the details, I doubt you can maintain it for long. Why don’t you join me instead of dying for a lost cause? There’s room in my empire for anyone with strength like yours.”

  Edge didn’t bother to answer. Every scrap of his concentration was riveted on figuring out a way to bring the jailbird down before the clock hit zero.

  The problem was nothing was working. While a fully flared Double Slash had done some damage, he hadn’t been able to land another hit with Elemental Blade due to the Claw’s incredible swordsmanship.

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  Fear, Roar, and Repel combined weren’t doing much more than annoy Yussuf while keeping him slightly off balance. Edge was being forced back beneath an unending volley of sword strikes and wind attacks, any of which could kill him if he took a direct hit. He was managing to remain upright by combining every defensive and supportive skill he had, but as matters stood, it was only delaying the inevitable.

  Overdrive was going to deactivate soon, and when it did, Edge was going to die.

  His strategy wasn’t working. Switching Harden on and off was slowing him down too much, and he needed to maximize his mobility if he wanted to win. However, a single wind spell would blow him to bits without his diamond scales and dodging them all was impossible as matters stood.

  He was already fighting with everything he had, using every trick he’d learned over the course of his adventures. No grand insight was calling to him, and he simply didn’t have anything left to give.

  That was when he sensed one of his avatars trying to get his attention—one that hadn’t communicated with him directly before. It was a pair of eyes with mismatched irises, belonging to All-Seeing Gaze.

  In that moment, he understood what his skill was trying to tell him.

  He had no idea if it would work, and there was a good chance Gaze’s plan was going to get him killed. But given that he was about to lose regardless, a probable death was a better wager than a certain demise.

  With no time to entertain doubts or second-guess himself, Edge activated the Gaze’s combined mode, and information blasted his brain like a star going nova.

  He couldn’t hope to process what he was experiencing, so he acted entirely by instinct, trusting the avatar to filter the information as every scrap of his soul focused on evading the lethal volley of wind spells Yussuf had unleashed during the split-second Edge had been distracted.

  Using his sensory skill’s most powerful mode, he could see the air currents themselves, including tiny temperature differentials and minute ripples in the magicytes as the warlord’s magic passed through. He pushed his mind to the limit to make use of what he was seeing, drawing on every point of Perception he had and the boost from the potion.

  As he completed one desperate dodge after the next, the image crystalized like a lens sliding into focus.

  The transparent skills revealed themselves to be wedges of highly pressurized air—blades formed by some type of field whose dynamics weren’t important right now. They were incredibly fast, but with his current attributes combined with the bonuses from Fear and Mantle, he could throw his body out of the way with millimeters to spare... if he stood at least fifteen feet back.

  Yussuf swore when his next blade missed, eyes going wide when the same thing happened to the next two. It took everything Edge had to keep Gaze running while moving his body. If his concentration wavered to the slightest degree, he was going to get hit.

  It was, without a doubt, an amazing accomplishment, but it wasn’t good enough. He still wasn’t landing any attacks of his own, and Overdrive would end in another twenty seconds.

  He must have noticed that I can see his spells, but he doesn’t know about Regeneration. I need to use that to get through his guard, but how?

  In the heart of that dark moment, a plan was born.

  The only way Edge could trick the Claw was to do something the warlord would never be willing to do—sacrifice himself to bring his opponent down. Edge had no intention of trading his life to kill Yussuf, but he was willing to bleed to make that happen, since he could survive wounds that would cripple or kill anyone else.

  Edge’s eyes analyzed the endless flurry of spells, searching for a path to thread that would let him close the distance. But a warrior like Yussuf hadn’t left anything as convenient as a gap between his attacks… a gap the size of Edge’s body at any rate.

  The instant he saw what he was looking for, he burst into motion with a flared iceblade in each hand. He ducked beneath one spell, twisted out of the way of a second, and then Leapt over a third. By now, he had closed half the distance, giving him even less time to react as the Claw centered his onslaught on Edge’s position.

  There wasn’t enough room to slip past the rest, but he cut one wind skill out of the air with the iceblade in his right hand, using the explosion to fling him out of the way of the next.

  He repeated the maneuver with the sword in his left hand while reforming the blade in his right. It was going to take another second to manifest—a second Edge didn’t have.

  By now, he was five feet in front of the Claws’ leader, and there were two vertical wind blades streaking straight for his body, a little less than shoulder-width apart.

  He couldn’t dodge them both, so he didn’t try. Instead, he twisted to narrow his profile, tucked his right arm in, and kept on running, knowing that he was about to experience the worst pain of his life.

  A wind blade hit the left side of his body half a heartbeat later.

  Even with Warlord’s Mantle, Harden, and his garax-leather armor, Yussuf’s skill bit deep into the meat of his shoulder. It hurt like hell, but that wet agony was nothing compared to what happened when the spell erupted inside his body.

  Edge screamed as his left arm detached in a spray of blood mist, but he proceeded with his plan without missing a beat.

  He closed the final few feet and drove the iceblade that had just finished forming deep into Yussuf’s guts. As frozen blood bounced off his body, he executed a full-power Double Slash from inside the warlord’s torso, pulling the crystalline blade through his vital organs to leave rime-coated ruin behind.

  Then they slammed into each other and toppled to the ground. At that point, some manner of triggered skill kicked in, teleporting Yussuf a hundred feet away, close to where Tiburón was struggling to endure a ceaseless pummeling from the defenders of Puppet Town.

  The leader of the Crimson Claws was critically injured, but he wasn’t dead yet, and there was a chance he could still recover. Able’s team was holding Yussuf’s crew back, but they couldn’t disengage long enough to finish off either man.

  Edge pushed past the pain as Regeneration staunched the blood pumping from the stump of his arm. Just then, Overdrive faded away, and the fugue hit him—nearly knocking him out then and there.

  The battle wasn’t over yet, but nothing—not the anguish of his injuries or the ocean of exhaustion that had risen to drown him—was going to stop him from stealing a skill after everything he’d been through.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Trapper corner Blaze, dispersing a final Wall of Flame with Manipulate Air before thrusting her silver sword into the firebug’s heart.

  At the same time, Able killed a pair of Claws and then hurled Earl’s hammer at Tiburón. The whirling weapon hit the shark in the back, shattering his spine and puncturing his lungs with a half-dozen shorn ribs.

  It took everything Edge had to rise to his feet, holding back the mind-numbing enervation through sheer effort of will. He rose on trembling limbs and took one staggering step after the next, limping to where the elite claws lay dying in the dirt as a surge of gluttony blossomed behind his ribs.