“Tell me,” I muttered as we circled each other on the rickety wooden stage, the cold moonlight casting long shadows across our faces, mingling with the flickering torch flames that danced like restless spirits. “Are you even human? The speed you showed just now—it wasn’t.”

  His eyes, twin embers burning with unnatural crimson light, locked onto mine. A slow, bitter chuckle escaped his lips. “Says the one who just healed her nose in record time. What are you using? Healing magic?” His voice dripped with mockery, but the truth behind those glowing eyes sent a shiver down my spine.

  Magic. He was steeped in it—though the signs were subtle, almost invisible. No swirling runes, no crackling energy. Just the faintest whisper of power lingering beneath the surface. It was as if his very soul was bound in sorcery, concealed in plain sight.

  And yet, something else tugged at my instincts—his grip on that dagger. Too loose. Untrained. A child’s grasp, not a seasoned warrior’s. It was as if he had barely begun to learn the art of combat. I smirked, my mind racing through possibilities. This was a weakness ripe for exploitation.

  But no flicker of caution crossed his face. No hesitation. He was oblivious to the trap I was setting.

  “You’re a mage,” I stated flatly, feigning an upward sweep with my blade, then driving my shoulder hard into his belly before he could react.

  He staggered back, warily putting distance between us, his gaze sharp with newfound respect—or was it calculation? He understood I was no easy mark, even though I hadn’t landed a single real blow.

  “That’s right,” he admitted, no longer hiding it. His voice was calm, almost proud, as if confessing a secret to his own doom. The bandits surrounding us blinked in surprise, clearly unprepared for this revelation.

  “And what can you do?” I pressed, already piecing together the fragments of his unnatural prowess.

  His eyes gleamed with an eerie fire as he leaned forward. “I control the flow of time.”

  Before I could react, he surged forward with impossible speed, a blur of motion. I barely managed to block his dagger’s savage strike, then leapt back, heart hammering as I braced for the storm of attacks that would surely follow.

  A cruel smile tugged at my lips. “Didn’t your mommy ever tell you not to lie?” I taunted quietly. I knew enough about magic to sense the impossibility—time manipulation was no trivial sorcery. It wasn′t even a god’s power, and certainly not something a mortal could wield.

  Aska had tried time manipulation a handful of times already—and each attempt had ended in catastrophic failure. I still remember the sickening sight: how he accelerated the flow of time around himself until he catapulted three weeks into the future, moving at a speed so unnatural it felt like seconds had stretched into eternity for him. But the universe was unforgiving. The moment he emerged from his time anomaly, the cosmic balance snapped back with brutal force—freezing everything around him in a rigid stasis that lasted exactly those same three weeks. Time itself refused to be bent or broken.

  After that disastrous leap, Aska never dared to try again. I made sure of that—I stacked heavy stones above where the anomaly had opened. The look on his face when stone after stone rained down on him, his entire being crushed under the weight of time snapping back into place, is etched into my memory. It was a blend of rage, disbelief, and helplessness that no man should ever endure.

  The truth was clear to me then: true time manipulation was impossible. But illusions of it? There were countless ways to mimic the effect. Some magics demanded constant activation—energy sustained like a flickering flame in the dark—and that was precisely what the bandit king was doing now.

  I lunged at him again, sliding under a slash that seemed to come from miles away, and swung my dagger upward. His retreat was swift, unnatural—like a shadow fleeing the light—but I wasn’t about to let him slip away so easily. I leapt forward, driving my blade towards his face.

  Then, the impossible happened.

  His entire body shifted—not just a step, but a complete sidestep so silent I barely heard it.

  My dagger sliced through the air, missing by a hair’s breadth. Yet, a faint resistance grazed my skin—a whisper of pain above his ear where I must have nicked him. It was my first strike, but it came at a cost.

  Before I could recover, his dagger plunged deep into my side.

  Blood welled quickly, hot and relentless, before the wound began sealing itself shut with a sickening smoothness. I staggered back, pain throbbing as I breathed heavily and unravel the enigma of his magic.

  “Ever heard of Schr?dinger’s cat?” I asked, voice low, trying to bait his confidence.

  He blinked, cautious now, and we resumed our circle—not attacking yet, each of us waiting for the other to make a fatal mistake.

  “What’s that?” he asked, curiosity tinged with wariness.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “It’s a thought experiment. A cat, locked in a box with two holes cut out. Two people look in from either side, each seeing something different. One sees the cat alive, the other sees it dead. Schr?dinger, an illusionist of sorts, made it so neither could say for certain if the cat lived or died.”

  He snorted darkly. “What a touching story.”

  “But here’s the cruel truth,” I pressed on, “neither was right. There had never been a cat in the box.”

  He fidgeted, eyes darting, his magic playing tricks with my perception. While I could tell roughly where he moved, pinpointing his exact location was a tormenting puzzle—like chasing a ghost trapped in a mirage. His movements weren’t bound by normal rules; he existed in multiple places at once, a flicker between reality and illusion.

  In that moment, I understood the true nightmare of his power: not control over time itself, but control over the observer—making the mind doubt, hesitate, and falter.

  “And the story’s moral is that the illusionist always wins,” he sneered, stepping closer. His voice was low but heavy with cruel certainty. I halted mid-stride, letting his words hang in the cold night air like a death sentence.

  “No,” I whispered back, voice steady despite the pounding of my heart. “Not quite. What would a blind man do? Would he blindly stare, or would he reach out and shatter the illusion?”

  I closed my eyes deliberately, plunging myself into darkness. The world I trusted was a lie. I tuned into everything else—the whisper of the wind brushing against my skin, the faint scent of damp earth and burning torches, the subtle creak of the wooden boards beneath the weight of my unseen opponent.

  A sudden gust stirred, and a sharp sting blossomed across my cheek—an almost invisible cut—as I stepped backward, narrowly avoiding a strike that would have ended me. He wasn’t stronger or faster. No, his power lay in deception. My eyes lagged behind reality, blurring his movements until he appeared to move faster than mortal flesh should allow.

  I opened my eyes again, but the vision I saw no longer commanded my trust. The world around me was a canvas for his trickery. Before I could react, a searing pain exploded through my right leg—the blade had found its mark, slicing clean through muscle and sinew. Yet his body was nowhere near the spot I saw him occupy. He was everywhere and nowhere at once.

  I froze for three agonizing seconds, heart hammering, before the attack came again. This time, I heard him—a subtle whisper of movement—and twisted my torso, narrowly evading the strike. My dagger sliced through empty air where his arm should have been. A thin line of blood traced the edge of my blade, a fleeting testament to my defiance.

  A cold smile curled my lips. “If I can cut you once...” I began, but my words died in the night.

  Silence swallowed the space around me. The bandit had vanished.

  Visually, I was alone on the stage, but my senses screamed otherwise. Every muscle tensed; every nerve strained to catch the faintest hint of his presence. The night held its breath, as did I.

  I faced a cruel dilemma: move forward and risk walking into a lethal trap, or stand still and hope to drain his mana as he searched for an opening. I chose to wait—a fatal miscalculation.

  Then—a faint creak. The barest whisper of sound betrayed his attack.

  Before I could react, a dagger flew from the darkness, moving with silent, deadly precision. It pierced me without warning, stabbing deep into my lung and lodging itself firmly in my chest. The world spun as I stumbled backward, breath stolen in a violent gasp. How had I not seen it coming? The thought burned in my mind like acid.

  My vision blurred, pain blossoming in sharp waves through my body. I hit the ground hard, my head striking the wooden planks with a sickening crack. Weak fingers clung to my dagger, the only weapon still in my grasp, as darkness edged in.

  Steps echoed softly through the suffocating darkness as I kept my eyes tightly shut. Pain throbbed in my chest, but I focused on every creak and shift of the wooden boards beneath us. The sounds abruptly ceased—he had stopped, standing unnervingly close.

  “The illusionist always wins,” he whispered, cold and certain.

  The dagger lodged in my chest twisted painfully as he pulled it free. I choked, blood bubbling in my throat, coughing not from necessity but from defiance. Clutching my dagger with desperate strength, I lashed out in a swift, furious strike—piercing his thigh with brutal precision.

  A raw, guttural scream tore from him as he stumbled backward, the blade embedded deep. Seizing the moment, I yanked the dagger from my own chest. The searing pain dulled quickly, my flesh knitting itself together with unnatural speed, though the hunger gnawing inside me only grew sharper with each heartbeat.

  I spat a crimson spray onto the planks and approached the fallen bandit with deliberate calm. His illusion shattered like fragile glass, and I finally saw clearly what I had grazed above his ears—pointed, delicate, unmistakably elven.

  A dark smile crept across my lips as the fiery red glow in his eyes flickered and died, replaced by a colder, deeper crimson—raw and human in its cruelty.

  “I agree,” I said softly, voice dripping with venom, “that lies always win. But illusions don’t just hide the truth… they only delay its reckoning.”

  I turned my body sideways, balanced on my left leg, and lunged forward. My arm thrust the dagger with flawless intent. This time, nothing blocked it—the blade sliced through the night air with deadly grace.

  The dagger sank deep into his right eye, piercing straight into the cold gray matter of his brain. His body convulsed briefly, then collapsed backward in complete stillness—more dead than Schr?dinger’s ill-fated cat.

  An eerie silence rippled through the plaza as the bandits registered the death of their leader. The man who had fought to preserve their chaotic freedom lay broken before them—and now, revealed as an elf, a predator who had twisted their loyalty to sow ruin among humans.

  I planted my boot firmly on his lifeless skull and, with a cruel twist, dragged the dagger free. A sickening squelch accompanied the motion as a shard of brain tissue clung to the blade, spilling out in grotesque ribbons for all to see.

  “So…” I said, voice innocent and cold, “who’s next?”

  The firelight flickered over their frozen faces, each shadowed figure trapped by the ring of flames cutting off any chance of escape. I had felled their strongest—shattered the one thread holding their fragile world together.

  They were all teetering on the edge of death, but the choice remained theirs: fight for survival or fall like their leader.