Harem Cultivation System

Nibel’s opponent hadn’t spoken a single word since the void closed around them. The twitchy, mismatched-eyed man simply circled her at a distance, movements erratic and unpredictable, his left eye tracking one direction while his right tracked another, as though the two halves of his focus belonged to two entirely different people occupying the same restless body.

"Not much of a conversationalist, are you." Nibel spun her scythe once, testing its weight in the grey silence, the curved blade catching what little ambient light existed in this pocket of nothing. "Fine by me. Less to listen to before I put you down and get back to my nap schedule."

The man didn’t respond, not even to acknowledge that she’d spoken. He simply kept circling, feet dragging small, uneven arcs into the ash-colored dust, head tilting at odd angles like he was listening to something only he could hear — or seeing something only half of him could actually process.

"Doesn’t talk, doesn’t blink evenly, and moves like his own legs are arguing with each other." Nibel tapped the butt of her scythe against the ground, unimpressed. "I’ve seen more coordinated corpses."

That, finally, got a reaction. The man’s twitching stilled for half a second, and then he lunged — but not toward her. Toward a point three feet to her left, his whole body compensating for some misalignment only he seemed able to perceive, as if the world he saw and the world that actually existed had drifted subtly, permanently out of sync with each other.

Nibel’s scythe caught him mid-lunge anyway, the flat of the blade cracking hard across his ribs and sending him sprawling face-first into the ash-grey dust with a sound like a dropped sack of grain.

"Predicting your nonsense wasn’t difficult." She watched him claw his way back onto his hands and knees, entirely unimpressed by the display. "Mismatched eyes, mismatched targeting. I’ve fought drunker men with better aim than that, and most of them at least had the decency to buy me a drink first."

The man rose slowly, snarling now, wiping a thin line of blood from his split lip with the back of one trembling hand — and this time both of his eyes locked onto her simultaneously, actually onto her, properly, for the first time since the fight had begun.

"There we go." Nibel’s tone shifted, just slightly, sharpening with genuine interest for the first time. "Finally decided to focus. Was wondering how long that would take."

Translucent afterimages split away from his body without warning, three in total, each one barreling toward her from a completely different angle at once — one from the left, one from the right, one dropping straight down from directly overhead like a stone falling from an invisible ledge — while the true body hung back in the space between them, hidden somewhere among the decoys, patient, waiting for her to commit to defending against the wrong one.

"Ah. Illusion-split." Nibel didn’t so much as tense, studying the pattern unfolding around her with something close to mild academic curiosity rather than alarm. "Cute. A little derivative for my taste, but cute. I’ve seen at least a dozen variations on this exact trick over the centuries, and every single one of them made the same mistake."

She let the first afterimage close within striking range before she moved at all, scythe carving a slow, almost lazy arc through the space it occupied — and where a normal blade might have simply passed through an illusion without resistance, hers didn’t behave like a normal blade. Space folded inward around the strike the same way it had for the assailants aboard the plane earlier, bending the reach of her scythe through more of the grey void at once than a single swing by rights should have covered, catching a curve of reality broad enough to include all three afterimages and the empty space directly behind them in the very same motion.

The true body, hidden in that fourth position she’d already accounted for well before he’d even finished the split, caught the trailing edge of that same fold.

He didn’t even have time to register the hit landing before all three afterimages dissolved into scattering, translucent motes and the real body dropped, unconscious, into the ash with a soft, unremarkable thud.

Nibel let her scythe dissolve back into shadow, entirely unimpressed with herself despite the clean, efficient finish — the kind of fight that didn’t even leave her breathing hard.

"Tsk. Disappointing." She glanced around the empty, silent plain stretching in every direction, already turning toward the seam that would fold her back to the plane and back to the others. "A whole trick built around misdirection and hiding your real position among a handful of decoys, and he still couldn’t manage to actually hide anything from someone who’s spent centuries working exclusively in the dark. That’s like trying to blind a woman who’s already used to seeing with her eyes closed."

She paused before stepping through the fold, glancing back at the unconscious man one final time, studying the mismatched stillness of his closed eyes now that there was no longer any tension animating them.

"Whoever trained you clearly never fought anyone who actually understood how space bends," she murmured, mostly to herself. "Pity. Might’ve made for a decent second round if you had."

With that, she stepped fully into the seam.

"Ariel and Rosalia had better have left me something more interesting to talk about," she muttered as the darkness folded around her, "or this entire detour is going to go down as the single most boring kidnapping attempt in recent memory, and I’ve survived a few genuinely boring ones."

The fold closed behind her without a sound, leaving nothing behind on the grey plain but drifting ash and one unconscious man who would wake, eventually, with a story about the woman who’d beaten his best trick without even breaking a sweat.

Somewhere behind her, the ash plain would remain undisturbed until the fold sealed itself shut for good — no wind to stir it, no sound to fill the silence, just the faint impression of a fight that had lasted barely long enough to be called one. Nibel didn’t bother looking back a second time. She never did. Looking back was a habit for people who doubted their own work, and doubt had never been a problem she carried with her.

— End of Chapter —