Void Reaper: The Essence Apocalypse

Chapter 54 54: We’ll see who kills who

The old man's face flushed the moment he heard her question, like someone had just slapped him across the mouth. Then he exploded, jerking his wooden cane up and stabbing it toward Natalia with a hand that trembled with rage.

"You've got the nerve to ask who I am? After everything you've done?!" he shouted.

His voice carried down the frozen street, bouncing off the surrounding buildings, and off the dead zombie bodies littered around them like grotesque markers.

For a brief moment, Natalia stood perfectly still, genuinely thrown by the reaction. Her mind searched, fast, precise, trying to pull up anything. A face, a memory, a name. There was nothing. No connection. No trace.

The longer she searched, the more certain she became.

She had never seen this man before in her life.

"You must have me confused with someone else," she said at last, her voice cold and clearly irritated now, tinged with caution. Because she wasn't stupid. Anyone brave enough to move through a city alone right now wasn't a helpless civilian. "I don't remember us ever meeting."

The old man stared at her for a fraction of a second.

Then he burst out laughing, loud, ugly, dripping with mockery, like she'd just told him the funniest thing he'd heard all week. He lifted the cane again and pointed it straight at her head.

"Stop playing dumb," he snarled. "Maybe I didn't see your face, but that hair? You can't mistake that color. You really think in this country every other person has blue hair? That you won't stand out?"

Natalia felt that familiar, unpleasant pressure start to pulse at her temple, the tiny vein that always appeared when her patience was being tested.

A very specific thought flicked through her head.

Does every man I run into in this world have to be an idiot?

And then Adam's face flashed up in her mind, and she corrected herself.

Fine. Almost every man.

She exhaled slowly, forcing herself to stay calm.

"I genuinely don't know what you're talk…" she started.

But she didn't get to finish.

The old man cut her off mid-sentence, raising his voice even higher, and something in Natalia twitched. Lately, more and more people had been interrupting her while she spoke, and it grated on her nerves faster than she wanted to admit.

"Either you give back what you stole from me!" he screamed, shaking the cane like it was a weapon and a verdict. "Or I'll take it myself. By force, if I have to!"

Natalia stared at the yelling old man, her expression cooling further by the second. It was clear now, he really had mistaken her for someone else. But it was just as clear that the conversation was already dead. He wasn't going to listen to explanations or logic. His anger had momentum, and it needed somewhere to go.

She barely had time to finish the thought when the old man vanished.

He moved fast like the space between them had been brutally folded.

Then he was right in front of her, cane swinging down with shocking speed and precision, nothing you'd ever expect from someone with that age and frame.

Natalia's eyes turned ice-cold.

She snapped her hand up on instinct to block the strike, and for a fraction of a second it seemed like it would end there, simple. Clean.

Then her body was launched backward with violent force.

She flew through the air for dozens of meters before twisting in a short, controlled rotation and landing in a stable stance. Her ice heels scraped against the asphalt, and a thin layer of ice beneath her feet caught the rest of the impact like a cushion.

The old man's eyes went wide.

He clearly hadn't expected that.

"…Too far," he muttered to himself, surprised. "I didn't even hit you with full strength."

And he was right, this wasn't just about the blow.

It was about her outfit.

The tight, white dress Natalia wore might have looked, at a glance, like pure provocation. Like she was deliberately showing off her body. Any random passerby would've assumed she wanted attention.

And, in a way, that was true. Natalia had a high opinion of herself, knew exactly what she was worth, and saw no reason to hide it.

But to her, the appearance was secondary.

What mattered was what the outfit did.

Even though it was "only" a Rare-class artifact, Natalia had gotten absurdly lucky, lucky even by evolver standards. This set had an active ability, not just stat boosts and passive reinforcement, which made it exceptional on its own.

Any time an opponent struck her outfit directly, a recoil effect triggered, instantly throwing her body backward by several meters, dispersing the impact and forcing the attacker to close the distance all over again.

For a mage like Natalia, it was damn near a blessing.

Close combat was her nightmare, something she avoided at all costs. Distance, space, and battlefield control were where she belonged, and this outfit gave her exactly what she needed: time. breathing room. the space to turn a fight into something she was built to win.

She raised her gaze to the old man, straightening slowly. Around her heels, a thin crust of ice began to form.

"Since you've started," she said evenly, her voice calm and cold, "we'll finish this quickly."

The temperature dropped again.

Mana began to pour out of Natalia in a volume that was almost tangible, thickening the air, making it feel heavier. The cold snapped downward in a clear, sudden plunge. Even the zombie corpses gained a thicker coat of frost, and the old man felt it instantly, before he saw anything, because that kind of gathered energy wasn't something you could ignore.

He didn't wait.

He lunged forward with full commitment, because he knew if he let a mage set up freely, things would spiral out of control fast.

But in that same instant, ice blades began to materialize around Natalia one after another, as if the air itself cracked and gave birth to weapons.

Then they shot toward him with terrifying speed, so fast an ordinary person wouldn't even register their trajectory.

The old man had to move.

One step to the side. A sharp pivot. A backward hop.

And when there was nowhere left to dodge, he swung the wooden cane, shattering several blades mid-flight. The ice exploded into thousands of glittering fragments, scattering like glass in the air.

But even then, he couldn't pause.

For every blade he broke, another one came.

Every attempt to close the distance forced him to change direction or retreat. The rhythm of the fight became brutally one-sided, not an exchange of blows, but relentless pressure that didn't allow him a single step forward without risk.

He clicked his tongue, slipping past another blade by a hair.

"So you're a ranged type…" he muttered, with irritation rather than fear.

He understood immediately: he'd wasted his best chance. If he'd pressed her harder at the start, if he hadn't given her even a breath to establish tempo, this would've been a different fight.

But that window was gone now.

So instead of trying to break through the wall of ice by force, he changed approach.

"Fine," he said louder, more to himself than to her. "Then we'll play a game."

He started dodging, only dodging.

No forward pressure. No counters. Because he knew one thing: mana wasn't infinite, not even for someone like her. If he avoided long enough, if he let her burn through her reserves, there would come a moment when the tempo dropped.

And when it did…

He would step in.

Natalia didn't move from her spot the entire time.

She didn't retreat. She didn't advance. She simply controlled the flow of mana, and every few seconds more ice blades formed around her and launched, forcing the old man into more evasions, more sudden shifts, more desperate footwork. The ground around them slowly became a mess of ice crust and shattered shards.

A minute passed.

Then another.

The stalemate lasted longer than Natalia expected. Her face stayed calm, but a faint crease appeared between her brows.

Because she knew her mana reserves weren't endless, either.

She glanced to the side, more out of habit than need, at the internal sense of her pool. She could feel that familiar heaviness in her body, the warning sign that her reserves were draining faster than she wanted.

From the original eight hundred points, she had a little over three hundred left.

Not critical yet.

But combined with the earlier zombie purge and this prolonged deadlock, it was becoming a problem she couldn't ignore.

Natalia's brows tightened slightly. In this tempo, the fight couldn't keep going. Her issue wasn't power or control, it was the effective speed of her ice blades against an opponent experienced and fast enough to read her rhythm and exploit every gap.

Her gaze dropped to her ice stilettos, transparent, bright, almost glowing with condensed energy.

And in that instant, she decided.

Forcing distance was pointless if the enemy was intentionally playing for her exhaustion.

The ice blades stopped forming.

The old man noticed immediately. He let out a short, raspy laugh, like he'd just gotten confirmation.

"Run out of mana?" he asked with a mocking tilt of his voice, straightening slightly. "Give back what you took, and we'll walk away like we never met. I don't want to kill kids."

Natalia gave a quiet snort, more reflex than answer. Her eyes sharpened.

"We'll see who kills who," she murmured.

In the next moment, her ice stilettos flared with bright, intense light as she stamped her right heel into the ground.