Chapter 80: The First Wave (4)
Not far from where Garrick was fighting, another stretch of the battlefield had turned into a storm of steel and blood.
Amid the sea of Morveth, a young woman stood out — calm, spine straight, unhurried in a way that felt almost wrong for the chaos around her.
Her long black hair was swept neatly behind her, framing a pair of dark eyes that remained calm despite the chaos around her. sword rested naturally in her hand.
There was nothing about her build that demanded a second glance — tall, slender, the kind of frame that looked like it belonged somewhere other than a battlefield.
Then she moved, and every part of that first impression died at once.
She slid between two charging Morveth, and her sword caught the light exactly once on the way through. One of them fell with its throat already open, still working out what had happened to it.
After that, she barely seemed to run at all. She simply appeared in new places, moving through the battlefield so quickly that it was hard to follow her movements.
Every motion carried a strange, deliberate grace. No wasted step, no target missed, no opening she failed to take.
Wherever a gap opened in the enemy line, she was already standing in it. Whenever a Morveth turned its back for half a second, her blade found the space it left behind.
Watching her fight felt closer to watching someone dance than watching someone kill — except every step of that dance ended with something dead.
She didn’t fight like an ordinary duelist. She fought like a professional killer, every movement precise and every strike meant to end a life.
This was Seren, one of Ronan’s companions who had come with him to support Blackthorn.
"Would you look at her." A soldier close by muttered it half to himself, close enough to Seren that he’d likely already be dead twice over without her there. "Moves like a ghost. Anybody know who she even is?"
"She’s a friend of Lord Kael and Lord Ronan. I’ve seen her with them before." the man beside him answered, not taking his eyes off her.
"That speed... Could she be using a Space Law?"
"Has to be. Nothing else moves like that."
"I heard her Law is ranked even above the High-Rank Laws. She’s truly a first-tier genius."
"Then thank whatever’s listening she’s on our side. Without her we’d have been swallowed by this many Morveth."
While Seren carved her way methodically through the bodies, a sudden roar tore across the battlefield.
A massive Morveth shouldered through the chaos, towering over every creature around it — nearly three times Seren’s size, muscle stacked on muscle, a war hammer gripped in both hands like it weighed nothing to it either.
Seren’s dark eyes settled on the thing. She stood and watched it come, murmuring something under her breath that nobody else caught.
She was unnervingly calm for someone about to be charged by something that size. She didn’t move an inch.
The Morveth raised the hammer overhead and brought it down, clearly intending to flatten her slender frame beneath its full weight.
Seren watched it fall. At the last possible instant, she raised one hand and caught it.
The hammer simply stopped, as if it had struck a wall nobody else could see.
The creature had no idea how something this small and thin had halted its swing so easily. Something felt wrong, though it couldn’t say what.
Then the hammer started getting heavier in its grip — heavier by the second, until it nearly slipped from its hands entirely.
It hauled back, throwing more force behind the pull, and still couldn’t reclaim the weapon. Either this tiny human was several times stronger than it was, or it had somehow grown weak for reasons it couldn’t name.
The second option should have been close to impossible. It wanted to dismiss it outright. But the feeling that had started the moment it looked into her eyes wouldn’t let it.
"You damned witch! What have you done to my body?! Why has my strength vanished..?!"
A faint smile touched Seren’s lips. "The dead don’t need explanations."
The words had barely left her when the sword moved — faster now, carrying weight it shouldn’t have carried — and the Morveth came apart in two clean halves before it finished falling.
Another one had been watching this from a distance, and unlike the last, something behind its eyes actually thought before it acted. It understood immediately that closing the gap with her was a losing move.
It raised both hands and began casting instead, keeping its distance and avoiding close combat.
A massive fireball took shape and hurtled toward her. But Seren was already moving before it landed.
The Morveth refused to let her close in easily, backpedaling to hold the gap while it lined up its next spell.
Mid-step, she scooped a stone off the ground without breaking stride and threw it. It cut across the battlefield faster than anything that size had any right to move.
The Morveth watched the stone come, and its whole body tensed for impact — braced for at least a shallow line of blood across its skull.
But the stone passed harmlessly beside its head and landed several steps behind it.
For a second the creature just stood there, blinking at the space where the stone had gone. Then it laughed, a low sound. It thought Seren had panicked and missed.
It turned back toward her, ready to mock her failed throw. But she was gone. The spot where she’d been standing was empty.
Its laughter stopped and its pulse spiked before its mind caught up with why.
Its eyes went wide when it found her — right beside it now, standing exactly where the stone had landed.
There was no time to react. Her sword passed through its neck in one unhurried motion, and the head hit the ground still wearing its half-finished laugh.
Seren lowered her blade and kept walking, like nothing had happened at all.
Her swordsmanship alone would have made her dangerous. Every strike rolled into the next one with a precision that made the whole thing look choreographed, rehearsed a hundred times before today.
But what made Seren genuinely frightening was something else entirely — her Law.
The Law of Exchange.
Her Law let her trade places with inanimate objects. That was the real reason she seemed to blink across the battlefield — most people assumed Space Laws, but that wasn’t what this was.
Space Laws needed no exchange to function. Hers ran on a single principle: something for something else.
The hammer hadn’t stopped moving because Seren was physically stronger than the creature holding it. That had nothing to do with muscle at all.
She had simply swapped strength stats with it — the Morveth inherited her physical traits, and she inherited its.
Nothing had vanished. An exchange had happened, which was exactly why something that size suddenly felt so weak.
And that was only the smallest use of the Law. She’d heard of practitioners exchanging skills, injuries, even the five senses — trading the properties of objects as easily as swapping coins.
Given how versatile it was, it seemed strange that most fighters would choose to avoid it. But there was a real reason for that.
The Law came wrapped in conditions, and every use of it demanded a price.
The simpler an object, the easier the trade. A stone or a scrap of wood barely resisted her will at all.
A living creature was an entirely different problem. Swapping a weapon out of someone’s hand for a rock meant her grasp of the Law had to outmatch his, her will strong enough to override his own — and that always cost her, straining her mind harder the longer she needed the swap to hold.
Forcing an exchange onto someone weaker came easily enough. Against someone stronger, the whole process turned brutal. And if that person carried a powerful Law of their own, anything bound to it resisted her that much harder — especially if she tried to interfere with it directly.
She’d learned all of this through trial and error. The Law didn’t respond just because she wanted something to happen.
She had to force the trade between both sides, and the more resistance she met, the more pressure landed on her.
That was the true cost of her Law — constant mental strain and total focus, all while she was expected to keep fighting, surrounded on every side. It was exactly why most fighters steered clear of it entirely.
Healers and support fighters found it far more useful, since it let them stay out of direct combat.
A healer who mastered it deeply enough could exchange wounds between allies and enemies, turning injuries that should have crippled an ally into another weapon against their opponents— though reaching that level was nowhere near easy.
The Law had one real advantage, though. Exchanges between two willing people cost her nothing at all, so long as neither side resisted.
That inconsistency made the Law almost impossible to rank properly. Some called it High-Rank, given how much it could do. Others called it weak, buried under too many conditions to be reliable.
It had no rank anyone had ever agreed on. Everything came down to whoever was wielding it.
The limits Seren knew right now weren’t necessarily the Law’s real limits, either.
The deeper her understanding went, the wider the range of things she could trade — and some of what felt impossible today might not stay that way forever.
She hadn’t reached that point yet, though.
For now, she fought within the boundaries she actually understood, and made the absolute most of everything her Law allowed her.
Seren’s grip tightened around her sword as another wave of Morveth closed in from every direction at once.
Her breathing came heavier. The faint pressure building behind her eyes had crossed into something close to unbearable.
"Malrik... you better hurry."
For the first time all day, a flicker of real frustration broke through her composure.
"I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up."