The Hated Hero: Sigil-Powered Warrior-Chapter 26: Immanuel Versus The Mistress of Puppets

With the woman and her puppets’ numerical advantage over Immanuel, they each moved in the ways of untrained thugs. She remained where she stood with weapons up in a guard, while the puppets merely walked around Immanuel, taking their time, never even inclined to attack him again.

Taunting me into moving rashly, are we? Making me believe that if I hit you harder, you’d all crumble, are we? Well, I am not giving you the satisfaction of seeing all my maneuvers go to waste! Immanuel just stood where he was, looking left and right, watching the puppets’ steps.

Then, as though trying to give Immanuel the impression of unpredictability, the puppets wound side to side. At times they slid to one side, and at times they flipped to another side. But Immanuel knew a reason behind their sideways movements—judging from one puppet’s initial position, those movements let them reposition themselves to either side... perhaps to get Immanuel to shift his stance?

If so, then it worked: Immanuel shifted his feet to change his stance so he faced one of them again. So how does this give them any advantage whatsoever?

It turned out that Immanuel had made a mistaken assumption of why the puppets moved the way they did. The one in front of him and two others to either side, who were closest to three of the hall’s pillars, leapt towards them and climbed them on all fours. As the puppets’ movements relied on the woman’s control, they scaled up the stones without the need to pause and without feeling sore.

Immanuel grinned. Oh, I’ve seen this playbook before. This is gonna be a fun battle of wits for sure! A sigil on each forearm flashed for a brief moment.

The puppets’ clicking and rattling intensified behind him. Immanuel rolled twice to one side as he dodged multiple darts coming from behind, fired by the puppets, perhaps.

He held his grin despite the numerical odds stacked against him. He seemed cautious for a time, until...

Watch this! As soon as his feet were flat on the ground once again, the dark tendril snaked out of his back like a tail and darted to a pouch to pull the flap open. Then it pulled out several throwing daggers at the same time and launched them all at the direction of the puppets behind him. The entire sequence happened in rapid succession.

The throwing daggers hit the wall, pillars, and two puppets, exploding upon impact. Using Exploding Clone on the daggers worked!

"What?!" Immanuel’s trick startled the woman. With her attention now on the smoky aftermath of the explosion, he had an opening.

But so did the two monks in black. A dagger darted from where he remembered the monks has been hiding. It would have hit the woman’s back had she not raised her sword and brought it behind her in one flashy motion to block it without looking.

Meanwhile, the other monk who wielded a fighting staff ran up the pillar to deal with one of the puppets above them.

Impressive! So she knows a thing or two about fighting! Immanuel leapt towards her while her sword was behind her, his greatsword held with both hands to keep his downward swinging power at the maximum.

With the woman’s quickness in shifting her footing and grip, their swords clashed into a deadlock. But with her other hand holding a dagger, she was at a disadvantage in the deadlock. She needed to get her secondary weapon past Immanuel’s guard to neutralize his advantage. Considering the length of Immanuel’s sword, a puppet behind Immanuel might need to help her out.

The monk armed with a fighting staff sped through the air past Immanuel. "Let me take care of them, Maier!"

"Grah!" Immanuel grunted. A throwing dagger held by the Reach sigil’s power clashed with the lady’s dagger. The clash would have forced her into a second deadlock had she not pulled it away.

"Damn it! Three hands!" she whined; her grip on her sword weakened with each passing moment in the deadlock. And Immanuel, having overpowered her, struck her hand with an elbow. Then he stepped away to break both of them free from the deadlock.

"I’m not even complaining that you got more hands than I do!" Immanuel chuckled as he referenced her puppets. Behind him, wood clashed against steel. The occasional grunt hinted to the intensity and ferocity at which the monk was fighting. Where’d the other monk go?

The answer came a heartbeat later. A dagger floated off the floor then darted through the air, stopping when it was so close to the woman’s neck. The monk then appeared behind the woman out of thin air, revealing himself to be the one wielding the dagger.

"Yield," he demanded, his voice stern. But right away, something took him out of his advantageous position. A series of metal strings tightened around his limbs and his neck.

"I was sure I knocked it out before coming here!" The monk disappeared, leaving a tiny puff of smoke behind. The metal strings fell.

The dagger-wielding monk then reappeared in front of a puppet behind the woman, one seated with its arms stretched out in front of it. He then nailed the puppet with rapid flurries of punches, kicks, and dagger stabs while it was still spooling its metal strings back into its body.

Ah, there’s an idea. Or two. Immanuel acknowledged the Plagiarism Sigil, pumping more mana to allow him to copy the spell that turned the monk invisible, the casting of which he had not seen. Without knowing it, his eyes glowed with a faint purple light.

Immanuel lunged forward and swung his sword down at the woman, who raised her sword and dagger up in time and blocked the swing. But the attack was just a distraction—Immanuel disappeared as soon as she blocked his attack and he pulled away. He left not a hint of him behind.

Panicked, she looked around, perhaps in hopes of finding even the slightest hint as to where Immanuel had gone off to. But no matter where she looked, she found none.

All she saw were two groups of her wooden puppets—every single one armed with a glowing blade—overpowered by two monks acting independent of each other on two sides of the massive hall.

"Damn you!" she stomped a foot in frustration.

An invisible force struck the woman’s back, causing her to stumble forward, almost to the point of falling face first, and yelp in pain. The attack ripped much of the back of her dress but did not draw blood, instead activating something that bathed her body in faint red light.

A magical barrier?

Immanuel, with his sword invisible like him, struck the woman’s back again. As with the earlier attack, all it did was rip her dress further and inflict stinging pain on her.

I knew it.

Immanuel thrust his sword onto the floor, and when he let it go, it became visible once more. So that’s what happens if I let something go while I am invisible.

While still standing next to his lengthy blade, he spoke. "I’ll give you this one chance to hit me. See this sword? I am standing next to it. Make it count."

Without hesitation, and perhaps fueled by desperation, the woman swung both weapons one after the other, but neither hit anything but air.

Then a voice whispered so close to her ear, "I never said I’ll be standing still."

Before she could even move, Immanuel struck her side, and she doubled over in pain, which caused her to drop her weapons. I didn’t expect this barrier to feel hard.

But that didn’t stop him from attacking. Instead, he unleashed flurry upon flurry of unarmed strikes, almost matching the speed of the monks’ attacks. Each time she was on the brink of falling, a strike prompts her back up, allowing Immanuel to maul her a number of times more. But in time, the attacks overwhelmed her, and she fell to the stone floor, face first, at last.

Immanuel reappeared, already mounted over her body. "What’s your business in the Cathedral, and who sent you?"

The woman, too exhausted to speak, could only struggle to catch her breath. At this, Immanuel raised a throwing dagger over her.

"Stop the attacks, and I’ll let you live." She nodded. The puppets fell to the floor rattling.

"Oh!" exclaimed a monk. "Good work, kid!"

"Now, answer my que—" BOOM!

The high-rising ceiling of the Cathedral burst open wide, and gigantic debris threatened to fall upon the sacred workspace of the clerics. Immanuel rolled off the woman and, out of instinct, pulled her up. Then he darted towards his sword, the woman in tow, and then they both rushed towards where ordinary folks pass going in and out of the Cathedral’s structure. With the danger the ceiling debris posed, the woman did not resist Immanuel.

"Let’s fight somewhere else!" Immanuel growled through the chaos. The woman, already panicking, nodded with a hint of gratitude that Immanuel couldn’t see.

Just as they were about to clear a stone arch that served as the ordinary people’s entrance into the Hall of Answered Prayers, something massive crashed behind them. And in front of them, someone landed, facing them.

The figure was clad in a familiar silver and white heavy armor ensemble. Instead of a mace and shield, he held a blood-drenched halberd. He held an air of superiority, punctuated by his massive grin on his heavily scarred, bald head.

It was not Hierophant Hawking.

He brandished the blood-drenched halberd. "Did you expect Hawking? This is his blood. He defied us, and we killed him!" he growled.

"No!" came the struggled response from behind Immanuel. The voice bore a hint of Hierophant Arthur Hawking’s. "I’m still standing."

A figure drenched in blood then darted through the thick cloud of dust towards the halberd wielder.