I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1222: The Penumbral Stalker

Sael had fought destroyers before, but he had never fought a devilish destroyer alone.

And certainly never in conditions this disadvantageous.

The monster’s jaw unhinged, wider than physically possible, and exhaled.

Black mist poured from its mouth like oil smoke, thick and unnatural. It spread across the ground, creeping toward his feet with deliberate slowness… too deliberate, too controlled. Where it touched his light arrow’s glow, the illumination hissed—a sound like water on hot iron—and died.

Sael fired immediately. The light arrow screamed across the chamber, guided by perfect accuracy and Northern’s shadow bow’s autonomous targeting. The shot was clean, the trajectory flawless. It should have struck center mass.

The arrow passed through empty darkness.

The Stalker had already moved.

The black mist spread faster now, flooding across the cavern floor like spilled ink. Sael manifested a wind platform beneath his feet and launched himself upward, escaping the creeping darkness. Three more platforms materialized in quick succession—invisible steps of condensed air and moonlight forming his aerial highway.

’Create space. Maintain distance advantage.’

He nocked another arrow mid-leap, fired, nocked, fired again. Four shots in two seconds, each one targeting a different position where the monster might be. Each arrow adjusted mid-flight, seeking. Hunting.

All four passed through shadow.

The mist reached the dead elf against the wall. Where it touched the corpse, the body seemed to… diminish. Not decay—something worse. As if the darkness were drinking it.

Sael landed on a platform twenty feet up, bow drawn, breathing controlled. His stern demeanor crystallized, emotion locked away behind the facade he’d perfected over years of training. This required methodology. System. The creature was fast, yes, but everything had patterns. Everything could be read.

’Find the pattern. Exploit the opening.’

He activated one of his talent abilities—five invisible lunar sigils manifesting around his position, pale marks hanging in the air like frozen starlight. The marks would bind to whatever he hit first, priority targets for focused fire. Each one represented a stacking advantage.

The darkness spread across the ceiling now, flowing like liquid shadow. His remaining light sources flickered. Dimmed.

Then died.

Absolute blackness swallowed the cavern.

Sael’s heart hammered once. Twice. The old panic rising, that familiar sensation of walls closing in—the same helplessness he’d felt against the Kageyama scion who’d beaten him in the narrow dark passageway, who had made him feel slow, predictable, outmatched.

No.

Not again. Not here.

He fed more essence into the shadow bow, the weapon drinking his power like water into dry earth. The bow pulsed in response, its semi-autonomous senses bleeding into his awareness. Not sight, exactly. More like… knowing. He could feel the shape of things—air currents displaced by movement, the texture of space where something solid existed. The bow whispered positions, distances, trajectories into his mind like a second set of instincts.

There.

Behind and above. Descending.

He fired into the darkness behind him without turning, trusting the feedback completely. The arrow adjusted mid-flight and curved upward, targeting something Sael’s eyes couldn’t see but his bow absolutely could.

A wet thunk. The sound of a broadhead finding meat.

The Stalker shrieked.

The sound was wrong—too high-pitched for something that size, layered with multiple tones like three voices screaming at once. It reverberated off the stone walls, disorienting, maddening. The echo seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

The ability Sael activated locked onto the beast immediately. One sigil embedded, invisible, permanent until death. The Stalker would take 25% increased damage from all his attacks now.

’First mark. Four more to stack.’

He manifested ten more wind platforms across the chamber’s airspace, building his three-dimensional network. If he couldn’t see, he’d control the space through positioning. Force the monster to come at him through predictable angles, funnel its approach vectors.

Something dripped in the darkness below. Thick. Heavy.

Blood, maybe. Or something worse.

Then that smell hit him—rot and wet earth and old meat, the stench of carrion left too long in standing water. Close. Too close.

’Move.’

Sael dove forward, abandoning his platform. Wind caught him mid-fall, guided by instinct and the heritage of a lineage built on aerial supremacy. A new platform materialized under his boots just as something massive displaced the air where he’d been standing. He felt the rush of it, the pressure wave of enormous mass moving fast.

The shadow bow thrummed a warning directly into his mind.

’Behind. Above. Diving attack.’

He twisted, fired blind into the darkness above and behind. The arrow screamed upward, curved impossibly right, struck something solid with the meaty impact of a perfect hit.

Another shriek—this one frustrated, pained.

Second [Constellation Mark] embedded. The slow effect was stacking now—10% reduced movement speed on the Stalker. Not much. But every advantage mattered when fighting above your weight class.

’Good. Keep it methodical. Stack the marks. Reduce its advantage incrementally.’

Sael landed on another platform, already repositioning before his boots fully touched down. His breathing stayed controlled despite the darkness pressing in from all sides like a physical weight. The bow’s senses fed him information in fragments—displacement here, movement there, the faint sound of claws scraping stone in a circular pattern.

Stalking.

He fired into that sound. The arrow adjusted trajectory three times mid-flight before impact, compensating for target movement with machine precision.

Thunk.

Third mark. The debuff was building. 15% slower now.

The Stalker’s breathing changed. No longer confident, no longer treating this as easy prey. Annoyed, maybe. The breathing pattern shifted—circular now, orbiting his position. Testing his defenses. Looking for openings.

Patient.

’It’s learning.’

The realization chilled him more than the darkness, more than the smell, more than the weight of fighting alone. Catastrophic danger level meant monsters weren’t just fast and dangerous anymore. They became tactical. Devilish monsters became intelligent, shrewd and cunning—capable of adapting mid-fight, capable of strategy. Abysmal became menace, neutral evil, sometimes even lawful evil.

Every exchange with the Penumbral Stalker was teaching it something about his capabilities. His patterns. His limitations.

And he was fighting in complete darkness.

Against something built for it.