The two tigers collided in the center of the white arena like two opposing blast waves of light and shadow.
The Void-Stitched Tiger moved with horrifying, unnatural driving force. Despite its massive eight-meter bulk, the man-made void flesh on its left flank warped local gravity. That let the brute speed up across the hundred-meter gap in less than a second. Its rusted steel saber slashed downward in a heavy, cleaving arc aimed at bifurcating Vesper from skull to pelvis.
Vesper didn’t dodge backward. She leaped directly into the path of the blow.
A fraction of a split second before the rusted steel could touch her whiskers, Vesper carried out a Sub-Spatial Step.
Her white dark shape vanished from three-space-folding space. That left behind an afterimage of silver starlight that the clone’s rusted blade smashed into powder. The striking force of the monster’s missed strike struck the floor, shattering a ten-meter crater into the white jade and sending chunks of crushed stone whistling through the air like shrapnel.
Vesper rematerialized two inches above the clone’s left shoulder.
Snikt!
Her foreclaws extended, each tip glowing with razor-sharp, razor-thin Gengjin light. With a blinding double-swipe, she struck the thickest man-made tentacle where it grafted into the monster’s ribs.
