It wasn't just the hand. Everything – the walls, the armored person, even the battered woman at his feet, all seemed impossibly far away. It was like he was looking at the room through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
He noticed the barely perceptible smudge in the distance, who he believed to be the armored person, twitch. Reacting on instinct, he rolled to the side, a massive crater forming several feet to his right as a mountain-sized sword crashed down.
He cast out with his psychic senses, hoping to use them to get around this power, but was met with nothing. He couldn't even sense his own knees. Sparing a quick glance, he found his knees were miles away, his proportions reminding him of a funhouse mirror.
"This is such a bullshit power," Fate yelled, but his own voice sounded like a distant echo.
He threw himself into the intangibility of Null once more, trusting the twinge of his instincts. He felt a rush of invisible energy flow through and past him, the fruitless shove of the armored person's Divine Energy.
When he noticed another faint movement from the shadowy smudge in the distance, he rolled once more. Something told him that the person's sword would go through him in a different way than the Divine Energy.
'A Manifest Sword? Here?' Manifest Weapons were rare and expensive, made exclusively on an order-by-order basis by the Hephaestus Guild. The weapons gained properties of the user's Manifestation by channeling Divine Energy into them, allowing dozens of strange new ways to attack.
Of course, due to how they worked, one needed to be an Avatar or stronger to even think of using one. The problem was that this planet was supposed to be a backwater rock, out of the eyes of the EPF, and without the means of space travel necessary to procure such items.
He sidestepped another swing, only this time he misjudged the warped distance and got a chunk of his leg carved off. He scowled, the expression mostly hidden behind his mask. His mind racing, he tried to think of a way around this.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw yet another smudge move slightly. The gloominess of the cellar made seeing another level difficult, but he was sure it was Gilliam, attempting to get to the girl.
With a thought, he shoved at the smudge with his Divine Grasp, only for it to fizzle out before it reached the smudge. 'It affects my range as well? Fuck.' Then he noticed that the smudge of the armored lady was getting closer.
He squinted at it, then was forced to dodge another distant swing. Casting out with his senses, he found the Divine Energy in the area slowly siphoning toward him, only to be shredded and consumed by his Manifestation.
'That's right,' he thought, dodging another sword strike and getting a piece of his forearm sliced off. 'I can eat that stuff now, or whatever it is I'm doing. So, I just need…' He dodged once more. '…to stall. Easy.'
He noticed a rush of flame in the distance, coming from where Fate believed the butler was. He threw a barrier of Divine Energy up, the field tearing the flames apart with ease. His eyes narrowed, an idea popping into his head.
He coated his skin in his Divine Energy, giving another layer of protection to himself, and willed himself to disappear from the eyes and minds of everyone else. Like before, the armored person still knew he was there, and continued attacking. The others, meanwhile, were shouting in confusion, Fate barely able to make out the words "…are you doing?!"
He kept rolling and dodging, noticing the smudge in the distance growing closer and closer with every second as he whittled away at more and more of the knight's influence. Eventually, after losing another three chunks of flesh from his shoulder, stomach, and leg, respectively, the room was once more its normal size in the eyes of Fate. He stood there, hands on his knees, panting. Across from him, the knight was also panting, hands on their sword, which was stabbed into the ground.
Fate recovered first.
He reached out with his TK and squashed Gilliam's heart, then grabbed the man's eyes with his TK and yanked them out. Hopefully, the man's painful few seconds before death would help atone for his atrocities.
The armored person looked at Gilliam, who was now collapsed on the floor and wheezing, coughing blood. Then the knight's helmeted head turned to Gilliam's butler, then to the merchant in the corner, both of whom were staring at the knight with shock and fear. No doubt they thought it was this person who did it.
Fate felt the knight's Divine Energy steel as if they decided on something momentous, and it rushed out, splattering the two men into paste against the wall.
Fate straightened, edging to the side to put himself between the poor woman on the floor and this armored Incarnation. When the person's breath stopped panting, he heard her speak. "Her," because the voice was unmistakably that of a mature woman.
"I promised his father that I would watch over and protect him… I had no idea that he would grow up to become such scum. My oath bound me, but you…" She turned her visored gaze to the corpse of Gilliam. "You've freed me from my obligations. I must thank you. My honor prevented me from acting against him, but then again, because of him I had little honor left."
She turned her head to the chained woman on the ground. "Get her to a healer, fast. She will not last long." Raising her sword, she swung at the woman's shackles, severing them. "An Avatar of Health should be enough for her. For both of you."
Her golden eyes turned to the wounds on Fate, each of which resembled bloody ponds as he held the blood back and forced it back into his veins. She pulled a golden card out from under a piece of her armor, handing it to him.
"Go to this man, present this card. He will take care of you both. He owes me a favor." She hefted her sword, resting it on her shoulder, and moved to leave the body-filled cellar. "If we meet again, let it be as friends. Your ability was a pain in the ass to deal with; I do not wish to go against it once more."
Fate tried to chuckle, the sound coming out more like a groan of pain. "Likewise." When the woman was about to cross the doorway's threshold, she turned back.
"What's your name?" She asked.
"Fate. Yours?"
She was silent for a moment. "Freyda. Farewell, Fate."
With that, she left.
Fate kneeled next to the blue-haired woman, taking what remained of his jacket off and wrapping it around her. He took her up in his arms, finding her surprisingly light, and looked at the card in his hand, having to shuffle the woman around a bit so he could see it.
"'Frederick Fongnra.' If he heals as well as his name is weird, we might live through this," he said to no one in particular.