With wide eyes, Miles laughed, coughing up blood.
The rabbit before him widened their eyes, too, the black pupils becoming as large as the rabbit's eyes.
"I'M LATE!" The rabbit gasped, as Miles fell to his knees, tears on his face while even in death, manic, hysterical laughter insisted on flowing from his throat. "I'M LATE, I'M LATE, I'M LATE!"
Immediately, as if its words meant something other than what it had said, the rabbit took a small pocket watch from the inner pocket of its best, and began turning the tiny key, delicately embedded into the bottom of the silvery piece of fragile time piece.
Everything happened fast. Too fast for anyone but the wraith to understand what was going on, but it was slow in the beginning. Then, it began picking up speed.
Miles himself did not understand. The only thing that kept him from going utterly insane, as the black blade was ripped out of his chest with violence, and at the same time, in what words could only explain as a miracle, the hole in his chest, left by the blade, started to close, along with the hole in Miles' heart, was the unexpected, soothing feeling of being fixed.
As if something was putting him back together.
It felt different from the regular healing magic he had experienced many times before since Earth became a game. It felt different even from the healing effect of the [Ether Teapot], but it was not like the unlife cast on him by the wraith, to simply prolong his suffering.
As soon as the strange energy enveloped him, Miles' laughter subsided, his broken bones mended together, his disfigured body became whole again, his wounds closed, and his mind became silent like a tranquil lake. Cold and indifferent to the wind caressing its surface.
Miles blinked a few times, feeling the sudden pressure of an incoming attack from behind, immediately dodging it by crouching down.
"I think you were just in time, Mr. Rabbit." Miles chuckled, his skin crawling with the ecstasy of the strange healing magic. 'It also feels like the new stat points finally kicked in, whew…'
The new stats might not have made Miles much stronger, but his perception was higher than most sub-ten players, which allowed him to at least cover the gap in fighting ability between him and the wraith.
However, the dark entity was still fast enough to land a solid kick that sent Miles rolling sideways.
It did not hurt him as much as if it had landed cleanly, though, thanks to the increased resilience of his body, after the assimilation of his newly acquired strength, and Miles had already recovered some of his presence of mind to roll over the bones smoothly enough to just earn some bruises.
Grinning, he got up as soon as his hands and feet touched the stone floor.
"So, you acquired the guardian's key..." The wraith chuckled, sounding like grinding metal. "I think I had enough fun. You will die."
Looking more attentively at the wraith, Miles was able to discern a black label atop its head, where it was supposed to carry its name and level. However, there was nothing but red, blue, and yellow distortions, as though the wraith was like a glitch in the system.
"A glitch inside The Glitch?" Miles chuckled, hurriedly avoiding a swing of the wraith's sword arm. "Now that's some irony."
The wraith let out a sharp screech and lunged towards Miles, covering the distance between them in the blink of an eye.
"You're late!" The rabbit muttered, and immediately, the wraith seemed to slow down, ever so slightly. But enough for Miles to understand its movements, allowing him to dodge the piercing strike sideways and strike the wraith's sword arm with an upward arc of his own sword.
As the [Cheshire's Gleam] went up, Miles reversed his grip on the hilt and tried piercing the wraith's torso with it, but whatever it was that had made the entity slow down had ended, and the dark enemy immediately swatted the blade of Miles' sword down with its own, turning its head in the rabbit's direction.
Miles looked at the humanoid rabbit too, and to his surprise, all bars that kept it from leaving its cage were now rusty and decrepit, little by little turning to red dust.
"Nuisance…" The wraith hissed, and the rabbit's eyes went wide as the entity charged towards it.
'Bad!' Miles gasped.
His attention felt all over the place, but strangely or not so, he felt especially focused.
So much so that, in the breath that it took for the wraith to reach the rabbit, and Miles to take some action to prevent it from happening, he noticed both the system's message in front of him and the fact that the blade of the [Cheshire's Gleam] was conveniently positioned for a low strike.
As Miles moved, swinging his sword in an open arc toward the wraith's heel, he felt like it was just the right thing to do. The arc was just wide enough to reach the target, and the strength in the strike made it so that the attack was compact enough to deal the damage he needed.
As soon as the blade seemed to sink into the shadowy wraith's tendon, however, it dissipated into its initial form of swirling fog, disappearing from Miles' field of view all at once.
"Die!" The wraith's voice echoed from behind Miles at the same time as his perception told him that there was something behind him, and a sharp pain made him see stars, along with the freezing pain of the wraith's sword arm slashing across his torso.
"Urgh!" Miles gritted his teeth, moving backward and trying to gain some distance from the enemy, but the wraith was both faster and stronger, and Miles was not nearly on par with its strength to give it a fair fight. 'This is bad, damn it!'
As soon as he thought that, he felt the same energy from before, filling him to the brim, and making the cut on his side close as if nothing had happened.
Even the blood seemed like flowing back into the wound before it closed completely.
The wraith growled and screeched as Miles tilted his head, trying to parry the dark entity's strikes with everything he had.
As soon as the flurry of cuts began, though, it ended. The wraith growled once more, and soon after, its figure became blurry, foggy.
Miles' mouth fell open as he saw the wraith splitting in two, and where there once was one enemy, already hard enough to even fend off, now there were two, and one of them had its bright, red eyes, set on the white rabbit.