Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 287

Zaeryn stared up at her, stunned past the point of covering it. "...Flight?" His voice cracked slightly on the word. "What else is there?""Shut up," Mireille said.

The ground beneath him answered before he could. It tore itself loose in one violent motion, ripping free of the floor with him still standing on it, and carried him straight up into open air, a slab of raw stone hanging in space with nothing beneath him but empty air and a long way down.

Then gravity remembered its claim. He dropped.

The fall wasn’t long, maybe ten meters, but it felt eternal. Zaeryn twisted mid-air in a desperate bid for control.

He managed something closer to a controlled crash. Boots slammed into the packed soil with a shockwave of his own. His knees buckled, but he stayed upright, breathing like a cornered animal.

Mireille flew closer to him and hovered just above him now, braid drifting lazily in. She looked... effortless. Regal, even. The way she floated there, arms loose at her sides, just reinforced the fact that she was indeed a powerhouse who could not only do that but also made the ground obey her.

Zaeryn created a little distance between them by stepping back, this way he could see her moves. He struck a fighting stance ready.

"You wanted ruthless," she called down, voice carrying that smoky calm. "So here it is."

The air itself seemed to answer her. Two more slabs of the ground tore upward from the arena floor, flanking Zaeryn like the jaws of a trap.

He rolled sideways to get away from them but the slabs followed, faster than they had any right to be, guided by her will.

Using his speed he finally managed to create the needed distance.

Zaeryn’s will was already at work. Out of thin air he created two separate discs, each one spinning fast enough that its edges blurred into a single unbroken ring of solid gold, humming at a pitch high enough to sting his ears even from this close.

He turned his twin spinning blades toward the two stone slabs closing in on him from both sides. Wherever the blades hit the solid rock, the rock stopped being solid. The slabs split apart into ragged pieces, cut cleanly through, and collapsed in broken chunks around his feet.

For one brief moment, he allowed himself to feel satisfied. He had just witnessed how much his vitae weaving had improved already.

He turned back toward Mireille. She was still hovering several meters above the arena floor, her expression shifting from amused to something closer to genuinely attentive.

She raised her hand and fired again, the familiarity sapphire glare shooting toward him in one straight, unbroken line, and Zaeryn threw himself sideways in the same motion he had used a dozen times already tonight, letting the beam pass close enough to his ribs that he felt its heat even through the miss.

He seized the opening at once, bringing his own palm up and answering her with a Concussive Blast of his own, the pale gold light tearing across the space between them. Mireille tilted out of its path with the same effortless economy of movement she had shown him all fight, and his shot went wide, detonating harmlessly against the far wall of the arena.

She pressed her advantage before he could recover from the miss. The ground beneath his feet lurched again, the soil rippling like something alive, and Zaeryn felt the world start to buckle under him exactly the way it had when she had first launched him into the air.

This time, though, he was ready for it. The moment his footing steadied, he triggered his speed and tore himself clear of the collapsing ground entirely, putting real distance between himself and the wreckage before it could close over where he had been standing.

From there, the fight stopped being a single exchange and became something longer, something that kept going in a way that made it hard for Zaeryn to track exactly where one attempt ended and the next began.

He tried closing the distance on her directly, using the broken remains of one of the fallen slabs to launch himself higher than his legs alone could carry him, only to watch her drift backward out of reach before he ever got close enough to land anything.

He wove the golden bow next, loosing arrow after arrow of condensed light toward her position in the air.

All of them went wide or were swatted aside without much effort on her part.

Mireille did not even bother moving much anymore. She simply tilted her body, raised a hand, or snapped her wrist, and each golden shaft either missed by several feet or shattered against an invisible force. Her aura or something.

Zaeryn clicked his tongue. Direct shots were useless. So on the next draw, he changed the weave.

The arrow formed between his fingers like the others, bright and slender, but this time he shaped it into something more than a simple point. It was hard to hold together and it took far more willpower than a normal construct, but he managed it. He released the string, and several arrows shot toward Mireille at once.

They screamed upward. Mireille’s eyes had already moved off them, tracking them just long enough to confirm they’d all sail wide before she dismissed them entirely. And they did sail wide, every one of them passing harmlessly by her, which was exactly what she was counting on.

What she did not count on was one of those arrows curving back.

As she turned away, the last arrow arced around in the air behind her and drove into her back, carving a thin line across the fabric of her uniform before it dissolved.

For the first time in several minutes, something like genuine surprise flickered across her face.

Zaeryn was just as surprised as she was. He hadn’t known he could steer a construct in flight at all. After watching the whole volley miss, he’d reached for the arrow with a desperate mix of wanting it to come back and forcing his will into it to make it happen, not really expecting either to matter, and somehow the two together had been enough. The arrow had answered him, turned in the air, and found her. He filed the discovery away with everything else this fight had already taught him, and kept moving.

He didn’t let up. He fired Concussive Blast after Concussive Blast at her, and though his aim kept betraying him, the shots landing wide or low or catching nothing but the space where she’d been a half second earlier, enough of them forced her to actually move, to spend real effort dodging instead of hanging there untouched, and that alone felt like progress worth having.

It genuinely was progress, and he could feel it happening in real time. His body was adjusting itself to a fight that had started completely outside anything he knew how to handle.

His speed felt cleaner with every burst, the transitions between bursts growing shorter and more efficient, less wasted motion bleeding out of every movement the longer the fight went on. His aim with Concussive Blast was still nowhere close to where he wanted it, but even a blast that missed its mark was forcing her to actually engage with him instead of simply outlasting him from a safe distance, and every one of her small, controlled dodges told him that whatever this was costing him, it was costing her something too, however little that might be.

His Vitae Weaving kept surprising even him, throwing up constructs he had never consciously planned, a hooked line meant to catch at her ankle when she drifted too low, a broad flat disc he tried using as a springboard to launch himself higher into the air than his own legs could manage alone. More of it actually worked than failed.

He was thinking in ways he had never once had to think before, and some small, stubborn part of him recognized that this, more than any single hit landed or avoided, was the real value in everything he was putting himself through right now.

The problem was that all of it cost him something, and he did not have an unlimited amount of anything left to spend.

His reserves were thinning with every construct he wove and every burst of speed he called on, a deep, hollow kind of tiredness settling into his limbs that had nothing to do with the bruises or the ache in his ribs and everything to do with simply running low on whatever fuel his body had been drawing from to keep any of this going at all.

Mireille, by contrast, showed no sign of slowing down. Her breathing stayed exactly as even and unbothered as it had been from the moment she’d taken to the air, her expression as composed now as it had been at the very start of the spar, and the longer the fight stretched on, the more obvious it became to Zaeryn that whatever ceiling existed on what she was willing to spend tonight, he was nowhere close to finding it.

’Huff. Huff.’ Zaeryn reset his stance again, planting his feet and squaring his shoulders the same way he had done more times than he could count over the last several minutes, but this time the motion came slower and heavier, his body clearly working harder than it should have needed to just to hold a position it had managed effortlessly an hour ago.

He never sweats. But this time it was happening. Sweat ran freely down the side of his face and along his neck, soaking through the collar of his uniform, and his breath came in visible, ragged pulls he no longer had the energy left to hide from anyone watching.

"That’s enough for now."

Daphne’s voice cut across the arena floor, utterly final, the kind of tone that did not invite argument from either of them.

Zaeryn agreed with her. He lowered his arms and sat down on the ground, then finally let himself lie back, staring up at the sky. He breathed out.

Mireille floated over toward Zaeryn and came down out of the air she had been hovering in. She stood over him, watching him.

"Hi?" Zaeryn said. "How did I do?"

"You did great," Mireille said. "Considering your situation and all." She stretched her arm out toward him.

Zaeryn watched it and shook his head. "No, I think... I’ll lie here a little longer, and... catch my breath."

Mireille nodded.

"Anyways," Zaeryn said, "did I really give you a hard time, or were you just holding back?"

The observation deck detached from its mount high above the arena and slid down the curve of the wall on some kind of internal rail, gliding smoothly across the open floor until it came to rest a short distance away. Its sealed doors parted with a soft hiss, and Annalise stepped out first, Daphne close behind her, then Arya and Cyra, all four of them crossing the packed earth toward him.

Mireille looked over at Arya, who was just stepping clear of the deck’s doors. "You did better than Arya. I also noticed that you seemed to be improving at a rapid rate, faster than I could adjust. Your speed and Concussive Blasts have greatly improved compared to when we just started. So yeah, you gave me a hard time," she admitted.

Annalise reached him first and looked down at him with something warm and clearly impressed in her expression. "Impressive fighting skills, Zaeryn."

"You two looked like equals at times," Arya said, arms crossed. "You improved a lot during the fight."

"Thanks," Zaeryn said, still flat on his back, not bothering to sit up for either of them.

Daphne crouched beside him next, tilting his chin slightly to one side with two fingers, her eyes moving over the split skin along his jaw where Mireille’s palm had caught him earlier, then down over the darkening bruise blooming along his ribs.

"You will need to get these looked at properly. The cut on your jaw is shallow, but it will scar if it closes wrong, and that bruising on your ribs is deeper than it looks from here."

"No need to worry," Cyra said, already lowering herself to her knees beside him before anyone had asked her to. "I can fix him up."

She reached out and pressed two fingers gently against his cheek, just beside the cut.

"What are you doing?" Zaeryn asked, going still under her touch.

"Healing the cut," Cyra said, as though the answer should have been obvious. "I have healing powers. And I can heal this cut."

"Really." He held still, more curious now than wary. "Go ahead, then."

Cyra’s brow furrowed, her fingers pressing a fraction firmer against his skin, waiting for the familiar warmth of her powers to answer her the way it always did.

Nothing happened.

"Strange," she murmured, frowning down at her own hand as though it had personally betrayed her. "It is not working. My healing powers are not doing anything at all."

Zaeryn pushed himself up onto his feet properly this time, ignoring the ache still radiating through his ribs, and looked down at Cyra with genuine surprise written across his face. "Are you sure that’s not just... you? What tier are you?"

"Three," Cyra said, still frowning at her own hand.

"Vitae tier mismatch, then?" Zaeryn offered. "Maybe you need to be higher to heal someone in my bracket, or whatever."

"No." Cyra shook her head, certain of it even through her confusion. "A tier gap would mean something if I were trying to bring a dead woman back, that draws deep, and a Tier 3 healer genuinely could struggle against that kind of demand. But sealing a shallow cut is nothing. It costs almost nothing to do. There is no version of the tier system where I should fail at something this small."

"Well." Zaeryn rubbed the back of his neck. "I have healed before. Not from Vitae, from tech, there was a doctor who used some kind of regenerator on me a while back, and it worked fine. So maybe it’s not me. Maybe your ability’s just not connecting, for whatever reason."

"That is impossible." Cyra’s voice sharpened, more offended on behalf of her own power than anything else. She rose to her feet, crossed to where Mireille stood, and reached for the small, faint scrape along her shoulder where one of Zaeryn’s stray arrows had grazed her earlier in the fight. The moment her fingers touched it, the mark simply vanished, the skin closing over as though it had never been broken at all.

Cyra turned back to Zaeryn, and whatever amusement had been in her expression before was gone now.

"There is something wrong with you," she said. "You are not healing."

Daphne, standing a short distance away, had gone very still, her eyes fixed on him with the particular sharpness of someone filing away a detail she had no intention of letting go.

---

Not long after, Daphne brought a regenerator unit like the one Dr. Aveline had used on him identical in every visible way, humming faintly as she passed it slowly over the fading bruise along his ribs.

The last time he had one of these used on him, he had healed with no issues. So this should work is what he believed.

The device beeped once, the way it always did when it registered a target and began its work.

Nothing changed.

Daphne frowned at the readout, adjusted a setting, and passed it over the same spot again. The bruise sat exactly where it had been, untouched, unresponsive, as though the machine were running over empty air instead of skin.

"That’s weird," Zaeryn said, watching her try a third time. "This exact thing worked on me not that long ago."

"I know." Daphne’s frown deepened, her eyes flicking between the readout and the bruise itself, as if the two of them refusing to agree with each other was a personal insult. "This should work."