> There is something about power that is intoxicating, no matter who you are. Men and women both are enthralled by it, seduced by it, and addicted to it. Power can come in many forms, but one is notably more visceral than all others. When I walked in and saw them there, arranged as they were, my immediate thought was to laugh—and then my second was to worry. I saw the look, then. I saw what impression his power had left, and every instinct in me screamed to warn him off. Sometimes I wonder what might have been different, had I listened.

Instinct, buried muscle memory, and an extrasensory sense of danger saved Arthur from an early grave—and he rolled under the metallic whine of a blade slicing the air his neck had occupied only moments earlier.

Confusion, panic, and anger combined together into a composition that sent suffusing waves of calm focus radiating throughout his body. He felt muscles he barely recognized tense and relax one heartbeat after the other while instinctive preparedness lanced through him like a switch in his brain had been flipped.

He looked up immediately toward his would-be executioner.

A pair of intense green eyes stared back at him.

A sense of familiarity blazed through his mind, but he ignored it reflexively.

His attacker was dressed in a generic maid’s outfit with the sleeves cut off, and had wrapped her face in a definitively feminine scarf to hide her identity. Only the uniform and scarf, combined with the distinctly feminine appearance of her exposed arms, gave away her gender.

He was being attacked by an assassin that had infiltrated the House Leos maids?

All of this rapidly processed through Arthur’s mind in the same moment as his attacker shifted her stance backward, moved her weight, and swung down at him once again with what appeared to be a well-honed steel xiphos.

Arthur rolled away from the blow and pushed himself to his feet, his towel miraculously still in place while he raised his hands in an open-handed guard, and his eyes focused on his enemy.

She was tall, close to or just above six feet.

Extremely uncommon for a Graecian, let alone a woman.

The pale skin of her arms, lightly tanned from Apollo’s touch, showed biceps that were clearly those of a woman used to physical exertion. Not overly large, but well-defined and possessed of clear strength. Going off of the vague shape of curves beneath the conservative uniform, she seemed to have a body ideal for force and speed, with a greater emphasis on the former.

Definitely a woman who excelled at precise blows backed by raw power.

Which, according to his Zacaris memories, was the ideal build for a female assassin.

Arthur glanced around quickly for something to use, and promptly cursed when his attacker came at him once again. This time she launched herself forward with staggering speed, and delivered two precision slashes intended to bisect him at the shoulders.

As if he could anticipate her thoughts and movements, his body reacted.

The first he dodged with an instinctive weave to the left, and the second he threw off by pushing forward into her guard and using his left hand to throw off her right-handed strike with a backhanded slap to her wrist with his own.

Her swing went wide, and Arthur took the chance to jump backwards and roll across the bed toward the closet. Her blade struck the sheets when he passed, and he filed away the fact that it managed to slice clean through the silk and mattress in an explosion of padding and feathers that surprised him.

Real feather mattresses? That was surprising.

His eyes darted from the sword to her face, and he saw a glimmer of frustration in her eyes at his escape. Already she was stepping back to move around the bed and follow him, and so Arthur took three quick steps backward and rolled sideways onto the bed—right near the headboard.

The assassin hesitated.

Arthur didn’t.

Pillows nearby him were picked up and flung with wild abandon using every iota of his gene-enhanced strength, and he heard the thump of impact each one made. His attacker cursed in a voice that sounded almost musical to his ears, and staggered backward while slashing apart the pillows in a spray of fine silk, feather, and stuffing.

Arthur threw the last one and rolled back to his cupboard to rip it open—thanking whatever divine forces there were that it was a ‘classical’ pull open cupboard—and grab at the first two belts he could find. That done, he threw himself back onto the bed.

No sooner than the xiphos was flung out to impale the polished wood of the door.

“Alright, you crazy bitch.” Arthur growled while bringing the belts up and looping one around his waist quickly to hold the towel, while the second he doubled up and gripped between his hands. “Let’s do this.”

“You mean no more running like a coward?” his assailant questioned tauntingly while retrieving her xiphos.

“You have a sword!” he said incredulously.

“And you apparently lack a spine.” she replied angrily.

Why she was angry, of course, was a mystery.

But Arthur wasn’t about to question the mental acuity of an assassin.

Instead he launched himself forward with every iota of his gene-tailored body’s speed at the same moment as she came back into the open area, and this time he didn’t hesitate. When she swung at him, Arthur lifted the belt and used the leather to very carefully deflect the stroke away. He couldn’t catch the blade on the belt, but that wasn’t the goal.

The goal was to do something better.

When the blade was deflected, Arthur took note of the angle of her stance and danced backward, storing the information in his brain and waiting for her to recover.

The moment she did, and her jade eyes narrowed in focus, he charged her again.

This time she tried to stab at him, and Arthur instead ducked down to his left and around the xiphos to lift his hands and push the blade toward her left while standing to her right.

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Her balance was overextended and she momentarily stumbled, enough for Arthur to shift his weight and deliver a short-range snapkick to her stomach with moderate strength.

It felt like kicking a sheet of solid metal, and though he knew he’d encountered several people with stronger bodies, hers still ranked among the most durable he could recall. Given how far he was from the Core, that was both puzzling and quite concerning.

The majority of humans would have had their ribs broken by the force of his blow.

His assailant, though, only slid backward on her feet while managing to stay upright.

Even more concerning was the fact she only appeared moderately winded.

And to truly cap it all off, the would-be assassin still held onto her sword.

Arthur’s eyes glanced across her figure with careful assessment while he tried to find a weak spot to exploit, or a defensive hole through which he could press the advantage. She maintained an admirably solid stance despite his kick, and he felt that even as Arthur Zacaris he would have given her respect for that level of sheer tenacity.

Clearly, he was not the only one in the room with exceptional gene-tailoring.

“Is that it?” she asked with a mild wheeze. “Is that the best you can do?”

Arthur was careful not to let down his guard, though her question perplexed him. What manner of assassin made small talk during an attempted killing? Was it a Graecian custom, or was his opponent simply stalling for time while she recovered?

Not wishing to give her the chance if the latter were the case, he burst into motion.

Arthur moved with every ounce of his gene-enhanced speed toward her while giving her as little time to react as possible. When she did move, he loosely noted a slight widening of her eyes before she brought her xiphos down toward him with a cutting strike at his shoulders.

Arthur lifted the belt up to slide the blow to his left, and forced his assailant to overbalance to her right. Following that, he lifted his right hand off the belt and firmly backhanded her across the jaw.

A shock of familiarity rippled through his mind again, and for a brief instant he almost felt what she did.

Then it was gone.

A snarl of pain and surprise was his reward, and Arthur used the moment to slam his right hand back down against her forearm once, and then twice, and then a third time before she could fully recover.

On the third strike, his left hand seized her spasming right and relieved the xiphos from her grip. Arthur promptly took the blade by the hilt and stabbed it into the wooden footboard of his bed. He would have liked to simply kill her, but that would be contrary to the point of gaining information.

Namely, who it was that had sent her and why.

He might have lost much of himself, but Zacaris had survived enough assassination attempts to understand the value of good intelligence. He would have been a fool and idiot besides not to at least attempt to discover her motivations, or even better; the person who sent her.

Then he could deal with them afterward.

The assassin was even then recovered in the intervening seconds between his disarming her and stabbing the blade into the headboard, and Arthur staggered when a surprisingly adroit kick took him in the ribs.

Stupid fool! His inner Zacaris berated him. You were distracted! Stop thinking!

He felt an actual bruise from her kick, and took a note to her seriously as a result. She really was enhanced. Considerably so, if a simple kick left him in notable discomfort.

Arthur was more ready for the follow-up punch that came afterward, and dodged to the left away from it.

Another followed, and his next dodge—a quick tilting of his head to the left—resulted in the echoing crack of wounded marble when her fist indented the solid stone.

Definitely gene-enhanced.

Her third punch was when he chose to act.

She once again attempted to swing at him and Arthur moved forward and snapped his hand up to grab her wrist, while shifting his weight around to slam his left elbow backward into her stomach. She wheezed at the impact, and Arthur pushed his strength to pull her forward and over him to smash spine-first into the ground.

At the same time, he rotated to grip her by the scarf, lift her head up, and smashed her skull backwards into the stone. When he did, her scarf came off at the same time as he dropped his knees to pin her down with his weight atop her thighs, and tore the blade from the headboard to press the tip against her throat.

His left hand gripped her wrists before she could fully recover, and he watched her intently.

His first thought was that she was durable, given that all the head-smash had seemed to do was cause her to squint at him in pain. She’d barely even grunted.

The second thought he had was that she was obscenely attractive.

She had full pink lips with a natural cupid’s bow to their shape, and a small cut in the lower lip where he had struck her.

Her deep jade-green eyes were matched by dark eyelashes, and her face was constructed in a way that exemplified high cheekbones, a feminine jaw, and the sharper features common among aristocrats in Graecia.

She was so familiar in a way that he couldn’t instantly place, despite his memory.

Her skin was fair, with a slight bronzing from the sun, and on her head waist-length black hair, shot through with streaks of light gold, framed her face from where it had fallen free of the scarf.

Her features were more than beautiful, Arthur noted distractedly, and instead would be better described as breathtaking. Even in an era of broad-reaching and extensive genetic tailoring, the foundation for beauty had to be present before it could be enhanced to something greater.

In the case of his attacker, that process had been embodied and writ large.

“Well?” she demanded with what Arthur noted was a contradictingly authoritative and commanding tone, while raising her chin at him defiantly. “Do your worst, you bastard.”

Arthur bent down to look into her eyes directly, and when he was mere inches away, spoke in a voice of cold menace he remembered from his time as Arthur Zacaris.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” he asked in a soft growl.

Her eyes widened, and of all things, a blush bloomed across her cheeks.

Her lips parted as if to retort, but before she could respond the closed doors to his room burst open.

Arthur and his assailant turned at the same moment to see Endymion and Perseus framed in the doorway, with their blades drawn and their helmets sweeping the interior of the room. Both Kidemónes seemed to acknowledge Arthur for only a moment before examining the destruction left in the wake of the fight, and then promptly lowered their swords.

“Arthur.” Endymion said gruffly. “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing?” Arthur asked incredulously. “I’m about to interrogate my attacker!”

“Arthur, don’t you know who that is?” Perseus asked with perplexing amusement.

“What? No. Should I?”

“Arthur.” Endymion growled. “The woman you’ve got by the throat is the Lion Maiden of Laconia.”

Arthur’s eyes narrowed at Endymion’s words and he looked down to his would-be killer, who stared up at him defiantly in turn.

No wonder her features had been so familiar. She looked like a younger Cassandra.

Looking at her now, he could see the similarity for what it was.

“Hello, Arthur Magellan.” his opponent said with a smile that seemed more like a baring of the teeth. “I’m Circe Leos.”