I snap.

Dimly, I’m aware of Cal sprawling as I kick off her and lunge from the ground faster than a shadow fleeing light. The distance between Thane and I evaporates. I’m onto him in an instant. Eye-to-eye, magmatic gold filling my vision for a split second before he sidesteps with precognitive grace and smashes his staff into me like a stubborn tree trunk.

My body folds. Air ejecting as I’m lifted off my feet. World tumbling. I’m flung out of the clearing and crash into the rows of vats like a cannonball, ending inside one amidst a nest of broken black umbilical cables. Sparks skitter across the floor. Tinkling glass drips off me. Fresh slices gleam red down my exposed back. A console outside the vat clicks and churns, glowing pale green beneath a veneer of fresh blood. Glowing indigo liquid drips into my hair from some ruined tube.

A howl builds in my chest. I hiss a seething gasp through chattering teeth. My nails scrape and break against hard metal. The howl rises to my throat. I shake. I shudder. Glass vibrates like wind chimes. I mumble a single word through the maelstrom like a death curse: Again. My lips repeat that word in a murderous promise: Again. Again. My soul screams to give in. And finally, I stop caring to hold it back.

The nightmare of aura I’ve been keeping so tenuously bottled ignites like a match dropped on a nitromethane puddle. Every pore of my body bursts open at once. Black, monstrous ki flashes into the laboratory like a hurricane. Chokingly noxious. My body isn’t ready for the shock. Dark kinetic energy surges into every inch of skin, every twine of muscle, every fiber of nerve in a single beat of my manic heart. Searing my nerves from the inside out. And my soul keeps churning the energy out at a freakish speed I can’t control, siphoning limitless fuel from the killing frenzy in my head. Raging faster. Faster. Devouring the emotion in gasps and gulps as it feeds and feeds and feeds and my head snaps back to Thane like a puppet possessed and I’m gonna kill him. I’m going to kill him. I’m going. To. Kill.

The lab groans, datapads and debris whirling into the hurricane, the entire sublevel creaking as it’s made to bend under the force of a nightmarish flood of energy. Kinetic tremors shudder through the floor. Bolts and debris rattle across the deck. Even the light dims as it’s bathed in my wrath. Anything not screwed down is swept into the tempest. It’s insane. More raw ki dumps into the atmosphere in half a second than twenty lesser fighters could summon in an entire minute. And it doesn’t stop.

Inside, the dark flood escalates in an unending runway. Eating me alive. I scream as crackling pain shoots through my body so forcefully that my back arches in reverse, fingers real and fake clawing on air. Sensing the exponentially rising danger, Thane reaches out with his master’s infamous class, liquifying the floor around me. Metal spreads and encompasses like a flytrap closing shut.

Decades of hardcoded instincts take over. I just barely manage to snap back into control, riding rodeo on the mind-blanking torrent coursing through me. Black ki crackles down my limbs. Explosive, like rocket fuel injected straight into muscle tissue. Spinning off the ground, I let the power flow through my palm and saw out of the closing prison, then dive back at the clearing haloed by a buckshot payload of half-melted steel. Behind, the severed upper half of the tank slides off and smashes into the ceramic floor with a sound like a temple bell.

“Cal!” Thane shouts.

But the tidal force I’ve awakened inside can’t be stopped. It catapults me forward in a flash flood of movement. Closing the distance to Thane. I ricochet through the derelict tanks and slash down to slide sparking across the floor, carbon fiber arm screaming in protest as a knife whizzes through the trailing tail of my hair.

I twist mid-slide to see Cal recoiling from the throw. My left hand snaps up on reflex. The power within leaps to without. I don’t even have to think to channel it. All the aura pouring from me bends to the overwhelming will of my violence and focuses down my arm, through my palm, building to the intensity of an orbital strike in a nanosecond. Inhaling the atmosphere like the world itself is gasping in shock.

A pulse of dark light shatters the lab like a thunderclap, tearing through holotables and Oldtech machinery like dry paper before churning into rest of the machinary. Cal disappears inside the blast. The kinetic shockwave rips a cone of destruction meters wide. Scorched ozone sizzles like bacon in the aftermath. I twist through the smoke and skip off the floor in a corkscrew bullet jump, slamming into Thane’s raised staff so hard I hang in midair on sheer momentum.

“You’re dead,” I hiss over the weapon, nearly faltering outright from the pain of the ever-escalating aura. Mind white with agony, yet I’m seeing through it anyways. My whole body shudders from the load. But I can take it. I can take it. “You’re dead,” I gasp again, meeting his iron gaze.

“And you’re out of control.” Thane stares through the strands of his fallen hair unblinking. “You’re everything your father feared you’d be.”

“Because of you, Thane!” My voice cracks with hate. “You took everything from me and still you laugh. As if I was left with anything other than this anger I suffer! I hate you, I hate him, I hate that I hate you and that Dad is gone and he will never see me again. I hate that I am alone! You should have killed me when you killed him!”

His eyes widen. I howl and throw all my supercharged strength into him, wrenching his staff out of the way. Too hard. He lets the weapon drop and releases his grip, letting my momentum carry me past with the staff still clutched in my hands.

I react on sheer reflex, cutting at his neck with a chop as I overshoot. Thane deflects it barehand, redirecting the human-shattering force over his shoulder with the most minor of movements. My toes jam down. Monastic weaponry filling my hands. Even if it’s Thane’s, I’m not untrained. The staff glides across my carbon-fiber palm as I swipe it across my back in a defensive cross to intercept Thane’s replying strike. I finish the spin and burst into him with an animalistic frenzy of knee strikes, kicks, and jabs that he blocks like he’s reprimanding a child. Deflecting my blows so eloquently that I can’t displace him a single inch.

The futile onslaught only enrages me more. Feeding the positive feedback loop that’s devouring my soul. I snap a low kick to clip Thane’s ankles and he steps powerfully into my range instead, stamping a foot down between my legs to cut off my rotation. My eyes widen as I feel the ground shift beneath me and a beam of metal pistons out of the floor, launching me away in a ragdoll flip.

Thane’s staff clatters into the darkness. Tumbling through the air, I rotate and throw an arm out backwards. Black energy surges and leaps at him like lightning, erupting into a pillar of black light five feet wide. Thane casually snaps his fingers. Holotables and gurneys lunge out like snakes as I flip past, snagging my torso and clotheslining me back to the ground. Cutting the blast off at the neck. The beam reaches him a heartbeat later. Enough power in that impulsive burst to level a Titan-classed Mecha. But rather than disappear inside it, Thane catches the energy in his hands and bends it like water. Horrifically painful black lightning crackles down his arm as it flows towards his other palm. He doesn’t even grimace. Animal panic spikes inside as he mouths a mantra I know by heart:

“First comes hands.”

And my father’s teachings tear back at me in a beam of my own kinetic energy, melting me under a metal prison. More molten debris rains down across the lab as the carnage I wreaked scatters across the space like steel leaves.

I tremble beneath the slag as it cools and pings. Scorched across my entire back. Vibrating on the edge of sanity. Spine bracing against the scalding heat as I strain to shove free. Even just to get my hand free enough to start sawing with ki. Panting for breath, I listen for the calm pace of Thane approaching to finish me off. But it’s another, far softer pair of soles that treads casually into my vision first, halfway around the other side of the clearing.

“I thought you wanted her alive,” Cal says.

“Tay isn’t the type to listen to words, believe me. The only cure for a temper like hers is to beat it until it can’t move.” The buzzing sound fades as Thane exchanges classes again. A Shifter’s wind stirs the battlefield. I can almost hear him crane his neck to examine the currents of my kinetic hurricane. He stretches his shoulder in a small circle. “I know you feel that murderous miasma too, Cal. Her bloodlust radiating into you, infecting you with its frenzy. That’s what’s left of her soul. I hope it cures you of the idea of growing a morality. She just tried to kill you.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“I don’t exactly blame her.” Cal’s smoking, singed leather boots creak as she nudges Thane’s fallen staff. “She was right about you. All this time.”

“You already knew that,” he warns. “Perhaps not in full, but enough. Your hands are no less stained. Don’t think you’re any safer from her.”

“Believe me…” Cal stomps on the end of the staff like an airboard, flipping it up into her hand. “…I’m well aware.”

Shifting wind stirs Thane’s hair to the side. “Don’t. You’ll regret it.”

He says it with such finality that she freezes on instinct. Then he switches back to me. Gaze piercing through all the debris I’m buried beneath. “You’ve forgotten why you should have been more afraid of losing, Tay.” He clicks his tongue. “Let this be a ray of reality for that delusion.”

Thane waves his hand and the metal burden I strain to cut through, flash-fried into place by his ki blast, suddenly lifts free. Ruined projector screens flash across my retinas. I throw myself sideways and the metal reforms with sentient precocity, wrapping around my neck and legs. Dragging me back towards the ground. I fight it every inch, choking for breath, hands slamming down and arms bracing just to stop myself from being flattened out like a prize rug. Then, just before my quivering strength fails, Thane suddenly grunts and the pressure halts.

Fighting against the weight around my neck, I wrench my head up to see Thane stagger forward a single step, face tight with pain. The hilt of a dull metal blade protrudes from his shoulder.

“Would you look at that,” Cal says, casually spinning Thane’s staff in her hand. “Bluffing after all.”

The moment of distraction is all I need. Agonizing ki explodes again through my veins as I feel Thane’s control slacken. No hesitation. I rip out of my metal bonds and flash forward, loosed across the battlefield in an arrow of black light.

Golden eyes blink up to meet me. An invisible wind kicks through Thane’s hair, the omen of his Shifter powers activating again as he exchanges classes. A white spellbook blinks into his hands-

“-Spell Dilation, Avaritic Arsenal, Energy Conduction Five-”

-the book dematerializes and he shifts classes again the instant before I hit. Translucent light of a Guardian-classed barrier flashes into hexagonal shape between us. My bones creak as I slap into the field and rebound wildly, pinwheeling towards Cal as she dives to attack me from the other side. I bend my momentum into a wild twist, throwing my shoulder at her and whipping into a three-sixty reverse kick so fast my toes skip clear of the ground.

She’s already springing over my head. White wood flashes. Carbon fiber sparks four times in a single second as she passes, too fast an exchange for anything but a slow-motion replay to catch. Nicked but not hurt. Blocking my strikes without replying in kind, she slashes down on my other side, deflects a chasing attack Thane aims at my spine, then dives straight into him with his own weapon.

Cal’s opening salvo is even faster than the one she used on me, a whirling series of acrobatic low-high crosses that buys precious seconds. “He killed your father, didn’t he!?” she shouts back. “So fight! Snap out of it and fight, you stubborn, freckled mess! I’m doing this for you!”

Thane meets her like mercury. He shifts classes and a battered six-o-clock revolver with a white-black paintjob fills his hands. Weaving around the staff’s ends as Cal hunts for his center mass. Precognizant footwork, sidestepping with perfect timing borne from years of elite experience, then pivoting back-to-back and using his sister as a shield like an unwilling dance partner. Somehow the revolver’s barrel locks onto me as I close. Sapphire electrolytic rounds prime in the ammo cylinder, then scream across the clearing in staccato as he squeezes the trigger without stopping.

One round skitters off my leg and another slams into my side as I juke. Paralytic current erupts through the muscles like a cramp. Slowing but not stopping me as I compress the black ki pouring out of me into a crackling dark star within my palm, then flip through a sideways cartwheel to add a martial artist’s flourishing momentum to the supersonic blast that I jerk back a hair-trigger from releasing.

Through my scorched fingers, I watch as Cal feints low and strikes high at Thane’s Gunslinger revolver, smacking the weapon from his grip. Her offhand sweeps at his open neck with a hidden dagger. Already retaliating, Thane meets the edge of the blade with an open palm and the dagger turns to liquid as it flows out of her hand, across his skin, then over his shoulders and into his other hand where he backhand whips it at me without even looking.

I rip to the side. Cold steel punches through the meat of my collar instead of my heart. My control frays. Snaps. Before I can reign in the impulse that fires back, the blast building in my hand releases with a firecracker cackle. Kinetic wrath punches through the air like a supersonic delete key. Half the laboratory is wiped out in the breadth of a thought. Spilt oil ignites in a curtain of flame to ring the clearing.

Filling the space Thane just pivoted out of, Cal has a microsecond of warning to activate her Relic before she’s atomized in his place. Ki vacuums into her Relic in a stream of light. Thane gives her no respite. He throws himself between Cal and I like my father would in the garden, using our disharmony to unravel each other. Dueling against both sides simultaneously. Building his flow step by step. Eyes whispering closed he seamlessly cycles classes again and a web of electric-blue nanolines wraps into a Duelist blade with a circular crossguard in his right hand. I leap in to stop him from finishing the weapon and he snaps his fingers instead, combusting elemental fire from the atmosphere to slam my head sideways into a workstation.

Stars explode through my head. Unconsciousness pushing hard against my brain. I drip off the desk with a groan. Thane’s undivided attention falls on his sister. Focusing her down. Pruning the variables. Gami’s teachings now, not my father’s. A logical equation he wields to deadly effect.

She does well to last six seconds. Too fast to react to by eye, Thane’s blade cross-slashes from opposing directions to envelop Cal’s attention; keeping her fully trapped in defense. A flash of metal carves across the nerves of the wrist she controls her Relic with before she can activate it again. Then Psionic tampering muddies her reflexes. He shifts classes and electricity arcs into her legs from nearby machinery, staggering her footwork. He shifts again. Sword blows rain down on her like hammer falls. Telekinetically seized debris shatters her shoulder joint with a wet pop. Her defense caves under the omnidirectional onslaught. A near miss carves off a flap of bicep and a chunk of an ear on the opposite side. Right side, left side. Opening up her center line. Lungracian stance, first mantra. Before she can recover, Thane ends the exchange like an executioner, pivoting one-eighty to hack through her and meet me in the same motion.

He swings without thinking, expecting Cal to do anything but be cut in half at the waist. He doesn’t see she’s faltered to her wounds until it’s too late.

An instinct wildly different from the killing frenzy fires through me as I see it happening. My body responds without thinking. My hateful aura suddenly evaporates. I lunge forward and throw my arm into the path of the blade, shielding Cal with my body. Metal bites into flesh and bone from wrist to elbow. Biting deep. I stifle a grunt. Blood wells and pours. Our eyes meet for a fraction of a second, false blue against magmatic gold.

Then the force of the blow hurls me away and we’re tumbling and I’m clutching Cal half-conscious to my chest, gasping for breath as the pain shakes through me. Eyes fixed on Thane all the while. He doesn’t make a move to chase me. Just calmly magnetizes his staff back into hand from the depths of the flames, eyeing the dark storm that’s suddenly faded around us.

My chest rises and falls at a manic pace, still gripped by the adrenaline high. Left arm hanging limp, flesh scorched like a sunburn from neck to nails, blood dripping and oozing freely, shuddering down to the fingers. Stained hair draped lifelessly across my face. I keep backing up, never once letting Thane leave my vision. Fists aching to ruin him as he has me. But I can’t. I can’t. I can’t push it. I should have known better. I couldn’t beat him at my best, and I should never have fought him now. But I did.

And now I’m running in the only way I know. A wild animal slinking away from a threat.

Thane stops me with a shout. Not an angry shout. A worried one. The named bullet he knows will find my heart.

“Tetsuka,” he calls, letting my name linger for tortuous seconds. “I don’t want to hurt you. Just stop and listen to me, please.”

Wet-eyed, I feel out the grating that we entered through with my feet and kick it open.

“You’re just delaying the inevitable. I’m not the only one hunting for you. If Gami learns that you’re still alive, I can’t protect you from him.” He breathes out quietly, that tentative way he does before saying something without testing the future. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

He holds out a callused hand for me to take. Planting the seeds as his master did so long ago.

“I still need your strength. You could join me. End all of this running and hiding. Hate me if you must, but listen to me, Tay. Together, we could be enough to stop him. We could make things right.” His hand waits. “I can’t do it alone.”

I search his hand for a long moment before shaking my head. The faintest, tortured twitch.

“Make things right?” My voice cracks in disbelief, bloodshot tears slipping down my cheeks. “You took him from me, Thane. How could you?”

His eyes close, fingers curling reticently inwards one by one.

“How could you?” I croak. “Dad loved you, and you killed him.”

He has no answer.

I turn my back and run.