Valance gets one syllable of her incantation out before a bone-deep tremor cuts her off.
Behind her, the citadel’s doors split down the center with a seismic rumble, groaning open to reveal a vast ascending staircase flanked by towering metal effigies with unfinished features. Her words trail away. All of us following her gaze towards the top of the stairs where a corridor stretching towards the breaking dawn bisects the entire fortress with winter light. At its distant end waits a gleaming speck of metal that rests in perfectly preserved condition atop the citadel’s external landing pads. But it is not the door nor the dawn that gives Valance pause.
A piece of my heart waits atop the citadel steps, facing that distant brushstroke sky of royal gold and purple. His eyes are dark. Brow furrowed. Defiant shoulders silhouetted so completely that only a halo’s edge of sunset crests them.
A cruel gust of winter wind flutters through the empty sleeves of the coat that hangs from his shoulders, twisting my heart to the breaking point.
Once, long ago, he said he always wore his coats like that. Another lie for me.
As long as his back is turned, I can believe the naive illusion before me. But as the callous shadow that replaced my soulmate finally turns the molten gold of his eyes on me after an agonizing pause for breath, I know that illusory future I always wanted was never going to be our destiny. There is only one end for dark stars and the comets they dance with.
The fading boom of the grand doors is the only sound that fills the courtyard. The others are stunned by the sight of Thane. He pays them no heed, not even glancing at Valance when she stutters out his name in confusion. He only has eyes for me, and I for him. We speak without sharing words. Our communication an instinctual evolution of years, the slightest hints of body language. Regret. Certainty. Pain. The final vestiges of a bond that has suffered so long without breaking.
No one dares move at first. Pretend all she may, not even Valance is stupid enough to test a reputation like Thane’s when she doesn’t know where he stands. Aurix’s fiery aura gushes and roils in the quiet. Cal fingers a dagger. The mech pilot primes a small toggle on his gauntlet. Yuki wipes at his forehead and reforms his icy blades, glancing from Thane to the trio of Shadows corralling him on the other side. Jolie reaches into the interior pocket of her jacket. Her eyes narrow behind her glasses, darting from her nephew to the murderer of her twin brother, then finally to where the gunship waits beyond the opposite end of the citadel. Tension building like a lit dynamite fuse.
Thane breaks the silence first, casting his voice at me. “You saved me the trouble of coming to get you.”
The coldness of his voice is that of a stranger; but I wonder how deeply he means it anymore. I still hear the loneliness in his words that no one else will. Desperation for what we should have been. But it does not make him any less determined. The man he thinks he has to become has long since buried the man he wanted to.
“I won’t let you stop us,” I reply, dangerously low.
“Because you think you can.” He looks to our right, to the ending night. “Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t.”
Our eulogy is already written in his eyes. But even if I know it’s pointless, I cannot stop myself from reaching out one last time.
“Tell me something, Thane.”
He pauses. “Anything.”
My voice falters. “…Why?”
He cannot look me in the eyes.
“I am what I am,” he quietly says. “Just as you are.”
Horrible determination settles over my heart. My eyes close, lips pressing into a hard line. Fingers curling into fists while Valance’s harsh voice steals into the frigid tension.
“You should’ve been more careful in your choice of allies, Thane.”
“I’m well aware,” he replies to her, coldly eyeing over the others. Lingering longest on Jolie. “I see nothing but enemies here.”
Hairs prickle up the back of my neck.
“Your game is up. The cards are on the table for everyone to see. There’s only one way out of this mess now.” Valance tips her head from me to Jolie. “Embrace that you lost your gamble, help us apprehend them, and I’ll do what I can to assuage our master’s wrath once we bring the prizes in. Or run your defiance to its dead end.” She unlatches the spellbook on her waist with one manicured finger. “Your choice.”
A simple wooden staff materializes in Thane’s hands. A weapon only capable of admonishing blows on its own. The weapon of a master. Not a student.
The weapon of someone who does not need it to secure his victory.
“Betrayal is natural in our world,” Thane says, idly rotating the staff with a lifetime’s worth of grace. “Gami won’t care if he loses a pawn to gain a queen. Nor will he care whose hand plays the board.” The staff’s end hammers once against the floor. “Only that the pieces know their place.”
Listening to the danger instinct crawling up my spine, I call on my heart again and push my aura out to its full intensity, casting long shadows across the plaza. Fresh pulses of ki push into my tired muscles. Burning away my exhaustion and propping up my already exhausted body. A scalpel’s sharpness files my mind to a razor point.
Realizing what they’re trapped between, the mech pilot abandons the Shadows’ trident formation to guard Valance’s back instead, broken leg nearly buckling from the effort it takes to hobble sideways. Jolie whispers into Yuki’s ear. Cal catches me with a side-eye glance. I respond with only a nod. Too focused on Thane as he shrugs off his coat. With him, even the slightest tell could spell instant loss.
The currents of my aura stir through his black hair like a hurricane’s omen. Eyes closed, he pauses at the wind’s touch like the caress of an old friend. His hand tightens around the center of the staff. That dynamite fuse ticking, ticking away. Then his eyes open once more.
Gold is all I see.
For a fleeting moment, we’re standing in the garden of my home, teenagers squaring off on the whitewashed marble for the ten thousandth time. Eyes locked, bodies tense, awaiting my fathers call. Bamboo and sunshine our only observers. A songbird chirps in the distance. The Lungracian tree shivers, wind plucking a pair of silver leaves from its branches and casting them spiraling down to the marble.
The image burns away as the standoff collapses in a surreal silence. Crumbling one link at a time. Aurix wordlessly breaks formation and rushes forward. Then Valance and the mech pilot follow like the chains of an anchor being slurped into the sea, shattering the spellbound stillness.
Only then does Thane move.
Accelerating into a flow of motion without even appearing to step, he shifts a class and instantly puts himself in the gap between the Shadows and their quarry, throwing three nervekiller strikes at every corner of Aurix’s body simultaneously. He goes down in a quivering mess. Jolie’s hand flashes from her jacket. Metal sparks and peals as Thane bats her extendable blade to the side without even looking and sweeps his staff in a low crescent behind his back, clipping her ankles out from beneath her. Rather than strike in the momentary gap, Yuki sees through the bait and drops his swords to catch Jolie instead, spiriting her up the steps while a warding slick of ice spreads in his wake.
Thane arches an eyebrow at the nonaggression. His hand lifts at Yuki’s back, a Shifter’s wind stirring his hair until Valance begins an incantation of her own.
The Psi hisses out a curse and aborts the spell as one of Cal’s daggers wings past her jugular, carrying on to miss Thane by a millimeter as he pivots to the side on unreal reflex. Cal hits the remaining Shadows like a rip current. Vaulting over the shoulder of the limping mech pilot, she saws her dagger across a gap in his back armor before whipping into an evasive roll as telekinetically flung debris from Valance blows past her head. The roll ends in a forward spring as she lunges up towards Thane instead. His focus flickers to her, already split in three different directions.
I flash in.
Bursting across the plaza in a bolt of light, I rebound off the citadel’s huge doors and crash into Thane from a completely unprotected direction. Sheer kinetic momentum transfers from my body to his. We bowl off the staircase and into the grand central corridor head over heels. Limbs swinging, hands grappling, clawing at his throat. Trying to trap him down. We roll wildly again and I throw an elbow at his head. Point blank, but he’s already twisted and kicked me away with a judo reverse. He cartwheels back to his feet and instantly lunges at me. Staff whirling, smashing through a brutal frontal assault ten hits long as he harries me down the vast atrium and towards the sunrise.
Zero time to recover. Blow after blow rains into my arms and legs from every direction. Leaning hard on the principles of the negative edge; every strike firing with chaser already in motion. Hewing me down like an unwanted tree. If his patience is a dam, his skill is the avalanche that follows. A flood of oscillating techniques that never stops, weaving a roulette of momentum that drives me down the corridor in a rapid backpedal. It’s like being plunged into frozen water. Thane swings with impossible force and unrelenting speed, constantly altering his physical properties or shifting classes right at the moment of impact to maximize stopping power. He’s as fast as I am and twice as precise. A gardener trimming patiently away at the hedges until an opening appears.
Anything less than a perfect defense will end me.
I’m locked into retreat from the very first instant. I can’t even hit back. It’s impossible that he’s even better than he used to be, much less to this degree. But he is. Cal was incredible to even last six seconds against him.
Once applied, Thane’s pressure never releases. It only grows. His face is set, golden eyes narrowed in concentration as the staff continues its destructive path in an opening series I’m starting to fear will never end. Yuki opened with one brilliant strike when we sparred. My limit is twelve. Thane passes twenty without even bothering to exhale.
Every block I make is another lost foothold. The momentum shoving me back mounts into an unstoppable force in moments, blinding me to the bar of metal Thane ejects out of the pair of statues our fight brings us beneath. Blunted steel pistons into my chest, launching me away in a wild tumble right as Cal attacks him from behind. He changes targets with the mechanical efficiency of a bullet being chambered. Cycles a class and blinks away from her with a Magus teleportation spell, only to reappear beside me and cleave down with an overhead strike I almost twist an ankle kicking away from. A Mecha flechette shot chases me as I flip back to my feet, microfragments riddling my collar instead of my eyes when I jerk my head to the side. But he’s just getting started. I gasp in pain and lock back onto Thane right as he shifts classes again, transforms his staff into a six-o-clock revolver, then twists and fires a seemingly random shot at an angled piece of architecture forming the foot of a ten-meter-tall statue.
Cal grunts and stumbles as the ricochet slaps into her bicep. Her knife flails out of her fingers mid-throw and clatters awry into a corner. Just ahead of us, Jolie shouts out over the chaos.
“Help them! I’ll make it!” she yells, shoving free of Yuki’s grip.
Before the Duelist can dash back to help, I throw a hand out and fire a ki blast into the roof of the corridor, triggering a collapse between us. Yuki’s aghast face vanishes behind a wall of debris.
“Tetsuka!” he shouts.
“Go! Run!” I shout back. “Take care of her! I’m trusting you!”
I whip my head back to the fight. Aurix and Valance are summiting the steps. Cal pants for breath, trapped weaponless between them and Thane. Blood oozes between the fingers she keeps clamped over the bullet hole in her arm. Knowing he can’t beat me quick, Thane calls his staff back to his hand and bears down on her instead.
I move without thinking. Protective instinct hurls me at Thane’s just in time to eat the back end of his staff. Hard wood smashes into my stomach, resplitting my still-healing gut wounds. Bending with the blow, I force all of my ki into my leg and cleave at his neck with a cyclonic kick as I start to fall away. Thane catches my foot barehand and wrenches it to the side, twisting my ankle and throwing me away with a brutally fast exertion. My hands touch the ground and I fling out a microsecond blast at his legs, buying the moment I need to land back on my feet. My back slams into a hard wall. I grunt and fire again, forcing Thane to kick a defensive sheet of metal from the floor. It melts to slop when I put my heart into the next blast, collapsing the steel into a molten slurry at the same moment a firecracker staccato booms further down the hall.
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Aurix flashes back into the fight like a fireball. Cal hurls herself to the deck as he swings out at her with a flyby punch. Thane doesn’t even look up. Catching an incoming beam of elemental fire- hot enough to boil living flesh- in the palm of his hand, Thane snuffs it out with a snap of his fingers and grabs Aurix by the face mid-charge. He redirects the brawler’s momentum like a pulley, sweeping him off his feet and smashing him facefirst into the deck with casual violence. Like he’s hammering a nail into a board.
“Stop him!” Valance yells. My mind roils as her hostile takeover hits all of us at once. Violent impulse directed at Thane surges into my brain. “Stop him now! I can’t-”
The only one immune to the Psi’s control, Cal slips off her Relic and slings it at Valance with a backhand flick. The suppression field envelops Valance right at the moment of impact. Mental clarity rushes back. Perfectly synced with his sister, Thane ducks beneath another of my ki blasts so it slags the blockage between us and the landing pad, jams a foot into the deck to make a javelin-length bar of metal using borrowed elemental control, then swivels his hips and snap kicks it down the corridor like a spear shot from a magnetic cannon. It flashes perfectly past Cal as her Relic bounces back to her, firing into Valance’s stomach so hard the gory, impaling tip protrudes half a foot from her back. Sheer momentum punches through the Psi like a second fist to the chest. She stumbles backwards and crumples with a bloody groan.
Thane shifts to Ki Fighter and bursts through the open gap after Jolie. I follow a fraction of a step behind, forcing my heart to churn out even more aura to keep up. Shuddering amounts of power erases the distance between us. He whirls and throws up his staff in a defensive cross the moment before I crash into him. We strain against each other for a terrifying second. I in midair trying to force my leg through, he pushing back all too easily.
Our warring auras blast through the corridor in a whirling maelstrom. At the top of my vision, I just barely see as Jolie and Yuki break out into the grey-clouded dawn and sprint across the landing pad. The waiting gunship’s doors gasp open at a key from my aunt’s JOY. She disappears inside at a full sprint. A braid of golden color ripples as Yuki twists back to see Thane slam me to the ground and launch me away with a brutal kick. My insides groan around the hit.
“Enough, Tetsuka.” Thane glances to the landing pad as the gunship’s engines activate with a deep-throated rumble. “You won’t beat me. Put down the sword.”
“So I can be a prize for your master?” My chest shudders from a violent cough. Skin sparking to an even brighter glow. “A prize for you?”
He flinches.
One by one, my fingers curl inwards.
“You think… after everything you’ve done…”
One by one my limbs find their strength.
“…everything you’ve taken…”
Inch by inch I force up onto my knees, head hanging, gasping for breath.
“…that I’m just going to give up?”
I slam a fist into the metal. Seismic shudders begin to wrack the citadel. My gaze snaps up.
And I snarl that word for myself.
“Think again.”
I unravel from the floor. Smear the back of my hand across my face, streaking the glowing skin with sizzling blood. Cal jogs up beside me. Holding out a hand, she helps me up the rest of the way. We knock knuckles and stride forward side by side.
“Together,” she says, face set in grim determination.
“Me and you,” I echo.
I glance over, catch her doing the same. She smirks away from the look and shuts her Relic’s suppression field off with a flick of her wrist. A pair of long blades woven from pure light spool out of my aura and into her hands. They spin easily; the weight familiar, the balance perfect.
“He’s not wrong,” she says. “We can’t beat him. Not like this.”
“We don’t have to beat him.” I nod at the gunship. “We just have to buy time.”
“…I’m starting to realize that you always pick the worst places to start being a hero.”
I swing my left arm in a small circle, reseating the shoulder joint with a grunt of pain. “It’s hereditary. Can’t help it.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You don’t? You’re the one who’s always having to save me.”
“It’s got its perks. Smokeshow girl who’s always falling into my arms, more chances to flirt than the Varsity on a weeknight, a sweet-ass bike…” she shrugs. “It’s a nice change of pace, being one of the good guys.”
Thane drops his staff to a horizontal plane behind his back, settling into the old comfort of the Lungracian stance. His eyes flick between us. Calculating. Then back to the landing pad. His final chance to force our hands. We can’t let him have it.
Cal and I lunge forward as one.
Not alternating or flanking, but moving together side-by-side. I don’t even have to think about syncing up. Cal moves like my own shadow. When she stumbles, I take the fore. When I overextend, she’s there to shield me with quick toggles of the Relic. We grow smoother in seconds than I’ve ever been with another fighter. Small jostles, quick words, a panting quip the only recalibration we need as we hound Thane towards the landing pad.
We always knew he would be preparing to fight against her Relic. He gave it to her, after all. Our only chance to hold the line isn’t to rely on it to make him weaker. It’s to embrace what makes us stronger. Embrace the light that Cal brought back to me. The skin-tingling effects of the aura, energy overflowing from me to her, propping us both up longer than we should ever be able to stand against Thane.
I don’t know if I ever could beat him, even with Cal’s help. But I don’t have to. Thane may be the better fighter between us, but I have a monopoly on stubbornness. I just have to drag him down with me when I fall.
Icy rain showers over us as we break out onto the opposite side of the citadel; fresh snowflakes melting into sleet when they fall into the heat of my aura. Weak winter sunlight fights to crack through the grey-enveloped sky. Blinking through the half-melted rain, outnumbered and unable to use his Shifter abilities for more than a moment without Cal’s Relic interfering, Thane still manages to fight back at a backpedal almost better than he does on solid ground. Every movement he makes executes attack and defense in the same action. He analyzes our patterns and counters by breaking us apart individually. Dissecting my overreliance on Cal. Answering in a twisted helix of two champions’ styles, singling me out time and time again. But even as he seeks to break me and I him, there is no hatred to us now. Not anymore. We are children again as we fight to the death.
The last shift he manages changes his staff to the falchion he ended our last fight with. We never let him slip away again. I overextend to steal his attention and keep him from stopping Jolie’s escape, even when his strikes start landing truer and truer.
Every slash I intercept in Cal’s place, every injury Thane leaves forces me to feed greater and greater rivers of energy into my wounds just to keep standing. I can feel Cal flagging at the same rate I am. Even with nearly limitless amounts of ki to draw on, I’ve been pushing out fighting levels of aura since I started chasing Aurix. My heart is fluttering as it’s pushed to the brink. My body, still repairing itself, can’t sustain so long a strain without breaking down at the molecular level. Human bodies weren’t meant for this. Yet mine devours the agony with an ever-growing hunger. My teeth chatter as flesh chars at the tips of my fingers. But I can take it. I can take it. I have to take it.
I can see the gunship’s engines spooling up. Blue flames ignite behind the turbines. The landing gear lifts up two inches from the tarmac as hovertech kicks on. Yuki waves from the open door, shouts drowned out by the roar of my aura.
Far below, freight convoys and bullet trains howl through the industrial district like wind through a canyon. My body burns on the verge of incinerating itself while I chase Thane through a manic series of backpedalling defenses, following him right to the edge of the bridge connecting the pad to the main of the citadel. He makes enough distance to throw out a hand and seize the gunship itself by its metal hull with elemental control, wrenching its rise to a stop. A guttural grunt tears from his chest as he drags it back down to the landing pad by sheer force of will.
“Go!” I scream at Yuki. “Go! GO, Yuki!”
The Duelist’s lips tighten in understanding. He vanishes into the gunship. I breathe out a silent sigh of relief.
Still finishing the pre-flight warmups in the cockpit, Jolie suddenly glances up, finding me through the rain. Her palm presses flat against the viewport. Mouth opening in a shout. Eyes wide with panic as she sees Yuki rushing into the cockpit behind her. She reaches for her buckles to rip free. Then the doors slam shut and the gunship kicks away and Thane wheels around, his chance lost, dire reality sweeping back in as his falchion passes through my vision like a windshield wiper to cut Cal down.
A red crescent blossoms on her chest as she’s thrown to the side. I lunge at Thane with a wild cry locked in my throat, tackling him roughly to the ground. My hands find his weapon and seize it with an iron grip. Bladed metal bites into my fingers; I don’t care. I force it down towards his neck. Jerking it closer one millimeter at a time. Aura melting the bridge around us. His skin starts sizzling with an acrid stench.
“Don’t make me,” I beg. “Don’t make me do this.”
“If you won’t,” Thane grits out, “I will.”
He starts to fight me off. My breath comes in ragged hitches as I scream out, straining the muscles in my arms and begging them for more. More. I push him to the breaking point, driving the weapon down within an inch of victory. The blade’s edge trembles at his throat. His arms shake with tension. We both know the moment they stop moving is the moment he dies. I waver on that edge for the briefest moment. He forces right past it without slowing.
Redirecting the downward force just as he releases the tension in his arms, Thane guides the blade to slam into concrete instead of his neck, then uses the moment of jarring recoil to shove me off. I hit the ground in a limp pile, heart seizing in my chest, a thermal runaway of crushing pain ripping through my body.
Thane wheels to his feet like a drunk. Body pushed so far beyond the human limits of endurance. Golden eyes wide with adrenaline as they find me defenseless on the ground, paralyzed by heart attack agony. His hand snaps to the side, palm open. The falchion slithers back towards his hand in liquid form. Then he takes two lurching steps towards me before Cal crashes into him from the side, driving him off-course.
Fresh to the fight, she wouldn’t have been able to come within ten paces of him. But we’ve wrung everything out of each other.
She blindsides him.
Hands braced like she’s holding a spear, Cal drives one of her real, long knives straight into Thane’s chest. Blood sprays. They go down hard atop the bridge. A fist hammers down. She fights her way on top. Blade pushing for the kill, arms shaking, straining with all the strength she has left. Somehow Thane got a hand in the way. I claw back to my feet.
“Cal!” I scream. “Cal, stop!”
The dagger jerks another millimeter closer to his heart. Deadly calm, Cal reaffirms her grip while Thane stares up at her with the same impossible calm. His fingers slip in their own blood as he clutches at the blade.
“You’re gonna hate me for this, Tay. And that’s okay.” Cal’s voice cracks. “You shouldn’t have to carry this weight.”
Thane’s struggling slows. His eyelashes flutter. Sudden, lethal tiredness finally taking hold. And he lets it. He could strike back. He could struggle. Shout. Do anything other than fight slowly as the blade scratches on the doorstep of his heart. But as his head rolls to the side and his golden eyes meet mine, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that deep inside him, there is a cursed boy, scared of his own name, who wishes this day had never come. A lost boy without a father who believes he’s destined to do evil, and hates every atom of the monster he has become. Yet no matter how much he tries to change, he knows he cannot escape what he is. So he embraces it and hopes instead that he can pave the road to heaven with the bricks of hell.
And he is wrong.
I crawl forward and put myself over him. My fingers wrap over Cal’s, stopping her from pushing the blade home. Again my heart seizes in my chest. I nearly collapse outright, and it’s only because she doesn’t understand that she lets me lift her hand away.
Aura chars and stings my skin with an internal glow as I fight to raise my head, searching the feeble dawn for the last trail of the gunship. It escapes the capital’s border without contest. Headed north. Relief floods through me. And it evaporates just as fast when a tectonic rumble of a voice shakes through my very bones.
“Noble,”
A single, titanic thump reverberates through the very core of my being.
“and naive.”
The dagger falls from Cal’s frozen hands. I sweep it off the freefall drop to the industrial district and rise with a fawn’s shaking strength to see him there. A platinum colossus larger than life, towering over the three broken humans that limp out of the citadel behind him.
Fifty bare feet are all that protect me from Gami. Fresh snowfall melts in rivulets down his featureless golem shape. His head doesn’t even shift towards the Shadows as he growls again.
“Failure.”
Gami’s tail snaps out and obliterates the mech pilot. Gory shrapnel peppers Aurix and Valance. They hunch frozen in shock as his tail slithers back into place and the full, dread weight of a Champion’s attention falls on my battered, glowing frame.
I stand straighter beneath it, staring him down from across the bridge. The winter sun cracks through the clouds to bathe me in its light. An eastern wind hammers my side, billowing out my hair, carrying the howl of the trains on its breezes. I reach down and grab Cal and an unconscious Thane by their collars. Cal in my left, Thane in my right. I fight and drag them to the edge. The railyards roil hundreds of feet below. All the while, Gami watches me like he must have watched my father so many times before. An apex predator behind a pane of glass. So huge of a threat that I don’t even think twice about the cowering people behind him until the last fading word of a Magus’ incantation and a faint snap of fingers reaches me like a whisper on the wind.
“...electrum.”
Valance’s scornful eyes meet mine across the expanse. Her outstretched hand twitches. A snap of fingers I’m too exhausted, too wounded to react to in time. Electric energy gathers in her fingertips and explodes past Gami with a clap of thunder. A bolt of lightning sears across the bridge and into my chest faster than a blink.
White-hot shock explodes through my body, my brain. Electrical agony rips a guttural cry out of me as I’m kicked back by the force of the bolt. Ripped sideways, my whole body spasms, smoke pouring from my chest. My right hand locks in Thane’s collar when the prosthetic’s failsafes kick in, dragging him with me as my heels slip off the edge of the platform. But the fingers of my left stutter out of control.
Cal drops out of my grip. Twisting towards me with a shout, she lunges to try and grab my wrist, golden eyes widening in rabid desperation as the other Shadows surge across the bridge behind her. Her fingers brush mine in the moment before gravity takes hold. She screams my name as our hands slip apart.
And I fall.