With Aether coursing through his Sun Circuits and Moon Circuits, Hiran was able to take in the entire scene around the habitation block in the span of a heartbeat. A quick remote check from Chaoswing’s view-lenses told him that the cordon of levy guardsmen was completely gone, with not a single soldier or armored vehicle remaining.

Half a dozen smaller aircraft—bulky atmospheric dropships that looked like smaller versions of Enforcer dropships—were hovering above the building. Their landing bays were laden with armored and heavily augmented mercenaries. Most of them were carrying flame-based weapons. They seemed to be waiting for an order that would see them rappel down to the habitation block’s rooftop.

Another ship sat in the air thirty or so feet above Hiran. It cast a sleek, gray-green silhouette. Plasma blasters and plasma lances bristled from the multitude of gun ports mounted all across its hull. A quick scan with his Ajna Interface told him that this ship was named Gerhasu, a Magellha-Class spaceship that was more heavily armed and armored but slightly less maneuverable than Chaoswing.

Gerhasu’s guns had been powered up, judging by the red activation lights upon their barrels, but they weren’t trained upon Hiran.

His scrutiny returned to the mercenaries arrayed before him and Lila. Mirabelle was amongst their number, of course. She had her submachine guns aimed at Hiran and a sheepish, almost apologetic smile upon her face.

“Sorry,” she said. “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t think things would turn out this way.”

“Care to explain before I break your face?” Hiran growled, raising his right fist and clenching it.

“Sure.” Mirabelle shrugged. “The boss found out about the subcontract, and to my surprise, he took an interest… a very personal one.”

A panel slid open on Gerhasu’s hull, and a mercenary clad in sleek, black powered armor emerged. His head was encased in a full-faced helm, with an understated rounded crest and cobalt-hued lenses filling the slits of its visor. He leaped off his perch, did a flip in the air, and crashed down upon the street before Hiran, cratering its asphalt surface with the impact of his descent.

“That’s the Ashen Knight,” Lila said, her crimson lens whirring and clicking. “No other information is available due to data-theft countermeasures.”

The Ashen Knight straightened to his full height, roughly eight-and-a-half feet in his armor. The top of his helm barely crested Hiran’s collarbone. He tipped his helm head upward, leveling his visored gaze directly at Hiran’s eyes.

“You’re the leader of the Ashen Guild, right? Good. I need to talk to you.” Hiran gestured at the building behind him. “Those aliens we found in there… they could be a much bigger problem than we’d thought. You need to—”

Servos whined in the Ashen Knight’s armor. His gauntleted fist blasted toward Hiran’s face. It was a swift and powerful blow. Hiran caught it with his left hand, resulting in a thunderous clash of armor against armor and the outward radiation of a circular shockwave from the point of impact powerful enough to push Lila back a few staggering steps and rattle the gun barrels of the other mercenaries standing several paces away.

The Ashen Knight tried to pull his fist back, but Hiran held it in place with the Fallen Spiral technique. He clamped his fingers around the mercenary’s knuckles and rolled his palm down, trapping the Ashen Knight in a wristlock.

Hiran raised his right fist, intending to return the favor, but he hesitated. The other mercenaries hadn’t lowered their guns at all. If they decided to pull their triggers, Lila would be caught in the crossfire.

That gave the Ashen Knight enough time to follow up by crashing his elbow into Hiran’s sternum, cracking the surface of his armor and throwing him off balance. Hiran grunted, but before he could regain his footing, the Ashen Knight tore his hand free, fell into a crouch, and lashed out with a sweeping kick.

Hiran managed to hop over the arc of the Ashen Knight’s shin, but in doing so, he rendered himself airborne, which meant he couldn’t avoid the mercenary’s next blow: a second elbow strike, thrown with the weight of all of the Ashen Knight’s armored bulk and his considerable strength.

Hiran crossed his arms tightly across his chest, taking the hit on his armored forearms this time instead of upon his cracked breastplate. The impact blasted him away, hurling him back toward the entrance to the habitation block’s ground floor lobby.

He twisted in midair, bringing his legs behind him so that he hit the synthsteel doors with his feet instead of his back. The doors flew apart from the force of the collision, buckling from their hinges. Hiran crashed his heels down upon the floor next, his armored boots carving furrows through the flimsy and cracked tilework as he came to a skidding halt.

The Ashen Knight was hot in pursuit, charging forward with his fists raised. Hiran’s gaze flickered past his shoulder and saw several other mercenaries hit Lila with a barrage of stun probes, causing the Savant to go into convulsions and collapse into a crumpled pile upon the street.

No! Hiran clenched his jaw, feeling anger swell within his heart. He surged to his feet, cycling as much Aether as he could into his Sun Circuits.

The Ashen Knight crashed into the lobby. Hiran advanced to meet him, fully intent on breaking every single bone within the mercenary’s body. He lashed out with a Contemptuous Comet as he closed the distance, thundering his heel directly at the Ashen Knight’s face.

The mercenary slipped underneath the kick, falling into a low crouch with his left arm and leg extended, before surging up again, bringing his armored body into a graceful spin as he did so. The maneuver placed him on Hiran’s left flank.

That’s a Martial Form! he realized, before the Ashen Knight crashed an armored shoulder into his side with enough force to blast him across the lobby and send him crashing into the wall on the far side of the room.

Hiran grunted as he snapped his limbs out wide, breaking free of the crater his body had created on the solid synthcrete surface he’d struck. He regained his footing just as the Ashen Knight closed the distance between them.

The mercenary lowered his posture, stepped his right foot out, and stamped his heel into the floor, so that his thighs and shins formed a right angle. His right arm blitzed out, powering a strike with the heel of his palm toward Hiran’s abdomen.

Hiran used a basic technique called Dipping Moon from [Darkened Mist] that spun him into a tight half-circle, using his left heel as a pivot. The small rotation was enough to bring his body away from the path of the Ashen Knight’s blow, so that the mercenary’s palm struck the wall instead of him.

A tremendous crash resounded through the air. Synthcrete shards geysered from the point of impact between the heel of the Ashen Knight’s palm and the wall. The mercenary withdrew his arm, leaving behind a hole large enough to throw a grown, unaugmented Ghandarnian man through headfirst.

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The Ashen Knight moved to strike again, only for Hiran to hit him in the ribs with an Arrogant Tide technique. The mercenary leaped backwards just before Hiran’s shin made contact with his breastplate, successfully lessening the force of the kick—but not by much.

A pained grunt escaped the speaker grille on the Ashen Knight’s helm as Hiran’s technique landed home and slammed him into the already tortured and crumbling wall. The mercenary’s armored bulk broke through and tumbled into the room behind, which was a narrow habitation cell, before crashing down on the cheap dining table owned by its former dweller and reducing the piece of furniture to slivers and chunks of broken plastic.

Hiran stormed through the breached wall as the Ashen Knight struggled to his feet. The mercenary’s armor was cracked, exposing a multitude of damaged, sparking circuitry. The Ashen Knight darted forward, his posture tight and compact, and drove a straight punch at Hiran’s chest.

Hiran swept out his right palm, intending to intercept the blow with a Fallen Spiral technique, but the mercenary’s punch had been a feint all along. The Ashen Knight yanked his fist back, then whipped it out again in a flickering jab, smashing his armored knuckles against Hiran’s jaw with enough force to snap his head back and fill his mouth with the taste of his own blood.

He’s pretty skilled, Hiran thought, as he withdrew, bringing up his arms to block the barrage of swift punches that rained down upon his ribs and abdomen. And I’ve seen that Martial Form before.

An armored fist drove into his side then, with enough force to make him take a single staggering leftward step. The Ashen Knight followed up with a leaping punch intended to break Hiran’s unhelmed face. Hiran pulled his head to the right, allowing the mercenary’s blow to blast past his cheek and over his neck. Then he pivoted on the ball of his lead foot, grabbed the Ashen Knight’s extended forearm with both hands, and threw the mercenary over his shoulder and against the wall at the far end of the habitation cell.

The Ashen Knight hurtled through the air and broke through the flimsy flakboard separating the habitation cells in this building from one another. To his credit, the mercenary managed to roll to his feet just before Hiran reached him and kicked him in the chest, further buckling his breastplate and hurling him through yet another flakboard wall.

Hiran strode through clouds of billowing dust, eager to finish the fight and rescue Lila. He was confident that if he managed to subdue and capture the Ashen Knight, the other mercenaries would fall in line easily enough and release the Savant.

Just as Hiran entered the latest habitation cell the Ashen Knight had tumbled into, he caught a glint of crimson light in the corner of his vision and a whiff of ozone upon the disturbed air. He threw himself back the way he came, just barely avoiding the sweep of the Ashen Knight’s energy-claws as they sliced through the empty air he’d occupied a split second ago.

Hiran cartwheeled backwards, keeping his movements as small as he could, so that his boots didn’t tear into the low-lying ceiling and landed in a fighting stance. The Ashen Knight emerged from amidst the dust, a set of three curved blades arcing from the top of his right gauntlet. He flicked his left hand out, and another set of claws snapped out from above his left fist. All six blades hummed, the energy fields wreathing their lengths atomizing every speck of dust they touched.

Those will go straight through my armor. I don’t fancy my chances of catching them with any of the techniques I can handle from [Woven Cloud], either, Hiran thought. His hand drifted to Azure Fang, only to halt just as his fingers brushed its hilt. There is no way this fellow won’t realize that this is an Aetheric Weapon. If I draw it, I will have to kill him.

The Ashen Knight halted his advance. His visored gaze dipped briefly but meaningfully to Hiran’s weapon. A panel opened on the underside of his right gauntlet, and a tube of black metal slid out and into his grasp. It was roughly eight inches long and just under an inch thick. The mercenary depressed a switch upon the tube’s length, causing a long, thin blade to telescope from one of its ends, turning it into a short sword. Another switch brought about the emergence of a humming energy-field around its bladed length. He then tossed it to Hiran, hilt-first.

Hiran caught the energy-sword and gave it an experimental twirl. It was lighter and flimsier than most of the other blades he’d wielded over the course of his overly long life, but there was no doubt it would be capable of piercing the Ashen Knight’s armor.

“That’s a backup weapon,” the Ashen Knight said, speaking up for the first time. His voice was heavily modulated by his speaker grille, so that it was deep and menacing, yet completely featureless. “So the charge will only last three minutes or so.”

While his claws are obviously hooked up to his armor’s power supply. Hiran grinned and brandished the sword. “How nice of you to let me use it, then.”

“Oh, don’t mention it,” the Ashen Knight said, his shoulders twitching in evident amusement. “As I recall, you favor using two swords instead of one, don’t you, Hiran?”

Azure Fang flashed into his right hand. Its blade blazed with blue light as Hiran poured Aether into it. He advanced upon the Ashen Knight, holding both swords out and at the ready.

“About time.” The mercenary raised his claws. “And here I was thinking you weren’t ever going to take things seriously. Remember, Hiran. Three minutes, and you’ll be back down to a single sword again.”

“I only need ten seconds to finish you,” Hiran said coldly, before breaking out into a charge that closed the distance between him and his foe in a tenth of a second.

The Ashen Knight flinched in obvious surprise, but he still managed to lash out with his claws. Hiran parried the mercenary’s left-handed weapon with a twirl of his energy-sword, while binding it at the same time with Concentric Trap, one of the intermediate techniques of [Twinned Songs]. He then pushed the sword out to the side, pulling the Ashen Knight’s claws along with it and tugging the mercenary slightly off balance.

Azure Fang flickered out at the same time, the Aetheric Weapon clashing directly against the energy fields wreathing the Ashen Knight’s right-handed claws. Sparks flew as the blades burned and strained against each other for a split-second.

And then the Aetheric Weapon simply wasn’t there anymore, leaving the Ashen Knight’s claws to lurch forward into abruptly empty space. Imbalanced on both the left and the right, the mercenary lost his footing and took a single stumbling forward step. He recovered almost instantaneously, a testament to his skill, but the opening was enough for Hiran to capture the mercenary’s right wrist with a Fallen Spiral technique, binding it in place with threads of woven Aether to his palm.

Azure Fang looped around, aloft on Hiran’s will, before slicing into the Ashen Knight’s pack. Sparks flew as the Aetheric Weapon annihilated the power module of the mercenary’s armor. The light faded from the lenses of the Ashen Knight’s visor, and the plated segments of his armor suddenly fell silent, the bundles of synthetic muscle fibers beneath their surface having gone inert.

Hiran had estimated earlier on that the Ashen Knight’s armor weighed at least three hundred pounds or more of high-end synthsteel and other ablative and impact-resistant materials. Now, all of that had turned to deadweight upon the mercenary’s body.

You’re going to feel that, no matter how augmented you are. Hiran twisted the sword in his left hand, raking its energy field over the now-inert claws protruding from the Ashen Knight’s left gauntlet and slicing them into ruined stumps. Releasing the mercenary, Hiran did a spinning back-kick as he executed a Contemptuous Comet technique, crashing his heel against the Ashen Knight’s breastplate.

The impact threw the mercenary back, sending him hurtling through the hole he’d made with his body a few moments ago. The Ashen Knight soared across the length of another habitation cell and blasted through its wall as well, before eventually coming to a rolling halt amidst the ruins of a shattered recreational screen and the wreckage of a plastic storage cabinet.

The mercenary tried to rise, but his movements were strained and sluggish, in part due to the weight of his damaged armor and in part from the injuries he’d undoubtedly incurred from eating so many hits from [Stride of the Conqueror].

Hiran reached him just as he had managed to struggle to his feet. Azure Fang had returned to his grasp. He placed the glowing blue sword against the Ashen Knight’s neck.

“Wait,” the mercenary said, his voice faint and muted within the confines of his unpowered helmet. “I—”

Hiran swept Azure Fang around. The Ashen Knight’s helmet fell to the floor, neatly split along its crown. He looked upon the mercenary’s face for the first time and sighed.

“Damn it,” he said, taking in the pale, feminine features of a Starforged he’d fought alongside a different lifetime ago. “Hello, Sarasva. I guess it’s good to see you, all things considered.”

“It’s good to see you too, Hiran,” she replied, spitting out a mouthful of blood.