Lan Feng’s spear flashed, and Raksha swept Steelbreaker around to meet its tip. The clash of their aegises whipped the air in the chamber into a frenzied tumult, catching at the edges of his robe and flinging his hair from his face.

The revenant readdressed its weapon and thrust it out once more. Raksha moved to parry. If he could bind the spear with his blade, he could close the distance and—

Lan Feng crashed the shaft of its other spear into Raksha’s cheek. Bone broke with a dry, crisp snap. Stars danced across his vision. The sticky, acrid warmth of blood filled his nostrils. He blinked, clearing his vision just in time to see the revenant kick him in the chest.

The impact cracked his breastbone and hurled him across the chamber. He crashed into the side of a furnace, denting the metal, and bounced off, before flopping face-down on the floor.

“No, no.” The revenant’s gurgling voice echoed in his ringing ears. “When using a blade against a spear, logic dictates that you parry, bind, and close. But you have one weapon. I have two. Stand, child. Try again. Do better.”

Groaning, Raksha struggled to his feet. The Conflagration’s aegis pulled the shards of his shattered cheek into place and started rebinding them. His chest tightened as his breastbone began to heal. Lan Feng could have swept the blade of its other spear across Raksha’s throat just now, decapitating him or inflicting a wound beyond his aegis’s regenerative capacity.

But the revenant hadn’t done so. Neither had it pressed the attack. Instead, it paced a small circuit around the chamber, twirling its spears in either hand.

“If you die, I’m going to laugh so hard,” Sadea jeered from the side. “I’ll even take off your pants, so you’ll be walking around as a bottomless corpse.”

“Thanks. I’ll do the same for you.” Raksha raised Steelbreaker once more. The Conflagration had already lit the fifth Solar Gate, the hottest he could burn it right now.

Lan Feng grinned and beckoned.

Roaring, Raksha charged, focusing his aegis downward so that beneath each step, the floor cratered where there was permacrete and buckled where there was steel paneling. Six feet away the revenant, a spear-tip rose to meet him.

Back-stepping, Raksha hooked the toes of his left boot underneath the lip of a buckled steel floor panel and kicked upward, tearing it from its resting place. He flipped the tortured metal into the path of Lan Feng’s spear. Wreathed in the revenant’s aegis of eerie black light, the weapon punched easily through the steel panel and continued toward Raksha’s face.

But the minute delay caused by the spear’s passage through an inch of metal was enough for Raksha to slip his head past the sharpened tip. He hit the bottom edge of the steel panel with a left-handed palm strike, hurling it to the ceiling and bending the spear shaft thrust through its center.

Lan Feng’s second spear darted for Raksha’s throat. Tucking his chin in, he caught the spear tip between his teeth. The Conflagration’s aegis blazed at his jaw, reinforcing his bite and securing its grip on the weapon. Raksha felt minor tendons and muscles at his neck tear and several lesser channels rupture, but he stopped the spear’s flight.

The revenant’s eyes widened in evident surprise. Bleeding from his gums, Raksha spat the spear-tip sideways. A step brought Lan Feng within Steelbreaker’s reach. He struck.

Releasing both spears, the revenant hurled itself backward, beyond Steelbreaker’s arc, but not before a shallow cut parted the grey flesh of its right cheek. Raksha lashed out again, seeking to drive Lan Feng further from the spears.

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The revenant gave ground, flipping its body back and away, before landing ten feet from where it had released its weapons. Raksha closed that distance in two strides.

Then he threw himself backward, in a rolling, undignified tumble.

Cold sweat beaded at his temples. His heartbeat pounded in his ears as he scrambled to stand.

“Hmm. Good instincts, child,” the revenant said. Its right hand rested lightly on the hilt of its sword, and its left hand held the blade by its sheath, tilting the weapon so that its tip pointed slightly upward. “A micro-second’s hesitation would have seen you join me in walking death.”

Raksha exhaled, trying to steady his pulse and nerves. In all his years of battle and against all the opponents he’d faced, he’d never quite come as close to death as he’d done moments ago.

The revenant’s posture was self-explanatory. It had adopted a fast-draw stance, in readiness to unsheathe its blade and strike in a single, fluid motion. Blade Forms using a fast-draw stance were uncommon, but not unheard of. Raksha had defeated several martial scientists who favored such styles of swordsmanship before, but Lan Feng was on an entirely different level of mastery.

If Raksha had pressed his attack, the revenant would have sliced him into half. And he would have been powerless to stop it.

“What the hell are you doing, you moron?” Sadea demanded. “In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a lot of time!”

“Sit down and have a candy bar, or ten!” Raksha called over his shoulder. He adjusted his grip on Steelbreaker and assumed a combat stance.

“Curious,” The revenant mused, bringing its fingers to the cut on its face. “Despite the disparity in our power, my aegis gives me no protection against yours.”

With that, the oddity that Raksha had noticed in Lan Feng’s aegis became clear. Regardless of the martial scientist’s chosen Path, his aegis always stemmed from within, emerging from his nexus to encase his flesh in a protective energy field and heighten his strength and reflexes.

In death, Lan Feng’s nexus would no longer function. Neither would all his channels and meridians. The revenant’s aegis, an aura of black light sheathing his limbs and haloing his temples, flowed from without, sustained by whatever foul sorcery was responsible for the tide of corpses.

This meant that the Conflagration, so effective against sorcery, was anathema to the revenant’s aegis as well. Lan Feng’s aegis, that of the Mortis Howl, was many magnitudes stronger than Raksha’s. Yet it had crumbled beneath the Conflagration’s touch.

“Elder, I have an advantage over you. My aegis, for reasons I’m unsure of, counteracts yours due to its, uh, unnatural origins,” he said.

“Oh?” Lan Feng’s features twisted into a grotesque parody of rueful despair. “If that’s true, victory will be yours if you can land a single clean strike.”

“Yes.”

The revenant drew its sword and held it up. As Raksha watched, the marvelous bluish steel blade turned black. Runes of an unclean purple hue blazed into existence down its length. Its brilliant ivory hilt dulled and tarnished, and its decorative jewels fell away, their gem-sockets now filled by green pustulant orbs with pulsing red veins.

Raksha had heard of such things before, of enchanted weapons so tied to their wielder that their natures and destinies were intertwined.

“Ha! Distant Moon! How faithful you are, following me into the darkness.” The revenant chuckled bitterly. “So far have I fallen. If my tears still flowed, I would surely weep. If my heart still beat, it would surely break.”

“Elder…”

“Be that as it may, my despair is my burden to bear alone. I should not have voiced it for others to hear, so I apologize for my unseemly demeanor,” Lan Feng said, bowing formally.

“We promise we’ll feel better if you cut off your own head!” Sadea called.

“You don’t need to apologize, Elder. What happened to you is abominable,” Raksha said. “All I can do to correct that is to—”

“Give me an honorable death in battle,” Lan Feng finished. The revenant cast its gaze upward, looking at nothing at all. “Toward the end, after more than two centuries of pointless violence and vainglorious duels, there was nothing I loathed more than battle. I was actually relieved when death came. But now, wearing this carcass of nightmares and horrors, it has become all I want.”

Cobalt radiance filled the chamber. A bolt of lightning burst from Sadea’s staff and roared toward the revenant.

Raksha intercepted it with his blade.

“And you will have it, Elder,” he said, ignoring the sorceress’s cries of protest.