Ranvir had never fought another person who wielded space mana before. Sure, he’d gone over the fight in dozens and dozens of ways. Planned out a score paths to whittle her down. And yet, in the true face of the experience, all of it paled.

Fighting Saleema was not a struggle of force against force, nor, as it turned out, was it spirit against spirit. She had sustained too much already for him to add much that mattered at this point. Maybe when she was weakened and tired. For now, it was a struggle of territory.

Saleema blew up, lashing out with massive waves of space, barely controlled but strong, like an unending wave of power. But Ranvir didn’t have to stop the flood, only divert it, part but a fraction. So they fought over space itself, their push and pull like the struggle of the river fighting the seasons. One day it would freeze but eventually spring and the thaw would come.

Perseverance.

But a river could be diverted. What if the when the sun warmed, and the ice wept, water no longer came?

Fell mana washed over him, tinged with her manic mind, the ill form of her thoughts written in the shape of her power. Ranvir swallowed as a dozen lines of purple, right-angled and deadly, struck him. Each of them ended less than an arm’s span before Saleema, following him even as he rushed for the limit of her Discipline.

Mantle, the third stage from the Discipline of Wings, had a maximum reach of two hundred meters. He could make that well before she struck.

She raised pebbles, glowing with enough space-mana to make them harder than steel. Space compressed, not all of it, but enough to make sweat pebble his forehead. Maybe two hundred meters was a long bet. If she had locked onto him with Piercer, he had seven-hundred-and-fifty meters, but he could dodge that.

One hundred meters.

She released the first stone; it ripped through compressed space. In half a second, sixty meters disappeared, and the pebble struck an energy line.

Grunting, Ranvir forced platforms of space to coalesce beneath his feet. Only one formed solidly enough to support him, the other breaking apart at his touch. Energy lines were hard to control. He should be able to dodge it.

He couldn’t hear the stone racing through the energy line, never slowing down, never losing speed, but he could sense it.

Risky, he told himself, holding his breath and stopping Bastion. His shield of sand, his primary protection against damage, turned into a messy cyclone surrounding him. Grains and dust immediately struck his face and eyes, yet he seized as it all and shoved himself directly downward.

It was not faster than his regular traveling speed, but perhaps it would be enough for this one-off trick. His vision darkened as a cocoon of sand suddenly threw him to the ground. His stomach churned and twisted, but he heard the hissing rasp of the pebble rush across the sand.

Bastion activated again, and he rushed for the limit of her Discipline. She’d already readied another attack, but she was sluggish after his barrage following her attack on the school.

He easily dodged the last stone, which flicked into the snow with a white puff. He breathed hard as he gained further distance on her envelope of space. She departed her created space without a care in the world, the edges already sparking purple as it began dissolving.

Two hundred and twenty-one meters

Her features were marred by his attack. Her once fine dress had been ripped and torn, leaving her barely covered. Blood had soaked and caked on her middle and down one leg, plastering the torn fabric to her mauled body. The orbital bone around her eye had deformed. The orb had settled into a dark crevice within her skull. Her right arm was so mangled she could barely hold the stones she carried. Ivory bone showing through on multiple locations.

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Only her left arm was left with little more than crude lacerations, capable of holding the warp-sword. Spared from the worst damage. Within the dark pits of her eyes glowed islands of purple and yellow lights. Struggling back and forth, pulsing and throbbing as she took control of her spirit and body. Islands of yellow fighting the inevitability of purple, each second sloughing under, only to rise anew elsewhere. Never, however, so quickly as ground was lost.

Her spirit fighting through her body’s default state, asserting her own power.

As he watched, the surrounding air trembled. Not an effort of space, but of her spirit. A soul like a thousand malnourished and abused hands clawing at the world around her. Deliberately, she raised her head, exposing her torn throat, and the flesh began healing.

Ranvir had seen it before, some time ago now, but he recognized it. Latresekt had done something similar, although with first-order material rather than the second-order. He licked his lips as Saleema’s throat licked closed. She gave him a bloody grin, red clumpy viscera spilling over her tongue and falling to the ground below, spattering the pristine snow.

“You run,” she spoke, meaning translating through the spark of their interaction, much like it had with Dhaakir. The Blackstorm had represented the arrival of power coming too late, the twisting of his greatness arriving on the eve of his passing, unable to fix what had been done to him. The First Daughter was the opposite, a convolution of power too early, inset too deeply. A twisting of the socket within which sat her morals installed at an age before even her manifestation.

“I run? What are you doing?”

She sneered at him, unable or unwilling to fix the rest of her body. “You mince words with me? We are here to fight, are we not?”

Ranvir looked around. They were in a middle of a windy, snowy plain, not unlike the one they’d first clashed on, though they were farther north currently. “Why do you seek to fight?”

“It is the trial of purity,” she smiled, a genuine expression that almost tore the horror from her corpse-face. “A place and time where only the combatants matter. You and me.” Her gaze hardened. “One and two. Together. Here I shall know your soul and so I shall understand who I strike down.”

“That’s a pretty speech.” Ranvir narrowed his eyes. “Did the Sun King teach you that?”

“My father taught me many things, Child.” She rushed him and it would seem they were to have a match of close-quarters.

She swept in swiftly, whipping the lethal blade toward him. She was still slow, however, unbothered as her soul was. Her body could not ignore the injury it had taken.

Ranvir caught her arm by the wrist and hammered a Dune Blow into her stomach. The sword tore from her hand as she was struck by enough dust to drown a wagon. Yet before he could grab it, she swept out power. Space mana roaring in all directions and seizing on the sword.

It reappeared in her hand with two flashes of purple. She pushed up from the sand, her stomach now bared and raw, grains stuck between the fibers of her muscles.

He needed to keep her talking. It was unlikely that he could twist her mind into calming down, but if he could force her mind to fore, compel her into her prime, then she would also tire quicker.

It was a risk, but what part of this Goddess forsaken fight was not. He was gambling on outlasting a woman who could fight and terrorize for days, if not weeks, at a time. Last time I tried for endurance, it didn’t go too well.

She fell into a ready stance; her left arm to the side, rainbow edged blade ready to sweep across his body.

“So all of this is for your father’s approval?”

She flinched and straightened, then took a deliberate step. For a moment, Ranvir tensed. The ease, speed, and perfection of the tiny rectangular platform could’ve been her attuned technique. Yet, so could her compression of space. And she could control the energy lines. He couldn’t even determine their general direction.

“My father’s approval? That is not what I seek. Do you not realize? No, of course you can’t. It’s been years since he’s been seen. How many? Decades? A century? Maybe more still than that?” she shook her head and stared into the distance, yellow islands creeping forward.

Her gaze hardened, and the island fled before an ocean of purple. “No. Life is a challenge. Every moment a fight. Every day a chance to claw your way further up the stairs. You cannot stop until you sit at the top and can look down on all else. Fashion a throne from the bodies of your enemies.”

“That’s what your father taught you?”

She sneered at him. “That’s what my father proved to me. He proved it to the entire world. Who could stand against him? He forged Ankiria by the will of his own blood, a will that stands still hundreds of years later.”

Ranvir slumped slightly. “There’s nothing more to life then. An endless climb to the top until you see only the bodies of your victims? When is it enough?”

“When they know better.”

Ranvir peered into the distance. Towards his friends, he imagined. “When they know better.” He pursed his lips. “What about when you know better?”

But it appeared she was done talking.