Rapax heard what Doctor shouted, and he believed it, because he had felt it a breath before the words came.
The afterimages were spent currency. The scatter of false selves that had carried him untouchable through the whole of the fight meant nothing to the Red apostle that could now pick the true Rapax out of his own shadows, and so the trick that had kept him on edge was simply gone, taken from him by the red eyes the way the legs had been taken from her. He needed something else. He did not have the luxury of finding it slowly.
He moved, and this time it was the true Rapax that moved and only the true Rapax, no decoys to hide behind because there was no longer any point in hiding. The Apostle rushed to meet him — straight at the real one, un tricked — and their weapons met. Shadow steel on marrow-stained bone, the friction throwing small hard sparks into the dark, and they held there grinding edge to edge before they broke and came again.
A minute of it. Two.
