The rain continued.
No longer as scenery.
As presence.
It dripped onto bodies.
Dripped into the mud.
Dripped onto scattered metal.
Dripped into the silence itself.
No thunder.No wind.
Only the continuous fall—thin, insistent, almost too delicate for what was happening there.
Zeph was kneeling.
One knee buried in the mud.
The other set unsteadily, the foot slipping with every minimal adjustment of his body.
His torso was upright by choice.
Not by strength.
His clothes were torn in three places.
Blood ran from the cut along his side, mixing with the water sliding through the fabric. A darker thread slipped from the corner of his mouth and was carried away by the rain before reaching his chin.
His face bore two thin cuts.One above the left eyebrow. Another running from the temple down to the line of the jaw.
Nothing fatal.
Everything cumulative.
His breathing came controlled.
Too short.
Too contained.
Not from panic.
From calculation.
Around him, blades floated.
They did not spin. They vibrated in stillness—suspended.
Pointed at the neck.At the chest. At the exact place where the body loses support.
And one he did not see—only felt, by the way the air there no longer wanted to exist.
None of them touched him.
All of them were too close to be abstracted.
The entire courtyard seemed trapped in that arrangement.
Telvaris stood several meters ahead.
Standing.
Open stance.
Low center.
Hands relaxed at his sides.
Rain slid down his garments, along the line of the mask—but it did not seem to touch him the same way it touched the world.
He watched.
Not like one who guards.
Like one who waits for something inevitable.
Then he spoke.
The voice was low.
Steady.
Without hardness.
"This is the end point of every weak ideology. When it meets reality."
The golden gaze swept over the blades—not as one who counts them, but as one who confirms they are where they should be.
He looked back at Zeph.
One of the blades answered first.
Not by firing.
Not by attacking.
It simply advanced enough to bury itself in the flesh of the thigh still braced in the mud.
The metal went in clean—and even so, the entire body reacted.
It did not pierce through.
It stopped at the point where movement ceases to be an option and becomes a cost.
The mud darkened.
Zeph tightened his jaw.
He made no sound.
Telvaris observed that.
"See," he said softly. "Still whole."
A half step forward.
"But not the same."
Another short pause.
"What destroys you is not falling. It's still believing you shouldn't."
He raised a hand—not in threat, but as one who marks a point in space.
The blades vibrated.
The air between them and Zeph lost tolerance.
"Remember: you didn't fail from weakness. You failed because you still tried to be someone."
The gesture ended.
The blades advanced.
Not like an attack.
Like something that no longer asks for response.
One went for the neck.
Another for the heart.
The third for the base of the skull.
The world chose where he should die.
Zeph felt it before he understood.
But his body did not flee.
His hand dropped.
He pulled the blade embedded in his own leg.
The metal came free in a short arc—slick with blood and rain—and the motion continued without pause.
A minimal turn on the ground.
Not a jump. Not a retreat.
Just enough to change where he was.
Zeph's blade met the first in the air.
Deflected it.
The second followed immediately.
He brushed it aside, like pushing a door already open.
It passed.
The third did not.
It arrived before the motion ended.
Metal met flesh and stopped.
His shoulder opened in a hot line.
Blood came with the water.
Zeph dropped to one knee.
Breathed.
Once.
Not to calm himself.To accept.
The corner of his mouth moved.
Not in mockery. Not in defiance.
In something that looked like… memory.
He lifted his face slowly.
His eyes met Telvaris's.
And for the first time, there was no tension there.
There was understanding.
"It's curious…" Zeph said, his voice still misplaced, too low to be just calm. "How, in the face of death, the things we thought useless become the clearest."
"There was something my grandfather always said: 'Kill the monster while it's still one.'"
A brief pause.
"Because once you learn its story… it starts to look like someone."
Zeph pulled the blade still lodged in him.
The metal came out slowly, with a sound too wet to be called a sound.
His body trembled once—and then steadied.
He drew a deep breath before continuing.
"I never really understood that," he said. "Always thought it was just the rambling of someone who didn't come back whole from war."
The smile was minimal. And vanished.
"But listening to you now, Lord Telvaris… I finally understand."
He began to rise.
Not like one who challenges. Like one who accepts a decision already made.
The knee left the mud. His body straightened.
"I finally understood my grandfather… and why Master Karna would not kill you, even if he had the chance. Not from incapacity. Not from weakness. It was because he could still see someone."
He stood.
His gaze did not waver.
A fraction of silence.
"I don't need you to seem human."
The wind changed.
Not as a gust. As orientation.
"And that's why… I will do what Master Karna could not."
The air around Zeph adjusted.
Not in explosion. In alignment.
A low whistling began—not from the wind, but from space yielding around him.
The nearest blades did not fall. They were pushed.
Not violently flung away—but displaced like something that no longer belonged there.
They scraped the mud, left thin grooves in the ground, spun once, and stopped outside an invisible circle around Zeph.
Others followed—thrown by Telvaris—and died at the same boundary, diverted aside like leaves trying to cross a current.
Metal struck mud. Farther now.
The metallic plates around Telvaris adjusted on their own, scraping against each other in a sound too low to be called sound.
The whistling continued.
Zeph did not open his arms. Did not raise his voice.
He simply said:
"Limit — Index: Regnant Anila."
He did not change posture.
And yet the world around him was no longer the same.
His silhouette darkened, as if light had learned to bend around him instead of touching him.
Subtle veins of prāṇa ran through his body, glowing in pale turquoise tones—not as exposed energy, but as something flowing within.
Air passed through his form, sketching translucent currents like smoke or condensed wind.
It was not an aura.
It was space giving up resisting him.
Above his head, the wind organized itself into invisible arcs—not as ornament, but as recognition.
His contours seemed slightly out of focus, as if Zeph existed half a step ahead of reality.
His eyes briefly lost any human definition.
Sounds around him dulled. The rain began to fall in gentle curves.
Telvaris felt it before he understood.
The weight of the world had not increased.
The margin had shrunk.
Zeph did not emanate power.
The air had simply decided to obey.
The air yielded first.
Not in explosion—in collapse.
The pressure around Zeph thickened to the point that rain no longer fell in lines but in curved sheets, diverted as it touched the field forming around him.
The ground groaned.
It did not crack—yet.
The pressure did not push bodies.
It pushed decisions.
Telvaris reacted to that pressure by instinct.
His muscles adjusted instinctively—widening his base, sinking his center of gravity, anchoring weight into the metal scattered beneath the mud.
"I see…" he murmured. "So you can break limits too."
The metal around them answered.
The fallen blades began to melt.
Not from heat.
From obedience.
Steel lost rigidity, became thick black liquid, like living oil, slithering through the mud toward Zeph.
"But it's still not enough."
The golden eyes vibrated.
"Abyssal forge."
The liquid metal rose into columns, whips, blades with shifting edges that cut as they changed form.
They advanced together.
Zeph did not run.
He turned.
His foot traced a low, almost lazy arc—and the world followed.
The wind twisted the axis of the attack—not deflecting the blades, but displacing the space between them and Zeph.
The first whip passed where he had been—not where he existed.
The second came diagonally.
Zeph stepped into it.
His forearm guided the metal like a partner too heavy, redirecting the mass into the ground.
The mud exploded.
The third came high.
Zeph inclined his torso, let the blade skim his hair, and rotated his hip in a low capoeira movement, kicking the air.
The air kicked Telvaris.
The pressure crossed the courtyard like an invisible wall.
Telvaris was pushed three steps back before his feet found something solid.
He drove his heel into a still-warm metal plate.
The ground cracked beneath him.
He did not fall.
But the world had to hold itself together to keep him there.
"Fast…" he murmured.
Zeph was already on him.
He did not close distance.
He removed it.
The hand came open—not to strike, but to erase space.
Telvaris reacted with pure silat: low base, twisted torso, elbow rising like a short blade into the center of the approach.
The impact was not sound.
It was displacement.
Telvaris's elbow landed.
And still he was thrown backward, as if he had struck a moving wall.
The arm vibrated to the bone.
Stress fracture.
Not immediate—but inevitable.
Telvaris slid through the mud, twisted his body, pulled two liquid knives from the ground, and threw them in a crossed angle.
Zeph turned with them.
The wind folded their trajectories midair.
The knives met halfway.
They exploded into black fragments that scythed across the courtyard like reverse rain.
Zeph passed through the cloud.
Shards cut his face, neck, arms.
He did not slow.
His fist came short.
Telvaris blocked with the blade of his metallic forearm.
The impact sent a wave across the courtyard.
Columns groaned.
The roof lost two plates.
Telvaris was hurled backward and punched through the tower's side wall like a projectile.
Stone turned to dust.
Zeph landed where Telvaris had stood.
He was not breathing hard.
The world was.
The metal around them began to vibrate again.
Not as attack.
As adaptation.
Telvaris emerged from the wall through the dust, his body covered in irregular plates, anchored directly to bone.
He smiled.
Blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
"Now the world between us is almost the same."
He advanced.
Not like a man.
Like mass.
Zeph entered the advance.
Body to body.
The collision made the rain evaporate between them.
Knees collided.
Elbows met.
Bases broke.
Zeph used flow.
Telvaris used weight.
Zeph diverted, spun, removed angles.
Telvaris cut lines, invaded spaces, crushed decisions.
A punch from Telvaris grazed Zeph's face and tore a stone plate from the wall behind him.
Zeph answered with a palm strike to the sternum.
The impact caved the metal armor and slammed Telvaris into the ground.
He rolled.
Stood before stopping.
Both were wounded now.
Telvaris smiled.
Not from pleasure.
From recognition.
The courtyard no longer existed.
It was an impact field.
Zeph felt something different vibrating in the air. Not pressure—direction.
He faced Telvaris.
And advanced again.
Telvaris did the same.
And when they collided for the third time, the world finally yielded.
The ground split open.
The tower groaned.
And neither of them stepped back.
Even when the world asked.