The lunge was a blur of emerald and steel. There was no time for a child's clumsy dodge—her bruised leg was a dead weight, rooted to the spot. As the venomous tip roared toward her chest, Elma shoved her hands forward.
She didn't just push the air; she detonated it.
The violent gust caught the assassin mid-air, a kinetic hammer that sent him tumbling backward through the willow branches.
C—05, Nagin.
The realization was a cold spike in her mind. He was a legend from the C-series, a "successful" experiment from the facility that had birthed her.
Elma scrambled to her feet, her breath coming in sharp, shallow stabs. She didn't wait for him to recover.
She threw her hands out, expanding her Aegis to a fifty-meter radius—sacrificing crushing power for a buffer zone.
She needed to keep distance between them.
He didn't give her a moment to breathe. C-05 vanished from sight, his speed turning him into a flickering shadow against the greenery.
Elma reached out with her mind, attempting to "grab" his presence and crush it, but her grip slipped.
He's compressed, she realized with a jolt of alarm.
His Aegis was a tiny, iron-hard kernel around his body, making him impossible to "latch" onto.
If she had known this technique in the arena, she might have stood a chance against that Strategoi.
"Get back!" she hissed.
She tore jagged chunks of rock from the garden path and fired them like cannons. Crack! Crack! The stones broke the sound barrier, but Nagin was a ghost.
He twisted in mid-air, his movements liquid and defying physics, closing the gap with terrifying efficiency.
He was ten meters away. Five.
Elma's teeth clenched so hard she tasted copper. As he leapt for the final strike, she didn't target him. She targeted the earth.
She slammed her focus into the soil beneath his boots and heaved. The ground erupted, a massive pillar of dirt and stone shrieking upward into the sky, carrying the assassin with it.
Nagin was launched into the sky, his silhouette sharp against the blue. Elma didn't let him fall. She reached out with her Aegis, not to touch him, but to seize the air itself.
She constricted her focus, turning the atmosphere around him into a pressurized coffin. Nagin was suspended mid-air, his emerald cloak fluttering violently.
A sickening crack echoed through the garden as the pressure began to cave in his ribs.
Not enough, Elma thought, her face reddening from the strain. She gave a guttural grunt and pressed harder.
Bones cracked, and dark blood seeped from beneath his mask.
Got you.
Even as his body buckled under the atmospheric weight, the C-series instinct remained flawless.
Nagin flicked a single finger. A tiny, silver shrapnel shard—no larger than a needle—flew from a hidden wrist-launcher.
It bypassed the thick atmosphere and bit deep into Elma's upper arm.
"Damn it," she shouted.
The effect was instantaneous. Elma fell to her knees, the ground cold against her palms. Her breathing turned heavy, a wet, rattling sound in her chest. A cold, numbing sensation began to crawl from the wound toward her heart.
Neurotoxin, she identified. Paralytic agent. Type-3.
Her vision began to swim, the garden blurring into a mess of green and brown. Her grip on the air began to waver, the pressure on Nagin loosening.
With a final, desperate surge of will, Elma hurled him back. Sending the assassin tumbling through the air like a broken doll, crashing deep into the thicket of the estate's outer woods.
Nagin landed on his feet before bolting back at Elma, but she was already ahead of him. She recompressed her Aegis. Jagged chunks of granite rose from the garden bed, caught in the high-pressure vortex of her Aegis, and shrieked through the air.
Each impact was a detonation. One stone caught Nagin squarely in the chest, the kinetic force tearing through his armor with a sickening crunch. He was thrown back, his boots dragging deep furrows into the manicured grass.
Elma watched him through the haze of her failing vision. If this were my previous body, that damage would have been undone in seconds, yet he was the "successful" one.
He clutched his serrated blade, trying to force himself into a final lunge, but the window had closed.
Above the garden, five streaks of golden light cut through the air. The Alloys. The House Altheris elite guards descended like fallen stars, their heavy, metallic-bonded armor clattering as they hit the ground in a protective perimeter around the child.
Two guards broke formation, weapons snapping toward the intruder.
Nagin turned to flee. A silver spear plummeted from above, impaling the ground and nailing him in place.
The Alloys hit him a heartbeat later, driving him face-first into the dirt and locking him down with practiced violence.
"Call the doctor!" one of the guards next to Elma shouted, his voice muffled by a heavy helm.
Elma's breath heaved, her heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs. Every beat was a struggle. This neurotoxin was formulated for grown soldiers—on a four-year-old's small frame, it was a death sentence.
No—no, not yet. I can't die here.
"What's wrong?" another guard yelled, reaching for her.
"I'm poisoned," Elma growled, the word barely more than a wet rasp.
She fought the creeping numbness, her fingers clawing at the grass, refusing to go quietly.
But the chemistry was absolute.
Darkness claimed her before her head hit the dirt.
---
Elma's eyes snapped open. The first thing she felt wasn't pain, but a terrifying, hollow nothingness. The neurotoxin, the rattling in her chest, the cold numbness crawling toward her heart—it was gone.
Her breath came smooth and steady, as if the battle in the garden had been nothing more than a fever dream.
How? she wondered.
She turned her head. To her right, Christa sat in a velvet-backed chair. The unsteady glow of a single candle traced the sharp lines of her face, but she wasn't looking at Elma. She was staring at a fixed point on the far wall, her hands folded tightly in her lap.
"What happened?" Elma asked, her voice sounding small and fragile in the silence.
"An intrusion," Christa said. Her voice was like a winter wind. "The Alloys reported a trespasser. They said you fought back for a moment, and then you collapsed because you were tired."
Tired?
The word felt like an insult. Elma tried to sit up, her mind racing. "I was poisoned... he used a shrapnel shard."
Christa finally turned her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her gaze vacant. "That is what the guards feared. But when the doctor inspected you, he found no puncture. No venom. No damage at all."
Christa folded her arms, her voice dropping to a whisper. "He said you were only sleeping."
Elma's blood ran cold. She knew what she felt.
Christa stood up, her silks rustling. She began to pace toward the door, her movements stiff.
"Don't go," Elma said.
The words were out before her tactical mind could stop them.
The memory of Nagin's blade and the darkness was still too close. Christa's presence somehow was the only thing standing between Elma and the realization that she had almost died—again.
She didn't want to think about it now.
Christa stopped. Her hand hovered over the door handle.
"Please," Elma said again. It was a word that felt like ash in her mouth, a word D-66 was never supposed to use.
Christa stood still for a long time. Then, without looking back, she returned to the chair and sat.
The silence of the room settled over Elma like a heavy blanket. Secure in the fact that she wasn't alone in the dark, her exhaustion finally won.
She stared at Christa for a moment longer before the world faded back into black.