He predator stopped circling.
That alone was catastrophic.
It straightened—not fully, not into a stable shape, but into intent. The chamber reacted immediately: cuts along the walls aligned toward Tareth, angles converging like witnesses turning their heads in unison.
The Sub-Cuts had decided who mattered.
The predator spoke.
Not with sound.
With revision.
Tareth felt memories twitch—micro-corrections attempting to rewrite how he remembered standing, breathing, choosing. The thing wasn't attacking his body.
It was testing whether his decisions could be edited.
The sword screamed in his grip, metal vibrating so violently his teeth rattled. Not hunger. Not eagerness.
Warning.
The Inquisitor dragged herself upright, blade ruined but will intact. "It's trying to overwrite you," she said. "If it succeeds, you won't die. You'll become precedent."
"That's worse," Tareth replied.
The predator advanced.
Each step erased a minor assumption. The floor no longer fully supported weight. Distance shortened inconsistently. Cause began arriving after effect. A shallow cut opened across Tareth's forearm—blood welling before the predator's limb passed near him.
It was learning faster now.
Learning how to hurt without striking.
Tareth planted his feet.
For the first time since Ironreach, since doctrine, since the blade had awakened, he stopped listening to correction entirely.
No sword-guidance.
No qi-alignment.
No system.
He breathed.
Once.
That simple act bucked the chamber, the Sub-Cuts stuttering as something unmodeled asserted itself.
The predator hesitated.
Just a fraction.
Enough.
Tareth moved—not fast, not efficient, not optimal. His step was late. His stance was wrong. His cut angled too high, too wide, violating every Kaelvar principle that had ever kept him alive.
The sword resisted.
Hard.
Because this was not a cut that preserved continuity.
This was a cut that cost something.
Steel met the predator's advancing geometry—and for the first time, there was resistance. The impact detonated outward, not as force but as contradiction. The predator's form flickered violently, edges blurring as incompatible rules fought for dominance.
It screamed then.
Audibly.
A sound like glass being told it was no longer transparent.
The Sub-Cuts buckled.
Prime incisions flared wildly, entire sections of the chamber blinking out of existence and reappearing a breath later, misaligned. The prime incision at the center split wider, the void between the pillars trembling.
The Inquisitor was thrown to her knees again, coughing blood. "Tareth—if you keep this up, you'll collapse the foundation!"
"Good," he said hoarsely. "Then it won't have anything left to learn from."
The predator surged, abandoning subtlety. It lunged directly at him, all its geometry collapsing into a brutal, unfinished approximation of a strike.
Tareth raised the blade—
—and did not cut.
He reversed the edge.
Turned it inward.
And severed his own qi-flow again.
The backlash was immediate and brutal. Pain ripped through him as his internal alignment shattered, qi dispersing chaotically, refusing coherence. He collapsed to one knee, vision whitening.
The sword went dead in his hand.
Utterly.
The predator froze mid-lunge.
Confusion rippled through it.
It had learned the edge.
It had learned the cuts.
But it had not learned refusal.
"You hunt broken rules," Tareth gasped, forcing himself upright through agony. "But I'm not a rule anymore."
He stepped forward, empty-handed now, sword slipping from numb fingers and clattering across the stone.
The chamber held its breath.
The predator recoiled—not from fear, but from loss of reference. Without qi, without alignment, without edge-guidance, Tareth was no longer legible to it.
He was noise.
Mistake.
Uncategorized.
The prime incision flickered.
The predator screamed again as its form destabilized, hunting for purchase that no longer existed. Its geometry collapsed inward, folding into itself as the Sub-Cuts—starved of usable precedent—began rejecting it.
Not sealing it.
Ejecting it.
Space tore open violently behind the creature, a wound not into darkness, but into elsewhere. The predator was dragged backward, clawing at definitions that refused to hold.
It locked onto Tareth one last time.
Not hatred.
Promise.
Then it was gone—ripped out of the Sub-Cuts, expelled into a reality that had not agreed to host it.
The chamber fell silent.
Too silent.
The prime incision dimmed to a thin, unstable line.
The Inquisitor stared at Tareth, disbelief naked on her face. "You… erased yourself."
Tareth swayed, barely standing. "No," he said. "I postponed myself."
Above them, Ironreach shuddered—then stabilized, not repaired, but paused. The bleeding slowed.
In House Myrr, Sereth Nael felt the pressure ease and knew immediately: something had been expelled, not resolved.
In the Demon Realm, the ancient entity went very still.
Then smiled.
"Ah," it murmured. "Now that is dangerous."
Because the predator was no longer trapped beneath the world.
It was loose.
And it had learned just enough—
to start writing somewhere else.