Mio
Mio didn't have time to refuse.
Mori moved.
One moment she was at the edge of the frozen floor, cracking her knuckles. The next, palm flat against Mio's sternum, heat blooming through her ribs.
[Burst]
Ceiling. Floor. Wall. Concrete hit her spine hard enough to taste blood. The heat was still there, spreading through her chest, cooking her from the inside.
She tried to heal. Green light flickered, started knitting—
Mori's foot connected with her ribs.
Airborne again. Shorter arc. She hit the ground rolling, came up on one knee, vision swimming. The air itself was hot. Hard to breathe. Like inhaling near an open oven.
Mori stood in the center of the room. Heat poured off her skin in visible waves, turning the frozen floor to steam where she walked. Her hands glowed faint orange, thermal radiation wreathing her fingers like gloves made of haze.
"Shizuka really did hold back." She tilted her head. "You're not even warm yet."
Mio pushed herself up. Legs shaking. Lungs burning. The hunger screaming for blooms that didn't exist. Nothing to kill here, nothing to take, nothing to feed the hole in her chest.
Alone.
Lightning left her fingertip anyway, a green-white streak, fast and accurate, that should have ended the fight.
Mori caught it.
The bolt hit her palm and hissed, green light meeting thermal radiation, organic matter flash-cooking on contact. Her fingers closed around what was left.
Ash.
"You're the same as the rest of them." She examined her palm. Not even a mark. "What else?"
Mio ran.
Lateral. Looking for angle, for distance—
Mori was already beside her.
Three hits. Elbow, knee, forearm. Each one cooking heat deeper into tissue. She didn't see any of them coming.
[HP: 251/1,420]
Stumbling. Mori let her.
That was the worst part. The waiting. Mori could have ended this three times already. Instead she was watching. Curious.
Green light stitched something back together, but the heat stayed. Sealed under new skin. Burns cooking deeper instead of fading.
Wrong. All wrong.
[Reservoir: 2,100/125,000]
Every heal locked more heat inside her body.
She couldn't outpace this.
"You walked into Shizuka's spears." Mori circled her. Slow. "That was smart. Stupid, but smart."
Mio's hands were shaking.
"Showed commitment. Showed you weren't afraid to bleed." Mori stopped. "Are you afraid now?"
No answer. Couldn't. Her throat was raw from superheated air.
"You should be."
Palm strike.
Mio tried to dodge. Made it halfway. Mori's hand caught her shoulder instead of her chest (small mercy) and the joint dislocated with a wet pop. Spinning. Ground. Mori followed her down.
Hand on her shoulder. Still burning. Pressing her into concrete while the heat spread through her collarbone, her neck, her chest.
[HP: 7/1,420]
Seven. Single digits.
No.
She reached for a heal. Automatic. Desperate. The green light fought the heat already sealed inside.
[HP: 48/1,420]
The shoulder reset. Burns closed. Still alive. For now.
Mori stood up. Looked down at her. The heat had stopped, pulled back into that controlled shimmer, waiting.
"Shizuka thinks you're special." Quiet. "She thinks there's something in you worth saving."
Mio couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Vision going gray at the edges.
"I don't see it."
Mori raised her hand. The air around her palm began to glow.
"This is where you die."
A sound. From behind. Metal on metal, tiny and rapid, like coins tumbling down stairs.
Mori's head turned.
The wall exploded inward.
Not the whole wall. A section. Rubble sprayed across the frozen floor, concrete chunks skittering toward Mori's feet. Through the dust, a shape. Small. Moving fast.
Can.
His armor was dented in a dozen places, visor cracked down the center, one pauldron missing entirely. Faint light flickered through the seams of his chassis, guttering, fading, but still holding on. He had crossed the city alone, through whatever stood in his way, and now he hit the ground running in a motion that was more controlled falling than actual stride. Each step a barely-caught stumble that somehow covered distance. Sword arm hanging wrong. Legs moving in stuttering jerks.
But he moved. Straight at Mori.
Watching from the ground through a haze of blood and heat, Mio saw it happen. The tiny knight charging a Grade A with nothing but loyalty and a broken body.
Mori turned fully. Back to Mio. Palm raised toward the knight charging from behind.
"Interesting."
Can didn't slow down.
Mori smiled.
Same smile Shizuka had worn when the Spark kept growing through Absolute Zero. Same hunger dressed as curiosity.
[Equip CHIMERA: Putrid Knight?]
[Dormant Form: Companion]
[Active Form: —]
The notification floated at the edge of her vision.
Active Form was blank. Undefined. She'd never tested it.
Mori's palm pulsed white. Eruption charging.
Can was fifteen meters away. Ten. Still running.
He was going to die. For her. Because he had saluted her in a parking garage full of blood, and now he was going to throw himself at a Grade A because that's what knights did.
No.
[EQUIP]
The command was instantaneous.
[Active Form: —]
[Initializing...]
Something tore open inside her chest. The hunger uncoiling. Rising. Sharper. Directed.
Can dissolved.
Mid-stride, five meters from Mori's burning palm, the knight came apart. Not destruction, but transformation. His armor folded inward as his body condensed into something liquid and dark, crossing the distance between them faster than Mori could track.
[Eruption]
The blast hit empty air where he'd been. Vacuum and pressure reversing in the same instant, tiles becoming rubble, concrete becoming dust, the observation window shattering inward as sprinklers burst overhead and filled the arena with water and smoke and superheated air.
The crater smoked. Rubble settled. Can wasn't there.
He was already in her palm.
Something hit her open hand. Wet, warm, a mass of black biomass that pulsed with faint light. Not dead, but changed. Condensed. Waiting.
She didn't speak. It moved anyway.
The biomass crawled up her wrist and forearm, black shell spreading across her skin like oil finding cracks in stone. She watched it happen. Let it.
Chitin plates locked into place one by one, layering over muscle and bone while green-white veins threaded through the black shell in time with her heartbeat.
Her fingers disappeared beneath the spreading armor. Knuckles. Wrist. The gauntlet climbed past her elbow, fusing with flesh, and she felt the knight's memories bleeding into her own: eight hundred years of standing guard at a threshold that no longer mattered, gripping a sword that had long since shattered against the tide. She saw his companions falling one by one until only the long vigil remained, an endless suffocating dark that stretched across centuries without purpose or end.
And at the end of it: a girl with green eyes who gave him a name.
[Would you like to assume the traits of the Putrid Knight?]
The question hung there.
She thought about the parking garage. The knight's arm rotting off mid-cast. Everything he had poured into one shot that came a second too late.
Final Vigil.
The move that almost killed him.
The gauntlet pulsed. Waiting.
Mori was turning now. Slow. Looking for the knight she'd just tried to vaporize—
Her arm rose.
What used to be her arm.
[HP: 48/1,420]
[Reservoir: 2,000/125,000]
The runes began forming. Lines first, thin and precise, then geometry blooming outward. The same pattern the knight had drawn in the parking garage. The same hum building in her chest.
Green-white this time. Gaian's colors bleeding through the knight's gift.
[Final Vigil cost: 100,000]
[Reservoir: 2,000]
[Insufficient]
[Incur debt?]
A hundred thousand.
She had two.
The knight had nearly died for this move. Spent himself completely. And even then, even giving everything, he had missed by one second.
She had 435 HP. A fused arm. A body still cooking from the inside.
Her eyes found Mori.
I don't give a shit.
[-100,000]
[Reservoir: -98,000/125,000]
[DEBT INCURRED]
The number went red. Negative. A hole that would need to be filled with kills, with blooms, with whatever the hunger could find.
The runes flared.
Mori finished turning. Eruption's smoke still clearing. She saw Mio standing. Saw the gauntlet, black chitin and green-white veins, the knight's armor fused to human flesh. Saw the runes taking shape above the armored palm. Geometry older than nations.
For one moment, she stopped.
Then the smile returned. Wider than before.
"This is new."
The runes connected with a sound like a lock clicking home. The geometry locked into place as lines snapped together and shapes folded inward, the whole structure beginning to spin, brighter now, fed by something that had waited centuries for a second chance.
Mio's eyes were empty. Whoever had walked into this arena was somewhere else now.
The geometry hummed. The pressure in her palm built toward critical mass.
Mori didn't move. She could have. Eruption had a cooldown, but she had other abilities, that terrifying speed. She could have closed the distance and knocked the runes apart before they finished forming.
She didn't.
Her lips moved. Mio couldn't hear the words over the hum.
"Do it."
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