"Come."
The killer did not come at once.
He rose slowly, like a man who had all the time in the world and who, for one reason or another, feared neither being stopped nor being beaten. He wiped the blood running from his nose and looked at Kaen — and smiled.
The roles reversed in a second.
Kaen did not answer the smile — he could not afford to. His red and violet lines were already pulsing more faintly, his body would not hold, his time was running out, and it would not wait for him.
He looked away from the killer.
Solvane was still on her knees, a few meters behind. Alive. Conscious. She was looking at him with an expression he could not name.
"What are you doing here?"
His voice came out sharper than he had meant.
"Take Azriel and leave."
Solvane did not move. Her lips parted, but nothing came out — no words, no refusal, just hesitation. She looked at Azriel lying on the ground, then Kaen, then the killer, then Kaen again.
Kaen had no patience left. His gaze cooled.
"That was not a question."
This time, she moved. She rose on legs still trembling. She slipped one arm under Azriel's shoulders, the other under her knees, and lifted her up — the way one holds a child that has fallen asleep, or the way one carries a queen. Azriel's head fell back, and her white hair swept the ground one last time before Solvane pivoted and ran, without a word, without even a look back.
Kaen did not watch her go. He turned his head toward the killer.
The killer had waited.
"Almost touching," he said.
A silence lingered.
"But you know, after you, I'll come for them next."
His voice had fully returned. It was not shaking anymore. The frightened man from a moment earlier was gone. Or had never existed — just a role, a garment worn over something else. What remained in the clearing was no longer an operative surprised that his target was still breathing. It was a Master. And he was no longer hiding it.
He rolled his wrist. His blade appeared in his hand as if it had always been there — curved, flat, without reflection.
"Let's see how many times you can come back from the dead," he said.
An unpleasant smile spread across his face.
"Let's see how long this power that is not yours will last."
Kaen felt his whole body tremble. The red and violet lines were pulsing harder than he would have wanted — not like marks, like fissures. His body was crumbling as the force carried it.
'He knows,' he thought. 'He knows I can't last.'
He lowered his hand toward his side.
He called his sword — the one he had received from the Trial, the one Elisabeth had told him not to use. It was no longer an option now.
That, or dying a third time.
He closed his hand on the hilt.
The cold ran up his arm. Not the cold of the air. The cold of a thing that had nothing to do with temperature anymore, and that recognized his hand without ever having had that certainty before.
He drew.
And in the same movement, he began reciting words he had never learned.
To kill is a mercy this art refuses.
It was not a thought. Not a reading. His own voice, dull, flat, spoken from within — the way one recites something one has always carried and never had to check.
To cut is to correct the insult of existence, returning the target to its initial state: Nothingness. What is struck is not put to death. It is decreed to have never existed.
He was not hearing himself say it. He was it.
Ten seals lock this technique. The last one who dared shatter the fourth became the very thing he wielded. He did not die; he simply ceased to have ever existed.
Kaen finally answered the killer's arrogant words.
"You didn't really think that killing me would erase me from your path, did you?"
He smiled — cold.
The killer did not lose his smile.
"Well said," he said — and attacked.
There was no announcement. No stance. His blade was in low guard one instant, and the next instant, it was rising from beneath toward Kaen's side — a rising strike Kaen should not have been able to see coming.
Not because he was good. Because the window, what was left of the window, chose to show him. His body stepped back half a pace, his own blade rose, and the trajectory of the strike broke against it with the sound of two metals that did not resemble one another.
The killer tilted his head.
"Interesting," he said — and pressed on.
They were no longer isolated blows. It was a single unbroken phrase. Six, eight, ten strikes following each other without any of them finishing — every parry Kaen put up became the doorway to the next, every dodge became the space for a worse angle. It was art. Kaen knew nothing of art. He had only the window, the sword, and his body, which broke every time he held his ground.
He could not win like this.
He knew it by the third exchange.
By the end of the fourth, he did what he had not had the time to think of doing: in the middle of a parry, he sent his blade cutting through the air beside the killer's guard. A short cut, white, that touched nothing solid.
It touched the air around the moving blade.
And while it passed — just while it passed — everything that happened along its path stopped making a sound.
The killer, for the span of half a breath, did not hear himself parry. The impact of the two blades reached his hands, but not his ears. He heard neither the whistle of steel, nor the tearing of the air, nor the small crack his own wrist should have made absorbing the blow. A silence in the shape of a trajectory. As if Kaen's blade had scratched the world in passing.
He stopped.
A second. Not more. But a second was enough, at that level, to change something.
Kaen did not attack. He would have lived so briefly he would not have had time to lose. He stepped back and let him understand.
The killer looked at the space to his left, then at Kaen. The unpleasant smile came back — but more slowly this time. As if the Master had just recognized something he should not have recognized, and had not yet decided whether it was a problem or a pleasure.
The silence, around him, had not yet closed.
Kaen did not wait for it to close.
His blade left again — shorter, lower, further from the killer's line of attack. It was not a strike: it was a cut. A cut, then a second, then a third, scattered in the gaps the fight left him.
Every cut touched the air.
Every cut deafened him a little more.
The killer kept striking. His blows were orchestrated, his angles impossible, his speed beyond what Kaen should have been able to follow. But he was no longer hearing any of it. He was no longer hearing the tearing of the air, nor the ash under his feet, nor his own breath. A fighter at his level lived by sound as much as by sight. Sound gave him the shape of the world behind him. Sound told him where he was in relation to what was moving.
Kaen claimed the space around him.
By the sixth cut, the killer missed a parry.
Not much. Kaen's blade barely touched his wrist, a thin thread of blood. But the Master's smile froze. He looked at his wrist. He looked at Kaen. And for the first time, something moved behind his eyes that no longer resembled pleasure.
Kaen did not let him think about it.
He advanced. He was not fast — the luminous lines were vibrating more faintly with every gesture, they were burning under his skin, his right arm was cold up to the shoulder — but he advanced. Three steps. Another cut. Then another. Then, when the killer thought to raise his guard to the right, his hand went to the left because he could no longer hear the signal that should have warned him against the right.
It did not cut.
Something came out of the ground. Not a root. Not a hand. Chains. Thin, black, without reflection — the kind of chains that should not exist in a clearing scarred by an exam. They wrapped around the killer in a fraction of a second, climbed his leg, his waist, his chest, his neck, and pulled him back.
"AHHHHHHHHH, stop, wait, I haven't finished what I had to do here!"
The man was panicking, clawing desperately at the ground.
A space opened behind him. Not a door. Not a portal. A gash — as if whatever lay beyond it were tearing through the world itself. The killer disappeared into it, pulled by the chains.
'Who — ?'
He did not have time to finish the question.
His legs gave way.
He fell to his knees, his blade drove its point into the ash, and he leaned on it like an old man leans on a cane it was never meant for. The window in his muscles went out — all at once, without warning, like a light switched off. His red and violet lines pulsed one last time, hard, and stopped all at once.
His breath broke.
He heard, from far away, footsteps running back.
"Kaen!"
That was Solvane's voice.
"What are you doing here?" he mumbled. "I told you to leave."
Then he heard another voice, fainter, lower.
"Kaen."
He had the strength to recognize it one last time.
"Azriel, you're alive," he said, relieved.
And he fell into a coma once again.