Chapter IX Part II

He hunts me through the breath and the light.

The yellow blade is everywhere at once—high feint, low cut, pommel jab that grazes my jaw, a cross-body slash that would have split me if I’d been a heartbeat slower. I meet each angle with the magenta hum of my double-blade, wrists rolling, forearms burning, feet skimming across lacquered boards that feel more like water than wood. My breath saws in and out, chest tight with heat and ozone. The air tastes like copper and smoke.

He drives me back with a diagonal cut that rings my bones. The impact shudders down my spine. I give ground, one step, then two, then stop giving.

“Good,” he murmurs from behind the mask, and the way he says it lands like a challenge.

I pivot out, blade singing, then kill the rotation and lock the staff at my hip, magenta plasma a bar between us. Sweat beads along my temple and trickles into my lashes. The grip leather is slick—I re-seat my hands, feel the tiny embossed claw marks bite against my skin and hold.

I’m fast.

But I can be faster.

I lift my hands to my shoulders. Papa stills, reading the motion, that almost-imperceptible tilt of his head that means he’s already considered three answers to whatever I’m about to do. The clasps click under my thumbs. The weighted robe sloughs down my back and hits the floor with a WHUD hard enough to make the balcony railing tremble.

The pressure vanishes.

My limbs go light—too light for a heartbeat, like stepping off a ship onto a pier after days at sea—then my balance snaps cleanly into place. Blood prickles at my forearms and calves as if the muscles are waking up for the second time.

His blade lowers half an inch. “You were holding back.”

“Kinda,” I say, and the grin that finds my mouth isn’t polite.

I move.

The wind under my soles is a wordless answer, pressure lifting at the last instant of each step, tiny invisible hands correcting the slip of sweat on wood, the yaw of momentum after a spin. The double-blade becomes a ribbon, a bright seam in the world. I drive, then break the saber in my hands—one twist, a hiss—and now there are two sabers singing in my grip.

Left hand draws his guard. Right hand stabs inside it. A shallow nick across his vambrace—no more than a kiss of heat, but it’s mine. He flows past, cleaner than I’ve ever seen him, robes whispering, the yellow blade turning my second strike into a shower of sparks that pepper his shoulder and die.

From above: a sucked-in breath. “She tagged him,” Lisanna whispers, awe wrapped around the words. Mira doesn’t speak; she’s forgotten how.

He doesn’t retreat. Of course he doesn’t.

His next step shortens the distance to nothing, and then he’s on me—blade, shoulder, knee, hilt—every part of him a vector. I let my hips loosen and slide, sabers crossing and uncrossing like scissors around a bolt of cloth. The hum of our weapons stacks until the dojo itself seems to vibrate. Our faces pass within inches. I see my own magenta light swim across the cutouts of his mask; I feel the breath he doesn’t waste.

A flash of heat against my cheek—his off-hand blooms fire. I whip one saber into a half-circle guard and redirect his attack with outstretched fingers, shouldering the flame aside in a bright sheet that curls into the rafters and fizzles. The other blade keeps working, a needle and thread through his defenses, never stopping, never letting him set the tempo.

He plants, changes weight, tries to cut me in half with a two-handed chop that would have broken my elbows last month. I meet it with both sabers crossed, knees bent, body stacked under the line of force. The impact claps the breath out of me. The floor complains under our boots.

“Very good,” he says softly, and pushes with an outstretched hand.

The shock tears my stance apart. My heels skid; the world tilts; the twin blades flare wide to recover. Every part of me wants to scramble backward, to chase distance and oxygen. I go forward instead.

Close. Closer. Crowding him. One saber high to force his angle. One saber low to harry his footwork. I steal an inch and then another, and now it’s his balance I can feel searching for purchase.

The mask dips.

The next instant, his hands clap.

The sound is nothing.

The answer is everything.

The dojo groans, then convulses. The floor rears up in a ring of stone. Pillars punch through the boards in a widening circle, slinging splinters and dust into the light. The twins shriek and cling to the balcony rail. Talia’s voice cuts, sharp and steady, calming them before I can look.

Papa jumps.

He alights on a waist-wide column as if it grew for him and him alone. The yellow blade points down, relaxed, like a fisherman’s line trailing into a black lake. “Come,” he says, quiet as a secret.

Challenge accepted.

The room drops away when I leave the floor. For a heartbeat I’m weightless, the world turning slow and precise around me, every mote of dust a star. Then the air gathers under my boots and sets me down on the nearest column with just enough mercy not to crack my ankles.

No handrails here. No second chances.

He moves as I land. I move with him.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

We leap from stone to stone, a rough spiral shrinking and widening, trading places, trading height. The dojo becomes a forest of gray trunks under us. My sabers draw arcs through the air that linger on my vision like constellations. His blade answers them all with lines straight as geometry. The wind tears the edges of our cloaks. The lanterns flick and gutter and then burn steadier, as if deciding this, too, is something they will survive.

He accelerates.

The yellow sword goes from line to blur, and for the first time today I feel real fear cut through the varnish of focus. Not the panic that unravels you—no. A clean, cold slice that sharpens everything to edges.

I lower my profile and let the staff come back together with a click. Twins are for harrying; this is a bridge, and a bridge holds. The magenta bar swings in tight, efficient circles that catch his attacks at the root. Hips and shoulders. Feet and breath. Time crawls and races in the same second.

He stabs for my thigh; I’m no longer there. He pivots, tries to take my ankles; I step on nothing and find a new column. He lifts his free hand and the pillar under me cracks and drops six inches with a bone-deep thud meant to steal my knees. The air under my soles hardens just enough to buy a fraction of a second. Enough.

From the balcony: “Nikko!” Mira can’t help herself. “Don’t fall!”

“She got this,” Lisanna says, and I almost believe she means it.

We collide again—steel meeting light, or rather light meeting light, and the steel in our arms behind it. The staff sings from my palms into my forearms and up my shoulders; the vibration is almost pleasant. Papa’s robe snaps in the wind as he shifts. I faint high, twist low; he reads both and stifles them, a hand on my chest without touching me.

Stop letting him read you.

I split the hilt a second time mid-spin. The right-hand blade drops out of sight. His guard tics down to follow it. The left hand doesn’t stab—it throws. Magenta becomes a wheel and crosses the space between us, screaming.

He bats the thrown saber aside—of course he does—but for a thin slice of a moment, his angle is wrong.

I’m already on him.

We pass each other at a dead run atop two columns barely wider than our feet and exchange six strikes in the space between heartbeats. My remaining blade kisses his again. I dodge just in time as his lightsaber narrowly grazes my arm. I felt the heat from the blade.

Somewhere above, Erza squeals, delighted, her little voice rising pure over the thunder of our weapons. The sound floats down like a bell and lodges where my fear might have lived. I grin into my teeth. I can do this. Not forever. Not even for long. But long enough.

Papa shifts—something tiny and total. The mountain stops humoring the climber.

Every strike now carries weight I can feel in the boards and the bone. The air around each swing compresses; my ears pop. He doesn’t waste anything—not a step, not a turn of the wrist. His free hand flickers, changing the battlefield by inches: a column shaved shorter, a ridge of stone blossoming under my trailing foot, a scatter of grit kicked up into my eyes. I blink the grit clear with a tear and do not surrender the angle.

I give him new problems to solve. Heat in my knuckles. The smell of scorched cloth layered with resin and incense. Fire spirals off my heel as I wheel kick for his head; he leans back so little I cannot see the motion and the flame sketches a red curve through the space where his mask was. The return stroke meets his guard and drives him back a fraction—half an inch, maybe less. I’ll take it.

“You are reading me,” he says, and there’s a new note in it—approval, yes, but also the satisfaction of a proud master. “Good.”

“Trying to,” I rasp, and hate how breathless I sound.

We cross the circle of pillars and cut it into quarters. The twins have stopped chattering. Even Apollo has stepped forward unconsciously, as if the small difference in distance could matter to a machine that would cross it in a blink if I fell.

Papa feints low, stabs high. I parry the high and let the low miss because there is no me left standing there. He sweeps; I ride the arc of the air just above the sweep and answer with a backhand that makes the bones in my wrist sing. Somewhere in the blur I retrieve the thrown saber—my hand closes around it as if the hilt is a live thing that wanted me back.

He lifts his hand, palm open.

The ring of pillars fractures.

Not breaks—unmakes. The upper halves shear cleanly and drift up like a crown unseating from a head. Chips hang in the air around us, each one catching lantern light in a different facet so the dojo is suddenly full of small, bright stars of stone.

With a quick flick of his wrist, the stars of stone fly towards me.

The world tightens to a needle’s eye. I don’t block; there’s too much to block. I shape. A shiver in the air. An angle where there was none a moment ago. I hold out my hand and the falling storm splits around me, stone singing past my ears and shoulders in a braided sheet that parts and closes like water. I step through it, and for two strides there’s nothing but the simple joy of being alive inside something impossible.

He’s ready for me anyway.

The yellow blade closes the door I wanted, so I make a window. I drop my shoulder and go under his guard, then snap up inside it and force him a pace back.

I don’t flinch.

I can’t flinch.

My mind screams move and my body obeys.

We blur toward the center—what would be the center if the floor still existed—and the blades meet and lock in a shower that tattoos my forearms in pinprick burns.

My lightsaber splits in my hands with a sharp twist. The left saber drops low and slashes for the tendons above his knee. The right saber goes vertical to catch the punishment I know is coming. He answers both, because of course he does, and when the hit lands on my guard it travels the old road up my arms and rattles the breath right out of me.

We separate across nothing and land again—he, weightless and precise; me, light in the limbs and heavy with lactic fire.

I spin both sabers once, take stock, and slide them home into a single hilt with a click that echoes farther than it should. My fingers tingle. My lungs burn and my muscles ache.

Papa stands like a storm held in human shape, his yellow blade low, humming steady. I can feel it—the restraint is gone. There’s no testing left, no gentle correction. He’s giving me all of it now.

The air tightens. My skin prickles. My grip firms on the hilt.

Then he’s moving.

I catch only impressions—the golden blur, the rush of displaced air, the crack of plasma against plasma. My arms lock as our blades collide and my boots skid furrows into the polished floor. Sparks burst upward, showering down like fireflies. He pivots before the last spark fades and slashes for my flank. I pivot with him, barely catching the strike, then whip my hilt apart, twin sabers answering from two directions.

For a breath, I press him.

He flows like water. His guard shifts just enough, his step sliding out of reach, the yellow blade batting aside my left-hand strike while the right only grazes his robe. He comes back with a cut so clean it’s like the world wanted to be divided.

I barely dodge. The hem of my tunic flares with heat and smoke.

Pain lances across my shoulder where his pommel clipped me. My whole arm sings with it, but I bite down hard and spin into a wheel-kick, flame lashing from my heel. He leans aside; the fire scars the pillar behind him.

He doesn’t stop.

Another strike. Another. Faster now. His blade is everywhere, his movements so smooth they barely make sound. My arms ache. My lungs burn. My heart hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to escape.