Nythrel gave us the location the same way he gave most things — quietly, without explanation, like he'd simply reached into the air and pulled it out.
A warehouse. East side of the city. Near the old port.
He didn't say how he knew.
Nobody asked.
We found it at dusk.
It didn't look like much from the outside — corrugated walls, a rusted rolling door, the kind of building cities forget about. A row of dead streetlights ran along the road in front of it. The kind of street that's busy enough during the day that nobody notices what's there, and empty enough at night that nobody comes back to check.
I stood in front of it with my hands in my pockets.
Leilani and Ikaroa just behind me.
Nythrel stood a little apart from the group, listening to something none of us could hear, the way he always did.
"I'll call Nuku," he said.
"We're not waiting," I said.
He didn't argue. He just nodded once, like he'd expected that answer, and stepped back from the door.
"He's in there," I said.
Not a question.
Something in the air around the building was wrong in a way that was hard to explain. Heavier. Like the space inside had been rearranged for a different purpose.
Ikaroa studied the door.
"We go in together," I said. "Stay within sight of each other."
Ikaroa rolled his shoulders.
Leilani nodded once.
I pulled the door open.
The smell hit first.
Old wood. Dust. And underneath it something organic — thick and faintly sweet, like the inside of something living.
The warehouse was enormous.
And it was covered.
Every surface — walls, ceiling, the old rusted support beams running overhead — wrapped in silk. Not messily. Not the way spiderwebs collect in corners. This was structural. Intentional. Thick cables of white ran between the beams like rigging on a ship, layered so densely in places that the walls behind them had disappeared entirely. The floor was clear, but only barely, and even that felt like a choice someone had made.
A single lamp burned near the far corner.
Beside it — a couch. A small shelf of books. A coat folded neatly over the armrest.
I looked at it for a moment.
So this was where he lived.
"Don't touch the webs," Ikaroa said quietly.
"Already figured that," Leilani murmured.
We moved in slowly, spreading out just enough to see around each other. The silk caught the lamplight in long pale lines. Above us, the ceiling had become something else entirely — a canopy, layered and deep, full of shadows that didn't quite resolve into shapes.
Then one of the shadows moved.
"You brought everyone this time."
Zeke's voice came from above.
He dropped from the canopy and landed on a thick horizontal cable maybe eight meters up, standing on it the way someone stands on a floor — easy, balanced, like gravity was a thing that applied to other people.
He looked down at us.
"Smart," he said.
He didn't look like Mr. Zeke anymore. Not really. The classroom patience was still there in his expression, but something underneath it had changed — or maybe it had always been there and the school had just been a very good costume.
"Hekeheke," Leilani said.
He tilted his head at the name.
"It's been a while," he said. Not to her. Not to anyone specific.
His eyes moved to me briefly.
Then back.
"I assume talking is off the table," he said.
No one answered.
Ikaroa was already moving.
It started fast and got worse.
Ikaroa went high — up the side of a support beam, using it to close the vertical distance, his blade already in motion.
Leilani moved low, flanking left, gecko spirit flickering along her arms as she navigated the web-strung floor without touching a single strand.
I went straight.
Heke moved across the webs above us the way water moves across a surface — frictionless, immediate. He didn't fight from one spot. He was always slightly somewhere else, and his webs moved with him, new ones appearing in the spaces we'd identified as clear, redirecting angles we'd already committed to.
I ducked under a cable that hadn't been there a second ago and felt it brush the back of my neck.
Thick. Wrong weight. Like a rope that was also a muscle.
I kept moving.
We weren't copying anything. There was nothing to copy — his style was too fluid, too geometry-dependent, too tied to an environment he'd constructed specifically for himself. My body knew what it knew. I worked with that.
It wasn't enough, but it was what I had.
Ikaroa landed a strike — actually landed it, clean across Heke's forearm — and for a second the air felt like it shifted in our favor.
Then three web lines snapped taut at once and yanked Ikaroa sideways off the beam.
He caught himself on a lower cable, swung, recovered. But his landing was wrong and before he could reset, another line came across and hit him in the chest like a horizontal clothesline.
He went down hard.
He got back up.
That was the thing about Ikaroa — he always got back up, and he always looked almost annoyed about having to.
We pressed together, side by side, and it was better that way. Ikaroa's reach covered the angles I couldn't hit from the ground. I kept the space beneath us clear, read Heke's weight shifts on the web lines above us like vibrations on a string.
We were actually working.
For a while.
Then Leilani's voice cut through the noise — not a word, just a sharp sound that meant something had gone wrong.
I looked.
A cable had her by the tail.
She was airborne before I could move — hauled upward, spinning, the web pulling taut as Heke redirected the line from above. She was going to be flung. I'd seen what those cables could do to a wall and I didn't want to think about what happened when they hit a person.
She twisted in the air.
And then something flashed — a sharp clean motion, not panicked, decided — and her tail came free.
Not because the web released.
Because she left it behind.
She dropped and hit the floor in a roll, came up on her hands and knees, breathing hard. A small length of tail remained suspended in the silk above her, still twitching faintly.
She looked up at where it hung.
"Not this time," she said quietly.
Something in her voice was different. Steadier. Like she'd been waiting for that exact moment to arrive so she could answer it correctly.
She stood.
Then Heke landed behind her.
One strike, precise, the heel of his palm to the back of her shoulder at an angle that made her collapse without drama. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.
He straightened.
Looked at us.
Ikaroa made a sound beside me that wasn't quite a word.
We moved.
The next few minutes were the worst.
Ikaroa was incredible — I already knew that, I'd watched him in the trials, I'd sparred beside him. But he was operating in someone else's environment and it was costing him. Every opening he found had a web behind it. Every line of attack ended in silk.
We kept each other covered.
It worked, until it didn't.
A cable came from behind, caught Ikaroa at the ankles, and before either of us could react it had dragged him back and up — three meters off the ground, suspended, wrapped. He got one arm free and cut the line with his blade but the momentum was already gone and he came down at a bad angle and stayed down.
He didn't get up this time.
His chest was moving.
That was enough.
I stood in the middle of the warehouse.
The webs shifted above me, settling into new positions. The lamp in the corner still burned. The shelf of books caught the light.
Heke descended slowly on a single cable, coming to rest on the floor a few meters away.
He looked at me.
"You've improved," he said.
I didn't answer.
He was right. But it didn't matter right now.
"You should stop here," he said. Not unkindly. "There's no shame in it."
I exhaled slowly.
Something had been building in my chest for the last several minutes — not anger exactly, not adrenaline. Something quieter. Deeper. Like pressure that had been waiting for a specific shape to pour itself into.
I'd felt it before.
I let it come.
The air around me changed.
Heke noticed. His expression didn't shift dramatically, but his weight changed — a slight redistribution, a readiness he hadn't needed before.
"Ah," he said.
I breathed in.
And then I breathed out.
The flame that came wasn't fire the way fire usually is. It was a beam, so bright it light up the warehouse, so hot it meltednthe spider webs, its color so beautiful I wanted to touch it, and it hit the web architecture in front of me and didn't just burn — it unmade, fast and consuming, the silk curling and vanishing before it had time to be ash.
Heke's eyes widened for the first time since the fight had begun.
"So that's what you were hiding."
The words were barely audible beneath the roar.
His Spirit answered before the rest of him did.
The tattoo-like markings across his back ignited with pale light, and with a violent snap eight enormous spider legs burst outward, unfolding in perfect sequence.
Black chitin gleamed beneath the firelight, each limb tipped with a blade-like point. They drove themselves into the warehouse around him—two into the walls, four into the remaining beams, two into the floor—forming a living brace.
Silk erupted from them.
Not thin strands.
Layers.
One after another in impossible speed, weaving over themselves into a dense white barrier. It thickened with every heartbeat until it resembled a cocoon standing between him and the oncoming blaze.
The beam struck.
The entire warehouse shook.
For an instant the silk held.
Then it began to disappear.
Not burning.
Vanishing.
The front layers dissolved almost immediately, the heat reducing them to nothing before they could even blacken.
Heke planted all eight legs deeper, muscles in his shoulders tightening as more webbing poured from them to replace what was being erased.
The pressure only grew.
His feet slid.
The screech of metal echoed through the warehouse as the spider legs carved long trenches through the concrete and gouged deep scars into the support beams they clung to.
Heke's calm expression finally cracked.
"...Impossible."
Another layer failed.
Then another.
The cocoon collapsed inward under the relentless beam, forcing the spider legs to fold tighter around him as the remaining shield shrank.
The force caught him completely.
His body lifted from the ground despite every point of purchase.
The spider legs ripped free one after another with explosive cracks, fragments of concrete and steel flying through the air.
He shot backward across the warehouse, still wrapped inside the last remnants of his shield.
The beam carried him all the way to the ceiling.
He hit it hard enough to cave in the rusted metal panels above him, the impact thundering through the entire building.
The remaining spider legs stabbed into the roof to stop him from being blasted straight through it, every limb trembling under the strain as they anchored him in place.
For a single moment, he simply hung there.
The last threads of silk drifted away like snow.
Smoke rose from the scorched armor of his Spirit.
Then the beam finally ceased.
Heke moved.
He was fast. He was very fast.
But his footing was in the webs, and the webs were going.
I stayed low and kept pushing — not recklessly, not pouring everything into the open air. Directional. Measured. The way Kahoni had taught me to think about force, even before I'd had anything to apply it to.
The webs fell.
Heke landed on the bare warehouse floor and for the first time in the entire fight he was standing on the same surface as the rest of us.
We were close now.
I hit him.
Not a technique. Not a copy of anyone else's movement. Just a punch from someone who had been learning how to throw one correctly for years, with everything I had left behind it.
He took it.
Staggered.
Caught himself on the wall.
The warehouse was still settling — dust in the air, the smell of burned silk, the last few cables swinging loose from the ceiling.
Neither of us moved for a moment.
I walked over and stood in front of him.
He was braced against the wall, head lowered slightly. Breathing carefully.
I wasn't in great shape either.
"Go," I said.
He looked up at me.
"The deal's done," I said. "You held your end. I held mine."
A pause.
Something passed through his expression — not gratitude, not quite. Something more complicated and older than that.
He looked at the ruined warehouse. The couch in the corner. The books still sitting untouched on the shelf.
"I suppose it is," he said quietly.
He straightened slowly.
He picked up the coat from the couch armrest.
He looked at me once more — that same careful attention from the office, from the hallway, from every encounter in between.
"Its sad you had to get wrapped up in our fight. Don't let the flames of Anakoa's past consume you, though I know my favourite student isn't weak enough for that." he said.
Then he walked to the far end of the warehouse, where a second door I hadn't noticed stood half-open, and he left without looking back.
I stood in the wreckage for a moment.
Dust still drifting.
Webs still burning at the edges.
Then I turned around and went to check on the others.
Leilani was breathing steadily. Ikaroa had managed to sit up on his own, which I chose to take as a good sign. His blade was still in his hand.
He looked at the scorched ceiling.
He looked at me.
"The breathing thing," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
He was quiet for a second.
"Next time," he said, "maybe start with that."
I sat down on the floor beside him.
Outside, somewhere distant, the city continued its business.
The warehouse was very quiet.
It stayed that way until the far door opened again.
Nuku stepped through it, took one look at the scorched ceiling, the downed webs, Leilani unconscious on the floor, Ikaroa sitting in the rubble with his blade across his knees — and then at me.
He said nothing for a long moment.
Then he crouched beside Leilani and checked her over with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this many times.
"She's fine," he said.
"I know," I said.
He stood.
He looked around the warehouse again — at the burned silk, the ruined structure, the second door still hanging open at the far end.
"He's gone," I said.
Nuku looked at me.
I met his eyes.
Neither of us felt the need to say anything else about it.
He said not to let the flames of their war consume me, but how can I not help my friend whom I finally found after so many years..