The battlefield inside and around the crimson hall had lost whatever resemblance it once possessed to ordered combat and become something feverish, something mythic and diseased, as though the mountain itself had peeled back its skin and revealed an older war still living underneath. Red-armoured enemies moved through smoke and broken stone with ritual precision, their cloaks snapping behind them like strips of flayed night, while my own people fought with the brutal economy of those who knew every second still lived was stolen from an enemy ledger. The hall's outer courtyard glowed with the low violent light of scattered fires, each flame licking at shattered barricades, severed limbs, and pools of blood that reflected the crimson pulse of the rift from within like dark mirrors. Above us, the faint bioluminescent shimmer of mountain insects drifted in slow spirals through the smoke, turning the moving shadows into something almost theatrical, yet there was nothing theatrical in the sound of it all the deep clang of steel against steel, the wet concussion of armour splitting, the sharp cracks of shock pistols discharging, the hiss of scorched flesh, the animal roars of familiars, and beneath every layer the quiet, constant whisper of the mist. That whisper had become smoother now, less like a temptation and more like an invitation. It slid through the mind with intimate patience, promising sleep, promising surrender, promising a release from thinking if only one would lower the blade for a single breath and let the dark make its claim.
Sextus, Quentin, Jabir, and Whitescale were already swallowed by that violence when I caught sight of Athena being driven toward the right flank of the battlefield.
She had been cut away from the others with frightening efficiency by two red-armoured enemies who moved with the kind of trained synergy that suggested years of fighting together in places where mercy had never survived long enough to become habit. Even from a distance I could read the shape of the trap they were building around her, one engaging her openly with disciplined force while the other vanished and reappeared through shifting angles and blind spots, the classic rhythm of cloak and dagger, one hand demanding the eye while the other prepared to cut the throat. I saw the second one emerge behind her at the exact moment his sword began its descent, and I did not think. My gravity boots ignited beneath me with a brutal burst that ripped me off the blood-slick ground and hurled me across the battlefield in a line so sharp and violent it felt less like movement and more like a declaration. The air screamed around my helmet. Sparks and embers streaked past my visor. I came in hard and low from Athena's rear quarter, driving my sword up into the enemy's katana with every ounce of thrust and panic and rage I had left inside me.
The impact rang like a great bell struck in a tomb.
His blade skidded across mine in a spray of sparks that lit Athena's face for a heartbeat and revealed the anger there, the exhaustion, the cold focus, the blood matted into her hairline. The force of my interception shoved the enemy's angle just enough to save her spine and shoulder, though the redirected blow still carved a bright line across the edge of my gauntlet. The shock of it ran up my arm like lightning and into my jaw. I landed awkwardly, boots chewing grooves into the stone as I absorbed momentum and pushed back into guard. The enemy stared at me for half a second with visible irritation that quickly settled into amusement. "Oh," he said, and his tone carried the smug warmth of a man being entertained at a dinner table rather than a battlefield, "you survived Gallow and still found the manners to intrude. I confess, I was not expecting the little prince to return from his lesson." The mention of that giant bastard's name sent a bitter pulse through my chest so sharp I could feel it in my teeth.
Athena did not waste the opening. Her next series of strikes came heavier, faster, more committed, each arc of her blades snapping through the air with greater force than before. Her anger was no longer hidden beneath elegance; it had entered the steel.
"These two work as one," she hissed to me between exchanges, her breath hard but controlled, her eyes never leaving the enemy in front of her. "Cloak and dagger. One drags the eye, the other takes the blind side. Break the pattern or they will drown us in angles." I nodded once, more sharply than I intended, and signaled with my blade and body positioning rather than words. The one I had intercepted my one now would be pressured hard and publicly; hers would be forced to react to her rhythm while she prepared to split the pair by velocity rather than distance.
I changed my grip, long sword forward, shorter blade reversed in my off hand and tucked closer to my forearm for near-range deflection and sudden line breaks. The enemy saw the adjustment and smiled in open mockery. "Oh, wonderful," he murmured, rolling his shoulders lightly. "The cub has found another toy and now believes himself a wolf." His sarcasm was smooth, polished, almost playful, and it infuriated me more than open hatred would have. Hatred I understood. This amused contempt felt like being skinned politely.
I did not answer him with words. I answered by exploding forward.
I drove both thrusters in staggered bursts rather than one clean launch, letting the first acceleration pull his eye high while the second cut my centerline sideways and into a spinning advance that turned my body into a storm of steel. My long sword carved the first visible arc, broad enough to demand his parry, while the shorter blade remained hidden in the rotation like a second thought waiting to become a first mistake. He leapt back immediately, his own katana rising to catch the heavy line of the long blade, but I changed direction in the last possible instant by punching my right foot into the ground and letting the planted leg become a hinge. My entire body twisted around that anchor point with violent efficiency, bringing the sword in on a tighter radius than the initial arc had promised. He was fast,faster than most men I had fought and he still got the katana down in time to catch it, but the surprise registered in his eyes before the impact settled. "Oh," he said again, laughing softly through the strain of the bind, "you are a quick little thing after all."
I kept pressing. I should have kept the gentleman's discipline that had been beaten into me by instructors and sharpened by Argelia and Whitescale, the philosophy that every battle could be understood if one remained calm enough to think one beat ahead, one angle deeper, one breath longer. But something in me had begun to reject that refinement. This was no academy floor with padded walls and instructors measuring improvement. This was no ceremonial duel beneath banners and curated lights. This was a slaughterhouse built inside a nightmare. Gentlemanly distance was a luxury of men who expected tomorrow. I no longer believed tomorrow owed me anything. So I let the training fracture just enough to reveal the beast beneath it. I clipped the short blade back to my thigh so I could commit my whole body to one weapon and one idea pressure. Pure, relentless, humiliating pressure. The enemy saw it happen and his mouth curved. "There," he said, almost approvingly. "At last. A prince remembers that blood was always beneath the silk." Then I came at him like a falling wall.
The first exchange after that was no longer fencing. It was impact warfare. My blade crashed down and across in overlapping diagonals, each strike driven not just by muscle but by timed thrust bursts that increased velocity at the final third of the swing. Every contact between our weapons sent fire-sparks bursting between us and drove vibration through my arms and into my shoulders. He gave ground, but not much, and every retreating step of his was so measured it made me feel as though he were still teaching me something even while under assault. His sarcasm did not stop. "Better," he said while slipping under a horizontal cut that would have taken his jaw. "Still clumsy, but better." Then, after turning a thrust with the flat of his blade and dragging the edge across my pauldron hard enough to gouge the plating, he added, "You've stopped asking to be respected. That is often the first honest thing a noble body ever learns." I wanted to shut him up, and that desire almost ruined me twice in the span of three breaths. Each time I overcommitted, he shifted just enough to let my momentum pass and threatened a counterline that could have opened my throat or knee had I been slower. The only thing saving me was the fact that I was beginning to understand my armour in new ways where the weight wanted to settle, how the thrusters changed the geometry of a strike, how gravity modulation could turn a simple feint into a change of timing too abrupt for the eye to read cleanly.
I cut low, then lower, then dropped entirely under his line as though falling. He followed the obvious trajectory, expecting a sweep to the knee or ankle, so I reduced my gravity for a heartbeat, let my body become lighter than the move should have allowed, and floated up through the opening he had unconsciously created.
My shoulder hit his chest plate. My elbow cracked against his ribs. My sword came up from under his weapon hand in a brutal inside track meant to split armpit and lung. He barely twisted away in time, and the blade tore across his side instead, opening armour and skin in a line that immediately darkened with blood. The scent of it hit the air hot, coppery, human and for the first time his smile thinned. "Good," he said through clenched teeth, then kicked hard enough into my hip to send me skidding across the blood-wet stone. I rolled and came up already moving. We collided again, and this time the opera still faintly spilling from hidden speakers somewhere in the settlement below seemed to wrap itself around the battle, strings and voices rising beneath the shriek of steel until it genuinely felt as though the world had become an opera stage and we were its two unwilling protagonists except he was enjoying it, and I was trying not to die inside it.
The mockery sharpened as my pressure increased. He started praising and insulting in the same breath, the way a cruel tutor might applaud a pupil for finally bleeding correctly. "Yes, there it is. Again." Then: "No, not like that, you provincial catastrophe." Then, after narrowly avoiding a thrust to the eye by dropping into a knee-bend so sudden it looked like the ground had been pulled out from under him: "Did no one ever tell you that desperation ruins the line of the shoulders?" The infuriating thing was that he was right often enough to make it worse. Somewhere beneath the anger and the need to drive him into the earth, I could feel myself learning his rhythms even as he criticized mine.
He fought like a man who believed the duel belonged to him not because he would win, but because meaning itself answered to his aesthetic standards. And when I finally managed to force him three full steps backward by chaining a low dirt-kick into a rising cut and then a thrust-assisted shoulder feint that became a real vertical strike, I saw irritation flash across his features not fear, not danger, but insult. I had made him work harder than he had intended to, and the wound to his pride seemed to matter almost as much as the line of blood spreading along his flank.
Then he started talking about expectations as if we were seated in some gentleman's study while servants poured tea over silver.
"Do you know what your problem is, young prince?" he asked while parrying a heavy descending blow and letting our blades lock for a heartbeat. His face was close enough that I could see the contempt sharpen in his pupils. "You have spent your life being guarded from consequence. Even your suffering was curated. Nothing that reaches you arrives unfiltered until tonight." He disengaged, spun, and cut so fast across my helm that the world flashed white for half a second. I stumbled and tasted blood inside my mouth. He continued as though lecturing. "Your house fed you honour like medicine and called it strength. It taught you to die beautifully, not to survive correctly." I came back at him with a roar I did not recognize as my own, sword hammering down in a sequence of short savage cuts designed not to kill but to collapse his defensive rhythm under sheer repetition. He met each one, though the final strike drove him half a step lower than he wanted to go. His expression soured. "There," he said. "That. That brute little honesty. Why did you hide it beneath posture for so long?"
Because posture was all that stood between men and monsters, I nearly said. Because civilisation depends on pretending the beast is a servant, not the heir. Because my father had raised me to rule worlds, not to become carrion with a sword. But what I actually said was harsher, more exhausted, and more true. "I'm not here to satisfy your fantasies," I told him, blood still dripping warm from the cut beneath my helmet. "I'm here to keep breathing." The words seemed to land where the blade had not. For the first time a genuine frown settled over his features, not theatrical disappointment but something closer to dismay. He stepped back, and for a moment the fight paused around that disapproval like a pond settling after a thrown stone.
"This," he said quietly, gesturing between us with his katana as though indicating a ruined sculpture, "is what offends me." He looked not at my wounds but at my stance, my breath, the fact that I had chosen survival over grandeur. "I had expected a glorious collision of bloodlines, a duel worthy of memory, something for which the stars might briefly forgive this century its vulgarity. Instead…" He looked at me almost sadly. "Instead I have been given a lamb standing in the rain and insisting it is war." He turned away from me then not fully, but enough to signal a profound disrespect and began reassembling his armour with the calm of a man dressing after an evening performance gone wrong. I stood there in disbelief, sword still up, chest heaving, and watched him recover each piece as though he had simply decided the conversation was no longer worth having. "I know not what lies have been told to you about battle," I said, voice raw, "but this is not a summit, not a tournament, not a song. I'm fighting for life. If that offends your sense of art, then die angry." He paused with one gauntlet half-fastened and laughed not loudly, but deeply enough that I felt the contempt of it more than heard it.
"Expectation," he said, fitting the gauntlet into place, "is the only fuel worth burning if one intends to transcend the mediocrity of mere survival." Then, almost kindly: "And yet you choose to remain present in what is. How dreadfully sober of you." He looked back over his shoulder, his expression a strange mix of amusement and disappointment. "Very well. Count yourself blessed, young prince. I have no appetite for ending lambs tonight." The words should have enraged me more than they did, but the truth was I was already angry enough that another layer barely registered. What did register was the battlefield around us coming slowly back into focus. The crackle of fires. The distant and intermittent blast of energy discharges. A scream cut short somewhere inside the hall.
No sign of Athena. No clear line to my brothers. The rift's pulse still throbbed through the stone like the heartbeat of a buried god. Gallow followed my gaze and seemed to understand immediately what I was thinking. "Ah," he murmured. "You hear it too. The larger performance." Then he bent his knees and launched upward in a motion so clean and impossible that gravity seemed to release him willingly. He rose into the smoke like an actor leaving the stage through a trapdoor in the sky. "Pray," he called down softly, "that tomorrow does not place you before my kin." Then he was gone.
I remained there for several breaths, fury and humiliation and relief warring so violently inside me that I could not have named which one was winning. The music from the hidden speakers had not fully died; it lingered in fading strings and distant brass, mournful now, almost embarrassed by the performance it had underscored. Around me the fires still burned in patches, their light casting long unstable shadows across the dead and the broken. The mist pressed closer.
The whispers resumed their soft persuasive work, and for the first time since the fight began they did not tempt me toward surrender so much as mock me for having survived. Somewhere beyond the courtyard, steel rang again. Athena was still missing. My family was still bleeding somewhere inside that nightmare hall. I bent, retrieved my sword from the dirt, and forced my breathing back into order. Whatever Gallow had seen in me and found wanting would have to remain his problem. I had others now. And as I turned toward the crimson mouth of the hall once more, the spiritual dread of the place settled over me with renewed weight not as fear of death, but as the deeper fear that the mountain, the mist, the rift, and the enemies waiting within were all trying in their own way to teach me the same monstrous lesson: that fantasy was not escape from hell, but one of its preferred dialects.