Yogiri walked out of Byzantium on a Tuesday.
No army. No escort. No announcement through the divine network. He simply walked north through the main gate at midmorning with his coat and his fire and the particular unhurried pace that had become, in three weeks, the most recognized and most feared sight in the Latium Empire.
The gate guard on duty — a soldier named Beeho who had transferred to the capital posting specifically because it was supposed to be quiet — watched him go and immediately sent word by relay crystal to every military station in range.
The message was four words.
He is walking north.
---
Straze received it at the Prussonian Pass.
He read it. Looked at Solomon across the command table. Said nothing.
Solomon closed his eyes, and the rune-script along his forearms ignited — slow at first, then faster, the living equations of his OMNISCIENT CODEX reading something in the ambient flow of the world's energy that normal senses couldn't touch.
"He knows," Solomon said.
"He always knew," Straze said. He was already moving — coat on, gauntlets, the crimson-gold of his Soul-Brand flaring to life across both arms with the ease of thirty years of practice. "It changes nothing. We execute."
He walked out of the command tent.
Outside, the army was already in position. Three thousand soldiers arranged in the formation Straze had designed over fifteen days — not a standard military deployment but something specific, something built around the particular architecture of what they were attempting. Eight Rank 4 officers at designated positions forming a rough octagon around a central point. Solomon's suppression anchors — four crystalline constructs buried in the road at compass points — were already glowing faintly.
Straze walked to the center of the octagon.
He looked north down the mountain road.
A white shape was moving at the far end of it, unhurried, getting larger.
"Solomon," Straze said. "On my signal."
"Ready," Solomon said, from his position at the rear.
Straze breathed once. Settled his weight.
"Ervalen."
From the eastern ridge, three hundred meters out, beyond the main formation's edge: "Ready."
Good, Straze thought. Now we find out.
---
Yogiri stopped walking when he reached the edge of the formation.
He stood on the mountain road and looked at what Straze had built. Took it in fully — the eight positions, the crystalline anchors glowing in the road, the secondary formations behind the Rank 4 points, Solomon at the rear with his rune-script running at full activation. His eyes moved across the geometry of it the way they moved across everything: completely, precisely, without drama.
He noted the eastern ridge.
The figure there was too far out to be part of the main formation.
One variable outside the pattern, he thought. Interesting.
He looked at Straze.
Straze looked back.
"You came to me," Straze said.
"You weren't coming to me," Yogiri said. "And I finished the grain surplus reports."
Straze's jaw didn't move. "Signal."
Solomon's hands came together.
---
The suppression field exploded into existence — not gradually, not building up, explosive, the way Solomon had designed it specifically to deny Yogiri any adaptation window. A dome of compressed reality-law, golden-white, snapping into place across the entire formation's interior. The air inside it changed texture immediately — thicker, pressing, the specific resistance of a space where certain rules had been temporarily renegotiated.
The black-and-white fire around Yogiri's shoulders flickered.
Just for a moment. Just a flicker — a candle in a draft.
But it flickered.
Three and a half minutes, Solomon thought, his hands locked in position, rune-script burning white-hot along his arms. Hold. Just hold.
---
Straze moved.
He crossed the distance between them in under a second — his full Rank 7 power output igniting, ABSOLUTE DOMINION radiating outward, the force of his will pressing against the space around Yogiri like a physical weight. At thirty years of refinement, Straze's Dominion didn't just suppress movement. It pressed against the decision to move — the signal between mind and muscle, the intention before the action.
Yogiri's head turned.
He was looking at Straze the way he had looked at the tactical map in the administrative office. Evaluating.
The eight Rank 4 officers moved simultaneously.
Straze had drilled them for fifteen days on this moment — not just the timing but the type, because the type mattered against a fire that ate attacks by recognizing what they were. Eight different ability-classes, eight fundamentally different energy applications, arriving from eight different angles at the same instant.
· Ice-compression from the north.
· Earth-force spike from the south.
· Wind-blade columns from east and west.
· Lightning-cage from above.
· Gravity-pull from below.
· Force-hammer from the northwest.
· And from the northeast — a Rank 4 specialist whose ability Straze had specifically recruited for this moment — pure silence, a compression of negative sonic energy that disrupted the resonance patterns of active Soul-Brands.
Eight attacks. One second. Eight directions.
The fire moved.
Not to block — to distribute. The black-and-white flame spread outward from Yogiri's body in a sudden radial burst, thin tendrils reaching each incoming attack simultaneously and dissolving them at contact. It was extraordinary — the coordination of it, the instant adaptation to eight simultaneous vectors. Ervalen, watching from the eastern ridge, felt his chest tighten.
He adjusted instantly. Before the attacks even landed.
But.
But the suppression field was working. The fire that came back after dissolving eight attacks was visibly smaller. Still there. Still orbiting. But where before it had moved with the lazy confidence of something that had infinite supply, now it moved with the slightly more deliberate quality of something spending itself against resistance.
That's real, Ervalen thought. Solomon is actually costing him something.
---
Straze was inside his guard.
SOVEREIGN CLEAVE — his sword technique, the ability that cut through spatial bonds and dimensional defenses as if they were fabric — came down in a full arc at Yogiri's left side.
The fire came up to meet it.
The blade went through.
Not all the way — it hit the fire and slowed, pushed against the black-and-white resistance, slowed further. Straze pressed with everything he had. The fire pushed back. They held there for one extraordinary second — the Commander's full Rank 7 output against the contained Hellfire — and the blade moved another inch.
Yogiri looked down at it.
Something shifted in his expression. Not alarm. That specific quality of attention that landed when something unexpected had occurred.
"Four minutes," Solomon said, through gritted teeth. His rune-script was burning so bright it cast shadows. "I can give you four min—"
Yogiri burned the suppression field.
Not from the outside. From underneath — from the conceptual foundation of it, the agreement between Solomon's rune-equations and the ambient laws of the physical world that made the field coherent. He reached into that agreement and burned it the way you burned a signature off a contract.
The field collapsed at ninety seconds.
Solomon staggered. His hands dropped. The rune-script across his arms went dark for three full seconds — the catastrophic backlash of having the structure he was maintaining dissolved at its root rather than its surface.
Straze felt the change immediately — the resistance against his blade vanishing, the fire re-expanding, the DOMINION field he'd been pressing suddenly meeting something that pushed back at its full original magnitude.
He didn't stop. He pressed harder.
Two minutes, he'd said. He'd gotten ninety seconds. He was going to extract the value of ninety seconds.
SOVEREIGN CLEAVE landed.
It landed on Yogiri's left shoulder — not clean, not deep, the blade turning at the last instant as the fire rebuilt itself around the impact point. But it landed. The fire couldn't fully compensate in time. The edge caught the shoulder, and Yogiri moved — one step, half a step, a controlled shift of weight that was still movement, still reaction, still something Straze had forced rather than something Yogiri had chosen.
Blood. A single line of it, visible at the edge of the coat's collar.
Straze saw it. Burned the image into his memory.
There. That's there. That exists.
---
Yogiri raised his hand.
The fire came back — full, immediate, no longer flickering. The Dominion field Straze was projecting hit it and bent. Not broke. Bent. Straze had never felt his own power bend before. It was like pushing against something that had no end to it, like pressing your hand into water and feeling the resistance grow the deeper you pushed without ever finding a floor.
The eight Rank 4 officers moved again — second round, as drilled. Different configurations this time, the backup patterns Straze had prepared for the moment after the first wave was absorbed. Earth-spike converted to underground eruption. Wind-blades converted to vertical compression. The silence-specialist hit again from a new angle.
Yogiri burned them.
Faster this time. Without the suppression field, the fire was back to its full operating pace — the attacks dissolved before they reached him, the tendrils moving with that awful patience, that absolute lack of hurry that communicated more clearly than any display that he was not being threatened, merely inconvenienced.
Straze went at him again.
And again.
He was not trying to kill him. He knew what he was doing — he was buying seconds. Every exchange was another three seconds of data, another configuration tested, another pattern catalogued. He fought with his entire body and thirty years of refinement and everything he had ever learned about the mechanics of pushing something that pushed back, and he made every second matter.
---
At the eastern ridge, Ervalen was already moving.
He had watched the suppression field collapse at ninety seconds. Had watched Straze's blade land — land, actually connect, the line of blood visible even from three hundred meters. Had watched the eight-vector second wave dissolve.
Now he was running along the ridge line, Soul-Brand blazing amber at full activation, DIVINE LANCE forming in his hand — the soul-force spear coalescing from amber light into something solid, something that vibrated at a frequency that had nothing to do with elemental energy and everything to do with the direct output of his own soul.
Straze had told him: one shot, from outside the pattern, at the moment of maximum saturation.
Maximum saturation was right now.
Yogiri was burning the second wave, managing Straze's SOVEREIGN CLEAVE, reconstructing the fire after Solomon's suppression collapse — four simultaneous processes, all of them demanding adaptation. His attention was distributed across all of them.
Ervalen reached the ridge's edge.
Three hundred meters. He needed two-fifty for maximum range on DIVINE LANCE.
He kept running.
Two-seventy.
Two-sixty.
The battle below was moving — Straze pressing, Yogiri not moving much but rotating, managing directions. The golden-green eyes swept the field with that absolute comprehensive attention—
Don't look east. Don't look east. You're busy. You have six things and I am not one of them, I am not inside the pattern, I am not a thing you've accounted for—
Two-fifty.
Ervalen planted his foot on the ridge's edge and threw.
DIVINE LANCE left his hand at full Rank 4 output — amber light condensing to a point so bright it hurt to look at, crossing two hundred and fifty meters in under a second, descending on a line toward a white-haired man who was looking the wrong direction—
---
Yogiri turned.
One hand came up.
The fire met the Lance thirty meters out.
And pushed.
Not dissolved — pushed. The Lance drove through the fire for three full meters before stopping, held there in the resistance, the amber light of it fighting the black-and-white fire in a sustained contest that lasted two seconds, three, four—
Then the fire won.
The Lance dissolved. The amber light scattered. Ervalen's hand was empty.
But in those four seconds, he had seen something.
The fire had moved to intercept the Lance before Yogiri's hand came up.
The fire had reacted first.
The hand had followed.
Reflex, Ervalen thought, running back along the ridge. That was reflex. The conceptual processing runs ahead of the deliberate decision. The fire acts before he chooses.
He filed it. Ran.
Below, Yogiri lowered his hand.
He looked at the eastern ridge. The figure there was already retreating — fast, disciplined, not panicking. He tracked it for two seconds.
Then he looked at Straze.
---
Straze stood twelve meters away, crimson-gold still blazing, SOVEREIGN CLEAVE reformed in his grip, breathing hard but controlled. He had been fighting at full output for three minutes and twenty seconds. His endurance was, Yogiri recognized, extraordinary.
The blood at his collar had stopped. The regeneration had handled it in under a minute.
But the wound had been there.
"You studied the field collapse," Yogiri said.
"I studied the attack vectors," Straze said. "The collapse was an acceptable adjustment."
"You only needed the blade to land."
Straze said nothing.
"You got what you came for," Yogiri said. Not accusation. A statement.
"Yes," Straze said.
"And the one on the ridge — that was the piece outside my accounting."
"He's twenty-three," Straze said. "You didn't think he'd attempt at that range."
Yogiri looked at the now-empty ridge. The amber light was gone. The figure had cleared the treeline and was into the mountain's northern face.
"He drove the Lance four meters through the fire," Yogiri said. "At Rank 4."
"I know," Straze said.
"In ten years—"
"I know," Straze said again.
The black-and-white fire expanded outward.
Straze moved — not toward Yogiri, but sideways, the lateral burst of ABSOLUTE DOMINION throwing his body thirty meters before the fire reached his position. The eight Rank 4 officers were already pulling back, executing the retreat pattern Straze had drilled into them for exactly this moment.
Solomon, recovered, was retreating with the rear formation — upright, moving, alive.
Straze was alive.
Ervalen was alive.
The trap had held for three minutes and twenty seconds.
---
Yogiri watched the coalition retreat up the mountain road with the controlled efficiency of an army that had planned for the retreat as carefully as the assault. He watched Solomon's retreating figure. He watched the direction Ervalen had gone.
He stood in the road for a moment.
The blood at his collar was gone. The shoulder had closed.
He turned south.
He began walking back toward Byzantium.
His pace was unchanged — unhurried, even, the rhythm of someone with a destination and no reason to alter it.
But his eyes, for the first time in three weeks, were not on the road ahead.
They were on the treeline where Ervalen had disappeared.
Four meters, he thought.
Rank 4.
He walked.