I do not wait for acknowledgment.
Power spreads across my hands as I charge the main body alone, leaving Raven Five to their defensive position. Shouts chase me into the press of obsidian bodies.
"Stop!"
"Fool!"
"Darkie!"
The word almost hooks me.
Darkie.
Edge's voice carries through the weapon fire, rough with nervous humor, the kind of slur that slides off tongues when fear loosens control. I hear it land. Feel the familiar cold settle in my chest where such words always find purchase.
My reflection in a thousand polished surfaces. Black hair in a city of platinum. Warm skin among the pale. The eternal reminder that I am other, always other, never quite belonging to the world that claims me.
The silver light flickers along my forearms.
Then I let it go.
I let the reaction go. I push it down into the space where such things accumulate, the growing weight of small wounds that never quite heal. There will be time for that later. Time to examine the particular shape of Edge's fear, the way it reaches for the easiest weapon when pressed.
Now, there is only movement.
I push into the horde.
The world stretches.
This is not the inner channeling of the Skathrith's power. This is something newer, something that lives in the space between my heartbeats, the inheritance from the earlier trials of the Labyrinth.
The charging warriors slow to an amber crawl.
I see everything. The synchronized rhythm of their advance, bodies flowing like water around obstacles. The particular angle of each bone blade, carved from substances I cannot identify, gripped in hands that move with purpose that does not originate behind their eyes.
Blue eyes. Dead eyes. The color of ice beneath winter starlight.
The nearest warrior fills my vision.
Four arms spread wide, two blades angled for my throat, two more positioned to catch any dodge. A formation designed for inevitable contact. A formation that assumes its target cannot move fast enough to escape.
I slip between the angles.
My silver-coated hand finds the junction where skull meets spine. The coating does the rest, molecular edges parting obsidian flesh with less resistance than thought. The warrior's eyes do not change as it dies. Blue and empty before. Blue and empty after. Whatever animated this body, it was not present enough to notice its own ending.
The corpse begins its long descent toward the metal ground.
I am already past it. Blood streams upward in ribbons that defy gravity, drawn into the Skathrith's folded absence above me.
Two more warriors converge from my left, their movements creating a perfect crossfire that would catch any normal target. Their blades trace arcs through slowed air, leaving trails my enhanced perception renders visible.
I flow into Wave of Stillness.
Mother's voice echoes through muscle memory. The wave does not fight the shore. It moves around, through, between. Find the spaces that exist and occupy them.
The spaces exist. I occupy them.
One warrior's blade passes beneath my arm as I rotate. The other's strike whistles past my ear as I duck. My hands find purchase on exposed flesh, silver light searing through skin and sinew, and both warriors crumple in sequences my slowed perception renders distinct despite their near-simultaneity.
Blood and meat spirals upward.
The Skathrith feeds. Warmth spreads through my chest. The familiar satisfaction of successful violence, of power meeting purpose.
I have killed three warriors in the space between heartbeats.
The fourth awaits.
I strike the fourth warrior.
My radiant hand passes through the space where obsidian flesh should resist.
No impact. No severing. The body occupies the space my eyes perceive, but my strike finds only air that tastes of displacement, of something removed rather than absent. My fingers close on nothing. My coating finds no purchase.
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The Xal'rith warrior continues its advance as though nothing has happened.
As though I do not exist.
The wrongness registers before conscious thought can process it. In slowed time, I should see exactly what happens. Every molecule, every moment, every interaction between my power and its target. Instead I see a gap. A space where cause and effect should connect but somehow do not.
I pull back. Reset. Strike again.
The same result. My hand passes through the warrior's torso as though one of us is not quite real. The coating flares with frustrated light, seeking purchase on flesh that refuses to acknowledge its existence.
The warrior's dead blue eyes stare straight ahead, tracking a path that will carry it toward Raven Five's position.
I abandon the impossible target and move to the next.
This one dies properly.
My strike lands with satisfying impact, silver light parting flesh, blood spiraling toward the hungry brightness above. The corpse falls. The warmth spreads. The mathematics adjust.
Four kills. One failure.
The fifth warrior phases.
I see it this time. Actually see it. The moment my hand approaches contact, the warrior's body shifts. Not physically. Not through any motion my eyes can track. The flesh simply becomes less present, as though someone has adjusted the dial on reality itself.
My strike passes through. The warrior continues forward.
The sixth warrior dies. The seventh phases. The eighth dies. The ninth dies. The tenth phases.
Eight kills. Three failures.
A pattern emerges through the chaos.
Something is selecting which warriors phase and when, spending them according to rules I cannot yet identify.
I push deeper into the horde.
The slowed world fills with violence. Bodies fall in sequences that stretch across heartbeats. Blood and dripping skin spirals upward in crimson threads that braid together as they climb. The Skathrith feeds and feeds, its hunger a constant pressure behind my ribs.
But the pattern continues.
Three kills. One phase. Five kills. Two phases. The ratio holds with mechanical precision, defying the chaos that should govern combat. Each phase occurs at the exact moment of impact, as though something is watching my strikes and responding with perfect timing.
I test the theory.
My next strike commits fully, telegraphing its target well in advance. The warrior I have chosen moves through slowed air, bone blade raised, dead eyes fixed on nothing. I watch for the phase.
It comes early.
The warrior flickers before my hand reaches its body, the shift happening during my approach rather than at contact. Whoever controls this has anticipated my attack. Has read my intent before I could execute it.
They are watching me.
Measuring me.
Learning. Like I knew they would.
Irritation builds beneath my ribs.
I am an Optimate of House Azure. I have survived the First Baptism, have torn through the Labyrinth with nothing but will and borrowed strength. I have killed creatures that should have ended me a dozen times over.
This should not be difficult.
The second channel waits at the edge of my awareness.
Internal channeling. Skathrith energy flooding through my nervous system, accelerating reflexes and perception beyond what my body alone provides. The dual configuration that brings pleasure and madness, the one that carries costs I have not yet fully measured.
I reach for it.
Heat sears through my veins. Not burning but transforming, sensation crossing thresholds my body was not designed to process. My heartbeat stutters, then burns.
I ignore it.
Time crystallizes.
The world becomes glass.
Where before there was amber crawl, now there is near-stillness. The Xal'rith warriors hang suspended in their advance, bodies captured mid-stride, weapons fixed at angles my perception can measure to the degree. Dust particles float motionless in the air between us.
My own movements remain fluid.
I pass among them like a ghost moving through a gallery of statues.
My silver-coated hand finds the first warrior's throat. Molecular edges part flesh with surgical precision. Blood begins its upward spiral so slowly I can count the individual droplets separating from the wound.
The second warrior stands two meters away, frozen in a combat stance that will never complete. I reach its position before the first corpse has descended a centimeter.
Strike. Kill. Advance.
The third warrior phases.
Even in crystallized time, the wrongness persists. My hand approaches the frozen flesh, seeks the resistance that should meet it, finds nothing. The body occupies space my eyes confirm, but the space itself has become negotiable.
The fourth warrior dies. The fifth phases.
Ten kills. Five failures.
The ratio holds. Regardless of how fast I move, how precisely I strike, how completely I dominate this frozen battlefield, the pattern continues. Someone is spending these warriors according to a logic I cannot penetrate.
They do not fear me.
They do not even acknowledge what I am doing.
They simply continue their advance, the ones who remain, pressing toward Raven Five with the mechanical persistence of puppets whose strings have been set to a single purpose.
I kill thirty warriors.
Each strike lands in crystalline clarity, the world around me reduced to frames advancing one heartbeat at a time. My movement is not blur but sequence, position to strike to kill to advance, each beat distinct and absolute.
Yet the phasing continues.
Where are they? I ask myself, and someone responds.
Though I cannot see her, I sense Binah's finger point toward a patch of trees beyond the village's twisted spires.
There. Movement in the dark that does not belong to the horde.
Smiling, I abandon the kills.
Flight comes easier than before.
The gyroscopic rotation wraps my body in cutting light, severing gravity, sound, and external force in a single spiraling motion. The battlefield drops away beneath me as I rise toward the false, darkling sky.
The silence is absolute.
In this pocket of disconnected space, only my heartbeat exists. Only my breathing. Only the Skathrith's pulse matching my own, two rhythms becoming one as I accelerate toward the shadows where the true enemy awaits.
I create stress points without thinking.
The flow of rotation curves, banking me toward my targets with increasing speed. The world outside the shell blurs and distorts, colors bleeding together at the edges where reality meets cutting edge.
But I can see them clearly.
Five figures among metallic trees. Weapons raised. Tracking my approach with precision that suggests training, that suggests discipline, that suggests understanding of exactly what I am capable of.
Energy beams lance toward me. Kirans firing in unison.
Even in the shell's isolation, even through the distortion of spinning light, I can see them approach. Coherent energy wrapped in magnetic containment, the signatures clean and surgical.
The first beam strikes the rotating shell.
The impact registers as fracture rather than pain, the cutting light breaking around the energy's intrusion. The rotation stutters. The flow that held me aloft begins to destabilize.
I try to correct. Try to redirect the stress points, to maintain the configuration that keeps gravity at bay.
The second beam hits.
The third.
I scream, force the shielding to hold.
The shell shatters.
Sound crashes back with brutal force. Wind tears at my face. Temperature slams into skin that was moments ago wrapped in perfect neutrality.
Gravity seizes me like a rope snapping taut.
The forest rises to meet me.
I have time to see the clearing. See the figures waiting with weapons raised. See the trap I flew directly into despite every warning my intellect should have provided.
Then I hit.
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Ablations (ongoing)