I drive my blade into the seam. The mechanism resists. Then gives. The barrier shudders, cracks spreading through it as the structure destabilizes, and I push through the opening before it can reset, stepping back into the central space just as the first Velkiron soldier reaches striking distance.
He dies quickly.
Steel meets armor at the seam beneath his arm, the blade sliding through with minimal resistance, and I move past him before the body fully falls, redirecting momentum toward the next threat without pause.
Xalith is already at the platform. I see his hand closing around the artifact. The air distorts. For a while, everything feels wrong. Then it stabilizes. Too quickly.
“You’re late,” he says, almost conversational, though the energy around him has shifted, subtle but undeniable.
I close the distance. A Velkiron soldier intercepts. I remove him. Another follows. Slower. Less precise. He falls the same way.
I reach the base of the platform just as Xalith steps back from it, the artifact secured in his grasp, its unstable form shifting against his skin as though testing him, measuring him.
“You don’t understand what you’re holding,” I say.
“I understand enough,” he replies, his grin sharper now, more dangerous. “It makes outcomes certain.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Then I’ll learn.”
Another wave of Velkiron forces floods the chamber, forcing distance between us, their numbers turning direct pursuit into inefficiency, and Xalith uses it exactly as intended, retreating step by step, never turning his back fully, never breaking line of sight until the last possible moment.
I push through them. One falls. Then another. Then three in quick succession. Too many. Too slow.
A strike comes from the side. I deflect it. Another from behind. I turn, blade meeting steel with a sharp, jarring impact that sends vibration up my arm.
Then I miss one. It happens rarely. But that is enough.
The blow lands across my side, deep and precise, cutting through fabric and into muscle, my movement stutters. Pain follows, sharp and immediate.
I try to adjust and continue, but the distance has widened.
Xalith reaches the end of the chamber, where the hidden passage still stands open, his silhouette framed by shifting stone and shadow, and he pauses just long enough to look back.
“You should have been faster,” he says.
I take a step forward despite the distance, despite the bodies between us.
“You needed an army,” I reply. “You always did.”
That earns a real reaction.
His grin sharpens, something more feral breaking through the performance. “And you needed a seer to find your way through a ruin,” he says, glancing past me briefly, acknowledging her without giving her weight. “We all adapt.”
“You mistake reliance for strategy.”
“And you mistake control for strength.”
The words hit me harder than they should. Not because they are true. Because he believes they are.
“You won’t survive it,” I warn, my voice steady despite the blood beginning to drag at my focus. “You don’t understand what you’ve taken,” I repeat.
“Maybe,” he says, almost lightly, though his grip on the artifact tightens, “but I understand this much. Whatever it does… it doesn’t answer to hesitation.”
His eyes meet mine again, black and sharp and utterly certain.
“That’s where you always fail.”