But his mind was working.
He began to see combat the way he saw genetic sequences—as information to be decoded, patterns to be recognized, variables to be manipulated. When Kaede struck, the attack created ripples through the engagement that affected Ryzen’s positioning. When Ryzen’s daggers moved, they altered theangles Kaede could exploit. Everything connected. Everything influenced everything else.
And there, in the spaces between their harmonious violence, Zyxel found the gaps where he could fit.
“Switch!” Kaede barked.
Zyxel rotated out of Ryzen’s reach and into Kaede’s. The assassin’s psydagger came at him—not full speed, but fast enough to demand response—and Zyxel deflected with his stun dagger, letting the force spin him toward Ryzen’s exposed flank.
His claws raked air where the Verya had been a heartbeat ago. Too slow. But he was learning the rhythm.
“Better,” Ryzen observed, his daggers reforming their orbit. “You’re reading us.”
“It’s what I’m good at.” Zyxel settled back into stance, his legs protesting less now. Still wrong. Still foreign. But beginning to obey. “Analyze. Adapt.”
“That’s all combat is,” Kaede said. “Analysis and adaptation at lethal speeds. Learning the environment and your enemy.” He gestured for another rotation. “Again.”
They went again.
The patterns grew more complex. Kaede called switches at random intervals, forcing Zyxel to track both opponents simultaneously, to anticipate who would come at him next. Ryzen’s daggers wove through the air in formations that tested reaction time and spatial awareness.
They both attacked never to injure—but close enough to the real thing., withdrawing or tilting their weapons away just in time.
Zyxel fell. Rose. Fell again.
But each time, he stayed down a little shorter. Each time, he saw the attack that felled him with a little more clarity. His scholarly mind cataloged failures and successes alike, buildinga database of movements and counter-movements that his body slowly—so slowly—learned to execute.
His Ezzaska venom glands pulsed with each near-miss, the Rkekh instinct to defend translating into this new form even when everything else felt foreign. Good. He could use that. Could channel the protective fury that had always lived in him—the same fury that made him willing to die for hisenax—into combat readiness.
The hours blurred together, marked only by the sun’s slow descent toward the ocean horizon and the accumulating ache in his unfamiliar muscles. Sweat soaked through the training clothing he’d switched to—simple black fabric that clung to his new form in ways that still felt like violation. His lungs burned. His joints screamed. His body demanded rest it wasn’t going to receive.
But something was clicking.
He stopped trying to fight like them and started fightingwiththem. Where Kaede’s shadow-strike created an opening, Zyxel learned to flow into it—not as a second attack, but as a distraction that created a third opening for Ryzen’s daggers. Where Ryzen’s storm of blades forced their hypothetical enemy to defend in one direction, Zyxel learned to appear in another, his talons finding purchase on exposed flanks.
He wasn’t their equal. Wasn’t even close. But he was becoming something useful—a variable they could incorporate, a factor that made their combined lethality greater than the sum of its parts.
“Stop,” Kaede commanded as the last light of day turned into darkness.
Zyxel bent double, hands braced on trembling knees, sucking air into lungs that had never worked this hard. Every muscle in this unfamiliar body screamed its protest, and the phantom ache where his tail should have been throbbed like a missing limb.
But he was smiling.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d pushed his body to its limits. On the asteroid base, his role had been one of support—medical expertise, genetic analysis, the quiet work of keeping others alive. Combat had been Ryzen’s domain, Xenak’s purpose. Zyxel had hidden in his Ezzaska form and hoped that hiding would be enough.
Hiding wasn’t enough anymore.
Selena needed protectors. Warriors who could stand beside her in hostile territory and ensure she came home. She had Kaede—that lethal shadow who would die before letting harm reach her. She had Ryzen—the storm of spirit blades who had forged his grief into purpose.
Now she would have him.
“Passable,” Kaede said, and from him that was high praise. “We’ll work on your speed tomorrow. Your instincts are sharper than I expected.”
Ryzen’s daggers vanished back into his runes, their emerald glow fading to match the dying light. “You think like a strategist. That’s useful. Kaede and I fight like soloists forced into duets. You might be the one who makes us an ensemble.”
High praise indeed.
Zyxel straightened, ignoring the way his spine protested the movement. Through his bond with Selena—that crimson thread still pulsing with newborn awareness—he felt something shift. A change in attention. A warmth turning toward him across the distance.
