He needed to know what was underneath.
Zyxel had taken the shaded bench at the yard’s edge, seated with a stillness that looked studied. Demi-human form today—long black hair pushed back from his face, warm brown skin catching the high sun, the curved black horns sweeping back from his crown catching light like polished obsidian. The form still sat wrong on him, somehow. Not the body itself, which was built like a fighter who didn’t waste motion, but the weight distribution—the subtle tells of someone whose center of gravity had recently been relocated two feet south. His chartreuse eyes tracked Ryzen with an attention that was half scholar and half something sharper. He’d asked to observe rather than rest inside. Kaede had let him, mostly because he wanted two sets of eyes on the Verya defector—and partially because any intelligence on Zyxel’s own assessment habits was intelligence.
His Star’s bond-mates were variables until they proved otherwise.
Zyxel was still a variable. Still new.
And Ryzen… wasn’t clan. Not yet. But Kaede knew too well. He’d seen the signs, knew Selena’s heart and mind… She wanted Ryzen—and felt the same undeniable pull to the Verya as she did with his other clanbrothers.
“She’s going to the CEG station without the full clan. Surrounded by strangers. Separated from half her bonds.” His voice carried without effort across the heat-warped distance. “Show me why I should trust you with her life.”
Ryzen’s head tilted. Something moved behind his eyes—not amusement, not offense. Recognition. Like he’d expected this exact conversation and only wondered whether it would arrive with words or blades.
“You want proof,” Ryzen said.
“I want competence.”
The daggers shifted—a ripple through the orbit, blades reorienting in a half-second of silent adjustment—and Kaede moved.
The first exchange told him almost everything.
Ryzen’s combat style was nothing like any soldier or assassin Kaede had run up against over his career. There was no calculated efficiency, no attempt to close distance and end things clean. What Ryzen did was pressure—ranged and layered and relentless, spirit daggers fanning into overlapping arcs that demanded split attention rather than focus on a single threat. The goal wasn’t to win fast. The goal was to make Kaede manage eight problems at once until one of them found purchase.
Controlled chaos. Smart chaos.
Kaede drove into it anyway.
He sent three drones sweeping low to cut off Ryzen’s flanking options while the other two climbed to high positions, crossing Ryzen’s field of vision from above. The psydagger’s blue edge sliced through the closest spirit dagger’s flight path—not to destroy it, just to force a redirect—and Ryzen’s focus fractured for a half-second as he managed both the physical spar and the mental projection sustaining his weapons.
That fractured half-second was the gap.
Kaede moved into it. Closed the distance in four strides, drove an elbow toward Ryzen’s guard—
And hit solid block. A forearm parry that absorbed the strike and channeled the force outward with practiced ease. No flinch. No give. The block of someone who’d trained against harder hits than this.
Capable, the back of his mind filed away. Trained in close contact as well as range. Doesn’t panic when the gap closes.
He rolled off the block, drones adjusting, and Ryzen’s daggers swept back around like a tide reclaiming ground. One came at his left shoulder, two more crossing toward hismidsection. Kaede caught the first on a deflect, stepped inside the trajectory of the second, and took the third against his forearm guard. The impact traveled up the bone to his shoulder.
Noted. Filed.
“You lead with your right,” Ryzen observed. Breathing controlled. That was its own kind of note.
“You count your own blades before you count the room.”
A pause—brief, assessing—and then Ryzen moved again. The feint went left; his body went right. Daggers peeled into two sweeping arcs that forced his drones into a split-pattern response. One drone caught a glancing strike across its casing, the impact producing a sound somewhere between a shriek and a ping. REI registered the damage: cosmetic. No function loss.
Kaede kept moving.
His drones rerouted as he worked—threading them constantly through micro-adjustments his hands barely registered making anymore—and he worked the close-range space that ranged combat styles always left thin. The principle was the same whether the opponent used spirit blades or psygun fire: every weapon held at distance was a weapon not held between you and harm. Close the range, strip the advantage.
Ryzen figured it out in thirty seconds.
The daggers compressed. Stopped fanning wide and started hovering tight and responsive—less spectacular, considerably more effective. Three precise strikes toward Kaede’s left flank while two daggers held his drones off at distance with targeted interdiction. The chaos shrank. The efficiency increased.
Learning as we go, Kaede noted. Adapts fast under pressure. That’s more dangerous than raw skill.
He ducked under the first strike, deflected the second with the flat of his psydagger, caught the third on his forearm guard. Kicked into the inside of Ryzen’s knee—breaking the stance without full commitment—and Ryzen turned with it instead ofagainst it, already refiguring geometry, already somewhere he hadn’t been a second before.
