I respect the intelligence. I’ll kill all of them regardless.
The first cultist reaches me before I fully reorient. I let my training take over—centuries of physical combat, long predating the domain, the muscle memory of a creature that was lethal before it learned to unmake. My hand finds his throat. My elbow finds the face of the one closing from my left. I do not need Oblivion to be effective. I was effective first.
But Tanith?—
I’m aware of her constantly, with a precision that has nothing to do with tactical monitoring and everything to do with choices I have already made and not yet acknowledged aloud. I know where she is without looking. I know the moment a blade finds her side—the sharp intake of her breath, the brief disruption in her movement pattern, the way she adjusts and compensates and continues without faltering.
I kill the man responsible before his blade can find her again. I do not kill him slowly. Lethal efficiency. I have examined my behavior in the cursed district and found certain elements inconsistent with what I intend to be.
I kill the next one. Then the one attempting to flank her while she handles two from the front.
I do not take the ones she is managing. She does not need me to. Taking them would not be protection—it would be the diminishment she has already told me she refuses.
The dead zone releases us. My domain floods back—diminished, the engine’s suppression having carved away what it could reach—and I direct what remains at the three threats she cannot reach. They crumple. She ends the last one before I can.
“You’re wounded.”
“It’s manageable.” She presses her hand against her side. I assess the blood flow without appearing to assess it. Significant but not immediately dangerous. I add it to the running calculation of what this mission is costing us both. “Keep moving.”
The Choir drivesus through the residential district.
Or believes it does. In fact, we are moving toward the core, allowing their harassment to channel us toward the approach we have already identified as optimal. I continue this fiction because it costs us nothing and costs them the impression of control. Let them believe they are directing us. They will discover their error at the engine’s anchor points.
My domain is compromised. The engine’s sustained pressure has reduced my effective capacity to something I estimate at sixty percent. I will not share this number.
A spell catches her arm. I see the burn against her skin. See her jaw tighten. See her kill the caster with precision that does not falter despite the pain.
A spell catches me—a hit from a cultist I allowed to reach me because Tanith needed my attention on a different vector at that moment. I note it. Set it aside. Continue.
“They’re channeling us.” I state the observation aloud, confirming what we have both already identified. “Directing us toward a specific approach.”
“Which means they’ve prepared the ground.”
“Undoubtedly.”
We pause in the shadow of a building that still mostly exists. I take full inventory. Left leg: a hit from three blocks ago, more significant than I have allowed myself to acknowledge in the moment. Domain: compromised. Tanith: side wound, arm burn, moving on discipline rather than comfort. A child’s toy abandoned on a stoop nearby, a laundry line frozen mid-flutter, the outline of a door that opens onto a void.
The Choir doesn’t see what was lost here. They see what was ended. The distinction is the entire argument against them.
“The direct approach is a trap.” She maps the probable ambush points with the practiced eye of someone who has been surviving impossible situations since before we met. “But the indirect routes will take too long. The engine is accelerating.”
“I feel it.” An understatement. The engine is actively working against my domain, a sustained pressure that requires continuous counter-effort simply to maintain current capacity. “If it reaches full power before we collapse the core?—”
“Regional erasure. Everything within fifty miles becomes ash.”
Including her.
The calculation ends there.
“Then we go through.”
“We go through.”
