Page 114 of Beds and Blades

I kept my position. I watched the engagement. I kept Velox steady.

The second vampire went down to a garrison soldier working in coordination with Varia. The hook found its target. The formation was working. The numbers were working.

Then the third one changed direction.

It was no longer engaging the formation. It was cutting across it toward Varia.

The calculation was exact and cold and visible to me before it was visible to anyone in the formation. I was behind the formation, and the angle was legible from where I was in a way it was not from where they were.

I saw it. I moved.

The decision had already been made in the moment of seeing. Velox responded to the shift of my weight before I had consciously communicated anything.

Velox covered the forty meters in seconds.

The vampire heard us.

It turned. The red eyes found me with total focus. I felt the focus land. The calculation of what I was and what I represented and whether I was a threat or an opportunity.

I came off Velox. I hit the snow in the controlled roll that Varia had drilled into me until it was autonomous and came up with the hook in my right hand.

The vampire was fast. It was faster than me. It was faster than me by a margin that the training had not eliminated.

I was not trying to be faster. I was trying to be smarter.

The tactical instincts Varia had taught me to trust were operating at full capacity. I read the pattern of the vampire’s movement as I had read hers in the training yard: the weight transfer, the angle of approach, the fraction of imbalance between motions.

I saw the window.

Its turn exposed the narrow seam beneath the armored collar, a brief line of unprotected throat.

It was the specific small window that opened in the half-second between the end of one motion and the beginning of the next. The window that Varia had told me existed in every fighter regardless of how good they were.

I took the window.

The hook found the opening beneath the armored collar. I pulled through, hard and committed, the curved blade biting cleanly across the exposed throat.

The head separated. The body went down.

Blood struck the snow in a hot, dark sheet. Some of it caught me across the hand and sleeve, startlingly warm against the cold. The contrast was obscene. Red spreading over white, steam lifting faintly where it landed, the metallic smell arriving a second later.

For one suspended moment, I could not move.

Fear remained inside me, sharp enough to set my hands trembling around the hook. The vampire had been faster. If I had misread the angle, moved half a second later, or caught the blade against bone, I would have been the body in the snow.

Instead, it was dead at my feet.

Adrenaline moved through me, hard and bright. I had seen the danger, chosen, and acted before fear became hesitation. I was alive. Varia was alive. When the moment came, my body had done exactly what I had trained it to do.

Varia had never softened the purpose of the hook. Here was the motion. Here was the follow-through. Here was what happened when you hesitated. Somewhere over four months of repetition, that knowledge had passed from my mind into my muscles.

Now the snow was red with the proof of it.

Velox came to my side as the engagement ended around us. Varia entered my peripheral vision, already assessing the field, the dead, and me.

Then my body, which had performed flawlessly through the entire engagement, submitted its resignation. The shaking started in my hands and moved inward.

This was my first kill. I would not pretend it was nothing. The blood was still warm on my hand, my grip was unsteady, and a body lay where I had put it.