The place was supposed to be a forest, but it was no longer a place of greenery.
Every second, every breath, every clash rewrote it. One heartbeat, the grove was collapsing in recursive spasms of past and the present colliding — the next, it was a marble courtyard Alex had declared into being, only to be shattered back into fragments of the past by the Deer Mask's relentless pressure.
Neither landed a hit.
Every strike folded into its own denial.
The Deer Mask slashed, but before the blade could bite, the echo of Alex already dodging it appeared — inevitability catching up, cutting down the dragon from an angle no man could defend against.
And yet, each time, Alex displaced that inevitability. A wound became a misremembered branch, a stab became a ripple in water that had always been there, a strike turned into nothing more than a concept that was never valid in the first place.
