Keiser didn't have the luxury of thinking, only moving.
Steel clashed around him, and he cut his way through the front line, blade flashing through smoke and blood. The surviving knights kept a shaky formation, ragged and exhausted after days of fighting without sleep. Some of them glanced his way, doing a double take.
Compared to them, Keiser looked small, a boy swallowed whole by armor that didn't fit. The plates pulled awkwardly at his limbs, too big at the shoulders, too heavy at the hips.
The set had been standard issue for the knights, and since the day he was deployed, he'd had no choice but to wear whatever they handed him. It had nearly gotten him killed more than once.
He'd learned to make it work.
He stripped off what he could, ditched the excess plates that slowed his swing or caught the wind of an explosion, and kept only the pieces that mattered, the ones protecting the parts of him he didn't have time to think about. It wasn't proper, but it kept him alive.
