The basilica's last echo died in Sion's ears as the portal's rim cinched shut behind her with a sound like silk being torn underwater. Sand took the sound and drank it. Daylight crushed the horizon in every direction—an ocean of ocher dunes, knife-backed ridges, hardpan flats split with old lightning glass. Heat shimmered in waves; wind combed the dunes in stray, glittering threads. Above, the sun roared its simple sermon: survive, or don't.
Sion planted her heels into the grit and let the desert name her weight. The coat came off with a shrug and a hiss; wind snatched its tails and flapped them once before the garment evaporated into a phantasmal fold of mana. She rolled her shoulders until tendons sang. The blouse—still sharpened with the day's mockery—gaped and breathed with her. Her lips curved. She did not bother to hide the pleasure of a fight promised and a debt about to be paid.
The portal re-opened behind her for a single blink, and Emilia stepped out first—black uniform, gold epaulets glimmering, eyes like coins newly minted in a furnace. She didn't announce anything. She simply took a place on a nearby outcrop and crossed her arms, a spectator who'd held too many lines not to recognize when she could afford to simply watch.
Then the air went thin, and cold, and something inside it grew edges. Eizel Frost arrived not as a footfall but as a correction in the desert's arithmetic. Heat receded from around her body, as if her presence were an equation subtracting degrees. Her hair, moon-silver and waterfall-long, fell down the length of a storm-blue dress that armored nothing yet conceded less. The whites of her eyes held the faintest glassy sheen. If ice could smirk, it would have used her mouth.
Eizel's gaze slid to Emilia and past, landing on Sion with that pleasant, practiced contempt. "You asked for a place where what we ruin won't matter," she said. "How considerate. I'll grant you a quick burial under your own glass."
Sion tasted her laugh before she let it have her tongue. "You can try, Queen of Freezers," she said. "But bring a shovel."
She drew in breath, set her stance. The sand took the print of her boots and did not forget. Left foot anchored, right foot canted a hair's breadth ahead; hips sloped, spine stacked, shoulders like gates—open, closed, open. A thin crimson shiver rippled off her, a heat haze turned predatory. The aura coalesced into a band around her ribcage, then flared like a second skin—scarlet, saturated, hot enough that the nearest sand sighed and crusted.
Southern Dragon—rooted, close-bridge, coils in the hips and explodes in the hands. She let the pattern write itself into her bones: elbows spearing, shoulders shearing, forearms guarding the heart, the head a lantern that never breaks. Knuckles flexed, then hardened into small, purposeful stones.
Emilia recognized the geometry and said nothing. Southern Dragon—clean. Where did you learn a lost animal? Another breath. Sion's weight shifted forward and the stance lengthened, cheekbones tightening, neck cording with anticipation. She stepped; the sand under her lead foot packed as if it were learning to be stone.
Eizel's reply was a weather change. Frost-lace spun into existence around her wrists—thin as breath, strong as oath. She lifted her hands and the air chimed. The first volley came like thought: needles of ice as slender as hair and as fast as snapping string. They glittered once and then blurred to invisibility as they crossed the space.
Sion's left palm swept a crescent in front of her heart. Mana flooded the motion—scarlet, densified—and a paper-thin shield sprang into being, curved like a dragon's eyelid. The needles hit and hissed, their points burning into steam and the ferrule of each shattering into snow that glowed and died.
"Cute," Sion said, and moved.
She sank and launched. Sand detonated beneath her feet with a thump that kicked dust into a halo. In three strides the world shortened; in five she was a storm-head's roll from breaking. Her right fist speared for Eizel's sternum—a straight line, no waste—wrapped in a narrow cylinder of crimson mana that bit the air.
Ice twitched, and Eizel's answer took the shape of a wall. A slab rose from the ground in a single, clean motion, clear as truth and twice as cruel. Sion's punch met it with a sound like a train engine punching a bell. A spiderweb of cracks threw itself across the slab. The third knuckle on Sion's right hand creaked; pain flared, then banked in the furnace of her aura.
She pivoted, left foot carving a crescent in the sand, hips whipping. The backfist that followed didn't aim at Eizel. It cut at the edge of the slab where thickness failed—geometry as tactic. The slab broke with the complacent sigh of things that believe themselves eternal and discover otherwise. Shards pinwheeled. Eizel rode the break with a small step, as if she'd been planning to let it go.
The return was immediate: lances—six of them—shaped out of coalesced frost, all tip, no mercy, forged in midair and fired with a thought. Sion's aura flared hotter; she turned a shoulder into them, forearm up, elbow tucked, chin down. Three lances vaporized on contact, replaced by a bloom of steam that wrapped the fighters in a hissing veil. One took her high in the triceps; muscle jumped and protested. Two zipped past and broke distant dunes.
"Stay still," Eizel murmured, hands opening. "It hurts less when you let it."
"Lady," Sion said, with a grin wolfish enough to make the sun blink, "I'm only still when I'm bored."
She drove forward again—but not the same way. The stance stretched long, the guard loosened, power cycled from hips to shoulders with a whip's cadence rather than a piston's certainty. Northern Dragon took her frame—the long bridges, the elastic, the leap built into the ankle and the back. Her left leg snapped out in a low arc. Sand sprang from the kick in a scythe of grit. A half-beat later, a vertical punch like a spear shook the air above it. Double-level: calf for hobble, knuckles for head.
Eizel didn't block; she edited the world. A blade of ice grew out of nowhere, an elegant scimitar of winter. She caught Sion's shin with its flat, deflecting without cutting, and glided her head away from the vertical fist by a margin so mean it felt like mockery. She returned all that grace with a crystalline twist—her own blade flicking up to slap the back of Sion's knuckles, a reminder about whose element cut better.
Sion's hand stung. She smiled wider to spite it.
A flash of thought: She's not just throwing ice—she's measuring. Distance, tempo, entry points. She wants me irritated, overextended. Good. Let her make a ledger; I'll set it on fire.
Sion stamped, and the desert answered like a drum. She drew crimson into her lungs and exhaled it as a compact sphere no bigger than a fist. The ball hung for an eyelash of a second, humming, then streaked toward Eizel with the disdainful speed of a bullet that had read poetry and learned contempt.
Eizel's scimitar dissolved; her palm opened. A circle of pale sigils blossomed before her—ice-script, ancient and arrogant. The sphere hit the circle and shoved. The circle groaned; cracks skittered across it like insects. The ice held for a heartbeat and then failed, but its failure had teeth—the circle exploded outward into razors. The sphere made it through thin, dimmer, its edges turbulent.
Eizel snapped her fingers. A column of clear ice sprang from the ground and nudged the sphere skyward with a sound like crystal glass. The sphere climbed, howled, and detonated two hundred meters above the desert. For an instant, the desert had two suns.
Shockwave. The air yanked at clothes and hair. Sand lifted, turned, and tried to become weather. The larger fragments of Eizel's destroyed circle shredded dunes like a conscripted plow.
Emilia braced herself on the outcrop as the gust slapped her coat, her eyes half-lidded and satisfied. This is clean work, she thought. Not elegant—honest. The best arguments are always honest when they bleed.
Sion used the momentary bloom of steam and glare to close the distance again, this time cutting right, then left, then vanishing behind the mirage of heat as if she'd stepped into thinner reality. Eizel tracked, pupils narrowing, shoulders settling into a new refusal. Sion appeared out of the glare low and inside, both hands snapping for Eizel's waist—a grappler's mischief in a striker's suit.
Eizel's answer was a waist-high ring of ice teeth that erupted outward like the desert had decided to become a maw. Sion's hands withdrew; her forearms crossed; she wrapped the ring with an aura cuff. The teeth hit her and hissed into steam again, but not before several points bit skin and drew bright lines of red on her ribs and biceps. The heat tanged with iron.
"You bleed prettily," Eizel observed, voice poised on the lip of cruelty. "It would look better as a frozen flower."
"Keep fantasizing," Sion said, low. "It's the closest you'll get."
She spun—a tight, mean pirouette, heel digging, hips cracking like a whip handle—and delivered a crescent kick aimed at the joint between Eizel's shoulder and neck. Northern Dragon's long leg, Southern Dragon's short intent. Eizel threw up a bracer of ice that met shin with a crack that rang the dunes. Pain climbed Sion's leg like an ambitious insect. She ignored it. On the landing, she fell into a close-bridge flurry—elbows and short hooks and the snap of a palm heel that clawed at Eizel's jawline.
Eizel's defense turned to vapors and blades by turns—thin plates of ice that shattered on impact, daggers that appeared and disappeared like gossip. She gave ground. She smiled as she did, a professional's smile when the game finally reached the part worth playing.
"Absolute Zero," she whispered, almost sweetly.
The temperature crashed.
It wasn't merely cold. Cold is discomfort. This was subtraction. Sound lost a fraction of itself; colors paled. The desert—the great show-off—forgot to be hot. The halo of Sion's aura drew tight, fighting. Frost spidered across her blouse in a film as thin as denial. Moisture in her exhale whitened into a storm of little knives.
Sion's mind snapped to math: Absolute Zero means she's trying a domain. Centered—on her. Radius variable. She wants my blood to slow, my reflex to glue, my aura to burn itself trying to keep pace.
She grinned around chattering teeth—grinned anyway. "You make a pretty dome," she said. "I'll carve my name in your sky."
She pushed crimson out further, compressing it at the surface of her skin until it formed a second skin—thin as a thought but honest. The frost on her blouse hissed and ran like frightened cats. Heat wobbled the air near her arms; the smell of hot leather and warmed perfume returned like old friends. The dome of cold pressed harder.
Eizel lifted both hands and turned her wrists as if to open a complicated lock. Above them the sky drew together and turned hard—the moisture in the air ceding to her will. A forest of thin, floating blades assembled, their edges lit with the blue of religious glass. They turned, aligned, and rained.
Sion didn't try to block them all; that was how fools died. She slipped and parried and ate what she had to. The first drew a ribbon across her cheek. The second planted in her right shoulder, not deep but ungentle, and she tore it out with her left hand while her right punched past it at Eizel's ribs. Two more nicked her thigh and bathed a strip of denim-dark leather in urgent red.
She broke through the rain with a leap. In the air she tucked, rotated, and dropped in a heel-ax kick that bent the light. Eizel sidestepped—but only barely. The heel missed her by a finger's thickness and scythed into the sand hard enough to melt it. Glass fountained, cooled, and shattered in the span of a breath.
Eizel was closer now, suddenly; either she had chosen proximity or Sion had forced it. At that range, Eizel chose uglier forms. Frost crawled up her forearms until they gleamed like armguards; she slammed a short hammerfist at Sion's temple. Sion caught it on a raised elbow and let the impact skitter down her bones into her hips—the way Southern Dragon teaches you to save the mind by spending the body. Pain spit sparks in her vision. She turned them into a headbutt aimed for Eizel's nose.
It landed. A small, satisfying crunch. A line of blood—more black than red in this stolen cold—slid down the Ice Queen's philtrum and kissed her lip. Eizel blinked once, as if consulting a manual, and then smiled with honest anger.
"You vulgar little bonfire," she said. "I will put you out."
Sion spat a tooth-fragment she didn't need. "Come try, ice princess," she breathed. "Bring a coat."
They broke and clashed again, a rhythm that had no chorus. Sion's hands found ribs and shoulders and once—sweetly—Eizel's throat; Eizel's counters found triceps, hip-bones, and the little muscles along Sion's jaw. The desert collected their prints and hardened into glass under each overcommitted strike.
Eizel's next trick came sly. She let Sion drive her three steps, allowed three clean body shots that struck like the drumbeats of a funeral march, and then she slid back on a sudden sheet of black ice that had formed under her heels. The ground carried her out of range as if the desert had decided it loved her more. At the same time, a lance assembled under Sion's left foot, coming up to spear through arch and ankle.
Reflex saved Sion and hurt her. She twisted, foot leaving the lance by a margin and finding purchase on a crust of ice that hadn't been there a second earlier. The twist pulled a tendon across bone and made it complain loud enough to be prayer. She rolled with the motion, converting near ruin into a low slide that took her under a razor Eizel had sent for her throat.
"Stop playing," Eizel said, almost kindly. "Die with composure."
"Not today," Sion said, and tasered the sand with a single palm slap—scarlet calling red from the water in the grains. Heat bucked in a circle. Steam bolted up. The dome of cold above them reacted with an angry pop as the thermal gradient rebelled.
Sion used the fog the way a dancer uses a curtain. She vanished into it and then tracked herself by touch, by pressure in her knees, by the shape of Eizel's damnably steady breath. She came out of it just beside Eizel's left shoulder and drove a ridgehand at the carotid with a sound like a bowstring loosed.
Eizel's left palm caught Sion's wrist. Her fingers closed like a trap made by a jeweler and a mathematician. "Too slow."
"Just right," Sion said, grinning.
Her right hand had been empty, but only because the mana ball she'd spun there was so small it hid in the hollow of her palm. She flared it, point-blank, aimed at Eizel's cheekbone. The detonation was more heat than impact—an improvised sun the size of a child's fist.
The blast hurled them both away in opposite parabolas. Sion landed on her shoulder, rolled, and came up with sand in her teeth, blood in her mouth, and laughter somewhere behind the pain. Eizel landed like a fallen statue—soundlessly, and undignified only for the blink it took her to reclaim grace. The side of her face was burned pink under a frosting bloom.
Emilia's eyebrows lifted, a little. Sly, Sion. Ugly and sly. Good.
Eizel lifted a hand to her cheek and examined the burn with an odd curiosity, as if she were studying a painting. When she looked up, her eyes were colder.
"Enough," she said. The word had the weight of a sealed decree.
The desert answered.
Spines of ice burst from the ground in a fourteen-point ring, spears seeking Sion's vitals from every angle. Sion jumped once, twice, heel-toed on spearheads that wanted to skewer her and used them like stepping stones instead. She tucked into a forward flip, grabbed one spear as if it were a dance partner's wrist, and snapped it with her shin as she came over. She landed in the ruin she'd made and grabbed the jagged end. It burned her hand and she took it anyway. Then she threw it.
The javelin of other-winter screamed through the heated air and rang against a mirror Eizel conjured in a wink. The javelin split into twelve thinner spears that obeyed their birth mother's last command: kill Sion. They reversed in a blink and came back.
Sion swore once—a deep, heartfelt soldier's curse—and burned hotter. She gathered mana into both palms, pressed her hands together, and dragged them apart to stretch a pane of scarlet between them. The returning spears hit. The pane wagged like a drum and moaned like a ship's hull in distress. Sion's arms shook. Too many. They'll punch through on the seventh.
She let the pane go just before it failed and dove to her right. The spears, designed to follow, followed—only to eat the sand and skewer it until the desert looked like a sea-urchin the size of a house. Sion came up from the dive in a long-bridge Northern stance, one hand extended, the other near her ribs. Breath in, breath out. Vision narrowed, then widened again. She thinks I'm flagging. Good. Let her.
"Your problem," Eizel said lazily, "is that you think heat is personality. It's only weather."
"Wrong," Sion said. "It's motive."
She cut left, faster than before. The pain in her ankle was there, but the aura smudged its signature. She threw a triple: palm to the heart, elbow to the chin, scraping knuckles to the eyes. Eizel parried the first with a plate of ice and rolled her head to slide the elbow past. The knuckle scrape connected. Eizel blinked, blinking slush from her lashes. Sion felt a small, mean joy.
Eizel's counter was not clever. It was honest, and it loved pain. She lunged in, grabbed Sion by the blouse with one hand and by the hip with the other, and fed her into a vertical pillar of ice that exploded up from the ground like a verdict. Sion's back hit the pillar and a white flare ate her breath. More pillars arced inward to cage her.
Sion bared her teeth and barked a sound halfway between a laugh and a snarl. "You really want me to stay."
Eizel stepped closer, the absolute zero dome tightened to a smaller, grimmer room. "Stay and learn manners."
Sion bent her knees and drove both palms behind her into the pillar at her back. Crimson detonated. The pillar split down the middle and sloughed in two; the cage's arcs crunched and collapsed inward, shards singing past her ears close enough to draw blood along two bright, clean lines. She broke through the falling knives and came for Eizel in a short, brutal rush that had no poetry.
Southern Dragon owned her again—hips low, shoulders square, short bridges and ugly questions. She punched Eizel three times in the same place, a hand's width below the breastbone, because Northern Dragon decorates and Southern Dragon drills. The third punch carried a little seed of heat. Ice cracked under Eizel's skin; breath left Eizel on a sound that was not quite pain and not quite approval.
"Better," Eizel said, eyes bright with a private gladness. "Now drown."
She clapped. The sound made the dome ring. The temperature dropped more—if there was such a thing left. The moisture in Sion's aura tried to seize. Ice crept up Sion's boots, ankles, calves—a lover with bad intentions. Sion swore and stamped and burned. The ice broke, but its insistence cost her.
"Think," she told herself, a command spoken into the rhythm of her own blood. She hands me cold and tries to own space. My answer is not only heat. It's shape. If she rules the air and the ground, I need a third surface.
Her eyes found the glass she'd created earlier—the melted sand, cooled and cracked. An idea took a seat and crossed its legs.
Sion sprang backward, baiting a spear-lunge. Eizel gave it to her—three lances in a stagger with the last placed where a dodger would retreat. Sion retreated, then—at the last heartbeat—dropped flat onto her back and slid on the slick glass as if it had been built for her. The first lance skimmed her leather and stole a button; the second hissed above her teeth; the third stabbed where her belly had planned to be. Instead she slid under it, hair kissing frost in a storm of sparks.
She planted both palms on the glass, shoved, and let mana explode out beneath her, propelling her into a low, tearing spin. She came up behind Eizel's right shoulder and hammered a backfist into the hinge of the Ice Queen's jaw.
The hit took Eizel sideways two steps. She pivoted, barely a breath late, and whipped a lash of ice across Sion's ribs that opened three quick red lines. Sion grunted and answered with a short knee into Eizel's thigh—a contemptuous little insult that said I know you hate being touched.
They separated again, breathing hard. Steam from Sion's aura and fog from Eizel's domain wrestled in the air and made a fickle curtain between them. The horizon's mirages leaned in to watch.
"Tell me," Eizel said, voice even, "what do you think you're proving? That you can bite above your rank? That Naoko's dog has teeth?"
Sion's answer was a crooked smirk. "That your crown cracks when it gets hot."
Eizel's eyes narrowed. "You speak of heat as if it were virtue. It is appetite. And appetite is easy to starve."
Sion spat blood into the sand and watched it crystalize red-black. "Appetite makes wars. Appetite makes empires. Appetite is why you keep your hair long and your insults longer. Don't pretend you're above wanting."
Eizel tilted her head. "I want to stop your mouth."
"Come take it," Sion said, lifting her guard again.
The next exchange was a blur even to Emilia, and she had war in her bones. Sion shed and adopted stances like skins—Northern to range in, Southern to cut—her feet writing equations in the sand that only she could solve fast enough to survive. Eizel's ice grew cunning—panes that mirrored Sion's posture for half a breath to confuse her own eyes; hollow sculptures that looked solid; solid ones that cracked deliberately to send decoys at odd angles.
Sion took a spear in the flank—not deep, but honest. She tore it out and the wound, hot and stubborn, wept a line down her hip. Her aura roared, and the skin at the edges of the wound crawled and knit, flesh spiraling toward itself in furious little currents until the blood slowed. Regeneration took hunger out of her eyes and replaced it with spite.
Eizel watched the knitting with a scholar's disdain. "Vulgar biology," she said. "Like patching a gown with raw meat."
Sion laughed despite the pain. "Says the woman wearing the world's biggest ice-corset."
She clapped her hands. Mana leapt and split and swarmed back into her knuckles. She went in.
Left—feint low for knee. Eizel lowered her guard. Sion rose and wrapped a hook for the ear. Eizel slipped it by a whisper and cut Sion's arm with a razor grown from her own forearm guard. Sion hissed and pounded a straight into Eizel's clavicle that cracked the ice there and bruised the bone beneath. Eizel's return was casual and brutal: an ice-augmented elbow that collided with Sion's jaw and made the sun go briefly sideways.
Sion fell into the spin instead of out of it and turned it into a spinning back-kick that found Eizel's ribs with the heel. The sound it made was expensive. Eizel's eyes widened half a millimeter—enough to register as pain to connoisseurs—and the dome shivered.
Eizel's mouth set. "Enough."
She dropped her hands and raised them again, palms parallel, as if holding an invisible box. The sand between her hands howled. Frost condensed out of nowhere into a cube large as a carriage, perfectly clear, perfectly cruel. In its center a dark mist twisted—no, not mist: the air itself slowed until it looked like liquid. She slid the box toward Sion as gently as a mother slides a cradle.
Sion felt the temperature drop in her marrow and leapt aside. The box changed direction mid-glide without a sound. It tracks. She sprinted, a low gallop, feet finding the glass patches she'd made earlier and surfing them in long arcs. The box followed, implacable. Wherever it passed, the world forgot how to move; sand stopped falling out of the air; a fly hung mid-flight like a bead on a wire.
She couldn't outrun it. She could out-think it.
She cut across her own earlier path and detonated a fan of small, mean heat-bursts—five in a star pattern, their points equidistant around Eizel's stance. The air bucked. The dome complained. The box stuttered for a fraction of a fraction. It was enough.
Sion turned, planted, and launched straight at Eizel, using the box's inertia against it—if it tracked her, it would have to pivot through its own slowed center. For two heartbeats, Eizel's tool was her tether. Sion closed. The punch she threw wasn't fancy—it was a promise kept. It broke the rest of the ice guarding Eizel's collarbone and bit her skin. Heat flared. Flesh hissed. Eizel's breath came short and angry.
Eizel dropped the box with a motion that said we are done with toys. The cube smashed into the sand and evaporated into white steam that didn't rise but seeped like fog. Then she raised both arms and brought them down. The dome collapsed inward like a lung exhaling wrath.
A storm of knives, plates, pillars, razors, and needles swept the arena in one continuous, curving argument. There was no safe. There was only less-bad. Sion crouched into Southern Dragon's smallest house and made it smaller—elbows hugging, forearms shaping a wedge, chin buried. Crimson mana went from skin to air to skin, a pulse timed to the rhythm of the incoming blades. She moved a half-step at a time, each step buying a narrow corridor through the storm. Blades kissed her. Some loved her enough to stay. She let them for a heartbeat and then burned them out, screaming as they left, not ashamed to scream when pain earned the noise.
When the storm thinned, Sion was on one knee, breath hitching, skin crosshatched with the calligraphy of bright harm. Blood dotted the sand like a new constellation. Her aura guttered, then steadied. She stood.
"Still here," she said. Her voice was raw. "Still loud."
Eizel's hair had loosened from its perfect fall; a few strands clung to the dampened burn along her cheek. She smiled with the assurance of a queen whose favorite song is a dirge. "Briefly."
Sion's laugh was small and stubborn. Inside her head, the math went on: She's escalating. Good. Her control has edges—push her past them. She loves shape. So break symmetry. Give her a chaos she can't freeze all at once.
She inhaled deep into the bottom of her belly and sent mana down her legs until her calves hummed. She began to move—small, twitching feints like a hummingbird's threats, then longer, broken rhythms. A right that wasn't, a left that lied, a step that invited pity, a stumble baited for greed. Eizel's eyes followed, precise, and then—noted irritation. The kind you feel when a metronome skips beats you swear you just heard.
Sion burst on the off-beat.
She threw not one strike but six half-strikes chained at odd intervals: wrist-snap for the eye, shoulder-bump for balance, foot-scrape to the ankle, hip-check, palm-feint, elbow-real. The chain made no textbook sense; it made Sion sense. The fifth half-strike was the true one, the elbow; it found the arc under Eizel's ribs and made her lurch—small, but honest. The sixth drove Eizel's chin up just enough that frost-magic aimed for Sion's thigh went high and merely shaved leather.
"Messy," Eizel said through teeth. "Desperate."
"Effective," Sion panted. "You can have the first two words."
Eizel answered with brutality—no art, no elegance. She reached for Sion's hair, closed a fist on the brown-ruby strands, and tried to feed her face to a rising spike. Sion let the hair go, mana burning it free in a stink of singe, and while Eizel held a hand that clutched nothing, Sion hammered a short cross into the soft muscle over Eizel's floating ribs. Breath jumped. Then Sion stomped the same spot with the ball of her foot—a Southern Dragon ugly that practitioners treasure like a family heirloom.
Eizel's reaction was honest and made the desert flinch. She grabbed Sion by the throat with a hand sheathed in blue frost and squeezed. Nerves along Sion's neck lit in panicked fire. Spots drummed in her vision. Cool pressure became a vise; a vise became a verdict.
Sion slammed both her palms into Eizel's wrist and burned, not outward but inward—heat concentrated enough to make the frost crack and peel like lacquer. She tore the hand off her throat, coughed, and used the cough as cover for a headbutt that smashed into Eizel's mouth. More blood, red now, warmer; more honest as well.
They staggered apart, two women reddened, breathing like furnaces with bad conscience.
Some distance away, Emilia let out a slow exhale she hadn't known she'd been holding. Her jaw ached from how tightly she'd been clenching it. Enough to kill, enough to stop, enough to learn, she thought, and her mind moved pieces on boards that weren't here.
Eizel ran her tongue along a split in her lip and tasted her own iron. She seemed to consider the flavor and approve nothing about it. "I warned you," she said. "You insisted on theater. Let me end your act."
Sion chuckled and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing red into a warrior's cosmetic. "Do your worst," she said softly. "I'm tired of your rehearsals."
Eizel set her stance. This time she did not conjure spears or walls or lathes. She raised both hands, palms open, and the world's light bent around them. Frost crawled from her fingers but did not fall—it arranged itself into geometry so precise it made Sion's eyes water. Runes surfaced on the ice, each stroke of them a command the air obeyed.
"The Absolute Seal," Eizel said.
The dome stilled into perfection—no hiss, no sway, a stillness that mocked living throats. The seal wrote itself in the air between them—thin circles nested inside thicker ones, connected by threads of script. At the center, a hollow where a name should be.
Sion felt the tug—the attempt to write her there. To make her part of a diagram. To file her. The seal tugged at not just movement but intention. Her next punch arrived early in her mind and late in her body. No.
She punished the instinct to panic. Panic gives seals more to hold.
Break it like any map: burn the legend, smudge the compass, lie about north.
Sion shifted into a stance that was neither Dragon—a crooked, ugly squat she'd once invented to mock a master and later kept because it worked. She slung her aura forward, not smooth but in lurches, as if she were a broken engine coughing smoke. She threw a feint at the wrong time and a real strike at the worst angle. She let her breath stutter deliberately; she let her eyes go dead and then wild and then dead again.
The seal stuttered. Runes twitched. A line blurred. Geometry hates lies; it does not know where to land when the subject refuses to be itself.
Sion laughed—a harsh bark—and stepped through the gap that laugh made. Her elbow cut a curve that no school would teach and slammed into the side of Eizel's neck. Eizel's eyes went wide, then narrow. She snapped a hand for Sion's throat; Sion wasn't there. The Northern bridge took her out of range and the Southern guard packed her back in with a shovel's meanness. She fed Eizel two short body shots, stole a breath, and fed her two more.
Eizel's patience ended. She screamed—not loud, not afraid; simply irritated, like a queen whose tea had been spilled. The air between them burned cold. The seal shattered into glitter that sliced Sion's forearms open in half a dozen places and then melted in the heat like guilty evidence.
"You are intolerable," Eizel said.
"I'm hired to be," Sion said. Then she spat more blood and smiled. "And beloved for it."
Eizel gathered both hands above her head and brought them down. A pillar big as a tower groaned into being and fell toward Sion. Sion ran—not away but toward. She leapt at the last second, planted a foot on the slant of the falling ice, and ran up it as it fell, using its motion to hurl herself at Eizel like a thrown knife.
The right cross she threw from the apex had the weight of everything she was: stubborn, hot, reckless, alive. It smashed into Eizel's guard and ate three layers of ice off her forearm in one bite. The elbow that followed found cheekbone again with affectionate precision. Eizel reeled.
Sion landed hard, both knees complaining in the language of old soldiers. She didn't wait. She tore forward again, a banner of heat fanning behind her, and dived into another close-bridge flurry—the kind that mauls dignity and racks ribs.
Ice answered, and so did Eizel. The desert, poor thing, suffered another hour in a heartbeat: dunes sheared into sleeted slopes; glass islands rose and sank; fog peered, lied, and fled. Thunder without lightning bucked the air as heat and cold punched each other in the face at speeds too petty for weather reports.
At last, Sion overreached. A left hook bit nothing; Eizel's parry bit everything, her palm sliding over Sion's wrist and locking it. The world folded around the grip: Sion's own momentum became a lever; Eizel turned, shoulder under elbow, hips snapping. Sion flew.
She hit hard enough to bounce and slid, carving a long red smear in the hungry sand. The smear glittered as frost caught it a second later. For a moment she saw nothing but whiteness and heard nothing but the ocean sound of blood in angry ears.
Up. The thought had to be ordered. Up, now. If you stay down, she'll seal you to the desert and call it art.
She got to knees, spat, got to feet. The aura shook; she forced it still, then forced it angry. The torn skin along her ribs closed with the unwilling teamwork of tired flesh. She exhaled, a ragged wheeze that infuriated her to hear.
Eizel studied her across the steaming, freezing, shrapneled arena they had made. "Yield," she said. Not magnanimous—merely practical. "You have proven your point: that you are impolite. You need prove nothing else."
Sion laughed, which hurt. "Oh, but I do," she said. "I have to prove that the next time you see Jin—my 'rat,' as you called him—you remember that even his aunt can break your teeth."
Eizel's eyes sharpened. "He is not your blood."
"He is ours," Sion said, voice low and certain. "And ours is a word your kind mistake for contract. It is a vow."
"Sentiment," Eizel said, with delicate disgust.
"Family," Sion said. "A hotter word."
They moved again, resigned to the costs. Sion's steps were smaller now; Eizel's magic was leaner, meaner, with less ornament. Both had burned through the pretense of style to reach the marrow where fighters live when they have been decided by the fight but not yet finished by it.
Sion slid inside a spear-line and took a cut along her collarbone—a bright, stuttering slice that made her shoulder heavy. She traded it for a short right to Eizel's left kidney. Eizel grunted, unpleasant surprise cracking the mask. In response Eizel let a bloom of frost erupt at Sion's feet that grabbed both ankles and glued them. Sion bent, slapped both palms to the frost, and burned in a short, surgical burst that freed one foot and then the other, skin on her ankles blistering in ugly crescents.
Eizel drifted back, drawing Sion forward into a narrow valley between two glassed dunes. The valley tightened like a throat. Sion's aura made steam of the air and then made it rain; the rain froze and fell as sleet; sleet hit her shoulders and ran off in hiss and spit. She didn't care. Don't chase to chase. Chase to corner.
She realized the corner half a heartbeat after Eizel sprung it.
The valley's walls bent inward and groaned. Eizel planted her palms on the air and pushed. The glassed dunes folded, trying to clap Sion into a thin hate-letter between them.
Sion sprinted, slammed a shoulder into the left wall, and detonated heat at the point of contact. The glass bowed outward, screamed, and shattered in chunked glitter. The right wall slammed, but caught only the empty wake of her shape. Eizel's eyes flickered—annoyance, calculation, approval all at once.
Sion didn't give her time to like anything. She threw two small crimson orbs in a lazy underhand toss, like a girl at a country fair. Eizel sniffed at the insult and swatted the first with a fan of ice. It burst—too small to matter. The second, however, disobeyed the pattern. It struck the fan, didn't burst, and clung like a hot burr. The fan would have to be dropped unless Eizel wanted fingers cooked.
Eizel dropped it and conjured another. Sion closed across the distraction and let her body do something it hated: she leapt into a full-body tackle.
They struck and went down into the sand, a tangle of heat and cold that threw steam like an altar. Sion headbutted, elbowed, bit—not skin, but the ice guard Eizel wore—and felt a crack leap through the guard in a lovely, wicked little line. Eizel kneed Sion in the belly, twice, hard enough to make her backbone ring. They grappled in a way neither school would teach. It was the kind of ugly that ends arguments.
Eizel won the roll and came up on top, hand at Sion's throat again, this time with fingers inside the aura and frost crawling down toward cartilage. Sion bared her teeth in a grin that was mostly gums and rage and slammed a short palm up into Eizel's burned cheek. Flesh met heat met frost in a burst that sent them spinning away from each other again.
They rose at the same time, breathing like furnaces in winter.
For a long moment no one moved. The desert groaned—no poetry, just physics in distress. Emilia, on her outcrop, watched the two figures resolve into clear sight through the steam, and felt, against her better judgment, pride for both. They have earned the next insult, she thought.
Sion wiped sweat and blood from her brow with her forearm and found her voice under the rubble of breath. "Round one," she said hoarsely. "Again?"
Eizel touched the new ruin along her cheek and then smoothed her hair back into an order it did not want. "Again," she said. "And again. Until you are quiet."
Sion lifted her guard, knees soft, hips cocked, eyes bright with the kind of hunger that makes saints nervous. Eizel raised her hands, the frost blooming from her fingers like cruel flowers.
Wind found them both and sang a thin, high note through the broken glass of the dunes. Somewhere, far above, a hawk made a circle and decided both were beneath its interest. The sun kept its sermon.
They stepped, breathed, and the desert leaned in.
— To be continued —
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Heat: Thank you very much for reading. This is a long chapter for you, more than 5,000 words.
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