The air in the blasted plain still quivers from the first round. Heat and cold braided themselves across the sand, and the smell of iron and scorched leather hangs heavy like a vow. Sion breathes slow, counting. Her wounds sting—riddled scratches, a pair of shallow cuts that still leak warm color where ice kissed skin and steam ate it. Her breaths make thin white ribbons in the cooling aftershock of Eizel's frostwork. She tastes metal and dust and the perfume she wore to the basilica, now thinned and mixed with sweat.
She is holding back.
Not because she lacks the will. Not because she lacks the tools. Because Naoko has forbidden a hunt that would not stop. Because Naoko trusts Sion to be ferocious but not monstrous. Because Sion has a map of consequences written on her bones: go full, and Eizel dies; Eizel dies, a house collapses; a collapse produces screams that echo in corridors Naoko means to keep silent. Sion has been ordered to be a hand, not an executioner.
Also if Ezel dies it will cause some inconvenience to Ms. Naoko so I'm just playing because I'm bored too and to warm up
So she keeps it to thirty–five percent. Thirty–five percent and a kind of exquisite cruelty: enough to make a point, not enough to end a life.
She closes her eyes for an instant, and the thought that lives there is not strategy but an image of Jin—small, smiling, a boy who is beloved like blood. When Eizel called Jin a "rat," the words fell like a slap in Sion's chest. Jin is not hers by blood, but he lives like a son in every way that matters. The insult is a burn she cannot ignore.
Right now, the calculus in Sion's head is stark and unsentimental:
The question is what if my son Jin was in my place?
— Jin vs. Eizel: Jin carries Uranus' blessing. A moon-blessing changes the equation. Magic that is conceptual, reinforced by lunar law, will eat a witch's craft with a kind of cosmic authority. Jin's spiritual blade, his lunar graces—especially if he channels Moon patterns intelligently at the right phase—would cut through Eizel's constructs, cancel or reverse frames of ice with a higher-tier sanction. Jin, with his lunar boons, would have the tools to catch the Ice Queen's spells mid-breath and spin them into silence. He would win because his blessings make him an answer to the very idea of ice.
But Jin is against me
— me vs. Jin: im would beat Jin in raw, kinetic engagement. They are both fighters. Sion's mastery of Northern and Southern Dragon forms makes her a mirror for martial truth. She knows how to remove a man's center faster than he can adjust to being struck. The sword is a language Jin knows—but so does Sion know the grammar of bone and joint and leverage. Without invoking any lunar sanction, she can disassemble Jin with two well-placed movements. She could beat him by virtue of the body, not the concept.
— me vs. Eizel: Here is the uncomfortable corner. Eizel is a sorceress whose toolkit is the environment. Ice is geometry; it is pause and denial and the ability to write rules into the air. Sion is a storm-bodied striker with regeneration and heat. Without lunar blessing, Sion cannot simply annul Eizel's framing spells. Even if Jin would fold Eizel with a blessed strike, Sion must fight in a different dimension: she must create entropy faster than ice can impose order. That requires far greater exertion and far greater danger. It is the reason Sion keeps her hand tied—because the kind of violence that breaks a witch is the kind that does not come back to the world pristine.
She breathes in, feeling the little centrifuge of the storm she has conjured roll under her skin. The red halo is a living thing now: not soft crimson but a dark, bruised maroon that flickers with black smoke in the core. Sand eddies around her like moths around a flame. The wind catches the hem of her coatless torso and for one second she becomes an altar of motion and claim.
Eizel laughs—an edge of ice on the laugh like a razor stroke. "You hold back because you fancy yourself merciful," she says, voice thin as sugar spun into glass. "How quaint. Mercy is a luxury for those who never feel the bite of consequence."
"Mercy is the calculus I'm given," Sion answers, steady as bone. "And Naoko is my law."
Eizel's blue eyes shave the horizon. "Naoko's law is a lullaby when frost hears a hungry house."
Sion's fingers curl into fists. She tastes rage now in the way one tastes salt on a wound.
She decides instead to punish with posture. She will show Eizel the small, humiliating things—shots that bruise and leave a mark, shaming work more than lethal. That is the mission: slap the ice queen's pride raw so the rest of the world remembers who can bite teeth into a crown.
She moves first—a red seam of energy that explodes from her palm, a compressed star-jar no bigger than a child's fist. It hammers into the air, a shock like a bell, and the desert answers with a geyser of hot sand and steam. Eizel's eyes narrow. Her hands braid a lattice of cold, and the bullet of heat hits frost and squeals like a violin string. The point of impact fractures; ice splinters into a glittering mist that cascades like a rain of glass. One shard finds her shoulder—punctures the white of her dress—and blood blooms on cloth like a scarified rose. Eizel smiles through it, because ice likes to pretend at stoicism.
Sion's grin is colder than the wound would suggest. She is tasting the satisfaction of a successful strike—details, not death.
The Ice Queen answers with geometry: spearlines that stitch the air, darts of frost that arrive in a fan. Sion moves like a breath in response—Northern footwork, the long bridges that let her appear and vanish with the economy of a ghost. She takes one in the shoulder; it punches her aside, but she spins on it, converts the momentum into a whip of red that catches Eizel in the ribs. Flesh gives a sound like a bell being struck—low, hollow, meaningful.
Eizel calls up an Absolute Zero seam in the air to try to freeze the pocket of the battlefield—an attempt to steal her advantage by stealing rhythm. The temperature collapses like a trap. The frost creeps across the sand and the air itself begins to behave like a metal disc. Sion feels her limbs go heavy, as though every motion must be argued for. The low hiss of ice forming in her clothes makes her teeth chatter.
This is what Sion expected: the absolute frame, the core of Eizel's design. If she breaks this frame, Eizel loses modelling time; if she cannot break it, she bleeds. The balance is a small and dangerous thing.
She goes quiet inside—no roaring, just numbers and body memory.
The dome sucks reflex. The response must be mechanical. Don't think about the cold; think about the line. Northern for entry. Southern to finish. Use the heel sweep to unbalance the ice hinge. Use heat to warp—local thermal gradients erase a line of frost. Keep breathing. Keep the hand corners ready to turn joints into leverage.
She breathes through it. Her red aura becomes narrower, honed to a blade. She takes a step and a half—two micro-steps, the chess of feet—and then dashes like a thread through an eye. The Absolute Zero slit tries to catch her, but she is already the seam, and her fist meets Eizel's sternum. Hard, precise. The contact throws the Ice Queen off her measured pivot. For a second the your of her spells tremble. For a second the desert remembers wind.
Eizel recovers, face an infuriated ceramic. She pulls new stakes from air—sheets that mirror Sion's motion and then pull like spider silk to restrain. She forms a half-dozen spears and vents them like a bored storm. Sion takes them—some in the flat of her forearms, which thrum with pain; some in the lower ribs, which wrinkle and ache and demand healing.
During all this Sion's mind is still running the cold math about Jin. She sees in the movement the invisible edges of what Jin could do—how a lunar sanction would have turned Eizel's Absolute Zero into a brittle toy, ripping seals instead of building them. Jin would not need to drown Eizel in brute force; he would present an authority Eizel's ice could not recognize. That is why Naoko keeps him distant when he must be a blade and not a public spectacle: blessings are a kind of jurisprudence; they carry votes the world must register.
But Sion is not interested in that now. She is interested in one thing: to teach Eizel to fear saying "rat" about Jin ever again.
She leans now into something less calculated and more elemental. Her red energy darkens, smokes, and turns viscous. The sand at her feet rises, wrapping into a cyclone that is not wind but mana made manifest. It chews the horizon into a murmur. She is the eye; the storm answers to her ribcage. Her eyes go all red—no trace of brown left; her hair darkens almost to black at the roots, the ends still copper, a living gradient of fire and ash. The desert stops pretending it owns the day.
Eizel's lips thin. She senses the change—the presence of a different signature in Sion's aura. The Witch knows magic of frames and the signs of a half-transform. Eizel has no trouble with shape, but she knows perfectly well what a fighter can do when she becomes something like a storm.
Sion thinks as much—fast, cold mathematics laced with the warmth of personal vendetta:
Naoko forbade annihilation, but she did not forbid force. If I calibrate properly—if I keep the burn localized, if I keep the kill-angle away from the heart—then I can break her pride without breaking her life. An Eizel who survives humiliated will teach her daughters caution. An Eizel who dies will make graven grief for Naoko. That is unacceptable. That is why I bite and do not swallow.
She launches.
The cyclone becomes a column now, a black red trophy of pressure that rips at the dunes. It lifts palm-sized boulders and spins them like missiles. The sound is a thousand fingers running over a thousand strings. Eizel finds herself in the center of a hurricane that does not freeze; the heat of Sion's spin strips edges from her frost constructs as if a file shaved them. The ice spears snap on contact, shatter, and fall like needles of glass into the sand.
Eizel counters by widening the battlefield in the other dimension: she drives ice in a planar burst upward, hoping to cage Sion in a ring. The cage locks for a heartbeat; the sound of ice clicking into place is like a thousand locks slamming. Sion smiles with savage courtesy. She uses that spinning pressure to pry the ice seams at the grain level. Her palms explode outward with radial heat-blades; the seam fails; a column of black energy—an upshoot of Sion's own mana core—rents upward into the sky, a spear of darkened red that gurgles like an old wound.
The sky takes the impact without complaint, and sand showers in a great shimmering curtain. The blast is not big enough to be a crater-maker, but it is big enough to be a proclamation. The desert's smell becomes sulfurous and hot, mixed with the ozone tang of shattered ice. Eizel is flung back, slamming into a dune with a mark of snow where her white skirt now carries black and red.
Emilia watches. The lines of her face are small, satisfied. She has always liked this kind of theatre—the uncharted meeting of two elements where the survivors are more clear than the dead.
Eizel rises like the stain on a robe that cannot be rinsed out. Her face is streaked with blood and frost; she blinks the moisture off with a violence that makes the sand against her lashes glitter with tiny glass crystals.
"You will not kill me," she says. "Even you." It is not a plea; it is an assertion.
"Good," Sion replies. Her voice has the ragged quality of someone who has been in the mouth of storms. "I would not want your daughters to grow up motherless and clever."
Eizel laughs—but it is not light. "They will learn clever enough to prune wolves," she says, and her voice is the consonant of chill.
The two circle, and Sion can feel the half-power pulse dissipating—her stamina thread is thinning. She is not unlimited. Heat ironies return to her muscles. She has to do the math constantly now: do I commit more? What is the threshold where Eizel's next spell would demand Naoko's sanction? Her mind flicks through scenarios like cards laid on a table, discarding each one it does not need. She calculates the possible counters to an Absolute Zero collapse; she maps ways to bend the battlefield into features that neutralize long-range ice—things like steam, glass, and forced motion.
She also calculates cunningly personal things:
If Jin ever decides to come here, the game is different. He would not fight like a man playing politics; he would fight like a law. He would not win with brutality but with a force that rewrites the rules of the moment. Eizel would find her spells stop because they would be illegal in the presence of that sanction. But I, Sion, I would beat Jin on the field because he is a blade and I am a fist. He cannot shift ground the way I can. So the triangle is awkward: me over Jin, Jin over Eizel, Eizel over me. It is a prime of pain. That is why Naoko's choices matter. She keeps the axes from stabbing the wrong ribs.
Eizel, meanwhile, is not idle in her calculations. She sees Sion's partial transformation and reads it as pride and limitation. She knows perfectly well that Sion's warmth is a dangerous variable. Her mind—cold, ordered—plots the moment where the storm's hunger will outstrip its control. She will choose the trap that does not demand death and still demands surrender.
"So," she says, low and dangerous, "you think you can force me to bow."
"I think I can teach you humility," Sion says.
They move like two metaphors with bone. Sion closes into close bridges, punching not to break but to open pockets. Eizel answers with darts and blades and then, cruelly, a veil of frost that slides over Sion's eyes. For a breath Sion sees the world in blue, the world in freeze frames. Another thought intrudes, bright and tiny:
Don't panic. The veil is a trick. Step back—create thermal differential—burn small holes to let the eye re-claim its axis.
She hits through the veil with a palm-stab that is both technique and animal. The vein of heat cleaves fabric, and Eizel hisses as the warmth bites her wrist. The feedback is a small, merciless victory.
The desert around them is a landscape of testimonies: burned palms of dunes, glass-rimmed tracks, the odor of ozone and copper and roasted flesh where a stray ice blade caught a piece of someone's aura. The sounds—thunks of bodies, the high laugh of breaking glass, the muffled thunder of an energy column that refuses to fall—compose an ugly music. Birds fly away from the horizon like ink spots.
Sion presses. She uses a hybrid combination—Northern rotational entry to evade the spearwork, Southern compact power to deliver the collision that matters. Her right hand finds the hollow beneath Eizel's arm and slams upward; ribs crunch; frost cracks in a hungry web; Eizel staggers. Sion's left palm opens and forms a cup of water-mana—she flings it like a net, then compresses it, turning it into a blade of steam that erupts under Eizel's guard and slaps her face. Steam hisses; frost melts in an angry spit; Eizel's long silver hair curls with wet bloom.
For one small wonder of a second, Sion sees the woman behind the armor—an expression that is no longer purely queen but tired mother, or perhaps merely human. It's a moment of vulnerability; Sion knows to clutch it not with a knife but with a lesson. She slams an elbow into ribs and then steps back.
"You were ugly in the basilica," Sion says, voice thin with hot laughter. "You called my prince a rat. Remember that."
Eizel spits a word that is a kind of snow. "And you will learn to kneel." Her breath makes a vapor and then a lattice of ice forms under her feet like a crown. "We will see."
The fight lurches onward like a fevered animal. Sion's partial transformation continues to feed her: faster regeneration, a harder core of heat, a hunger in her strikes that reads like purpose. She can feel the difference: her strikes land with a deeper percussion now, the flesh not only bruised but rearranged; her kicks make arcs in the dunes that do not settle back easily. The desert is being formed by their will.
Sion feels the edge of that gift, the shadow of what she has been told not to release. It makes her motions slicker and her judgments slightly keener. Eizel matches by letting cunning, not force, do the work: small traps, geometrical prisons, set sizes that will not admit Sion's heat without a price.
They both begin to wear from the dance. Steam and frost trade kisses in the air until the world seems to be breathing in two languages. Sion's red halo darkens to soot and then begins to flutter, as if her limitation is a bird that must not fly too far. Eizel's lattice gets brazen and dangerous, and Sion knows—through a mapping of scars and sweat—that if she lets this escalate another degree, Naoko will not be able to pull back the consequences.
So she chooses something cunning instead of cruel. She feints a full-bore right—something that would have been a killing arc if she had been allowed. Eizel anticipates this. Her frost lashes converge. At the last heartbeat, Sion twists into a low sweep that takes Eizel's base. The sweep knocks the Ice Queen's feet out from her just long enough for Sion to step in and press the tip of her hand beneath Eizel's jaw.
It is not the severing palm of a murderer. It is the assertion of a hand that might have killed and did not. The skin there is warm and real and has the tremor of living things. Sion speaks softly, not loud enough for the desert to be certain where the sound came from:
"Change your mouth," she says. "Apologize. Or I will make you feel what your words did—slow, careful, repeated. I won't end you. I will only make you wish you'd never taught your daughters to use tongues like knives."
Eizel's eyes, blue and furious, shower like ice breaking. The Ice Queen who prides in laws and geometry tastes the threat like metal on the tongue. She weighs the world. For a heartbeat—two—she is a queen who sees her reflection in a blade and questions whether the reflection can be polished.
Then she spits and slaps Sion away with a hand of ice that snaps like a hinge. The distance opens. Eizel's chest heaves. She does not apologize. She is too much a product of her own self to kneel to a hand she believes to be beneath her throne.
Sion straightens, breath heaving, the storm around her settling into a predatory hum. The red halo recedes back toward the reserved threshold she has set. She has made her point without killing. She has carved a scar of lesson.
Eizel gathers herself onto one knee. For a long, slow moment the two women stare at each other like two living arguments. The desert around them is a ruin of intent—spattered blood, glassed sand, frost rims—evidence of a duel that refused to be private.
Emilia finally steps forward from her high ground, the impersonation of composure. "Enough," she says, voice like a metronome. "You both know how this ends: one of you could die, and as a consequence, another dozen rooms will close. The realm does not need that today."
Sion breathes through the word like a prayer. She looks at Eizel—not with warmth, but with a promise. "We are done," she says. But the promise is built of stone. "You will think before you speak of Jin again."
Eizel answers with a wordless bow of head, not the kind surrendered but the kind of a mother who has counted the cost of her child's missteps.
They do not love each other. They do not forgive easily. But the fight pauses. The desert exhales.
Sion stands, each movement a ledger of choices made and restraint exercised. In the blood-scented wind she tastes victory that is not triumph but something harder—diplomatic cruelty carried in a fist.
She thinks, as she always thinks after the fight, about the triangular logic of power in their world—about blessings and blades, about which kinds of force leave a house intact and which kinds smash a house into unreadable pieces. She knows that Jin could do what she did and more; she knows that she could unmake Jin with her bare hands if needs be. That knowledge lives in her the way a compass does: a private, lethal map.
And she knows, with a bone-deep clarity, that Naoko's law was right tonight. Keep the hunt measured. Teach humiliation without murder. Let the world learn its limits in the mildest ways that will still scar.
The heat of her aura bleeds away, and the desert sighs around them. Eizel stands slowly, the whitened hem of her dress a ruin. The two women—furies and queens—hold the desert with their gaze for a moment longer, and then they turn away, each bearing the marks of a battle that will field gossip in any court that cares to notice.
Far above, the sky repairs itself. The column of blackened energy Sion launched has settled like a bad rumor: present, smudged, and soon to be forgotten by the sea of politics. The world around them is not safe; it is merely instructed, for now, in the languages of who can get angry and who must keep their hands clean.
Sion walks away with a limp she hides behind confident strides. She tastes blood and grit and the small sour sweetness of a job done under constraint. Her mind, relentless, catalogues everything—wounds to nurse, spells to study, angles to practice on private dummies she will set at midnight—and beneath it a clear truth that has nothing to do with victory or loss:
I am Naoko's blade. I have duty. I do not desire accident. I will fight until the rule is satisfied.
Eizel walks back to her own shadowed margin and considers the work of cleaning the frost out of her hair. She will not apologize; she will not kneel. But she will teach her daughters to be more guarded. The Ice Queen learns; the lesson is a different kind of hunger.
Emilia watches both go, and her eyes are quiet as a ledger balanced. She has watched a fight, understood what it cost, and marked the loss down in her own account. The world shifts; houses adjust their steps. Small wars have been fought and small truces asserted. The morning in the heaven above Athens is still a fresh thing. For now, the islands of the powerful still drift as they must, and the Rotschy name in its obsidian house keeps its calculations.
But on the wind, the whisper is plain: the next meeting will be bloodier. Someone will not be so careful next time.
— To be continued —
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Heat: Thank you so much for reading
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