The creature moved first—faster than my eyes wanted to admit.
One blink it was kneeling. The next, it was a streak of black and ember-red across the stone, claws out and low like a hunting cat. I kicked back hard, boot sliding on sand, and brought the First Star up between us just in time for the impact.
It hit like a battering ram.
Steel rang, a bright, ugly sound that ricocheted around the chamber. The shock ran up my arms to the shoulder—real weight behind those long limbs. The thing's mouth gaped inches from my face, rows of teeth like broken glass. Hot breath. Rot and ozone.
I shoved off, angled the blade, tried to slide its claws past me. It flowed with the redirect instead of resisting, twisted, and raked for my ribs. I folded—short hop, ten meters max without a proxy, a shimmer of space that dropped me behind a column. Claws shredded fabric where I'd been.
The creature was already turning.
"Fast," I muttered, more to stop my pulse from taking the rest of me along with it.
It came again, a low scuttle that became an upright lunge, leading with those hooked hands. I stepped into it, point forward, going for the throat. The First Star kissed black flesh—and skated, a shallow line instead of a puncture.
Tough hide. Not armor, not quite, but hide that wanted to be.
The thing's riposte was simple and vicious: shoulder check to break my stance, then a slash that would have opened me from hip to heart if I hadn't gotten the blade horizontal. Claw met steel, sparks spit, and I felt the edge bite the stone under my boot as I dug in.
It pressed. I gave ground. The table scraped my back—stone against spine—and the creature tried to pin me there, angle for leverage, jaws working in a ghastly half-growl, half-chuckle.
"Move," I told my body, and my body listened.
Star-Limb down the legs—short burst. Heat pooled from hip to ankle, muscle light and springy. I drove a knee up into its gut. The contact burned. Not enough to injure, enough to win space. The thing recoiled a fraction, not from pain so much as surprise, and I slid off the table, cut shallow across its forearm to remind it we were playing with knives.
It shook the arm once—as if calibrating—and then blurred at me again.
This time I went lateral, not back, using a column as a shield. Claws howled across sandstone, shedding dust in a gritty curtain. I pivoted around the pillar, let it overrun, and chopped at the hamstring. Resistance like cutting cured leather. The blade bit halfway. The creature staggered, then whipped that same leg back in a mule-kick that caught me in the thigh.
I saw ceiling. Then floor. Then I was skidding on my back across gritty stone, air blown out of me.
It didn't roar. It didn't beat its chest. It just came on with machine efficiency, closing the distance while I wrestled a breath back into my lungs.
I rolled as it pounced. Claws slammed where my head had been, gouging four channels in the floor with a sound like someone ripping cloth the size of a house. Its follow-up swipe grazed my shoulder—fabric tore, skin burned, hot lines of pain flaring and then flattening under adrenaline.
Isaac hadn't moved. He watched like a statue watches a courtyard: still, patient, measuring.
I needed angles. I needed anchors. I flicked two fingers, small and tight, and a pale, translucent bird popped into the world near the ceiling—then another at ground level behind the creature. Flock? Not here. The room was too small to run a whole swarm without turning my inner ear into soup. Two would do.
The creature flinched at the flicker—sensitive to the magic bloom. Good to know.
I folded to the high proxy, blink-step that put me five meters up and a little behind it, falling with the blade already in a two-hand grip. The First Star kissed its neck, harder this time, edge just starting to glow with Star-Fire as I pushed. White heat licked along the fuller. The hide didn't like that.
The cut went in a finger and a half. Dark fluid hissed and smoked where it touched the blade. The thing twisted with impossible grace, one hand pawing for me in midair. I kicked off its shoulder, folded to the ground-level proxy, let momentum carry me into a low thrust for the kidney.
It almost worked.
The creature's claw met my wrist in a backhand parry that would've broken bone without the Star-Limb I sank into my forearm at the last instant. Heat flared along the radius and ulna, my skin going halo-white for a heartbeat as the force dissipated. The parry shoved my blade wide. Its other hand scythed for my throat.
I ducked under and felt the wind of it lift hair from the nape of my neck.
"Okay," I breathed, "we're not friends."
It pressed, a hurricane in human shape. I met the storm with angles and bursts, cutting its attacks into pieces: catch, slide, riposte, fold. The chamber filled with the bright ring of steel and the ugly scrape of claw on stone. Twice it clipped me—once a line across the ribs that burned like salt, once a glancing shot to the temple that set my vision swimming with stars that weren't mine.
I bought space with heat.
Star-Fire along the blade, fuller to tip. The white deepened to a sun-bright edge, air warping around it in a shimmer. The creature shied, not from fear but calculation, and came in lower, testing footwork. I feinted a fold—pulse of magic without the jump—and it bit, slashing where I should've reappeared. I didn't. My blade was already inside its reach, slicing across the brow ridge. Flesh parted with a hiss and the stink of scorched meat.
It hit me backhand for that. No cleverness—just speed and mass. The strike landed square on the breastbone and I flew. The column I met didn't move. I did. Pain flowered across my chest in hot waves. The First Star skittered from my fingers with a skang of steel on stone.
The creature was on me before the sword stopped ringing.
Instinct said fold. My head said no—you'll reappear within ten meters and it will be on you anyway, and you'll be disoriented besides. So I did the stupid thing that sometimes keeps you alive: I met it empty-handed.
Star-Limb, full burst into the left forearm. My skin went white-hot, hairs burning away in a clean little scent. The claw came down and I caught its wrist on the glowing forearm, redirecting the line of force past my head. The heat sizzled where we touched. The creature jerked, surprised again—pain, finally—and I drove my right palm up under its jaw.
Star-Limb there too—short, contained. The contact popped like hitting a furnace with wet wood. Bone crumped. Teeth clicked. It reeled.
I rolled under, hacked breath into my lungs, and called the First Star back with a thought. It jumped to my hand in a flash of silver, goddess bless good design, and I spun into a rising cut that started at hip and aimed for armpit.
The blade caught. It screamed then—a noise like wind forced through rusted pipes. I rode the cut up and through, felt something thicken halfway (tendon? hinge joint?) and poured Star-Fire into the edge until it slid. The arm came away at the elbow in a gout of dark, smoking fluid.
It didn't bleed like a person. It bled like a forge.
The thing didn't fall back. It switched hands.
One arm gone, it came even faster, as if shedding weight had made it leaner. The shield-limb—no, not a shield yet, nothing of my later design, just a crooked, scabbed plate of bone—battered at my guard while the remaining claw traced hungry lines for my throat and belly.
I gave ground in a slow spiral, step-cut, step-parry, folding twice when it forced me into corners I didn't like. Every stumble, it punished. Every mistake, it priced in pain.
At one point I overcommitted on a thrust, thinking to skewer its chest. It twisted, let me slide by, and raked up my back. Fabric tore, heat and wet bloomed under the robes, and I saw Isaac's face for the first time since the fight started.
He wasn't gloating. He was… watching. Not hopeful, not cruel. Just gauging whether I belonged in his world.
"Lesson," I grunted, mostly to myself. "Don't get cocky in strange temples."
The creature feinted high. I didn't bite. It went low, scything for my knees. I hopped the cut and stamped down with a Star-Limb burst into its shoulder stump, driving it off-line. It rolled, surprisingly graceful, then bounded up the column like a lizard and launched at me from above.
I folded on reflex—sideways, not back. It landed where I'd been with a crack that spidered the stone, wheeled with predatory precision, and pounced again. I met it in a tight clinch: blade cross-guard jamming into its throat, left forearm locking its intact wrist, knee driving into the thigh. Heat bled from me into it in white veins wherever we touched.
Up close, it was ugly enough to admire. Sinew worked like braided cables under skin that wanted to be armor. The ember light in its eyes didn't waver. No hate. No joy. Just function.
"Sorry," I said, and meant it less than I should have.
I let go with the left, dropped under its arm, and stepped to its outside line. The First Star came around in a tight circle—a draw cut, not a chop—edge bright enough to pain the eye. I aimed not for meat but for mechanics: the cable of connective tissue behind the jaw, the seam under the shoulder blade where leverage lives, the tendon in the back of the knee. Slice, step, slice. No big heroics. Just ruin the engine.
It faltered. A fraction. Enough.
I took the opening too eagerly. It punished me for that, too.
Its remaining claw pistoned, a straight line to my face. I half-parried, not enough. The tips raked the side of my jaw and cheek, hot light exploding across half my vision. I tasted copper. The impact spun me. My heel slid on sand and I went down to a knee, the First Star's tip digging a furrow in the grit.
It came in for the finish—silent, efficient, a clean kill.
I stabbed the blade into the floor at an angle and fired a fold through the hilt.
It's an ugly move and a bad idea: short-range rip of space vectored along steel. The First Star twanged like a tuning fork as reality hiccuped around it. The creature's weight hit the warped spot at the wrong instant, misjudging resistance. Its balance broke. It pitched forward half a step, shoulders over knees, posture opening for a heartbeat.
That heartbeat was enough.
Star-Fire flared along the blade, white as a noonday sun reflected on snow. I came up from the knee into a tight ascending diagonal that started at right hip and ended at left clavicle. The edge sang. Flesh and false armor parted. The cut didn't quite sever the torso, but it ruined the thing's structure. It collapsed in two untidy halves that were still attached, legs scrabbling for orders that wouldn't compute.
I didn't wait for Isaac to call it. I stepped in and made it clean: one more stroke, downward this time, through the base of the skull.
Silence smacked the room like a hand.
I stood there for a few seconds that felt like a very long time, chest heaving, cheek stinging in hot pulses where blood traced my jawline. The First Star's glow guttered and went calm. My proxies, forgotten bobbing lights, edged back into existence near the ceiling as if they'd been holding their breath, too.
Only then did I look at Isaac.
He hadn't moved from his place by the table. The dagger still hung loose in his hand, no longer lit. The creature's corpse steamed between us, the smell a complicated stew of pitch, iron, and something bitter I didn't have a name for.
He nodded once. Not approval. A recognition—of effort spent, of something learned, of a line crossed.
"Again," he said.
I almost laughed. I almost told him that was a great joke, my ribs were a percussion section, and my face currently thought it was a bonfire.
Instead I wiped the blood off my lip with the back of my hand, rolled my aching shoulder, and lifted the sword.
"Again," I said.
The second one was faster. Or I was slower. It didn't matter. The fight stretched into a series of tests: angle under pressure, recovery after pain, how quickly I could read a pattern and break it. Isaac never barked a command at his creature; he didn't need to. The test wasn't theatrical. It was mechanical—strip away trickery, see what remains.
I bled. I adapted. I stopped trying to win exchanges and started trying to solve them. When I couldn't cut, I burned. When I couldn't burn, I moved. When I couldn't move, I made the world take a step with me.
By the time the second corpse went still, my breath fogged in the cool air and the stone floor wore a new map of scratches that traced our path like a storm chart. Sweat ran cold down my spine. My hands trembled on the grip, not from fear now, but from output.
Isaac sheathed the dagger.
"Enough," he said.
It meant you live. It meant we can talk.
I let the First Star fall back into its bracelet without flourish. The room felt larger without the blade's weight in my hand. My proxies dimmed to embers and then—respectfully—winked out.
Isaac stepped around the table, boots whispering in sand. When he stopped in front of me he was close enough that I could see the fine white lines of old cuts on his knuckles.
"You do not rely on one trick," he said, almost to himself. "Good."
I swallowed a mouthful of old copper and dust. "I like being alive."
"Then you can be taught."
Something in my shoulders unlocked that I hadn't realized was clenched. I let out a breath. Didn't smile. Didn't quip. Just nodded, because jokes felt like the wrong language here.
Isaac tilted his head toward the shadowed corridor. "Water. Then lessons. If you want to pretend at this art, go elsewhere. If you want to learn it—" His eyes cut briefly to the steaming corpses, then back to me. "—you will leave your vanity at the door."
I met his gaze. "I didn't bring any."
A flicker—not quite amusement, not quite approval—crossed his face. It was gone in a blink.
"Good," he said, and turned deeper into the temple. I followed, steps careful on the stone, chest already tightening around the knowledge that this was only the beginning.
Behind us, the night creatures' bodies cooled in the dark. Through Astral Sight, I watched their borrowed red lights shrink and gutter, curling back toward whatever pit Isaac had hauled them from. Human souls looked like stars—quiet, stubborn, each a point with its own gravity. These weren't that. These were brands—angry, engineered.
I thought of the Chalice and the empty nodes counting down like a clock. I thought of how badly I needed another engine.
"Again," I told myself, under my breath, and kept walking.