He cut down. She timed the step and slid so the blade hissed past an inch from her torso, kissing the fabric of her clothes but not the skin underneath. Her palm met his forearm and she guided energy that wasn't hers into the floor. Jorrah found himself a foot lower than the moment before, the blade biting planks, stuck. Alya's elbow tapped the side of his head, a kiss with spite in it. He reeled.
"Sloppy," she said, knowing he'd hate that more than any insult.
He snarled and ripped the blade free, splinters lifting into a tiny storm. He came with something clever now, a feint inside a feint inside an insult, and she let the first lie land, rewarded the second lie with a step toward it, then broke the third with both hands, catching his elbow and wrist and turning the joint into an oath it couldn't keep. Metal groaned. He went sideways. She planted a foot like a flag and sent him into a stacked tower of stools. They came down around him like clumsy acrobats.
The bar cracked into sound...shouts, bets called out, old neural reflexes kicking boredom off their stools. The hunters and warriors who'd come to watch a humiliation found themselves watching a rearrangement of hierarchy. Some looked delighted. Some looked as if someone had just told them the floor had moved two inches to the left.
"Enough," someone growled, but they didn't really mean it.
Screwhead leaped from her chair like gravity had been holding her back and she was mad at it. Her arm whirred and spun a sawblade blossomed out of her wrist like a metal flower. She came for Alya with a grin.
"Don't ," Kaylin called.
Alya turned just enough so the first slice kissed air. The second came low. She hopped it like jump rope, laughing without meaning to because her body knew this dance and had missed it. Screwhead widened her stance, cut high. Alya crouched under it, shoved the woman's hip as she passed, using Screwhead's momentum to set her own line. Screwhead skidded, sparks marking her trail, and crashed into a table. The sawblade chewed an innocent chair. The chair died in service.
"Get her!" someone shouted, half-admiring, half-panicked.
They obliged. The bar turned into a study in motion hands, elbows, knees, steel, more steel. Alita felt the shape of it the way a swimmer feels currents. Jorrah came back with his blade; she bounced a stool into him with a heel, saw one of the big men, McClovin commit his weight and stole it from him with a twist. She flowed across the room, not faster than anyone but more precise, like every bad angle made itself known half a breath before it existed. An uppercut into a sternum plate to lift a body, a shove to redirect that body into someone else, two quick fingers into a service port at the base of a neck to short a neural loop for three humiliating seconds.
She slipped, she slid, she didn't stop. She felt ridiculous and glorious, new and ancient. The music on the jukebox broke and restarted and broke again, cheering for her in its own glitchy way.
"Bar rule," the bartender intoned from behind the counter, as if reading from scripture. "Break it, buy it."
Jorrah's blade finally caught something she wanted to keep, a strap at her shoulder and drew blood. Alya stepped back, felt wet heat, and then anger that wasn't theater. She opened a lane with a palm heel, closed it with a wheel kick, and finished Jorrah's forward momentum by borrowing it and offering it to the floor. He hit hard. The blade skittered away and ended up under a table where a tiny cleaning bot had the good sense to reverse.
Silence rolled in a second time, this one with weight.
Alya stood in the middle of the wreckage chairs overturned, two swordmasters groaning, on his hands and knees, one eye a furnace. She panted, not from exertion but from the aftershock of what her body had been allowed to do. She lifted her chin.
Edo stepped through the back door of the bar, only to freeze at the sight before him...the place lay in ruins. But what struck him hardest was Alya, standing among the wreckage with her face hidden in her hands. For a moment, Edo was utterly left speechless.
"I'm not here to humiliate you," she said, breath steadying. "I'm asking you to stand for something. There's someone in the city building robots and soon they'll attack us. Work with me."
No one moved. A chair creaked as someone sat down deeper into it, unwilling to commit even the energy to stand. You could feel it in the bones of the room: admiration, yes. Willingness, no. Alya saw the shape of their refusal...fear painted as cynicism, apathy in the clothes of experience.
"I'll solo this," she said, not with pride but with a simplicity that startled them more than any punch.
"Little stray," said a voice that didn't belong, and zuldar bar's floor seemed to tilt toward the doorway.
The crowd parted without being asked. Shiwunki filled the frame like famine fills a map: wide, tall, wrong. His enormous chassis looked grown rather than built, a heavy, scabbed metal pushing out of itself. New plates had been grafted on, glossy compared to the scratched, war-stained surface of the old. Heat leaked from vents along his ribs. He smiled and the room got colder.
There were blades at the ends of his fingers, long and thin and jointed, nesting like telescopes. They extended half an inch as he flexed them, a promise and a preview.
Jorrah, suddenly no longer the center of anything, stepped back without realizing he'd stepped. Screwhead shut off her saw. The bartender reached under the counter for something and then didn't.
Shiwunki's eyes found Alya with the smooth certainty of a predator that has already solved the geometry. "There you are," he said, voice resonant enough that the bottles on the shelf hummed with it. "I've come for you."
Kaylin moved to Alya's side. "Don't," he whispered. "Not here."
"Not anywhere," Edo said from the door. Alya hadn't seen him enter, and now he was there, coat damp from fog, face pale from seeing the thing he feared in the place he disliked. He had his scythe slung low, hand on the haft, as if touching it made the world quieter.
"Jorrah lifted his blade and rested it on his shoulder. 'She's all yours,' he said as he walked out of the bar."
Shiwunki looked past Alya to Edo, and his smile widened the way an injury widens when you pull at it. "Little man," he said. "Still trying to keep your dog on a leash?"
Shiwunki slashed with his finger blades, cutting down two people in an instant then swiftly struck again, claiming a third.
Alya's wrath erupted, burning hot within her. Without hesitation, she stepped forward and crouched beside the bleeding corpses. Dipping her fingers into the blood, she smeared it across her face. "I do not stand idle in the presence of evil," she declared.
"Come then," Shiwunki said. "Down where no one don't have witnesses."