The morning fog clung low over the river like a thread of smoke.
24 stood on the bank beneath the bridge, blades sheathed, the cool air filling his lungs. He'd spent the night listening to the water and the creak of the bridge, cataloguing each stray sound. When he finally turned his head and saw them — eight shapes moving single-file along the opposite bank, rifles cradled and visors low — the movement registered like a soft, familiar threat.
They were scouts: light armored, fast, trained to probe and report. Eight of them meant numbers, not strength — but numbers still mattered in a fight.
He didn't say a word. He stepped closer to Lu, to the rhythm they had forged.
"I won't jump," he told her, low enough that only she could hear. "We do this together. Move as one."
She nodded, the mask a pale face in the morning gray. Her hands tightened on her blades. Her breath was steady.
They slipped into the shallows, boots barely whispering over the stones. The current kept rhythm with the beat of their training — slow, patient — and they took positions opposite the scouts' path: 24 at the center, Lu a half-step to his left, both flanked by broken pillars and low reeds. The eight moved like a hunting line, scanning the bank, unaware that the quarry had already stopped moving.
The scouts rounded a bend forty meters down. The leader signaled with a knife-finger, the formation tightening. They were almost clean — too clean. That's when 24 let them see the trap.
He moved first, but without the distortion he'd hidden behind for months. No jump, no impossible disappearance — just a deliberate step forward that baited the closest scout into snapping his head to track him. The man reacted, rifle rising.
Lu exploded from cover like a breeze turned blade: two quick steps, the short sword angling for the man's wrist. He punched the shot wide, not to kill but to break rhythm — the scout's rifle fired, the muzzle flash strobing. The bullet dug into a pillar behind 24, showering grit.
The sound split the morning. The others reacted.
This is where choreography mattered — exact, practiced, like a language. 24's body read theirs the way he once read circuitry. He did not leap. He did not vanish. He moved on smaller, subtler cues: the weight shift of a boot, the tightening of an arm, the way a shoulder prepared to throw a grenade. He stepped into their tempo, reshaping it.
Scout Three lunged at him, baton arcing. 24 blocked with the long blade's flat, redirecting the blow along the man's arm and then twisting the wrist until the baton clattered free. He did not finish the man; his restraint was purposeful. The baton skidded away, and Lu was already there — a flash of steel that took the scout's thigh with a shallow cut that knocked him down. Not lethal. Incapacitating. Lu's blade found purchase at the joint and the man folded, breath ragged.
Scout Two tried to flank from the reeds. 24 pivoted, meeting the angle with a low, controlled sweep that clipped the man's ankle. He watched the man stumble, unbalanced, and used a nonlethal throat grab — the kind of move that chokes the fight out of you but leaves breath. Lu finished by dropping in from above with a blade across the back, forcing the man to surrender and fall face-first into the mud. Again: not killing. Not yet.
The leader hesitated, eyes narrowing, trying to read the new tempo. He barked orders. The remaining five tightened and advanced in a wedge.
24 adjusted his stance and let Lu move to the front. Tonight's lesson had been given: she had to put marks on him, draw blood even. Now she had to strike for real. He gave her the opening — a small step forward that invited a shot.
Scout Four fired instinctively. The bolt zipped past 24's shoulder, nicked the leather at his collarbone. The sting told him how close the line had come — close enough that a single misstep would be fatal. He inhaled, let the pain center him instead of unbalancing him.
Lu was under him in a blink, running the angle he had set. She came from low, blade extended in a rising arc aimed at the leader's throat. The man barely had time to raise his guard. Her short blade kissed armor and cut a shallow line across exposed skin before he twisted away. It was a clean, surgical graze — not a kill, but it landed: the mark she had been ordered to leave. The leader staggered, hand to his collar.
That tiny victory changed everything. The scouts' composure cracked. A shout turned into panic. Formation fell apart.
24 flowed with the unraveling: controlled, economical, every move a buffer that kept Lu alive. He used his long blade to parry rifle butts and redirect shoves. Where a full strike would have finished a man's spine, he used leverage and joint manipulation to send them to the ground. When Scout Six tried a short sprint to the river, 24 met him with an elbow to the temple and a kneecap lock that dumped the man in the shallows, gasping.
Lu's face was a mask of concentration. She moved like the practice had rewired her reflexes, striking quick, close, and careful — hitting sensors, straps, weak points. She didn't go for throat punches or finishing slashes. Her hits were enough to break balance, to end resistance.
At one point, two scouts converged on her. 24 didn't vanish to open up the escape; he stepped into one and twisted so he could shield her, absorbing a blow meant for her with a forearm to the chest that threw him off center. He didn't take the brutal option; he took the controlled, calculated one. He staggered, not because he'd used all his strength, but because he wanted Lu to find an opening.
She did. In the split second he created, she slipped behind the taller scout and drove the short blade across his hip — a growling yank that dumped him into the mud. He went down, not dying, and Lu pulled back, breath fogging in the air.
The leader, bleeding from a thin neck cut and enraged, tried to finish it. He charged, pistol raised. 24 met him at a staccato of movement so precise it looked choreographed: a sweep, a redirection, a planted foot, and the knock of a rifle butt against helmet. The leader hit the stones, stunned but breathing.
By the time the last scout tried to crawl away into the reeds, Lu and 24 had him boxed between river and pillar. He made one last desperate lunge, grasping for a mud-slick rock. 24 moved in, not with superhuman speed, but with the same practiced economy he'd shown all along — a gripping of the arm, a joint twist, and the man slid into the river and did not get up.
They were all down before the morning sun had fully cleared the ridge. Not dead — neutralized and incapacitated. Some lay groaning, wrists twisted behind them; others slumped, breath shallow but alive. Blood stained a few sleeves, adding a dark thread to the river's edge, but nothing beyond what Lu had been trained to inflict when survival demanded it.
Lu stood panting, the mask dark with sweat. Her blades were wet at the edges, the steel catching the long light. She looked at 24, seeking something — approval, relief, a hint of distance. He was breathing hard too, shoulders tight, eyes calm.
"You did it," he said quietly. "You put marks on them."
"You held back," she answered, voice raw. "You could have—"
"I could have jumped," he said, the words even. "But you needed this. You needed to finish what you started. I needed to see you finish it."
She looked down at her hands, trembling slightly from adrenaline rather than fear. For the first time in weeks, she felt the full weight of what she'd become capable of: a lethal thing in a world that demanded it, and yet not wholly her identity.
24 knelt, checking the fallen for trackers then vacating pockets of useful gear — med strips, a battery, a folded commleaf. He handed one bandage to Lu without looking up. "We move south a day early," he said. "Leave nothing that points them back here."
She nodded. The lesson had ended, but its consequence would follow. They'd trained to be together; now they had to be a step ahead again.
As they gathered themselves and stripped the scene of anything that could be tracked, the river continued to run, indifferent and clean. The bridge overhead creaked with a wind that had seen more battles than either of them. In the quiet after the fight, Lu realized the training had been more than drills: it had been a reshaping of who she could be — not just someone who survived beside 24, but someone who could finish the job when it mattered.
24 laced his fingers together and for a moment allowed something like a nod of approval — subtle, almost invisible. "Tomorrow, we practice moving as one again," he said. "But not like today. We practice leaving no trace."
She met his steady gaze. "I won't get sloppy," she said.
"Good," he replied. "We'll need it."
They left the river with the rhythm of two people who had learned the same beat. The badlands swallowed their tracks, and the bridge stood over the water, a quiet witness to what had been done below.