Weaver didn't charge.
He began to walk.
A slow curve around Jonah—wide enough to respect the Echo, close enough to feel where its gravity ended. His steps were measured, quiet as paper falling.
Jonah didn't approach.
His eyes stayed locked on Weaver, but his feet betrayed him: a careful backward drift, one step at a time, reacting to every fraction of Weaver's angle as if the space between them were a blade's edge.
The smile had gone.
Because the fight was no longer entertainment.
It had become calculation.
Weaver watched him give ground and felt something click into place—not triumph. Not confidence. A small, cold realization that landed the way a tool landed in a hand:
Jonah was afraid of something he couldn't name.
And Weaver—despite the weight of the Echo pressing the air into a rule—was still moving.
He could feel Jonah's field like tidewater against bone. Every step into it cost more. Every breath inside it felt slightly borrowed.
But his body kept paying.
As he walked, his mind ran ahead.
When Jonah had taken his hand, his Dao had done something it had never done before. It had collapsed from an even circulation into a single flooding point—an internal rerouting, a concentrated verdict—and rebuilt him without hesitation.
Weaver had been circulating evenly because it felt correct. Balance. Baseline. The way you kept an engine idling so it wouldn't stall.
But maybe that was all it was.
Idle.
If circulation made him faster, stronger, clearer—
What would it do if he gathered it like a fist?
The problem was immediate: he didn't know how.
He didn't have time to dig through Amos's fractured memories. Even trying left him nauseated—like drinking from broken glass.
But his body had done it without permission.
Meaning the mechanism existed.
Meaning it could be repeated.
Weaver paused.
He looked down at his hands.
Perfect hands. Clean. Too calm.
The Echo pressed against his knuckles like invisible stone.
Jonah stopped backing away.
He lifted his left hand again—fingers curling into that loose C-shape.
Weaver raised his eyes.
Jonah's voice stayed light.
"Kitsune."
He closed his hand.
Nothing visible moved.
But Weaver's starburst eyes caught it: a disturbance the air tried to deny. A fox-head absence cutting through the world on a line that wasn't travel so much as certainty.
Weaver didn't try to dodge.
There wasn't room to dodge inside the Echo.
He did something else.
He brought his right fist down into his open left palm.
A single, brutal clap.
The sound wasn't loud.
The result was.
A shockwave punched outward from his palms—visible only in consequence: lanternlight shuddering, dust blasting off shelves, loose pages tearing free and spinning through the aisle like startled white birds.
Books lifted.
Shelves groaned.
The scholarium shook.
The air itself jumped, momentarily freed from Jonah's pressure as if the room had been kicked in the ribs.
Weaver felt the Echo recoil.
The invisible fox-head hit the shockwave and slid—its certainty shoved off-axis by a fraction.
Enough.
It missed.
It tore through empty air and vanished into nothing.
Dust rolled through the aisle in slow, thick curtains.
When it settled, Jonah was farther back than Weaver remembered.
His posture wasn't loose anymore.
He coughed once—sharp, surprised—then covered his mouth with the back of his hand like a man embarrassed to show weakness.
Weaver stared at his own palm.
No torn skin. No cracked bone.
His hand was fine.
He frowned.
"You fool," Jonah snapped, the first real anger breaking through the honey. "Are you trying to destroy the scholarium?"
"Shut up," Weaver said—still not looking at him.
Jonah's eyes narrowed. His gaze dropped from Weaver's face to Weaver's hands, as if the hands were the true threat.
Is he trying to punch through my Echo?
The absurdity moved behind Jonah's eyes.
Weaver raised his hands again.
Fist to palm.
Another shockwave.
More books lifted and crashed in slow arcs as the wave tore through the aisle. Lanternlight trembled like it wanted to die and couldn't.
Weaver struck again.
And again.
Each impact was a blunt refusal. Each time Jonah tried to close, the waves shoved him back—distance enforced by violence.
Weaver's knuckles began to split.
Fine tears in the skin from repeated impact. Blood beaded, then smeared.
And then—absurdly—his body began repairing it immediately. Cuts tightening closed even as new ones formed, like writing on water.
Weaver watched the blood appear and vanish and understood the problem with a clean, sick clarity.
He could hurt himself forever.
He could not hurt himself enough to matter.
His body would not permit damage to accumulate.
He needed to pause the healing.
He needed his body to stop correcting him faster than he could spend himself.
So Weaver stopped breathing the way a cultivator did.
He let the controlled rhythm—Dao threaded evenly through every limb—fall away.
In. Out.
Human.
Unshaped.
The wick remained. The Dao inside settled.
It stopped moving like a polished circuit.
Weaver struck his fist into his palm.
There was a sting now—small, honest, immediate. Not crippling. Real enough to remind him his body had stopped treating harm as irrelevant.
A ring of force tore outward and hit the shelves like a hammer.
Wood cracked. Brackets snapped. Whole runs of books erupted into the air as if the scholarium had been punched from the inside—spines flashing, pages shredding, dust exploding in a white-grey bloom.
Jonah's feet skated.
Then left the ground for a heartbeat.
The wave slammed into him and threw him down the aisle.
Weaver didn't wait to see the landing.
He struck again.
Another blast—stronger, cleaner. The air itself flinched. A shelf tore loose from its mounts and toppled sideways, books spilling like teeth. The floor shuddered hard enough to make lanternlight tremble in its paper shades.
Jonah hit the far end of the aisle and laughed once—short, disbelieving.
Then he lunged forward.
His Echo surged outward as he moved, trying to reclaim the space Weaver kept detonating. The air thickened behind him, folding into weight, and wherever that weight reached, motion became expensive.
Weaver ran.
Without circulation, if Jonah closed the distance, the Echo would lock him in place—
a statue with a heartbeat.
And then Jonah would kill him with a touch, the kind that arrived before fear could.
Weaver cut between stacks, snapped fist into palm without breaking stride.
The shockwave struck the shelves to his right.
They broke.
Wooden uprights cracked and sheared. A whole section ripped free and went down like a collapsing wall, sending books and splinters into the aisle behind him.
Jonah hit the debris-field and was thrown back again, forced to brace as wave and collapse collided.
But he didn't stop.
He rose out of the wreckage and kept chasing.
A chase through aisles.
—
A few rows away, Kiron's patience was cracking.
He was badly bruised now, blood running from the corner of his mouth in a thin line he kept swallowing back. One sleeve hung wrong at the shoulder where Cecilus had redirected him into a shelf post—not a strike meant to injure. A correction meant to place.
The scholarium kept trying to pretend the violence was contained.
It wasn't.
Even here, the building shuddered at intervals—distant concussions rolling through the stacks. A low, bone-deep whump that made lanternlight tremble in its paper shades, made dust lift from shelves in soft sighs, made book spines click against one another like nervous teeth.
Shockwaves.
Cecilus stood opposite Kiron, breathing controlled, posture too disciplined to look like violence.
Then he moved.
Kiron stepped in first—fast, no warning—his hand rising for Cecilus's shoulder.
Cecilus shifted half a step aside. Kiron's fingers closed on air.
Cecilus's own knuckles snapped up—two taps to Kiron's wrist. Not hard. True. The joint went numb for a heartbeat. Kiron's fingers spasmed open.
Another distant whump rolled through the shelves. The floor gave a tiny complaint underfoot.
Kiron recovered with his other hand, a short hook toward Cecilus's ribs.
Cecilus turned his hip and let it glance off cloth. His palm brushed Kiron's elbow and pushed.
Not force.
Angle.
Kiron's balance slipped. His foot landed half a width wrong.
Cecilus took that half-width and owned it.
He stepped inside, drove an elbow into Kiron's sternum with soundless efficiency. Kiron's breath left him in a sharp, involuntary bark.
He staggered back.
Cecilus followed—not chasing, closing. One hand caught Kiron's sleeve and used it like a handle, turning Kiron's next feint into a stumble. Kiron twisted to break free and Cecilus let him—
Because the letting placed Kiron exactly where Cecilus wanted him.
A deeper shockwave hit—closer now. Shelves behind Kiron trembled and loose pages fluttered down like startled moths.
Kiron's eyes widened. He went for Cecilus's throat.
Cecilus's hand rose and stopped it—two fingers pinning the strike line without gripping, without drama, as if he'd placed a bookmark in the air.
Kiron froze mid-motion.
Because Cecilus's other hand had already come up.
Two fingers angled at Kiron's throat—not touching, just close enough that Kiron could feel the intention like a cold coin pressed to skin.
The aisle held its breath.
Cecilus spoke quietly. "Stand down."
Kiron's chest rose and fell in hard, angry pulls.
"Or what?" he hissed. "You'll kill me too?"
Cecilus's jaw tightened.
"I said stand down."
Kiron's eyes glittered.
"Like Lin?" Kiron said. "Is that your answer now? A corpse and a story?"
Something twisted in Cecilus's face—an expression that started as anger and nearly became something else.
"Listen," Cecilus said low, "you don't under—"
The world interrupted him.
A body came flying through the shelves.
Not stumbling.
Flying—ripping through two rows of books like they were paper walls, smashing wood, scattering spines, turning the aisle into a storm of torn pages and splintered rails.
It hit the far wall with a wet, final sound and slid down, leaving a smear.
Jonah.
His robe was shredded. Blood painted his mouth and chin. His chest heaved like he'd been drowned and dragged back.
The white-robed attendant made a small, strangled sound and rushed forward, hands fluttering uselessly as if kindness could undo what violence had decided.
"Master Jonah—!"
Jonah tried to rise.
His arms shook. He dropped to all fours instead, coughing hard—then retching dark blood onto the stone.
His eyes lifted—wide, bright, raw.
Pure fear.
Not of Cecilus.
Not of Kiron.
Of the aisle behind him.
Measured footsteps arrived through the wreckage.
Not hurried.
Not triumphant.
Weaver stepped into view, unscathed.
The only proof he'd fought at all was the sleeve on his left arm—torn short and ragged where his hand had been taken—and the faint, drying stains around the rip, like someone had tried to mark him and failed.
Kiron—still trapped under Cecilus's poised hand—stared.
The attendant froze with his hands half-raised.
Cecilus's eyes flicked once—fast, involuntary—to Weaver's torn sleeve.
Then back to Jonah on the floor.
Lanternlight trembled in the dust.
And in that trembling, Jonah, Kiron, and the attendant reached the same conclusion without speaking:
whatever Weaver was, it did not need their belief to exist.