The fight dragged on, gradually tilting in Axiros's favour — though from the outside it would have looked like anything but.
In truth, he was trapped in one of the worst situations imaginable. This body was weak, painfully mortal, incapable of executing even the most diluted forms of what he knew. Anything beyond the bare minimum threatened to tear his muscles apart.
In his current state, only seven techniques were accessible to him. Seven, among countless. And of those seven, Swift Burst was the only one this vessel could barely tolerate — brief, spontaneous explosions of speed and force that let him move faster, strike sharper, react just a hair sooner than they expected.
But every activation came with a price.
The recoil was violent. His muscles stretched past their limits each time, fibres screaming, the sensation somewhere between tearing and burning all at once. It felt like the early stages of total collapse, like something inside him was splitting at the seams.
His expression didn't change.
Pain was an old companion — uninvited, familiar, entirely unwelcome. It had followed him across lifetimes, across worlds, across deaths more numerous than he could be bothered to count. Compared to what he'd endured before, this particular agony was almost quaint.
Steel rang against steel as the minutes wore on. The men pushed with brute force and numbers. Axiros worked with timing and precision, giving as little as possible, bleeding stamina carefully. He could feel the edge approaching — the point where this body would simply stop cooperating regardless of what his mind wanted.
So he gambled.
One technique. If it worked, the fight was over. If it didn't, this vessel would shatter past the point of recovery.
*Singularity Point.*
The air seemed to pull inward, like the room took a breath. No flash of light, no surge of visible energy — nothing so dramatic. Just a compression, a gathering, everything funnelled into a single point of motion. Axiros channelled every scrap of strength this frail body could produce into one impossibly focused strike.
His sword moved.
It didn't look fast. It didn't look like much at all.
But it was absolute.
The unawakened men couldn't process it in time. The blade passed through them as though resistance was a concept that simply didn't apply — force compressed along its edge, clean through flesh and bone, no ceremony to it whatsoever. No discharge of energy, no spectacle. Just the terrifying precision of a technique refined across more lifetimes than these men could conceive.
Silence followed.
Then the bodies came apart. Severed halves hit the floor and stayed there. The confusion never left their faces. Even dead, they looked like they were still trying to work out what had happened.
'How did we lose to… a child?'
---
Deep in the hidden chamber beneath the inn, Sophia was pacing.
Her boots struck the stone floor in sharp, uneven rhythms, irritation building with each pass.
"Why did the uninfected interfere now of all times?" she muttered. "During an extraction. Where are my men?" She stopped, jaw tight. "Don't tell me they actually lost to a child. Useless. Absolutely useless." She turned toward the upward passage. "Fine. I'll handle it myself."
Sophia was not an ordinary pawn — she was the only one here who had successfully awakened Aeonex, though even that had come at a cost she hadn't fully understood when she agreed to it. Her talent had been mediocre at best, nowhere near sufficient to reach such heights on its own. Desperation had done the rest. A chain of cruel circumstances, a bargain made in the worst possible moment, and she had given up a piece of herself for power.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Since that day, she'd belonged to them.
This forgotten world had become her prison — remote, isolated, so far behind technologically that most travellers didn't bother passing through. That isolation was exactly why the Old Ones had chosen it. Their influence here crept unchecked, partial and subtle, the kind of slow spread that drew no attention from the forces that would have crushed it anywhere else.
She exhaled slowly and steadied herself.
"If they couldn't finish it," she murmured, moving toward the passage, "then I will."
---
Outside, the clash had already ended.
The group stood amidst the aftermath — bodies of the Old Ones' operators scattered across the ground, not one of their own among the fallen. These weren't ordinary townsfolk. Each of them carried the particular stillness of people who had survived enough real fights that the next one no longer surprised them. Their blades hung at their sides, dark with blood, breathing controlled but urgent.
Gary, the eldest and unmistakably the strongest among them, swept the area with sharp, seasoned eyes. His expression tightened.
"We move," he said. "Now. The child is still inside and we've already wasted too much time."
No one argued. They surged forward together, fanning out as they hit the entrance, pushing through to find Axiros before whatever was left inside finished what the others had started.
---
The corridor was quiet in the way that follows violence rather than precedes it.
Sophia stepped into it moments after the last body had fallen. The smell of iron hung thick. Men lay scattered — some still, others twisted at angles that made it clear there'd been no struggle at the end, only an outcome. It wasn't a fight scene. It was a disposal site.
She looked at it without flinching. No grief, no visible rage. Just a faint curl of disgust at the corners of her mouth.
"Tch. Utter waste," she said. "Can't complete a single task without falling apart. I really do need better slaves." She let her gaze move to the far end of the hallway, where a lone figure stood. "Though I suppose there'll be a new addition soon enough."
Axiros had already sensed her. He'd been preparing to leave, posture loose and unhurried despite everything around him — but the moment she entered the corridor his attention had shifted to her completely, quiet and total, without him visibly moving at all.
"Looks like the waitress has arrived," he said, not quite turning toward her yet.
Sophia walked forward at an easy pace, no hostility in her expression, no particular anger at the pile of what had recently been her subordinates. If anything, she looked curious. That, more than fury would have, made the air feel heavier.
She stopped a short distance away and studied him the way someone studies something they haven't categorised yet.
"Hm," she said, tilting her head slightly, a smile forming that stopped well short of her eyes. "So, little deer — how exactly did you manage to kill those men?"
The words were gentle. What sat underneath them wasn't.
Axiros turned to face her fully. He could feel it now without any doubt — the weight of her presence, the particular distortion in the air that surrounded real power. She had it. Far more than anything his current body could match.
'Could I use existential energy?' he thought, running through it quickly. 'No. It would take too long to channel and this body would collapse before it even formed. Time isn't something I have right now.'
He worked through the options and discarded them one by one until only one remained.
"Don't be fearful of me, sweetie," Sophia said, her tone almost affectionate. "I won't harm you — if you willingly become a slave of mine."
Axiros didn't move. Didn't tighten his grip. Didn't blink.
He'd seen this game played out across more worlds and lifetimes than he could meaningfully remember. Rage meant losing control. Submission meant chains that never came off. Both paths ended the same way.
So he took the third option.
He simply didn't react.
A faint smirk settled onto his face — calm, deliberate, the expression of someone who found the whole thing mildly boring.
"Well?" she pressed, that curved smile still in place. "What's your answer?"
Axiros exhaled slowly and met her eyes.
"My answer," he said, "is shut the fuck up and skip the cutscene. You're going to try to kill me anyway. Why the delay?" He tilted his head slightly. "Come on then. Let's see what the one without brain cells can actually do."
The corridor went completely still.
Then Sophia's aura tore outward — violent, uncontrolled, all that power and none of the discipline to shape it. Like a storm that had never learned the difference between breaking loose and breaking apart. Real strength, clearly. Refinement, restraint, actual intelligence in how she used it — painfully absent.
The pressure hit Axiros like a wall.
He didn't move.
Didn't tense. Didn't gasp. Didn't so much as shift his weight.
He had stood under worse than this while trapped in bodies that made this one look sturdy. Compared to those memories, this was wind. Heavy wind, but wind.
He stood there and let it wash over him.
To Sophia it looked like fear. Like someone frozen by the sudden reality of what they'd provoked. Like submission.
'People ruled by emotion are the easiest to handle,' he thought, watching her with the same calm he'd have brought to observing weather. 'They mistake silence for weakness. They walk into their own traps.'
The smirk didn't leave his face.
Good. Right on schedule.
Sophia stepped forward, visibly savouring what she believed she was seeing.
"Did you want this?" she asked, voice soft with mock sympathy. "Did you want to feel the fear of death before you'd even awakened?"
Axiros said nothing. He steadied his breathing and quietly began preparing for impact. He knew what was coming — no negotiation, no miracle, no last-second reversal of the odds. Just the blow, and then however he survived it.
The silence ate at her more than any insult could have.
Her expression finally cracked, the last of her patience gone, something uglier taking its place. 'People like this are better off dead,' she thought, pride refusing to tolerate even one more second of his indifference.
The floor cracked beneath her feet.
She moved.
It wasn't something the eye could properly follow — less like speed, more like the space between one position and the next simply ceasing to exist. One moment she was several meters away. The next she was already on him, the distance collapsed in an instant, her force behind it absolute and overwhelming.
To any unawakened observer, it would have looked impossible.
To Axiros —
It was exactly what he'd been waiting for.