I would like to establish, before the inevitable tribunal of future historians, that my initial reaction to the sight of the King-Class mage striding through the dust was perfectly rational. I scread for us to run.
Yes, scread. Not the noble bellow of a commander rallying his troops, but the unrefined sound of a man who very much values his skin and has no sha admitting it. My voice cracked in the register of a choir boy pushed too hard on his first hymn, arms flailing in instinctive desperation.
"Run!" I shouted, pointing frantically at the shadow advancing through the haze. "Scatter, flee, sprint, scamper, gallop—I don’t care what verb you pick so long as it ans moving away from him!"
But before panic could carry further, Salem silenced .
Not with mockery, nor with the sharp edge of his wit, but with a single word.
"Enough."
It was said so quietly, yet with such finality, that the rest of my scream died in my throat like a candle snuffed by unseen fingers.
I turned to him, half in outrage, half in confusion. "Enough? Salem, forgive , but the proper response to imminent obliteration is not silence. It’s more. More running, more scheming, more cowardly brilliance. What in the saints’ nas do you—"
He cut off again, his golden eyes gleaming with a strange clarity. "It’s ti."
Ti. The word carried a weight I hadn’t heard in him before. Not one of jest, not one of reckless bravado, but of decision—heavy, inevitable.
I swallowed, lowering my voice. "Ti for what?"
His swords caught the firelight, his shoulders settling with the poise of a man about to step into his own legend. The grin that spread across his lips wasn’t feral for once—it was resolute. "Ti to use it. The technique I’ve been working on."
Ah. That. The mysterious practice he’d whispered about during our ti at The Sanctuary, the thing he had guarded like a secret too dangerous to share. I had dismissed it as one of his obsessions, a fever dream of steel and madness, the kind that usually ended with him laughing through his own blood. And yet, the look in his eyes told otherwise.
This was no jest.
"Salem..." My words ca more carefully this ti, less frantic.
He didn’t let finish. His voice steadied, calm in a way that made my doubts feel childish. "I’ve been researching. Experinting. Not with steel, not with stance, not with speed. With the mind. With the Nexus itself."
My brows shot up. "The Astral Nexus?"
He tilted his head, almost amused. "Many believe it operates upon power. Upon strength, or technique, or pushing harder than the next fool with a sword. But it’s not. It’s about persuasion and perception."
I stared at him, aghast. "Persuasion. Saints preserve , you’ve decided magic is a debate club."
He laughed softly, shaking his head. "The body lies, Cecil. It lies constantly. It tells us we can’t. That steel is steel, that blood belongs in veins, that our skin will split if cut. It draws borders. Rules. Limits. But the Nexus doesn’t play by those rules. It flows where the mind allows it to flow."
I swallowed. Against my better judgnt, I was intrigued.
Salem’s grin widened. "So I learned to lie louder. Louder than the body. Louder than pain. I told myself the blades were not tools. Not weapons. Not separate. They are . Blood and bone unacknowledged. Limbs unextended. Fingers of silver and steel."
He lifted his swords slowly, reverently, and for the first ti I noticed the faintest shimr around them—wisps of energy, translucent as smoke, coiling along the length of the blades like breath on glass.
"I’ve learned to convince myself they were mine," he murmured. "And the Nexus believed ."
I gawked. My jaw, already loose from habitual disbelief, plumted another few inches. "You... you gaslit your own soul."
Salem laughed, sharp and low. "Exactly."
I wanted to faint. Or vomit. Possibly both. Instead, I found myself staring in absolute awe as those near-invisible tendrils of energy grew brighter, streaming from the steel until the blades humd with a resonance that made the hair on my arms stand on end.
He tightened his grip, his expression sharpening into sothing unnervingly serene.
And in that instant, I knew. This was it. The endga. No more stalling, no more running. It was ti to kill.
The mage himself had slowed, sensing sothing in Salem’s stance. His empty hands flexed at his sides, the violet glow at his knuckles flickering faintly.
No one intervened. Not the knight, who leaned heavily against a wall with blood still dripping from his lips. Not Dunny, whose prayers had faltered into silence. Not even the Man in White, who rely watched with that infuriating calm, as though observing the final act of a play he’d already morized.
It was Salem’s stage now.
I set Rodrick down on a patch of dirt beside , intent on providing any support I could. However, I barely had ti to inhale before Salem moved.
Saints save , I’ve seen Salem fast before. I’ve seen him blur, vanish, reappear with blades red and grins sharper than daggers. But this—this was sothing else entirely.
He erupted.
One mont he stood beside , the next he was gone, a silver streak carving through the dust. His foot struck rubble, rebounded, launched him sideways like an insect scuttling across walls. He bounded, twisted, ricocheted off broken beams and shattered stones, a cockroach ard with lightning.
The mage barely had ti to raise his arm before Salem’s first strike ca down. Steel t gauntlet—and the gauntlet lted. Not cracked. Not dented. lted. As though Salem’s blade had been dipped in sunlight and drawn across wax.
I gasped. "Oh, you’ve got to be kidding ."
The mage disappeared in a flash, reappearing ten feet back, dust exploding where he’d stood. Salem snarled, already mid-leap, his blades carving arcs of white fire through the air.
I snapped at my stopwatch, thumb slamming against the trigger. The world lurched, slowed, my vision narrowing as I bent ti just enough to catch the mage’s next shift. Salem, to his credit, didn’t need the help, but I wasn’t about to let him hog all the glory.
"Left!" I shouted, my voice echoing oddly in the stretched air.
Salem pivoted instantly, his blade slashing where the mage reappeared. Again, the gauntlet scread, sparks spraying as steel slid into it like a hot knife through butter. The mage vanished once more, silent as ever, leaving nothing but the hiss of displaced air.
Salem growled, his movents faster, sharper, fury mounting with each near-miss. He wasn’t just striking now—he was hunting, bounding across wreckage like a predator denied its kill. Every ti his blades kissed armor, they sank deeper, slicing through layers of obsidian like cloth.
And yet, impossibly, the mage still refused to bleed.
"Why won’t you bleed?!" Salem roared.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My stopwatch ticked in my palm, the seconds dripping like honey, my lungs straining with the effort of tugging ti into compliance. I focused everything on guiding him, on giving Salem the narrowest windows of opportunity, on watching the impossible unfold.
Strike. lt. Vanish. Reappear. Again and again, the cycle repeated, each exchange a hair’s breadth from fatality, each flash of steel tearing deeper into the mage’s armor until it hung in tatters of smoldering tal.
And yet still—no blood. No grunt of pain. Nothing but that blank, infuriating silence.
Sothing was wrong.
I knew it in the pit of my stomach, but before I could voice the thought, the Man in White finally spoke.
His voice cut through the chaos like a blade, calm, asured, and far too certain.
"Sothing is...off."
My mind wracked itself with questions at that. But I felt it was well.
Now that I wasn’t sprinting for my life or digging comrades out of rubble, I could actually observe the fight properly.
Every ti he vanished, every ti he slipped between Salem’s strikes with that uncanny suddenness, my instincts scread one thing: wrong.
It didn’t take a genius to know that spatial magic was ant to be a farce, a thought experint that had been dissected, argued, disproven, and tossed into the academic graveyard decades ago.
The world had rules, and one of the first was that matter stays where it is unless shoved rudely by so external force. The act of simply stepping out of reality and back in elsewhere? Nonsense. Lunacy. About as possible as kissing your own elbow.
And yet.
There he was, proving centuries of scholarship wrong by flickering in and out of existence like a candle fla in the wind.
The only comfort I had was the small, bitter reminder that impossibility had already taken up residence in my pocket.
I glanced down at the stopwatch in my hand, its weight cold and accusing against my palm. Ti manipulation wasn’t supposed to exist either. And yet here I was, a sarcastic catastrophe in boots, bending the seconds to my will like a drunk puppeteer.
So perhaps impossibility was simply having a very busy season.
Still, sothing was wrong. Sothing beyond that.
I squinted into the haze, tracking Salem’s furious dance. The mage responded with his usual, infuriating silence—vanish, reappear, deflect, vanish again. A rhythm. A cycle. And I began to notice it.
Not the mage himself, but... sothing else.
Each ti he disappeared, I heard it. Faint. Barely audible above the ringing clash of steel and the scrape of boots across broken stone. A sound not born from magic at all, but from the mundane world. A tallic clink.
Not where the mage stood. Not even where he reappeared. No—off in the distance. Farther away, as though echoing from an unseen corner of the battlefield.
My skin prickled.
What in all the saints’ nas was that?
I barely had ti to form the thought before Salem shifted tactics.
With a snarl, he drew the mage in close, feinting high before slamming his boot down against the cobblestones. The impact sent a storm of dust spiraling upward, a cloud so thick it swallowed the plaza in a choking haze.
The mage vanished again—except this ti, when he reappeared, he faltered.
His head jerked sharply, his movents hesitant, as though the sudden wall of grit had scrambled whatever eerie chanism allowed him to track Salem’s position. His silence, once oppressive, now felt tinged with confusion.
And that was when Salem struck.
From nowhere—no, from everywhere—he erupted through the haze of dust.
I caught only flashes. The gleam of moonlight across steel. The twist of his body mid-leap, coiled like a predator springing from cover. The faint, manic curve of his lips caught between fury and triumph.
And then his blades ca.
Twin arcs of silver, perfect in their symtry, cut through dust and silence alike. They cleaved not at armor, not at gauntlets or breastplate or shoulder, but at the one point the mage had left unguarded for a single fraction of a second—his neck.
The swords sliced clean. So clean I didn’t even hear it, only saw it. The mage’s helted head flew free, rolling once in the haze before vanishing into shadow.
For a heartbeat, the world held still.
Then Salem landed.
He crumpled to his knees on the cobblestones, his body shuddering with exhaustion, his blades dragging at his sides like anchors too heavy to lift. The dust swirled around him, thick and suffocating, hiding everything beyond the faint outline of his hunched fra.
And the mage—oh saints, the mage—remained standing.
Headless.
For three eternal seconds, the hulking body remained upright, silent as ever, the jagged stump of its neck frad in sparks and smoke. Then, slowly, deliberately, it began to fold downward. First one knee, then the other, until it collapsed into a kneel.
As though in reverence.
My heart nearly exploded.
I ran. Saints forgive , I ran like the idiot I am, boots slipping over rubble. Every step carried closer to Salem’s hunched figure, every breath a ragged sob of disbelief.
We’d done it. We’d killed him. It was over.
But sothing was still wrong.
The feeling spread through like rot in a barrel of wine. By the ti I reached him, I could barely breathe.
Salem was back up, standing before the kneeling corpse, his back rigid, his head bowed. His swords hung limp at his sides, his entire fra trembling not with triumph but with sothing I couldn’t na.
"Salem," I gasped, stumbling into the haze. My throat tore with the words. "You—you did it. You mad, impossible bastard, you actually did it!"
In a fit of uncharacteristic joy, I threw my arms around him, hugging him tight, clapping his shoulder with manic relief. Dust clung to my lips, sweat stung my eyes, but none of it mattered. We were alive. We had won.
Except Salem didn’t move. Didn’t laugh, didn’t smirk, didn’t even grunt in acknowledgnt.
Confusion twisted through . I pulled back, frowning, my eyes darting from his blank expression to the body kneeling before us.
And then I saw it.
The mage’s headless body.
It was empty.
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