For one heartbeat, Lucy wasn't looking at Jin.
He was looking over his shoulder at Haruka. At the shaking girl with the glowing sword, and the long cut she'd opened across his back that wouldn't close. His whole attention had turned to her, curious and delighted, like a cat that had just noticed a mouse doing something unexpected.
One heartbeat was all Jin needed.
He came up off the snow with the old man's sword already moving. He didn't think about form or technique. He just cut, upward and across, with everything this body had, straight into Lucy's side.
The blade bit deep. Deeper than any cut he'd landed all morning.
Lucy grunted. The force of it lifted him off his feet and threw him sideways across the clearing, and he hit the snow and skidded and tumbled, horns gouging long furrows in the ice, until he crashed into the base of one of the broken stone pinnacles and stopped.
Jin was already moving the other way.
