The ash came down like winter that had forgotten itself—soft, slow, and wrong. It gathered in the grooves of the ridge, webbed the broken cart wheels, salted the hair of men who were not ready to be old. The Corrupter stood inside it and let his silhouette fatten, fused wings flexing with a hush like pages turned in a book that had decided not to be read aloud anymore.
Andy didn't lift the Oathblade any higher than he needed. The blade breathed with him—ember warm along the spine, tide cool at the fuller, gale whispering through the edge—and the ground approved, holding its shape beneath his heels.
The system touched his mind like a calm palm.
[Constellation Sync — Orion]
Nia ⭐ 82% | Aurelia ⭐ 74%
Tier II Combined: 46%
Buffs: Corrupter's Bane I | Shared Inventory (Auto-Summon Ready)
Status: Hold posture. Dominance without chase.
"Don't blink," Aurelia said. She had a smile like a dare and ash on one cheekbone where a kiss might have been if they were different people in a different hour. Her brooch ticked once; the twin to Moonfang breathed silver in her off hand with the smug pride of a knife that knew exactly why it existed.
"Don't boast," Nia replied. The Staff of Lumina rose, and with it three quiet circles lifted from the earth as if she were drawing the idea of a ring out of the dirt and teaching it to be light. The inner ring hugged the villagers; the middle ring set itself to drink shock; the outer ring flexed in a slow, patient tide—an adjustable baffle against whatever the sky forgot to love.
A husk of a corrupted knight lurched and remembered how to kneel. Then another. Then five, then nine—as if the shadow beneath the Corrupter had flicked out fingers and found empty armor like gloves. Their joints moved as though pulled by strings that had been soaked in water.
"Marionettes," Aurelia said, not quite admiring.
The Corrupter tilted his head. "Names are small cages," he said, and his voice arrived with all its letters intact. "You carry a dragon's oath in your hand, little sovereign. Do you know what it costs to keep a promise in a world that has decided it prefers suggestions?"
Andy stepped forward until his shadow met the Corrupter's and didn't try to be bigger. "Yes," he said.
The first wave came—the not-men moving with the drowsy precision of sleepwalkers, blades held as if remembering the idea of sharpness. Andy marked the lanes once and then cut them, not grandly but correctly. "Stormbreaker—Gale Rift." The air agreed to split. The ridge wore three new lines that wind could use. The front rank stumbled where the world had forgotten to be continuous.
"Tide-Singer—Aqua Fang," he added, angle sliding, and the water-teeth tore along a control cord the shadow had run underfoot. It snapped with a whine like wire broken tight. The marionette bodies stuttered as if the hands pulling them had looked away.
Nia's outer ring took a test breath of black fire and flexed; the heat ran along its curve as gracefully as a seam along a sleeve. She feathered sigils into the pressure points—little luminous stitches you wouldn't notice unless you were the sort of person who cared about hems. When a husk smashed its blade against the lattice, the blow spread like fingers through water and came out nothing.
"Left seam," Aurelia sang, and she became the note—boots whispering grit, body a neat arrangement of speed and decision. Two bolts went through the same ragged hole in a visor with mathematical courtesy. She didn't wait to see if the man who wasn't a man fell; he did, politely, as if remembering his manners late.
The Corrupter came on a half step, wrong blade held with the easy affection of a man carrying a bad habit he had decided to keep. Andy met the line without strain. The edges kissed like deer who hated each other. For a heartbeat the air between them pretended it wasn't there. On the return, the Corrupter drifted low, trying to talk the Oathblade into forgetting it was a thought that had learned to be steel.
He felt the pressure—Unmake Edge—like cold fingers along a poem, looking for the lines to rearrange.
He answered with heat, with tide, with wind. Ember steadied temper. Water remembered shape. Gale kept thought moving.
The system nodded, very slightly.
[Status Check]
Oathblade Integrity: Stable (Resisted Unmake)
Dragon Resonance: Budding (Tier II potential)
"Pretty," Aurelia called, having just stepped between two husks that tried to agree about her location and failed. "Keep the dance floor open."
Nia didn't laugh. She didn't need to. "I'll add stairs," she murmured.
She lifted the staff and spun a helix of water out of still air, anchored it to the ring with a gesture like turning a key. Light poured down its spiral—Glyphstorm, narrowed into a drizzle of threaded runes that fell in lines instead of sheets. The drizzle pattered off three helms and went right through two more where the steel had already agreed to be memory.
"Aqua Spiral Lens—good," Andy said without looking. He felt the angle change through the bond like wind reaching for a kite string.
"Walk it," Aurelia said, and she did, toes touching the lower coils of the helix for half-steps in the air. Her next volley split on exit into three smaller truths and found three eyes that had been brightly mistaken about survival.
The Corrupter's wings stirred ash into little whorls that tried to be voices asking to go home. He wasn't in a hurry. He leaked confidence like a cracked jar of oil.
"Show me who made your breath obedient," he invited, and flowed into a cut shaped like hunger.
Andy slid his weight and let the wrong line pass no closer than it had to. He took his answer from the seam of the fight where three different truths met. Fire made the first mark; water fixed it in the world; wind carried it along the seam like a hand finishing a tear that now wanted to be a cut.
"Draconic Oathblade—Triune Severance."
He didn't shout. The blade did the speaking. The shadow trunk that fed half the front collapsed as if somebody had cut a rope the camp had been asleep on. The marionettes sagged into themselves. A boy behind the inner ring put both hands over his mouth and made the kind of sound you make when the world draws a line and you realize you prefer it that way.
"Keep breathing," Nia told the ring, though the advice was for everyone. She rethreaded the middle circle, borrowing thickness from the outer to drink the next impact. The staff hummed like a warm hive. For a second the trembling left her fingers and went into the light instead.
The Corrupter crouched beside the fallen wyvern and pressed his bare palm to its plated breast as if greeting a dog he meant to steal a trick from. Then—without flourish—he sank his arm in up to the elbow.
The wyvern's corpse convulsed like a bad dream remembering teeth. Black ash that had been pretending to be snow jerked into a ring around the carcass and tightened as if trying to be a belt. When the Corrupter stood, the ring rose with him, not touching ground, trusting air. It widened until it matched the hill's curve and then began to move, slow as guilt, hungry as winter.
"Ash Pulse," Nia said, voice flat, because naming things sometimes helped even if the Corrupter was right about cages.
"Can you hold?" Andy asked.
"Yes," she said, which was not the same as no cost.
Aurelia had already shifted—chasing the pulse's shadow with the tip of her dagger the way you might trace a wave as it comes in so you know where to jump. "It's learning," she said. "Don't let it."
"It doesn't get a vote," Andy said.
He planted his back foot, let his weight go down into the ridge like a seed. "Terrafang—Earthen Shackles." The ground answered with a slow, rising fist, fingers of stone curling around the Corrupter's ankles. For a heartbeat, wrong wings faltered.
The Corrupter's gaze flicked down, not annoyed, merely attentive. The spine-thorns along his back flared, drank, and the shackles cracked like baked clay. Dust ran between his toes like water.
He came in with a line meant to shear, lifted from hip to opposite shoulder. Andy took it on the flat and tilted as if showing the move to a student who was promising but easily discouraged. The edges ground. The sound was the whine of a green branch arguing with a child's insistence.
"Closer," the Corrupter suggested.
"Later," Andy replied.
The pulse reached the outer ring of light and pressed. It didn't strike; it insisted, rubbing along the lattice for the gap a patient liar would use. Nia flowed with it. The ring breathed in. It breathed out. The ash ring adjusted, a bad student who had realized he could pass the class by cheating with better technique.
"Vector anchor," Nia whispered, not a spell but a request, and the bond agreed. A small pressure arrived under Andy's heels, the world's floor creeping up to meet him like a servant who had remembered a step stools' true purpose. His next pivot landed exactly where the fight asked him to be. He lifted the Oathblade no higher than necessary and wrote three short words across the Corrupter's next attempt to make steel honest. The wrong blade faltered, for the first time less than entirely certain of itself.
Ash rested on the eyelashes of a woman behind the inner ring. She didn't wipe it away. Her hands were on the shoulders of a child whose breath counted one-two-three-hold and forgot four. The woman did the four for her and then pressed the rhythm into the girl's back with her thumbs.
Aurelia vaulted the broken cart, landed on the rim of a shield someone had dropped with the same casual precision she used to sit on a tavern bar when she wanted to be taller than a man. "Left seam again," she called. "He thinks we like that lane; we do."
"Fixing," Nia said. She turned her wrist and a runic spline slid under the lane like a board under a door.
The Corrupter lifted his chin, as if tasting what the ash wanted. "You are disciplined," he allowed, which from him sounded like inconvenient.
"Practice," Andy said.
He stepped into the center of a small wind. "Gale Platforms." The air made three steps the length of a thought. He took two. Aurelia stole the third and turned it into a cold kiss for gravity. Her bolt went long, curving on the sleet of Nia's spiral lens. It found the place where fused wing met back and blossomed into clean silver that refused to go out.
The hiss the Corrupter made did not belong to a creature that remembered kindness. He reached for three kneeling husks and pulled. They collapsed not like men dying but like tents whose poles had been removed in a hurry. Strength sluiced along his wrong spine and into his wrong wings.
Nia flinched—inward, where nobody would see—and widened the outer ring by the width of a breath. "Breathe," she told herself, and chose the thing that would save more people and cost more of her.
The system chimed for tempo, not for prize.
[Bond Pulse ↑]
Nia ⭐ 83% | Aurelia ⭐ 75%
Tier II Combined: 50%
Resonance +14% (Move +12% | Resist +10%)
Andy didn't chase. The Oathblade watched the Corrupter's balance with him. There was a stutter when the wrong blade drank from dead things; a half-breath where the edge that lied became briefly, inconveniently, honest. He filed it where useful truths go.
"On the drink," he said, and Aurelia's next shot was already out in the air that would later accommodate the word.
The ash ring failed to be impressed by the previous defense. It flattened, then tucked, then crept—hugging the ridge's contour like a weasel learning the shape of a henhouse. It found a tongue of dirt where water had once cut a path and began to use it the way a thief uses a rumor.
"I have two," Nia reported, fingers making small, purposeful decisions. Two bulges of the ring met invisible wedges of light and, baffled, wasted themselves into paler ash.
"The third," Aurelia said, not panicked, merely discontent, because the angle was ugly and the timing worse.
The third split low and quick, knifing along the remnants of an old furrow toward the cart where the wounded had been piled, soft people arranged into triage by hands that weren't used to weighing lives. The inner ring could catch impact; it could not be everywhere with the same appetite.
Andy was two steps into air that had been briefly persuaded to be a staircase. The Oathblade was exactly where it ought to be for the Corrupter's next line. The villagers were not.
"Nia—" he began.
"I know," she said, and the words were raw silk pulled tight.
Aurelia was closest and wrong-footed by the slope. She didn't slow; she changed promises mid-run. She punched a bolt into the lattice, let it take her weight for a bend that punished knees. The ash ring refocused; it had learned too much, too fast.
Nia's breath hitched. The inner ring thickened at the cost of the middle. The shock would come through. People would bruise where later they might kiss. That was acceptable; other outcomes weren't.
The Corrupter saw the choice and smiled because he thought it would cost them more than it would.
"Eyes on me," Andy said, not loudly. The wrong blade came for that tone as if insulted by how calm it was. He set the Oathblade at the only angle that made sense and caught the line that would have asked his ribs to be less honest. The edges kissed and the air flirted with vanishing again.
"Invoice me later," Aurelia told the world, and cut the bad angle anyway. Moonpiercer drew a crescent through a tolerance that had not been designed for it. The bolt skimmed the lattice, shaved a hair from a rune that did not appreciate grooming, and struck the pulse obliquely.
The ring shivered. Split. One half tattered itself against Nia's widened breadth. The other half—smaller, smarter, meaner—folded, turned, and went for the cart from a new low door it had just learned to be.
The ridge held its breath. Someone whispered a name that wasn't any god's.
The system's hand hovered at Andy's shoulder, not urging, only witnessing the decision he would make with the time he didn't have.
Ash learned. Light held. Steel argued.
And the night, which had not even ended, leaned in to listen.