The sky kept getting meaner.
Clouds pressed down until the ridge felt like a chest under a heavy hand. Frost licked the lips of puddles that hadn't existed a blink ago. The wrong man in the split—constellation wearing a body—tilted his crowned head as if deciding how much to spend to make them kneel.
"Lines set," Nia said, the staff's crystal breathing pale fire. Her first band glowed like breath against glass; the second band pulsed tighter, runes cinched as neatly as buttons.
Aurelia loosened her shoulders. The Moonpiercers seemed impatient, blades sketching tiny eights in the air. "Tell me when to be rude."
"When he thinks the world owes him silence," Andy said.
The Lord stepped and the valley dented. Black threads uncoiled from his ribs and soaked into the ground. Grass went grey under each touch as if it had been told a discouraging story and believed it. A humming rose—low, wrong, the pitch of a choir built from flies.
The not-mouth creaked wider. Frost-smoke surged again, denser. Nia's channels opened on her beat; Andy let the prism take and split; Aurelia's thrown lances punctured streams until the breath tore itself into harmless shreds.
It wasn't enough to insult him. Only to irritate. The crown of fragments vibrated until the air around it fuzzed. Then came a different weapon: a pressure, intimate as a palm against the throat.
"Null field," Nia warned. "He's singing the letters out of the spells."
Her lattice flickered; the net between bands thinned. The staff quivered in her grip like talent trying to jump from a tired hand.
A shiver went through Andy's jaw—like biting ice—but he kept Tier I layered, aura steady. "Hold it," he said.
Nia closed her eyes and didn't speak. The bond opened like a door lifted off its hinges.
Don't forget me, she sent down the shared line.
The answer arrived, simple and sufficient.
[Whisper Cast — Active]
Constraint: Silence dome
Throughput: Limited, Stable
Dim runes relit as if obeying memory instead of voice. The net took weight again, shaky but obstinate.
The Lord started walking.
Each step left thought behind. People flinched. A boy dropped his wooden sword and didn't remember bending to pick it up would help him feel like himself. The air tasted like a blade kept in snow. Andy shifted half a pace left—smallest line to make the biggest change—so the monster would only ever see him, never the child, never the seamstress, never the cart with its neat row of bandages.
The crown rotated another notch. Three vectors—arm-length suggestions of cutting—peeled off the Lord's sides and came skimming low. Aurelia was gone before they fully arrived, boots finding the seam where lattice met air. She skimmed the edge like a swallow, flicked a dagger through the nearest vector, and split it into two thinner lies. "Bad manners," she called. "Apologize to the lady."
The second vector scraped the first band and sparked; Nia rethreaded the stitch, fingers quick, mouth quiet. The third went for Andy's knees because bullies always test the physical truths first.
He cut it away with a short, ugly parry—no flourish. The Oathblade rang. The ring sounded… strained.
The Lord noticed the sound too.
He was there, then he was here, the distance between a lie and a truth discarded like a coat. One arm-suggestion dropped straight down. Oathblade met it. The pressure felt like holding back a falling wall with a plank and a prayer. Andy's wrists jolted; his elbows sang. The steel hummed a warning through his bones.
Cracks spidered along the prism channels, leaping from rune to rune like rumor.
Nia's breath hitched. "Andy—"
"I know," he said.
It should have pleased the Lord that his weight made something honest groan. Instead, he tilted his head, curious again, the way a cruel child is curious about cause.
Aurelia slashed up the flank, daggers scratching sparks on the vector-skin, too shallow to convince. "He's heavy as a cathedral."
"Cathedrals fall," Andy said, tasting iron in the back of his throat.
The not-mouth opened with the leisurely confidence of a guillotine taking its time.
Andy let Tier I breathe as far as it could without tearing. The Oathblade's spine burned hotter; the wind at his heels began to demand speed. The Lord pressed down harder and the blade sang in a voice that meant choice.
He made it.
"Dragon Warrior Form—Tier II."
No flare—just gravity deepening.
Heat wrapped his left shoulder like a pauldron the color of sunset. Tide marble-cold flowed up his right arm, setting the wrist. Gale braided under both heels and pinned him to the ridge as if he had married it. The air leaned back to make room.
Villagers felt the change and straightened without deciding to. A woman dropped from her knees to her heels and blinked as if remembering her height.
The Lord's crown hissed. The vectors pushed harder—hard enough to crack a cow's spine, hard enough to turn a sword to memory. The Oathblade didn't sing this time. It spoke. The sound knifed through the pressure and set the angle. Steel held.
The system made a note with the tidy pleasure of a librarian shelving a difficult volume.
[Form: Dragon Warrior — Tier II]
Dominance Field: Engaged
Output: +22% Elemental Weave Control
Stability: High
Andy moved.
"Ember Edge—Flame Spiral."
Heat wrote a helix around the Lord's legs, not hungry, just persuasive. Black frost popped off in clots. The spiral didn't roar—it obliged.
"Stormbreaker—Gale Rift."
The wind cleft made a hinge in the pressure and the push slid off instead of through.
"Terrafang—Earthen Shackles."
The ridge grew fingers and clasped the Lord's ankle-shadow long enough to ask a question about balance. The answer arrived in a stumble. Crown-tilt, weight-shift, opening.
"Tide-Singer—Aqua Fang."
Water-teeth lanced the seam under the ribs—exact, spare. The flicker inside the chest hesitated as if a liar had remembered a better story and then forgot it again.
The Lord came down with both cutting-suggestions like a pianist correcting a mistake by playing harder. The Oathblade took both. Andy's wrists screamed polite objections. The blade did not yield.
"Not that way," he told it under his breath, and the steel agreed.
Aurelia laughed unkindly at the Lord's stumble and vanished into a Moonline Dash, feet barely touching the ward's ring. "Crescent Guillotine!" Silver arcs kissed three vector-tentacles and left them sulking in pieces. "Knees," she added—advising, not asking. "He has several."
"He has none," Nia said, and anchored a new set of Aurora Stitches over the crack where the first band had started to forget itself. "But he's made convincing lies everywhere."
The Lord's ribs brightened, then dimmed—the drink. Andy saw it, counted the beat he'd learned since the wyvern and the stone.
"On the swallow," he said.
Nia fed a sliver of light down his forearm, binding glyph to tendon, rune to intention.
Aurelia flicked a dagger across his shoulder as she passed, leaving a thread of silver heat that felt like consent more than aid.
The ribs turned honest for half a breath.
"Triune Severance," Andy said, and the Oathblade wrote the clean line he'd been holding back since morning. Fire marked. Water fixed. Wind carried. It wasn't louder than the weather. It was simply correct.
The line opened the chest. Not far—enough. Black light sprayed out like sullen bees and died midair, ashamed to be seen.
The crown shrieked in a frequency only bones appreciate. Shadow boiled under the Lord and rose.
Hulks shouldered up from the grey grass—men-shaped as barns, woman-shaped as towers, beasts the size of mills—stitched from collected fear and old night, all joints and wrong patience. Not titans of flesh; titans of agreement. The pressure of their presence pressed knuckles into the ridge's spine.
A child screamed. Three more did not, because the first one had already done the job.
Aurelia whistled low. "He brought furniture."
"We move it," Andy said.
The first titan swung an arm the size of a bridge. Andy cut not the arm but the hinge—the idea that let the arm make that motion. "Gale Rift," he murmured, and the wind made a new direction. The swing missed everything except a memory of itself.
Nia widened the ring. "Lumina Ward—Third Band." The new circle rose slow, like a ribcage healing in time-lapse. She went pale, but the staff's crystal glowed like a small noon. Her wrists shook. She put the tremor into the lattice instead of her fingers.
A titan bent to trample the well. Aurelia planted a heel on the ward, sprung to the beast's shoulder, and drove both daggers down where clavicle should have lived. The joints were lies. The daggers argued politely until the lies withdrew. The titan reconsidered gravity and sat.
The Lord's crown spun. The null field thickened. Runes dimmed in a hurry that was nearly panic. Nia's lips pressed white. She closed her eyes again and pushed through the shared door.
Whisper. Thread. Light without voice.
[Whisper Cast]
Throughput: Strained → Holding
Note: Physical fatigue ↑
"Don't you dare," Aurelia snapped at the field, and threw two Moonlances at once into the channels Nia had only suggested existed. The lances obeyed the suggestion as if it had been an order.
The second titan leaned into the ring. The lattice flexed and slid it sideways into a ditch that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago. It fell with confusion as its face.
The Lord pushed forward as if discovering delight in resistance. Three more cutting-suggestions fanned, cheap as gossip. Andy met them with blunt work—half-cuts, heel turns, the weight of a man who had negotiated with boulders and never apologized for being direct.
"Don't blink," Aurelia sang through her teeth, and in the same breath, "Blink."
Andy did neither. He timed the next drink. The ribs brightened… the honest beat came late. He didn't move. The Lord had learned the first lesson. Good students are always the most dangerous.
"Feint read," he said. "He can delay truth the way men delay debt."
"I can untangle the interest," Nia said dryly, sweat beading a new constellation at her temple. She slid a strip of glyph down the edge of his blade—the faintest lacquer of command. "If he pays."
The Lord lifted both arms. The sky tried to come with them. Snow that wasn't snow began to unwind over the ridge. Each flake was a motive to lie to yourself about being tired.
Aurelia bared her teeth. "I have never liked weather."
"Weather isn't the villain," Nia said, and shoved the second band under the first to catch the slush of despair before it could name anyone. "It's the choir."
"Then I'll sing louder," Aurelia said, and split the falling not-snow with a fan of small throws that turned flakes into polite suggestions.
The Lord rebalanced to chase her motion and by rebalancing showed the seam beneath the not-ribs again, a hair off the expected beat. Enough. Andy stepped through three small winds, placed his left foot where the ridge expected him to, and cut through a thought the Lord didn't know he had installed.
"Constellation—" the Oathblade began, and Andy didn't let it finish the name it wanted to claim; names are promises you can only spend once. He let the edge be light without myth and carried it through.
The Lord staggered, first genuinely. A line of night dribbled down his front and became boring when it touched the ground. The crown wobbled, fragments clinking like soft bells.
A titan took that as a cue to punch him. Andy stepped into the punch and disagreed. "Terrafang," he said, and the ground gave the titan ankle opinions. The fist went wide and introduced itself to a pine, which handled the meeting poorly.
The null field pulsed again. Nia's eyes rolled once—just a flick—and snapped back into a focus that would have shamed stone. "I can keep the bands for another five minutes," she said. "After that, I move space instead of defending it."
"That's called retreat," Aurelia panted, sliding under a titan's elbow and reducing it to the sort of joint better on a chicken.
"That's called choosing a different ground," Nia corrected, and set a Vector Anchor under Andy's heel without asking.
He used it. Pivot, half-step, small cut to batter aside a suggestion that had wanted to take his face off. Breath in, breath out. Tier II sat on him like a throne; he let it be a chair, nothing more.
The Lord looked at him now the way a pit looks at a man who has not yet fallen into it. Then he reached down—not to the ground, but through it. New threads—thick as wrists—yanked up.
Not titans. Not men. Pillars of compacted hunger.
They arced toward the band like battering rams dressed for a funeral.
The first two hit the ring and bled off into channels Nia had prepared while they were still rising. The third squeezed through a join no human eye would have called a gap.
"Got it," Aurelia said flatly, and wasn't there any more and then was, both blades buried to the hilts in the hunger-pillar's heart, if it had one. It bucked, spasmed, lost interest, went to mist.
The Lord drank again, late again. Andy did not cut.
"Make him want it," he said. "Don't give him the lesson just because he holds his hand up."
Aurelia snorted, amused despite the cold. "Cruel teacher."
"Fair teacher," Nia murmured, hands moving, mind on the ring. "He'll memorize the rhythm if we let him."
They didn't.
They stepped left when his ribs promised right. They cut low when the world begged them to leap. They allowed small hurts—scrapes on the ward, nicks along Andy's coat, a slice across Aurelia's hip that she stitched with a curse under her breath—so the big cut would still be waiting when it mattered.
The sky pulled itself together to try a new shape: a long, low sigh like an avalanche thinking better of itself halfway down a mountain.
"Brace," Nia said again, voice now a tired metronome.
"Prism on two," Andy answered.
"One," Aurelia counted, and threw first to show the field where the channels were going to be.
"Two." Nia flung the geometry into place.
The sigh came. It found gutters waiting and ran away from meaning. The bands held. The villagers didn't shout—they exhaled, which is the more adult version of cheering.
The system slid another pane across their shared vision.
[Constellation Sync — Orion]
Nia ⭐ 96% | Aurelia ⭐ 94%
Tier III Progress: 29%
Technique Loop: Vector Prism Stable
Recommendation: Maintain Tier II; avoid full escalation.
The Lord stopped. If absence could glare, he did.
Then he did the sensible thing for a creature that had learned too much politeness: he cheated.
Shadow ran back down all his threads—into the titans, the hunger-pillars, the gouges in the field—and pulled. The ridge groaned for the first time, honest sound. The ward's first band slid six inches downslope and would have gone farther if Nia hadn't nailed it there with a snarled rune that scraped her throat raw even spoken inside the bond.
"Enough," she managed, and the ring obeyed, scandalized.
The Lord blurred. Not faster. Less interested in speed. More interested in being. He was pressed against the band before eyes could attribute blame. The crown ground into the light with the steady rudeness of a millstone learning manners on someone's hand.
Aurelia went for the side of the crown with a spinning Ribbon Feint that became Crescent Guillotine mid-motion. The fragments rang and two fell out, bouncing across the rock like coins with unpleasant queens on them.
The Lord's arm-vector cut for her ribs with a last-minute change of ethics. Andy stepped into the wrongness, let it hit his left pauldron where Tier II's ember would take the insult, and gave the arm back a sentence it hadn't asked to read.
"Triune—" He didn't finish. He wrote. The cut chipped the thought that tied the vector to the Lord's will. It hung in the air, confused, then evaporated because nobody loved it enough to insist.
For a single, unearned heartbeat, the monster seemed smaller. Not less tall. Less inevitable.
"It hurts him to be measured," Aurelia said through a grin that had blood in it. "Let's bring a ruler."
Nia nodded once, and the geometry of her bands sharpened into a grid no art teacher would forgive. The null field hissed against the numbers and did not erase them.
Andy let Tier II sit. He resisted the itch to reach for anything brighter. The war had taught him that obedience to impulse is not courage.
"Stay with me," he said again, quieter. The ridge steadied under his boots like a friend putting a hand on his back without comment.
The Lord spread his arms wide and called in everything he had left from the field—the titans, the pillars, the threads. He braided them into a single, thick absence and aimed it at the place where ward met stone, where villagers had placed their fears with the care of people trying to stack breakables.
He breathed.
Nia anchored with her whole body, back teeth clenched, eyes fixed. Aurelia stepped into the channel she'd decided belonged to her personally and drew a line with both daggers that meant no and meant it all the way to the knives' little hearts.
Andy set the Oathblade level and made his edges a place where truth could rest without being embarrassed.
The breath hit, and for a long moment—long enough to grow old in a very specific way—it wasn't clear which sentence the world would decide to finish.
Then the bands held. The hunger unraveled. The crown spat two more chips and cursed in a dialect that sounded like caves breaking.
The Lord reeled, actually reeling now, as if somebody had kicked a stool out from under his certainty. The valley seemed to draw a small breath of its own.
"Again," Aurelia said, but there was laughter on her soreness.
"Again," Nia agreed, and lifted the staff in a motion that could have been prayer or threat.
Andy didn't answer. He stepped forward exactly one pace, and because Tier II belonged to him and not the other way around, the ridge stepped with him.
The next lesson would be more expensive. He could taste it on the air like copper pennies held too long in the mouth. He rolled his wrists once to remind the Oathblade that hands loved it, then raised it until the edge made a line a liar would find exhausting to cross.