It moved like a flea.
One second it was a wet, pale mass clinging to the cage floor. The next it was airborne, launched off whatever passed for its legs, arcing straight toward the closest warm body in the room.
Mine.
’It cannot see. It cannot think. It just knows I am the nearest thing that bleeds.’
I turned my hips left and kept my face forward, the same instinct Draeus had drilled into us not two hours earlier. Do not turn your back. Do not turn your eyes.
The Feral Flesh sailed past where my chest had been a heartbeat before and hit the stone a few feet away with a wet, unpleasant slap.
It did not pause. It did not recalculate. It just gathered itself and jumped again.
My heart was doing something it had never done before, not once, not in either life, a hard, frantic drumming that filled my whole skull and made the rest of the room feel very far away. I could hear my own breathing. I could hear the small, wet sounds the creature made every time it landed. Everything else had gone quiet, the crowd above the pit, Arthur, the entire watching Academy, narrowed down to just me and the thing trying to reach my throat.
I swung.
I had played tennis. Another life, another body, but the motion lived somewhere deeper than memory, deeper than Edmund’s borrowed muscle, some old instinct that did not care whose arm it was currently living in. Hips first, shoulder following, morning star cutting a flat, hard arc through the air exactly where the creature should have been.
It was not where the creature should have been.
The chain snapped taut at the top of the swing, the head far heavier than any racket I had ever held, and the handle tore itself straight out of my grip. I watched it go with the specific, helpless clarity of watching your own mistake happen in slow motion, morning star spinning end over end before it slammed into the wall five feet to my left and stuck there, quivering.
’That is not ideal.’
Somewhere above me, faint and muffled, I thought I heard someone laugh. I did not have the luxury of caring who.
The Feral Flesh landed, twitched, and jumped again.
I dodged.
It jumped again.
I dodged.
Again. Again. Again, each landing a little closer, each recovery a little faster, like it was learning nothing and correcting everything at the same time, pure animal persistence with none of the animal’s usual limits. My chest burned. My legs had started making small, private complaints I did not have time to listen to, and somewhere underneath the fear, quiet and stubborn, a different feeling had started creeping in.
Embarrassment.
Because this was supposed to be the weakest thing that existed. An untrained adult could kill one bare-handed. And here I was, weaponless, gasping, dodging a housecat-sized parasite in front of the entire first-year class, and some small, humiliated part of me was already composing the apology I was going to owe Arthur for whatever face I was currently making.
’Focus,’ I told myself, sharper this time. ’You can be embarrassed later. Later requires surviving now.’
’Weapon,’ I thought, sprinting sideways, boots skidding on stone that offered no traction at all. ’Get the weapon.’
I reached the wall and grabbed the handle, hauling backward with everything I had left in me. The morning star did not move. It sat embedded in the stone like it had grown there, like it had decided this was simply where it lived now, and I was still hauling on it, useless, both hands wrapped around cold iron, my palms already starting to sting, when I heard the wet scrape of something launching itself off the ground behind me.
I spun.
The Feral Flesh hung in the air less than a foot from my face, veins pulsing dark beneath translucent skin, no eyes, no mouth I could name, and somehow, impossibly, still looking directly at me. Time did the strange, elastic thing it apparently does right before something terrible, stretching one half-second into something that felt long enough to think an entire sentence in.
’Well,’ I thought, with a calm that had no business being there, ’I am so fucked.’
An iron fist came out of nowhere.
It crossed the space between us faster than my eyes could track, a blur of dark metal catching the low light for exactly one frame before it connected. The Feral Flesh did not scream. It did not have anything to scream with. It simply burst, a wet, final sound, flesh and dark fluid scattering across the stone in a wide, ugly arc, and then there was nothing left in the air where it had been at all.
I stood frozen, both hands still locked around the handle of a morning star that was still stuck in the wall, staring at the mess on the floor where a creature had been half a second earlier. My whole body was shaking now that there was nothing left to fight, a fine, useless tremor running from my knees up through my hands, and I let it happen because there was no one close enough yet to see it.
Silence rang out across the pit. Not the polite kind. The kind that comes right after everyone in a room realizes at the same moment how close something came to going very differently.
Slowly, carefully, I turned my head.
Eniphia stood exactly where she had been standing this entire time, at the rail, unmoved, unbothered, one arm still extended from the throw, her hand now curled loosely at her side as though she had simply flicked away an insect rather than launched something that had ended a creature’s life in a single motion. Her expression had not changed at all. Calm. Patient. The same expression she had worn through the entire lecture, like nothing that had just happened was worth updating it for.
"You froze," she said, not unkindly, into a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse in my ears. "For half a second. That is all it takes."
I opened my mouth. Nothing useful came out. My throat had apparently decided this was an excellent time to stop cooperating with the rest of me.
"Retrieve your weapon, Mister Rhys." She was already turning back toward the class, voice settling back into the same even, lecture-hall register from before, as though she had not just casually killed something with her bare hand from thirty feet away. "Next time, it may not be me standing at that rail."
That landed harder than the fight had.
I looked at the morning star. I looked at the wet, dark stain on the stone that used to be a creature actively trying to kill me a few seconds ago. I looked, finally, back up at Eniphia, already halfway through explaining something to the rest of the class like none of the last two minutes had happened at all, like she had not just reminded an entire room of fifteen-year-olds exactly how thin the line was between today’s lesson and someone’s funeral.
My hands were still shaking when I finally pried the morning star loose from the wall, legs unsteady beneath me, chest still heaving like I had run the length of the Academy grounds instead of standing in one small, terrible circle of stone.
’Note to self,’ I thought, dragging the weapon free at last. ’Never, under any circumstances, make that woman angry.’
I meant it as a joke. Some small, tired part of me was not entirely sure it was one.