The robe and the pale mask were a different cut, but it didn't matter. I'd seen that uniform once before, and I remembered every second of it.
A mask leaning over me in the dark, asking me to submit to the will of someone called mother.
That one had worn a scorpion's face. This one wore nothing at all, a blank white oval with two eye slits. Same tailor.
The two men came in on the same half-second lag as the hosts in the woods, which I registered without being able to do anything useful about it.
Nox put the first one down before his swing arrived, and Lisa's skeletal arms rising from the pavement held the second still long enough for Nox to lay him out beside the first.
Then the robed man stopped testing us.
He raised one hand. The air around his palm folded in on itself, black and dense, hardening into constructs.
A fan of black shards caught Nox mid-turn before anyone could react.
"I'm up," Nox said through his teeth. He wasn't up at all.
Lisa pressed a hand to Nox's wound and froze.
"This isn't normal mana," she said. "It's still moving in there. Mana's supposed to settle. This doesn't."
She is right.
That is...
Azazel went quiet for a long moment.
I know this. I have felt it before, and I cannot place where.
[ ...Oh. That's Aether. ]
[ The residue I've been asking you to absorb. Same thing. I didn't expect to find it shaped into a weapon and thrown at anybody. That's the part making me nervous. ]
...Is what I have been thinking myself.
Azazel's voice had gone carefully flat.
I did not expect it to be able to do this either.
The robed man lowered his hands.
"You feel it," he said, turning toward Lisa. "Good. Most people don't live long enough to notice the difference. It's a purer thing than what you throw around in the dirt."
"It's violent," Lisa said.
"Purity often is."
He raised his hand again, aiming directly at Lisa, crouched over Nox and unable to move in time.
I stepped in and took the next construct on the blade. The impact drove through the guard like it wasn't there, numbing my arm from the shoulder down.
I dropped to one knee. The robed man watched me, in no hurry at all, and began shaping the next attack.
I drew Nadir and went in the only way I knew. Old paladin footwork. A clean, straight line with the blade held high.
He read it instantly.
He stepped inside the swing instead of backing away. My cut went wide, and he was past my guard before I finished the motion.
Every angle I owned had been drilled for a shield-line with two other paladins standing in it, and there was nobody beside me here.
A heavy palm drove into my chest, throwing me backward onto the tarmac.
Your weapon does not want to move like that. You are swinging a tide as though someone still issued it to you.
"Little busy," I muttered, getting back up.
You cannot win this the way you are fighting it.
I stayed on one knee, my numb arm hanging, and let the words land.
I have watched you this entire fight. You keep reaching for the man you used to be, and he cannot help you here. He never learned this blade. He never learned this mana. Reaching for him is only going to get you killed slower than it needs to.
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"Then what do I reach for?" I asked.
You do not have to throw him away to move past him. That is the part you keep getting wrong.
You have thrown Eclipse ten thousand times in a room where the body did as it was told. You are now in a body that argues, against a man who is trying to kill you, and you have gone straight back to the paladin because he is the one who knows this feeling.
I looked down at my hand, still numb around the grip.
You spent half a lifetime learning to read an opponent and commit fully to a line once you had chosen it. To put yourself between danger and the person behind you without stopping to think.
Azazel's voice sharpened.
None of that was ever about the blade itself. That was you. Keep all of it. Just stop fighting with a line at his shoulder.
The form is already in your hands. It has been for three years. Stop trying to make it a shield and let it be what I built it to be.
The robed man finished shaping the next construct, wide and low to the ground.
"Then show me the difference," I said. "Fast."
Lower your stance. Loosen your wrist. The Umbra in it wants to pull, not push. Let it pull, and bring everything else you know along with it.
Cut upward from underneath instead of down. You spent a life learning to fight like the light, committed and total. Be that committed. Just be it from the dark instead.
I stopped fighting my own instincts and let them settle where they wanted to.
Something shifted up my arm. The straight, committed line didn't disappear. It bent, lower and looser, with the same total commitment behind it.
Nadir sat in my grip the way it had been trying to sit since he handed it to me. The Umbra caught and held.
My next strike didn't come down like a knight's blow. It hooked upward from underneath, ten thousand repetitions in a white room arriving with it.
A crescent came off the edge, black through the middle and violet along the thin edges, thrown outward past the steel.
The blade opened the robed man across his unguarded side, and the crescent opened the wall behind him.
Black blood sprayed across the tarmac. He staggered, his mask tilting, his footing no longer certain.
"That's new," I said.
I didn't give him room to adjust.
Every cut arrived from an angle the old style would never have used, landing with the full weight I'd spent a lifetime learning to put behind a blade.
He raised a wide construct to block the next strike, and Nadir split it clean down the middle.
The mage gave ground for the first time.
His constructs still came, but slower, and I was past two of them before they finished shaping. He tried the shard-spray again, but I read the wind-up and stepped clear before it landed.
"You're not supposed to be able to do that," he said. Something in his voice had lost its certainty.
"I've been able to do it for three years. Tonight it agreed with me."
There. That is not the paladin and it is not me either. That is the form going through a man who kept everything he was on the way in.
He is beaten. You can feel it. Finish it.
The robed man raised a hand, a shield construct forming in front of him in desperation.
I read the gap in the shield the way I'd read a gap in any guard, twenty years of instinct pointing where it needed to, and put the blade through it.
"Shadow Sword, First Form: Eclipse."
The cut opened him from hip to shoulder. He swayed, one hand pressed to the wound, as the shield construct dissolved around him.
I stepped in and finished it with a second, plain cut before he could reform anything.
He went down and didn't move again.
For a second, nobody spoke.
Two unconscious men lay on the pavement beside the dead mage. We stood in the orange streetlight, barely staying on our feet.
Lisa got to Nox first, checking his wound. He waved her off twice before she ignored him and kept working.
"You're not up," she said. "You said that twice already and it wasn't true either time."
"It's marginally more true now."
"Sit down before I make it true for you."
He sat down.
I looked at my arm. Feeling was coming back in slow, unpleasant waves, pins and needles from the shoulder down. Under the sleeve, the skin was one long bruise.
[ Well fought. All three of you. That was not a cheap one. ]
[ Same stuff as before, concentrated tighter from being actively shaped. Residue's fresh and it's dense. This is worth taking. Noah, your hand, if you would. ]
The household spirit has excellent timing. Go on. It has earned the ask, this once.
I crouched by the body and pressed my palm to the wound. Cold ran up my arm immediately, and the black mana bleeding from it stopped scattering into the air, pooling upward into my skin instead.
[ Aether residue integration complete. Host dark mana capacity expanded by seven percent. ]
[ Agility increased by two points. ]
[ Denser deposit than the last one. Good work finding it. ]
Seven percent, and two points in Agility.
Better. Still nowhere near enough for what I am, but better.
"How much would be enough?" I asked under my breath.
I do not know. Ask me again when the bar means something.
I stood back up.
"Okay," Nox said, one hand pressed to his side as Lisa finished with the bandage. "Two questions. What was that mana? And what was that thing you yelled?"
"I don't know the first one," I said. "Not for lack of trying to figure it out."
I know enough to be afraid of what I just watched. That is Aether, weaponized, out of a masked robe twice now. Whatever they are doing to make it hold a shape like that, I would very much like to know where they keep it.
"And the yell," Nox pressed.
"Shadow Sword," I said. "First form. Eclipse."
"You called it like you'd drilled it a thousand times," Lisa said, looking up from the bandage.
"I have."
That got her full attention. "Then why is tonight the first time any of us has seen it?"
"Because knowing a thing and being able to do it are different," I said, flexing my sore arm. "I've had that form for three years and this is the first time it's come out of my hands the shape it's supposed to be."
She looked at me a moment longer, then went back to packing her kit without another word.
We got Nox upright between us. He slung his good arm over Lisa's shoulders, and we started walking the last two streets home.
"You're steadier than you were an hour ago," Lisa noted from Nox's other side.
"I know."
"Are we discussing it?"
"Not tonight."
"Noted," she said.