One moment Nathan was standing. The next he simply wasn't.
No stumble, no warning lean — his body locked up as though something had seized every muscle at once, and then he went down hard, the sound of it flat and final against the floor. Kyomei clattered from his grip. The room held its breath.
Every eye in the place stared.
The fight had been extraordinary — violent and escalating and genuinely difficult to look away from — and then in the space of a single heartbeat it was over, replaced by something that felt worse than any fight. Nathan lay motionless, chest barely moving, face the color of old ash.
Yukihime moved before anyone else had even processed what had happened.
She was beside him in an instant, the distance between them simply ceasing to exist, and she dropped to her knees on the floor and pulled him into her arms with a sound that wasn't quite a word — something raw and unformed that tore out of her before she could stop it.
