The silence lasted exactly as long as it took the Captain to decide it was over. "Destroy him."
Then everything moved at once.
Not the Captain though. Everything but the captain resumed.
The vice captains came first, and they came the way they had clearly always come in fights that mattered: together, and without the half-second of hesitation that most fighters needed to commit.
The one on the left—the attacker—closed the distance in a single explosive burst, covering the space between them with a speed that forced Damien to move before he had finished reading the approach.
Its weapon came in on a downward diagonal, dense with compressed demonic essence, the strike carrying the weight of something that had practiced this exact motion until the practice was indistinguishable from instinct.
Damien moved sideways.
The blade carved through the space where he had been and hit the ground hard enough to crack it, the shockwave of impact rippling outward underfoot.
