Ash and the King traded one glance.
The whole cave slowed around it.
Ash's small hands tightened on the black behemoth of his sword. The blade hung in the blue light like a door left open on something worse.
Then the world broke.
Thunder rolled through the stone in endless drumbeats. Sparks burst across the cavern like fireworks, each one lighting the crystals from inside, and everything shook.
---
The King opened its hand.
Long black razors slid out of the fingers, each one sharp enough to part the air before it touched anything. It swung. The wind shrieked in pain, a sound like something slowly dying.
Steel met claw.
Sword and claw played the cavern like a drum, heavy and fast and without mercy, and every strike threw another wave of sound against the walls.
Ash went up the stone. The King followed him. Wall, ceiling, floor. They stopped meaning anything. The two of them moved through the room as though it had never had a down.
Up close, they were only a blur. A black shape. A smaller black shape. Light breaking between them.
But one truth could be seen through it.
The King was faster.
The King was stronger.
The King was the predator.
Ash gave ground with every exchange. Not much. A step. A hand's width. But always back.
---
A slash came.
Powerful.
Followed by a metallic screech that tore across the cave and made the crystals ring.
Ash was inside it before he knew.
The cut passed through the armor like a knife through butter. He flew. The wall met his back and cracked around him, and he hung there for half a second before gravity remembered him.
Three scars opened across his back.
Visible through the torn metal.
Blood ran down in thin dark lines.
His body shook, slow and small, the way a child shakes when the cold finally gets in.
His eyes stayed on the King.
---
The King's hand turned.
Twisted.
An unnatural angle, bone going where bone should not go.
The system's metallic voice cracked through the cave.
*"Skill activated. Abominable Mutation."*
Blades slid out along the arm, long and black, each one pushing out of the last. They stretched and kept stretching until the arm no longer looked like an arm. It looked like a whip.
The air in the room stretched with it.
Then a black blur, like snakes, appeared everywhere at once.
It cut a path of destruction across the cavern. Stone opened in clean lines. Crystals fell in halves. Every cut was neat, almost polite, and every one of them ran toward Ash.
He raised his sword.
Moved.
Fast.
The first line went past his shoulder. The second opened the floor where his foot had been. The third he met with the flat of his blade, and the shock of it went up his arms into his teeth.
Distance meant nothing to him now.
It meant nothing to the King either.