The fog moved like breath. It wrapped and unwrapped around them, hiding things until they wanted to be seen. Somewhere inside it, the horned figure watched with the calm patience of something that had killed for boredom and art.
Arin didn't wait for it to decide whether to strike. He moved.
A fist—clean, practiced—shot toward the devil's jaw. He followed the rhythm Om Sai had hammered into him: punch, dodge, kick, dodge—flow, not fury. A roundhouse like a cavalry boot—Om Sai had called it the horse kick—and Arin sent it spinning through the fog.
The devil's composure never cracked. He read the rhythm, avoided the first blows with an elegance meant to humiliate, and returned a single counterstrike that drove a clean line of pain through Arin's ribs. Blood bubbled in Arin's mouth. The creature smiled, red-blooming on its lips.
"After I kill you," the devil said, voice like a cathedral clock wound tight, "the Mother will sing." He spat, blood flecking his teeth. "She will be pleased."
Arin tasted iron. Fury washed logic aside like a tide. Echoform flared—not the wild blaze of before, but a crackling, darker current trying to push out from a place Om Sai had warned him about. The mark at his neck burned. Flesh kissed bone, and then, impossibly, his wounds shivered and knit themselves closed. The torn skin sealed as if thread pulled from the air stitched him together.
The devil laughed, mocking and soft. "How quaint. You heal like a puppet breathing borrowed light."
Arin steadied. He forced the new power into a shape he could tolerate—Phase Two, raw and not mastered, held by a thin thread of will. The aura around him became a blade of sound and light.
"Interesting," the devil murmured, stepping forward as if sampling a new spice. "So the echo awakens."
Arin lunged, faster than he looked. He aimed a strike, and their fists met. Bone vibrated; shock rolled out from the point of contact. Arin's fist struck true and, for a breath, it felt like victory—the devil staggered. Then the creature stepped in, knee carving into Arin's lower abdomen with surgical cruelty. Blood again, a thin red ribbon across his lip; a small cut opened at his chin. Pain sang.
He tasted it and kept going.
Arin backed, pushed, spun—an elbow, a dodge, a step—but the devil's counter was a sudden knee to the face, launched with impossible calm. Arin braced, collected every ounce of Astra and Echoform he dared to touch, and hard as he could condense it, he drove his knee up into the devil's jaw.
The blow detonated.
A concussive bloom burst from the point of impact; air shredded; leaves were stripped from nearby branches. Dust and fog ripped outward like someone punched the world itself. Arin felt the force travel through his bones, felt his own body fracture from recoil—but the devil? Unmoved. Not a scratch marked the creature's flawless skin. It took the hit as if it were a caress.
The devil stepped aside with a smile that did not need to be cruel—it simply was. He advanced at impossible speed, then slid past Arin's opening. Arin spun to meet him, swinging a punch that the devil dodged, and the creature's elbow whispered across Arin's back with a force that rolled him across the ground toward the lake.
Vayushri was there, shaking as she sprinted beside him. Tears streaked tracks of light across her face. She crouched and lifted Arin's head, palms trembling as she let a single crystal drop—one hot, quick tear—fall onto his cheek.
The moisture hit him and the air sang.
Where the tear fell, skin knit. The wound closed as if a careful hand stitched him together. The world contracted to that tiny, miraculous moment: liquid life sewed flesh back into being.
Vayushri hugged him tight, sobbing into his shoulder. "Don't do this, Arin," she begged between ragged breaths. "We can run. Leave. There's no way you can beat that thing."
His mouth tasted of iron and defiance. He pushed her gently aside, hands steady even when his chest hammered. "Believe in me," he said. It came out rough, half plea, half command.
The devil's laugh threaded through the fog like a blade. "Ah. Romance before slaughter. How touching."
Vayushri's hands trembled on him. She pressed an offering of spirit-energy into him—an instinctual outpouring of life that trembled on the edge of destruction. Her palms glowed, veins of water-light weaving toward him. Arin's wounds shimmered; the healing stung like frost then balm.
"You'll kill yourself!" she cried. "Do you understand? If I give you my essence—if I pour this into you—you will take it and it will finish you. The Mother will take what is hers."
He looked at her with a kind of feral clarity. "Even so," he said. "I can't see you die."
She forced her hands to stop, shaking, the light withdrawing as if some law forbade her full sacrifice. For a second the fog seemed to press closer, hungry for that act.
He shoved her aside, roughly, and took her in the eyes. "Believe in me," he said again, softer this time. "I'm not your burden."
"Shut up, bastard," he snarled back at the fog-creature when the mocking voice rose again.
Perin crept forward, low in his throat, but Arin barked, "No! Stay!"
The little spirit froze obediently, ears flattened against his skull.
Then suddenly, from the back of the devil's head, long thin blades unfurled—shards, spinning like the thorns of some mechanical crown. Black steel whirled in a lazy, lethal orbit.
Arin's breath caught. He looked at Vayushri. "What is that?"
She rubbed her eyes, panic tightening her voice. "Every spirit can shape the atmosphere in small ways," she panted. "I… I can pull water from air, form it—shape it—because I am a water spirit. Others craft with mists and stone. He—" she swallowed, voice thin with fear, "he draws something else. These blades are made from atmospheric poison. They spin… they poison with touch. Don't get hit."
Arin clenched his jaw. "Go. To the river. Now."
Vayushri's face crumpled—fear mingled with fierce loyalty. "I'm not leaving you."
"You have to," he said, voice hard and tender. "I'll handle this. I promise I'll come back."
She shook her head, but he put a palm to her shoulder and shoved gently. Then his posture snapped into motion.
A black sword snapped into being, trailing smoke like a living shadow, and it lunged for his throat—an extension of the devil's will, following its hand as if it were connected by a string.
Arin barely brought his arm up in time to parry. The black edge scraped his forearm with a scream of metal. Pain lanced; heat flashed. He tasted blood again.
"What the hell—" he muttered.
The blade pulled back, obedient. The devil whispered something like a benediction to the fog: "You thought you could hide the echoes." It stepped forward, the spinning crown of black blades blurring like a halo of knives.
Arin steadied himself on knees burning with pain, chest open and ragged. The Echo inside him thrummed—hungry, hungry—and at his throat, another voice, a cold velvet, breathed:
"Take it."
It was Kalkin—his voice, velvet and cruel. Take and be remade.
Arin's fingers tightened. The wound on his forearm smoldered; a faint strand of his Echoform crept toward the blade's edge like a moth to flame.
He did not act yet. The world held its breath.
And then the devil moved like a shadow shifting, a strike timed to split his chest open.
Arin met it—not with raw power, not with wild rage—but with the bitter, keen learning Om Sai had hammered into his bones: flow, timing, economy. He rolled, he parried, he answered a strike with a counter that landed, not by miracle, but by practice.
Still, the devil's skin hardly flinched; the black blades tasted the air and found no purchase. Arin staggered, heart pounding, each breath a drumbeat in a hall of ghosts.
The fog thickened and the blades spun. Vayushri's sobs floated behind him. Perin's growl was a low drum.
The black sword rose again—this time moving with a thought. It was not a thing of muscle, but of idea and will. It followed the devil's palm as if his hand controlled the wind itself.
Arin braced. He would meet the blade, or die trying.
A single line of moonlight struck the sword—silver on black—and the chapter closed on that flash: sword humming, blade dripping with the dark air between worlds, and Arin's eyes burning with a promise that was equal parts prayer and threat.