The glade erupted.
The older swordsman barked a command, and the forest spat death. Arrows hissed from the shadows. Arrion moved, not as a man, but as a storm-front of leather, iron, and vengeance. He dropped behind his rocky perch as two shafts thudded into the stone where he'd stood. The purple-wood bow sang its own deadly song in reply.
*Thrum. Thwack.*
A black-clad archer, drawing a second arrow from behind a thin birch, crumpled, the oak shaft buried in his throat.
Arrion was already moving, a shadow flowing along the ridge. He popped up, drew, released. *Thrum. Thwack.* A second man, rushing forward with a hand-axe, took the arrow in the meat of his thigh and went down screaming. Arrion ducked a volley of three arrows, the fletching whispering past his ear. He returned fire. *Thrum. Thwack.* The shot took a swordsman high in the chest, punching through leather and dropping him like a sack.
But they were closing. He was one, and they were many, and they were professionals. An arrow, shot from an angle he couldn't avoid, slammed into the black iron plate over his left pectoral with a deafening *CLANG*. The impact was a mule's kick, stealing his breath and spinning him half-around. A second arrow, a heartbeat later, hit the same general area, but higher, skidding off the curved plate with a shriek of metal and burying itself in a tree behind him. Pain bloomed, hot and fierce—cracked ribs, not a puncture. The armor, his father's armor, had held.
He abandoned the high ground. They were flanking him. He leapt from the outcrop, landing in a roll that jarred his injured chest, coming up with an axe in each hand.
Two men were there, waiting. One swung a broadsword in a overhead chop meant to split him to the navel. Arrion met it not with a block, but with a vicious upward sweep of his felling axe. The force of the blow, driven by his massive shoulders, knocked the sword wide. Before the man could recover, Arrion's other hand moved. The lighter hand-axe flashed in a short, brutal arc. It bit deep into the man's neck, just above his collarbone, with a wet, chopping sound. The man's eyes went wide, and he fell, a fountain of dark blood arcing onto the moss.
The second attacker, armed with a spear, lunged. Arrion pivoted on the ball of his foot, the spear-tip grazing the leather over his ribs. He trapped the shaft under his arm, yanking the man forward. The felling axe came down in a short, savage motion, shearing through the man's forearm. As he screamed, Arrion reversed his grip on the hand-axe and buried it in the side of his head. The body dropped, twitching, beside the first.
The clearing was a chaos of shouts and death. Five of the twelve were down. But the core—the older man, the younger one with the ring, and four others—were tightening the noose.
Then, the older man stepped forward. He had not drawn his greatsword until now. He did so slowly, the long, plain blade whispering from its sheath. He held up a hand, and his men, disciplined, halted.
His flinty eyes scanned Arrion, covered in blood not his own, axes dripping, chest heaving against the constricting pain of his injuries. They lingered on Arrion's stance, on the way he held his axes—one high, one low, feet planted for explosive power, yet ready to flow.
"The Fisherman's Gate," the old man said, his gravel voice carrying a strange note of recognition. "Modified for axes, not a sword. But the footwork… the balance of threat and defense…" He took a step closer, his gaze piercing. "Ser Wilham. The one-eyed hawk. He was my teacher. I was his first true disciple, long before he lost his eye."
Arrion's blood ran cold. This man knew the source of his skill. Knew its rhythms, its secrets.
The old man gave a slow, almost respectful nod. "You are better than I was. At your age. The raw power… the instinct. He would have hated admitting it, but he'd have seen it." He raised the greatsword to a high guard, two-handed. The plain steel began to hum, then to glow with a sickly, phosphorescent green light, like corrupted moss. The air crackled with ozone and a smell like opened graves. "But he never taught you this."
The old man's body seemed to swell with borrowed power. He didn't just swing the sword; he unleashed it. The glowing blade cut through the air not in an arc, but in a horizontal plane of annihilating energy.
It didn't just aim for Arrion.
It cut through the ancient standing stone beside him, shearing the monolith in two with a deafening crack of sundered rock. It sliced through the trunk of a massive oak behind Arrion as if it were parchment, the tree groaning as it began its slow topple. The wave of force, the sheer concussive blast of the magical strike, hit Arrion like a landslide.
There was no blocking it. No dodging. The world became sound, fury, and blinding green light. The impact lifted him off his feet, hurling him backward off the rocky shelf. He crashed through brittle branches, the world a tumbling cacophony of snapping wood and his own grunt of agony, before slamming into the soft, rotten loam of the forest floor at the base of the outcrop.
Stars exploded behind his eyes. Every breath was a knife in his chest. His axes were gone, lost in the fall. *Nightshade* was still at his hip, but his body felt broken, his spirit stunned. He lay in the crushing dark, the groans of the falling tree and the slow drip of stone fragments the only sounds above the ringing in his ears.
From above, he heard the younger man's voice, crisp and satisfied. "Finish it."
Boots began to descend the slope toward him.