Sophia charged at him at blinding speed, her arm snapping forward with lethal precision, aimed straight for his face.
Axiros had bought himself just enough time.
'Cognition Acceleration.'
The technique ignited somewhere behind his eyes.
The world slowed.
Not as a figure of speech. Not as the kind of thing people said when they meant their senses sharpened. Actually, physically slowed — the violent rush of motion around him dragging down into something thick and almost still. The air seemed to solidify. Dust hung suspended in the dim light like tiny frozen stars. The tremor running through the hallway walls crept forward one crawling inch at a time. Even the sound of Sophia's movement had stretched into something low and distorted, barely recognizable as noise anymore.
Her strike — what would have caved his skull in an instant — was now creeping toward him through the thickened air.
Slow.
Readable.
Almost manageable.
It felt like time itself had been grabbed by the collar and held in place.
But the cost hit him immediately.
A sharp pressure drove into both temples at once. His thoughts started burning, the way paper burns when you hold it too close to a flame — fast, hungry, consuming itself. The technique didn't actually slow the world down. It forced his brain to process reality tens of thousands of times faster than it was ever built to handle. Every fraction of a second cost him something he couldn't afford to keep spending.
His vision shook at the edges.
'Ten thousand times,' he clocked instinctively. 'This is the lowest output I can run it at. And it's already tearing through me.'
The sound of his own heartbeat was enormous now, filling the stretched silence like thunder in a sealed room. Blood vessels in his eyes strained against the pressure.
He didn't have long.
He didn't need long.
Because for the first time since she'd moved —
Sophia was too slow.
'If I meet this head-on the sword shatters. Two blocks, maybe. That's the ceiling. I have to end this before I hit it.'
The next realization landed flat and cold.
'Two milliseconds. That's what I have.'
He raised the blade anyway.
Not because he was confident. Because there was nothing else.
Even inside the accelerated state, his own body felt like it was moving through hardened resin — his mind racing impossibly fast while his limbs lagged behind, fighting him for every inch. He made micro-adjustments to the angle, correcting and re-correcting until the timing lined up with Sophia's descending strike.
Then —
Clang.
Heavy, metallic, the sound ringing through the corridor like something being tested past its limit.
The sword didn't break.
But it made clear that it was thinking about it.
Hairline fractures shot along the blade the moment the impact landed, thin cracks spreading like a spider's web beneath the surface. The force travelled up through the metal, through his hands, into his wrists and arms and somewhere deeper — a rattling, bone-deep impact that nearly took his grip entirely.
Sophia's eyes went wide.
The smug amusement she'd carried since stepping into the hallway was gone. Just — gone, replaced by something rawer and less controlled.
'He blocked it. That was barely a fraction of my strength and he blocked it. How is an unawakened mortal doing this?'
Her thoughts caught for just a moment. A small stutter, barely anything at all.
Axiros had been waiting for exactly that.
'Now.'
'I don't know if this kills her,' he thought, weight already shifting. 'I don't know what she's carrying — regeneration, substitution, something I haven't seen yet. But if this lands it buys me time. Time is enough. Time is all I need.'
Through the hyper-sharpened perception, he could see the tiny tightening along her jaw. The microscopic pull of muscle as her body started to recover from the surprise and prepare its next move.
That gap — that hairline sliver of a gap — was his opening.
He forced his body to move.
'The First Form…'
A tremor moved through the cracked blade.
'…of the Unorigin Severance Path —'
The air around the sword changed. Not dramatically — no surge of light, no visible energy. Something quieter and considerably worse. The space immediately around the blade seemed to lose its footing, like it had briefly forgotten what it was supposed to be doing there.
'The Severing of the Intangible.'
A low hum came off the metal. Wrong-sounding. Too deep for the size of the weapon.
Then the power moved through him.
Muscles tore. Actual tearing — fibres separating under load they were never designed to carry. His nerves sent up a simultaneous chorus of objections, every one of them correct. This technique wasn't built for a body like this. It wasn't built for any body. It was an authority meant to be pressed against the fabric of reality itself, not channelled through the arms of a malnourished child in a crumbling inn.
Axiros used it anyway.
---
Elsewhere in the inn, steel rang against steel.
"How many of them are there?" Kael muttered, ducking under a swing that came in wide and angry. "They're like wasps nesting in the walls."
The man he'd said it about didn't appreciate the comparison. His expression said so clearly.
Gary put down another opponent with a clean, unhurried motion nearby and didn't break stride. "Then we exterminate them," he said. "That's why we're here. The higher-ups watch this city rot and call it strategy. If we don't move, nobody will."
Another body hit the floor.
He barely registered it — until something else snagged his attention entirely.
His head came up. His senses pushed outward, stretching toward the deeper parts of the building, and what he found there stopped him cold.
The boy.
The same frail child they'd been following through the streets.
He was engaged with something at the Aeon Pulse Realm. Gary could feel the resonance from here — not close, but unmistakable. The kind of presence that even seasoned fighters gave a wide berth.
And the boy was still alive.
Still fighting.
'Impossible,' Gary thought, running through it quickly and finding no clean explanation. 'There's no awakened energy coming off him. None at all. He's holding that thing off through technique alone? Through pure control?'
That shouldn't have been survivable. By any reasonable measure it should have been over already.
Yet the child was still there. Still in it. Already damaged beyond what Gary would've expected him to be standing through, but standing nonetheless.
Something lunged at him from behind before he could think further about it.
"Die —!"
Gary stepped aside. One motion. The man's head met the floor.
He looked toward the deeper corridor and his jaw set.
"We move now," he said. "The kid's running out of time."
---
Back in the hallway —
The strike landed.
It didn't cut the way a blade cuts. There was no resistance to work through, no point at which steel met defense and had to push past it. Whatever Sophia had built around herself — spiritual, physical, the layered reinforcement of something that had been awakened and refined — the blade passed through all of it as though it had simply declined to acknowledge that any of it was there.
A thin line opened across her throat.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then it did.
The wound spread open, and with it came something that had nothing to do with physical damage. Something beneath the surface of it, something less visible and far more significant. It hadn't just cut flesh. It had cut through something that flesh was only the outermost layer of.
Sophia didn't move.
Her eyes had gone wide — not with anger, not with the particular outrage of someone interrupted mid-monologue. This was something older than that. Fear that came from a level below thought, from whatever part of a person recognizes before the mind catches up that something has gone genuinely, irreversibly wrong.
Then the voice came.
It didn't echo. It didn't announce itself. It was simply present in her mind the way a memory is present — as though it had always been there and had only now chosen to speak.
[You have used your remaining gift.]
No judgment in it. No comfort either. Just the flat, enormous weight of a fact being stated.
[The final chance has been taken.]
At the base of her neck, the tattoo she had carried for years began to come apart. Not fading — fracturing, like something had been carved into the surface of reality itself and was now being carefully removed piece by piece. The lines broke apart into faint, drifting motes and then were simply gone, leaving behind unmarked skin as though they had never existed at all.
But she knew exactly what it meant.
The mark had never been decorative. It was a tether — a silent, binding contract with the Old One she served. Through it she had been watched and, when it truly mattered, protected.
Not in the way armor protects. It didn't absorb damage or turn aside blades. What it did was subtler and far more unsettling: in moments of unavoidable death, it displaced the consequence. Moved the result of the damage away from her and onto the entity she was bound to.
Not healing. Not resistance.
Substitution.
Her throat was already closing — flesh rejoining at a rate that had nothing natural about it, blood reversing, the wound pulling itself shut as though reality had reconsidered permitting it to exist. Her body recovered. Her mind was somewhere else entirely.
That protection was gone.
Spent here. In this hallway. Against a child who should not have been able to touch her.
It had been a last resort by design — something to be held in reserve for a genuine threat, for the kind of enemy that could actually end her. She had carried it for years with the quiet certainty that she'd know when the moment came.
She hadn't even seen this one coming.
---
Axiros noticed all of it.
Not just the regeneration — that alone wouldn't have surprised him. What he was watching was the mechanism behind it. The subtle wrongness in how cause and effect had been rerouted, the particular way the injury hadn't been repaired so much as redirected somewhere else entirely. He'd seen that kind of construct before, in other lives, under different names.
'Failsafe,' he thought. 'One-time transference. Something behind her took the hit. I knew something felt off about her.'
The Cognition Acceleration was collapsing now, the stretched seconds snapping back toward normal pace, and with it came a wave of exhaustion that hit him like a physical thing. The muscles in his arms were actively tearing — he could feel it, that particular deep wrongness of tissue pushed past the point of complaint and into actual damage. This body had never been built to channel what he'd just forced through it.
His strength was draining in real time.
He would not be doing that again. Not today. Probably not for a while.
Axiros tightened his grip on the cracked sword — it felt heavier now, or maybe his hands just had less left in them — and steadied his breathing.
'I can't finish this here. Not in this state.'
He looked at Sophia.
She was physically recovered. But mentally she was somewhere else, still processing the loss of the mark, the reality of what it meant that the thing she'd always relied on to keep her alive had just been spent against a child she'd expected to take five minutes.
That fear — the specific fear of someone who just lost the thing that made them certain they wouldn't die — was written plainly across her face if you knew what you were looking at.
And Axiros had been reading faces for longer than this world had existed.
'She's rattled,' he thought. 'Genuinely rattled. That makes her dangerous and stupid at the same time. I move now while she's still trying to recalibrate.'
He shifted his stance, quietly, already mapping the angles.
This wasn't a victory. He had no illusions about that.
It was an exit.
And right now, an exit was everything.
Author's note- Thats it for today guys, see ya.