Balisarda Sumernor’s arm lifted, a controlled, almost casual motion. In its wake, the air alongside him solidified into a line of silent consequence. A sword appeared in his left hand, its arrival marked by a sudden, localised pressure in the room, as if the space itself had drawn a sharp, disciplined breath.

  ?

  The weapon was a study in elegant severity. A long, narrow blade of unadorned steel held twin edges that converged with sterile precision at a needle-like point. It caught the fractured light of the chamber not with a flash, but with a cold, continuous gleam. The guard was a dark, subtle curve, the hilt wrapped in tight, dark cord, and the pommel a simple, weighted conclusion. It looked, in every traditional sense, like a master’s sword.

  ?

  “It looks normal,” The thought sliced through the pain-fog in Jabari’s mind. “Which means it is anything but.”

  ?

  Balisarda’s arm extended, pushing the sword’s point toward Jabari with the detached focus of a surgeon presenting a scalpel.

  ?

  From the flawless tip, a dozen filaments erupted. They were not light, nor magic in any visible sense, but tangible lines of force, visible only as slight distortions in the air, like heat haze made solid. They crossed the distance between king and commander in a silent, unavoidable rush. The air they displaced washed over Jabari first, a dry, metallic tang coating his tongue and the back of his throat.

  ?

  Then they struck, wrapping around his torso with a force that drove the stale air from his lungs in a hard gasp. The pressure was immense, not biting, but constricting, a relentless, squeezing cage that pinned his arms to his sides. The material of his tailored jacket compressed, the brass buttons digging into his sternum. He could feel the individual strands, not as rope, but as bands of solid pressure, cold as forged iron against his skin through the layers of wool and cotton.

  ?

  “Strings?” Jabari gritted out the word, strained against the compression of his diaphragm.

  ?

  Balisarda offered no reply. His wrist pivoted upwards, the sword lifting in a clean arc. The filaments responded instantly, yanking Jabari from his feet. The sensation was of the floor vanishing, not falling, but being revoked. He was aloft, suspended by the unyielding bands across his chest and stomach.

  ?

  Then Balisarda's wrist began to turn, slow at first, then with a steady, rhythmic certainty.

  ?

  The world dissolved into a violent, revolving axis. Jabari became a weight on the end of a terrible pendulum. The room became a blur of streaked gold, shattered stone, and fragmented shadow. He saw the gem-veined wall rush toward his face, felt the brutal, shuddering impact through his skull and spine, a dense, bone-deep vibration that rattled his teeth and filled his mouth with the taste of stone dust and old mortar. The ornate frame of a shattered tapestry met him next, splintering wood, adding a sour, dry scent to the air before he was whipped away.

  ?

  Again and again, the collisions came. A carved stone bench halted his momentum with a deep, shuddering protest of weight meeting an immovable object, the impact of a cold, massive jolt that travelled through his hips and shoulders. A sheared metal brazier spun past his vision before his back found it, the clash a muted, gong-like ring that vibrated in his ribs. Each impact was a burst of pressure and soundless force, a concussive kiss against his unbreakable skin that left only shockwaves of sensation. The bruising thud, the wrenching twist, the dizzying disorientation.

  ?

  Through the dizzying whirl, one sensation remained constant: the searing, icy pressure of the strands themselves. They were the tether, the source of the violence, and his only point of orientation. As his body swung downward in the wide, punishing arc, his hands, scraped and throbbing from a night of impacts, found them. The strands felt alien, not like fibre, but like solidified tension, humming with a low, sub-audible frequency that buzzed against his palms.

  ?

  He gripped, his fingers clamping with a desperation forged from pure will. As his body began its upward whip again, he pulled, not with just his arms, but with the entire descent of his weight, hauling downward against the pivot point of Balisarda’s sword.

  ?

  The physics shifted. The relentless circular flight faltered. The filaments, for an instant, went slack, their trajectory bending to his monumental, opposing force. His boots, polished leather now scarred white by stone, slammed into the marble floor. The impact travelled up his legs, a solid, grounding shock after the nauseating flight.

  ?

  He stood, knees bent, boots planted wide, his hands still locked on the cold, humming strings. The chamber swung slowly back into focus around him, a room of wreckage and blurred edges settling into sharp, hard lines once more.

  ?

  The tension in the strings reversed. A relentless, magnetic pull replaced the whirling chaos, yanking Jabari forward off his hard-won footing. He leaned back immediately, every muscle from his calves to his neck locking into a rigid, backward strain. The fibres of his tailored jacket pulled taut across his shoulders. A low, grinding groan vibrated up from the floor as the polished marble beneath his boots refused to yield the traction he demanded.

  It was the stone that gave way first.

  ?

  With a sharp, granular crunch, the edges of his bootheels bit into the marble, not skidding, but sinking. Hairline fractures erupted around them, spiderwebbing through the polished surface with a sound like stepping on a frozen lake. Chips of white and gold-veined stone popped loose, their dry, chalky scent mixing with the ozone still hanging in the air. He was a statue being dragged from its plinth, his body angled back, heels ploughing twin, crumbling trenches through the floor as the inexorable pull of the sword drew him, inch by grinding inch, toward the king.

  ?

  A raw, guttural sound was torn from his throat, less a scream than the audible strain of his entire being resisting annihilation.

  ?

  Balisarda did not wait for the distance to close. He became a streak of dark green and bronze, closing the gap himself. In his right hand, the profane mimicry of a familiar face. The metallic grey head of the Ultimate Bloodshed User fused to a blade lanced forward in a silent, deadly thrust aimed at the centre of Jabari’s face.

  ?

  Jabari moved. Still pulled forward, still anchored by the trenches at his feet, he dropped his body low, a sudden descent that made the constricting strings bite deeper into his torso. The grotesque sword passed over his right shoulder, so close he felt the displaced air, cold and smelling of forged memory, brush his cheek.

  ?

  It met, instead, the taut, humming strands wrapped around his chest.

  ?

  There was a sensation of sudden, crystalline release, a clean, sharp severance that was felt more than heard, a silent snap that vibrated through his ribs and into his teeth. The immense, constricting pressure around his torso vanished instantly, replaced by a rush of cold air against his damp shirt. The severed strings, their energy spent, dissolved into mere wisps of fading, metallic-tasting dust.

  ?

  From his low lunge, Jabari drove upward, the power uncoiling from his bent leg, his fist a piston aimed for the king’s jaw.

  ?

  Balisarda flowed backward, the motion as smooth as retreating shadow, evading the blow with a margin so slight it felt like contempt. He regarded Jabari, who now stood fully, on the ruined floor around his boots. Balisarda’s glacial eyes swept over him, the torn, dirtied uniform, the dust matted in his short-cropped hair and beard, the sheer, unabated solidity of him.

  ?

  “You have absorbed impacts that would pulp a war engine,” Balisarda observed, his voice a clinical murmur in the wrecked silence. “Your skin remains unmarked. Your bones refuse to break. You do not bleed.” He tilted his head, a scholar confronted with an intriguing anomaly. “A human being is a fragile composition of water and brittle calcium. You are not. What, then, is your race?”

  ?

  “I am a human being,” Jabari stated, the words a flat, bedrock truth. There was no argument in it, only a fact.

  ?

  And he moved.

  ?

  The crumbling floor exploded beneath him as he pushed off, not with a roar, but with a focused expulsion of breath. He crossed the shattered space, his right fist pulling back through the air thick with dust and spent power, and drove it forward, a direct, world-simplifying answer to the king’s question.

  ?

  The sound was a sharp, dry fracture in the air, like the breaking of a giant’s bone.

  ?

  Balisarda Sumernor’s hands opened. The string sword and the mimicked blade fell from his grasp, their descent silent before they vanished into motes of dissipating light, leaving only a faint, chemical scent. He brought his right hand up, index and middle finger extended as one. He did not snap them together with force, but simply allowed them to meet, a precise, conclusive touch.

  ?

  From the point where his fingertips connected, reality splintered. A sword carved itself into existence within his grip. Its blade was the absolute negation of light, a narrow strip of perfected void that seemed to swallow the very glow from the room. It did not reflect. It was absorbed. Along its edge, a suggestion of distortion wavered, like heat haze over a desert, but cold, and shot through with faint, crawling tendrils of deepest obsidian that pulsed like dormant embers.

  ?

  He did not telegraph the strike. His arm, sheathed in bronze scale and dark leather, simply drew back to his side and then swept forward in a flat, ruthless arc aimed to bisect Jabari at the waist. The movement was terrifying in its economy, its silence.

  ?

  The black edge met the space Jabari occupied.

  ?

  The impact was not a sound, but a sudden, profound pressure, a collapse of atmosphere. Then, the world ignited.

  ?

  Where the sword passed, a vertical rift of black fire erupted into being. It was not a spreading blaze, but a sheer, towering wall of conflagration, instant and absolute. The flames were the colour of a starless midnight, yet they cast no true light, only a sick, inverse illumination that deepened the shadows around them and leached the colour from the air. They roared with a sound like a mountain being slowly torn in half, a deep, grinding fury that vibrated in the jaw and the hollow of the chest. The heat was not the dry kiss of a normal fire, but an invasive, bitter cold that seared the lungs and stole the moisture from the eyes, followed by a wave of palpable, annihilating energy that scorched the stone at its base a glossy, glassy black.

  ?

  Jabari was inside it.

  ?

  The black fire enveloped him entirely. His world became a vortex of silent, screaming, dark, biting, unnatural cold that burned. His short-cropped hair did not singe; it grew brittle. The tailored wool of his jacket did not catch flame; it stiffened and cracked, the brass buttons frosted over with a crystalline, sooty residue. His skin, unbroken, transmitted the full, horrifying sensation directly to his nerves, a sensation of being scoured from the outside and frozen from within simultaneously. It was a pain beyond simple burning, a violation of the very concept of heat.

  ?

  A scream was torn from him. It was a raw, ragged sound, stripped of language, born from the primal core where the body protests its own destruction. It echoed against the roaring silence of the flames, a human sound against an inhuman force.

  ?

  The vertical column of black fire persisted for a long, terrible moment, churning like a captured storm, before it imploded upon itself with a final, breath-stealing rush of vacuum, leaving behind a standing column of swirling, bitter smoke and the smell of ozone, chilled metal, and something eerily organic, like extinguished life.

  ?

  Jabari stood within the fading plume, wreathed in tendrils of dark smoke. His body trembled with a fine, constant vibration. His clothes were smoked and etched with strange, fractal patterns of frost and ash. His eyes, wide and streaming from the abrasive cold, were fixed on Balisarda through the haze.

  ?

  The king observed him, the Black Flame Sword held loosely, its void-like blade a quiet threat.

  ?

  "You are a fraud," Balisarda said, his voice calm, clear, and piercing as ice water. It carried over the ringing aftermath, each word a carefully placed stone. "You are no leader. You lead men to their deaths. You should never have waged a war on me."

  ?

  He spoke not with a shout, but with a devastating, conversational certainty, the words designed to seep through the ears and find the foundations of a man's purpose, to chill them more deeply than any phantom flame.

  ?

  From within the column of swirling, bitter smoke and fading dark flame, a new sound emerged.

  ?

  It was a deep, resonant impact that travelled through the marble floor, a shudder that rose into the soles of the feet and the hollow of the stomach. It was not the crack of breaking stone, but the dense, massive concussion of immense weight being driven into unyielding ground.

  ?

  Again it came. A rhythmic, deliberate punctuation against the roaring silence left by the fire. The vibration shook loose a fine dust from the shattered ceiling, which drifted down like grey snow, tasting of chalk and soot.

  ?

  A shape began to form within the dissipating plume. With the next terrible impact, a booted foot slammed down, crushing a fractured mosaic tile into powder. The black flames, those tongues of chilling negation, still clung to the figure, licking over the cracked wool of his jacket and the frost-ash etched onto his skin, but they were being pushed aside, shed with each movement like an unwanted cloak.

  ?

  Another step. The sound was monumental, a pressure wave of force that made the air in the room feel thick and heavy. Jabari emerged fully from the dissipating haze. His clothes smoked, his exposed skin gleamed with a strange, cold-burn sheen, but his stride was relentless. Each step was a deliberate, crushing act of will, the floor fracturing in a perfect, web-like pattern beneath his heels. The lingering black fire hissed where it touched the marble, leaving behind glassy, blackened scars.

  ?

  He advanced, a moving monolith wreathed in dying, dark flame. The chilling burn seared his nerves, a thousand needles of frozen agony, but it flowed over the unbreakable substance of him, unable to catch, unable to consume.

  ?

  His eyes, streaming from the chemical cold, found Balisarda. His voice, when it came, was a low rumble that carried over the fading hiss of the flames, each word scraped from a place of profound, smouldering fury.

  ?

  "Balisarda Sumernor. Do you honestly believe some insignificant fire can kill me?"

  ?

  The king watched him come, the Black Flame Sword still in hand. His expression was one of detached assessment, not surprise.

  ?

  "No," Balisarda said, the word simple, clean, and devoid of any disappointment.

  ?

  Jabari’s body coiled. The last vestiges of black flame snuffed out around his clenched fist as he drove forward, a final, explosive charge to close the distance. His arm pulled back, a piston priming to deliver annihilation.

  ?

  Motion flickered at the edge of his vision, from the king’s right side. A blur of charcoal grey and torn elegance, moving with a pained, yet perfect, trajectory. Hel crossed the intervening space, his face a mask of stark concentration over obvious hurt, and placed himself once more in the path of the blow.

  ?

  Jabari’s fist, committed to its arc, met the familiar, unforgiving plane of Hel’s midsection. The impact was a deep, sickening thud of transferred force.

  ?

  "I defeated you," Jabari growled, the frustration hot and metallic in his throat.

  ?

  Hel absorbed the blow, his body bowing under the pressure before the inevitable rebound began to gather. A faint trickle of blood had dried along his temple. He met Jabari’s gaze, his own eyes sharp with pain and a grim, reflective understanding.

  ?

  "You sure did," Hel replied, his voice tight but clear. "My body hurts really badly because of you right now." He gave a slight, pained shake of his head. "I am just like one of your soldiers."

  ?

  From his position slightly behind and to the side, Balisarda’s voice cut through, cool and instructive. "Ahahahaha. Keep your arm still, or else the impact will bounce right back at you."

  ?

  The warning was a mere observation of physical law. The recoil was already travelling up Jabari’s arm, a returning storm of his own power, demanding a price for the violence he had delivered.