---
Mihos stepped into that realization with ruthless timing and drove his elbow toward Sekht’s temple. Sekht ducked and turned his body, taking the blow across the upper shoulder instead of the head.
The pain rang through the joint. He answered with a short range strike to Mihos’s sternum, followed imdiately by a blood hardened edge from the other hand aid low for the liver.
Mihos blocked one, took the other, and smiled again.
That smile was beginning to piss Sekht off. Anger had uses if kept leashed.
They separated at barely a pace. Then closed in again.
This ti the force of the exchange beca obvious to everyone watching.
Mihos fought like a true heir should have fought if the family had done at least one thing honestly in his life. No wasted flourish. No lazy overconfidence in the actual movent itself, even if the arrogance around it stank from ten roads away. His body was trained. His Chaos shaping was brutal and efficient. He did not telegraph where he did not have to. He attacked with the ease of a man who had never truly tasted defeat in his generation and therefore had built his confidence not only on praise, but on repeated proof.
And Sekht felt it. For the first ti in a long while, the fight was hard. Not dramatically hard.
Not ’he might kill in the next second’ hard.
The more frustrating kind.
The kind where his body and instincts kept arriving correctly, but the outco of each exchange still fell short by a margin that should not have been there. He had fought above rank before. He had killed above expectation before. But those victories had always co through so edge. Hunger. Bloodline surprise. Ruthlessness of blood lust. Better instincts. Enemies too arrogant or too stupid to understand what he was until it was too late.
Mihos was arrogant. But Mihos was not stupid. And his Chaos purity changed everything.
Every ti Sekht’s force t Mihos directly, the answer ca back harsher than it should have. Every defensive layer Mihos built felt denser. Every strike carried cleaner penetration through blocks. The two-rank difference mattered, yes.
Chaos Rank Five against Chaos Rank Three was already tough enough. But the real poison was refinent. Mihos’s power moved like forged steel where Sekht’s still moved, at tis, like sharpened ore.
That made each exchange more expensive.
Sekht took a strike to the ribs and felt the force ring inward farther than it should have through simple contact. He answered with a slicing blood arc across Mihos’s forearm. This ti he cut skin, and a line of red appeared.
Sekht thought, "So the bastard bled."
Mihos looked at the cut. Then at Sekht. And his eyes lit with sothing colder than mockery.
"You are better than I expected," he said. "I will stop playing around. Get ready."
Then he attacked properly. The next sequence drove Sekht back three full steps.
A left hand wrapped in Chaos force.
A shoulder crash.
A downward hamring blow.
A rising backfist.
Sekht blocked the first, twisted off the second, caught the third partly on his wrist and partly on his shoulder, but the fourth clipped his jaw hard enough to turn his head and send white pain flashing through his vision for one brutal second.
The guards saw it. They were happy about it.
Sekht ca back imdiately with blood control snapping outward in three cutting threads. Mihos broke one with his hand, let one glance off his side, and evaded the third by inches before slamming his own Chaos-covered fist toward Sekht’s centerline again.
This ti Sekht felt the need for more decisive force.
He pulled blood from a cut at his own lip and from the opened line on Mihos’s arm, spun both through his control, and shaped them in one smooth motion.
Blood Sword.
It ford in his hand with a red-black flash, thin and sharp and cruel at the edge. The weapon lengthened into shape as he stepped in, cutting diagonally from shoulder to waist with enough speed that several guards at the edge visibly flinched.
Mihos saw it too late to evade cleanly. So he did sothing else. He drove his Chaos-covered fist directly into the blade.
The sound that followed was wrong. Not tal on tal. Not blood on flesh.
A cracking impact, sharp and violent, like hardened glass eting a hamr swung by a weapon Smith.
Sekht felt it through his whole arm. And then his Blood Sword broke...
For the first ti since he gained the skill, it broke. Not chipped. Not deflected.
Broken.
The red blade shattered apart from the point of Mihos’s strike, fragnts of blood-hardened force exploding outward into the night like red crystal shards before dissolving into mist.
The shock hit Sekht hard enough to matter. His eyes widened for one honest fraction of a second.
Mihos saw it. Of course he did. And laughed.
Actually laughed.
"There it is," he said. "That face."
Sothing dark and imdiate moved through Sekht then.
It was not panic. Not even fear. It was Fury.
Cold and hot at once.
His Blood Sword had never broken before. Never. He had trusted that edge. Built instinct around it. Used it as certainty in too many fights.
And Mihos had broken it with a punch.
Then the heir had earned what ca next.
Sekht pulled inward.
Every scrap of loose blood force. Every fragnt of the broken sword. Every active current of Chaos in his body. He drew them in hard enough that even Elena’s eyes sharpened from the side.
He fed his own fury into structure. Not wildness but Structure. The broken blood sword reford in his grip, not fully restored, but denser through the center, shorter, heavier, uglier. A weapon not of elegance now, but of concentrated violence.
Mihos recognized the change at once. His own expression altered. For the first ti since the fight began, he stopped smiling.
"Good. Co at with all."
The heir drew in too.
User Comments
0 comments from readers