"Are you sure?" Esmond asked. "Let's see whether you still believe that now."
The homunculus moved before his voice finished fading. She didn't charge with anger - anger would have required sothing alive to feel it. Her body simply obeyed, pale mana threading through the artificial channels beneath her skin and pooling around her bare feet in compressed plates that cracked against the floor and catapulted her forward in a vicious burst of speed.
Trafalgar t her with Maledicta, and the collision ramd pressure through the room. The floor split beneath his boots, the walls groaned under Matteo's wards, and a row of old shelves burst behind him, vomiting books, glass cases, and alchemical records into the air. The homunculus clamped both hands against his blade, fingers curling over the edge without flinching while dark, dense fluid wept from the shallow cuts opening across her palms.
Behind the obsidian visor, Trafalgar's jaw locked. That fluid was wrong. He'd handled enough strange blood in his life - monster ichor, cursed residue, alchemical sludge - to recognize when sothing had no business living inside a body. This wasn't blood. It crawled with a viscous weight, clinging to the steel in threads that refused to drip properly, as though the wound itself resented being opened to the air.
The homunculus bore down harder. Trafalgar slid back half a step and answered with [Arc Slash] at point-blank range. Dark-blue mana ripped from Maledicta in a horizontal wave, compressed by the cramped room into a vicious line that caught the homunculus across the torso. A mana shield blood in front of her ribs, but the slash chewed through enough of it to fling her sideways into the lip of Matteo's table, and the table detonated into splinters.
Esmond's expression curdled with irritation, yet the homunculus was already hauling herself out of the wreckage. Her body refused to move like sothing in pain. It righted itself with chanical obedience, shoulders realigning, mana clotting at the joints, the wound across her torso knitting only halfway before the fluid beneath it dragged into dark, sluggish veins.
Selara saw it. Her pistol drifted toward the homunculus, and her finger faltered.
Trafalgar gave the creature no room to recover. He poured mana into Maledicta and triggered [Morgain's Linebreaker] inside the miserable distance the room allowed. The sword cloaked itself in a heavy mantle of raw mana, and Trafalgar lunged in a straight burst that plowed through the broken furniture between them. The cutting wave hamred into the homunculus, shoving her backward and gouging a long scar across the reinforced floor.
The impact should have crushed her into the wall. Instead, a barrier unfurled behind her like a plate of hardened glass, caught her body, and bounced part of the force forward. The recoil shuddered up Trafalgar's arms. He canted Maledicta at the last instant, letting the pressure skim past him and shred a cabinet of sealed tools. tal instrunts scattered across the floor, chiming against broken stone and powdered glass.
Caelum seized the opening. Two of his clones swept toward Esmond from opposing angles while the real Caelum dropped low, daggers aid at the old man's wrist and the blade in his hand. Esmond plucked a thin capsule from his sleeve and crushed it between two fingers. A gout of gray vapor snapped outward, but Caelum twisted clear before it could swallow him, and one clone punched a dagger through the sleeve before the second capsule could surface.
Esmond hissed, more offended than wounded. "Still loyal to the boy, are you?"
Caelum's dagger flicked once, scoring a shallow line across Esmond's forearm. "Always."
The homunculus reacted to the wound on Esmond. Her head whipped around, and Trafalgar caught the small shift and moved first, triggering [Severance Step], saring through a blur of dark mana to reappear behind her with Maledicta already plunging toward the back of her neck. The cut aid for the spine - decisive, practical, because anything that guarded Esmond at that speed had to be subtracted from the fight.
A barrier cracked into being over her nape. Maledicta struck it, fractured it, and sank halfway through before the homunculus wrenched aside. Her elbow ramd into Trafalgar's chest with enough force to dent the obsidian plates and drive a dull shock through his ribs. He refused to surrender ground, ramming his knee up into her side, knocking her off balance, and chasing it with [Severing Fang]. The pressure slash erupted diagonally from Maledicta and carved through the barrier coalescing around her left shoulder.
This ti the edge reached flesh, and dark, dense fluid wept over the gray cloth.
Selara's breath snagged. Matteo, braced near the broken wall, registered the wound and blanched in a way anger couldn't cover.
"Trafalgar!" Selara shouted. "Do not kill her!"
The warning landed as the homunculus launched another punch. Trafalgar ducked beneath it, pivoted, and brought Maledicta up in a brutal rising arc ant to cleave her core. He had the opening - the flawless one. Her barriers had lagged after [Severing Fang], her torso hung exposed, and if that artificial body kept its control structure where he suspected, one cut would extinguish the threat.
"Not the core!" Matteo barked, voice ragged against the wall. "Destroy it and we lose everything inside her!"
Their voices struck at the worst conceivable instant. Trafalgar shaved the cut by a fraction, and that fraction spared the homunculus from death while gutting the perfection of the strike.
Maledicta tore through her side instead of her core, ripping a savage wound from ribs to hip. The homunculus hurtled across the room and crashed into a reinforced pillar hard enough to fracture the stone casing around it. The pillar held, barely. The wound disgorged more of that dark, viscous fluid, and beneath it Trafalgar caught threads of sothing fouler worming through the artificial tissue - a substance woven into the vessel as though Esmond had used corruption as architecture.
The room tightened around Trafalgar's anger. He understood it now. That sa wrongness. That sa impossible residue. The substance tied to Void Creatures, twisted and refined and buried inside a child-shaped homunculus wearing an elven face.
Trafalgar turned toward Esmond. "Seriously?" His voice dropped, carrying through the cracked room with more weight than any shout. "You don't hold even a sliver of sha for what you've done?"
Esmond studied him, and sothing realigned in the old man's expression - curiosity hardening into recognition. "Oh," he murmured. "You know that substance very well."
Selara's pistol tightened in her grip.
Esmond's mouth curved, and the satisfaction in it fouled the air. "Of course. I heard what you did during the war. Trafalgar du Morgain, standing against a sea of Void Creatures and walking off a battlefield most n would spend their lives trying to forget. I suppose it was inevitable that you'd recognize what runs inside her."
Trafalgar's mana boiled outward. The obsidian armor humd across his body, Maledicta devouring the pressure around his hand, and the cracks across Matteo's floor deepened as dark mana spilled from him in violent waves. The ward plates along the walls shrieked, caught between Matteo's protections and the force now grinding against them from inside the room.
Esmond watched him with fresh interest, but his smile had thinned. He hadn't uncovered a bewildered heir. He'd uncovered soone who knew exactly what sort of filth ran inside his masterpiece - and who had every intention of making him answer for it.
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