Trafalgar's mana bore down on the room like a storm handed weight.
The ward plates along Matteo's walls shrieked beneath the pressure, their runes guttering as cracks crawled across the floor and climbed the lower edge of the reinforced panels. Dust sifted from the ceiling in thin threads. The chamber had been built to contain dangerous conversations - perhaps even a duel between proud old n with too many secrets - but it had never been ant to hold Trafalgar's anger, Caelum's knives, Esmond's tricks, and a homunculus carrying Void-born filth beneath an elven face.
Esmond didn't retreat from Trafalgar's fury. He dissected it. The old man's smile had thinned, yet his mind hadn't slowed; Trafalgar could read it in the way Esmond's attention prowled across the room, never resting on the strongest threat for long. He weighed distances, broken furniture, Caelum's clones, Selara's pistol, Matteo's position by the wall, the wounded homunculus, every fracture his own masterpiece had helped tear open. Esmond wasn't hunting for strength. He was hunting for the weakest hinge.
The homunculus lurched forward again before Trafalgar could close on him. Her side still gaped from Maledicta's last cut, dark and viscous fluid dragging down the gray cloth in ugly threads, but pain ant little to sothing built without the dignity of suffering properly. Pale mana flooded under her skin, a barrier folding around her wounded flank as she drove a fist toward Trafalgar's helt.
Trafalgar t the blow with Maledicta's flat and answered with [Arc Slash] at close range. The dark-blue wave erupted from his sword in a compressed burst, slamming into the homunculus and forcing her barrier to flare. She skidded back across the fractured floor, but the barrier bent rather than broke, swallowing most of the force before it crumbled into smoke-like fragnts.
Trafalgar triggered [Severance Step] before those fragnts could vanish. His body curved through a blur of dark mana and surfaced at her left side, Maledicta carving for the joint beneath her arm. The homunculus answered without turning fully, a small shield budding over the exact path of the blade. His strike chewed through half of it, sparks of mana bursting across the obsidian plates of his armor, and he ramd his shoulder into her before she could recover the angle.
The impact flung her into what remained of Matteo's table. Wood splintered, tal legs buckled, and sealed papers scattered across the room, spinning through the air like frightened birds.
Selara fired through the storm of debris, her bullet threading between Trafalgar's shoulder and the homunculus's neck. It struck one of the pale channels glowing beneath the artificial skin, jerking the vessel for the first ti in a way no external force had caused. Her mana stuttered. The barrier on her flank shuddered.
"She's reacting through written pathways," Selara said, voice tight as she re-aid. "Trafalgar, keep gutting the channels, but don't cut through the core."
"I rember," Trafalgar replied, his tone making it clear he loathed the restriction.
The homunculus ca at him again. Trafalgar swept Maledicta down and aid [Earthsplitter] at the floor rather than her body. The two-phase cleave struck the already fractured stone, unleashing a controlled mana shockwave that split the ground beneath the homunculus's feet. Her balance broke for half a breath, and that was all Trafalgar needed. He sheathed Maledicta in pure mana and triggered [Morgain's Linebreaker] inside the cramped room, charging forward in a short, vicious line that ramd into her guard.
The cutting wave carried her backward. Her bare heels gouged trenches through the floor before she struck the wall hard enough to buckle the panel behind her. The room scread around the impact. A ward plate split down its middle, spitting blue-white sparks that crawled over the wall like furious insects.
Now Trafalgar had a clear path. Esmond stood beyond the homunculus, Caelum's clones tightening around him again. The real Caelum had shaken off the earlier recoil and slid toward the old man's wounded arm, daggers low, body screened behind the motion of his copies. One clone feinted high. Another cut for Esmond's knee. The third drove straight at his weapon hand.
Esmond's expression soured. Caelum was reaching him.
The old man twisted away from the first dagger, parried the second with his narrow blade, and let the third score his coat rather than his wrist. The real Caelum erged from the gap, one dagger angling for the tendons in Esmond's hand.
Esmond smiled, which was the wrong reaction entirely. A small glass vial slipped from his sleeve and dropped between his fingers. He didn't throw it - he let it fall, calm and exact, as if he'd been waiting all along for the broken floor to turn useful. The vial struck the stone and burst, dark alchemical fluid bleeding into the cracks, and it moved at once.
The substance threaded through the broken lines in the floor, thick and hungry, sinking into the damaged ward channels Matteo's room had been leaking since the fight began. Mana sparked where it touched. The ward plates along the wall flared in uneven pulses, and from the cracks rose thin filants like wet glass drawn into wire. One Caelum clone vanished as three filants stabbed through its chest and shredded the mana holding it together. Another clone severed the nearest strand, only for the strand to fork into thinner threads that wound around the dagger and dragged the copy off balance before tearing through its arm. The real Caelum recoiled by the width of a hand, barely escaping a filant that snapped up toward his throat.
Esmond stepped out of the collapsing ring, sleeve torn and forearm bleeding, his face wearing the satisfaction of a man whose preparation had finally been appreciated.
"Marrowglass," Matteo rasped from near the wall.
Selara's attention cut toward him. "You know it?"
"I know enough to hate seeing it inside my own house."
Matteo shoved himself off the wall, pain wrenching his face, and cracked the carved head of his cane against a ward plate beside him. The plate answered his authority with a dull pulse, several runes struggling to reignite beneath the damage. He was no fighter, but this was his room, his house, his private lattice of protections. If he could starve the ward feed in that section, he could choke the Marrowglass before it spread through the whole chamber.
Esmond saw what he was doing. Of course he did. "Matteo," he said, almost gently, "you always reach for the rules before survival."
Matteo ignored him and wrenched the cane. The ward plate brightened, and the Marrowglass arrived alongside him. Dark filants erupted from the wall and pinned his hand in place before the cane could finish the command. Matteo gasped as reversed mana surged through his arm, fusing muscle, bone, and ward into a cruel circuit. Another thread whipped across his chest and slamd him back into the wall, shallow enough to spare his life but hard enough to darken the front of his coat with blood.
Selara's pistol swung toward the filants.
"Don't shoot the plate," Matteo forced out through clenched teeth. "If it ruptures, the whole wall could turn."
Trafalgar stepped toward him, and the homunculus intercepted. Her barrier crashed down between them, cracked from earlier damage yet firm enough to halt his first cut. Trafalgar snarled under his breath and drove Maledicta into the barrier again, dark mana grinding through pale construction while his anger warred against the need for precision. Every second spent here handed Esmond more of the room.
Caelum lunged for Matteo from another angle, but three Marrowglass strands reared from the floor and forced him to cut and dodge rather than reach the old scholar. One thread sliced across his sleeve. Another caught the edge of his dagger and hissed as if trying to drink the mana sheathing it.
Selara fired twice - not at the ward plate, but at the filants pinning Matteo's chest. One bullet severed a strand. The second cracked another, buying Matteo enough room to breathe, though his hand stayed trapped against the wall.
Esmond raised his wounded arm a fraction, and the Marrowglass tightened. Matteo choked, his back arching against the reinforced panel as the dark threads crawled higher around his shoulder and throat. The ward plate smoldered beneath his pinned hand, turning his own house into a vice around him.
Trafalgar's mana boiled harder, and Esmond's voice cut through the ruined room before anyone could move.
"If any of you move, Matteo dies."
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