Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

The comm snapped like a wire.

"Raizen - get out of there. Now."

Alteea never sounded like that.

Dust sloughed from the tunnel ribs. The floor gave a small, mean shiver. Raizen didn't ask why.

He pointed, already moving. "Back. Move."

Lynea slid past him, lamp tight to her chest. Arashi kept pace, one hand on the wall, breathing through his teeth. The slab they'd squeezed by lay folded wrong on the ground like a book someone had closed with both hands. They hurdled it. The tunnel bent, then opened its throat.

Light hit like a slap.

They burst out into white - the dull winter glow off the ridge, the camp a gray stamp down-slope. Wind got in a single clean breath and pushed. For a blink, all Raizen heard was his own heart and the thin hiss of snow sliding over old ice.

"Report" Kori demanded over comms. "Say you're clear."

"We're-"

Something blurred out of the treeline on the right.

It hit Arashi first. A dark shape, low and fast. Claws raked across his arm. His jacket ripped and red leaped out of it like it had been waiting. Arashi staggered, something that was really a curse, and caught himself on his good hand.

Raizen didn't think. He moved.

Twin blades up. Gold flashed. He hit the thing at a diagonal, hard enough that the shock punched his shoulder. A limb came off clean - sleek, wrong, too long. Golden particles evaporating.

The Nyx reeled. No mouth. Only the suggestion of a head. Its "face" turned toward him like a mask thinking.

The arm began to grow back, pure darkness gathering back.

"Arashi!" Raizen called.

"I'm fine" Arashi lied. He fell back two steps, dug in, and sucked air like it had a price.

Lynea took his outside edge without being told. Fragments whispered from the inside of her tunic - flat, pale slips of sharpened light - fanning out to orbit her hand. Not many. Not yet.

"Two more" she said. Calm. She didn't point.

Raizen saw them the same heartbeat - dark bodies between trunks, one high in the branches like a spider pretending to be a person, another crouched low, shoulders rolling, tendons like cable.

"Fortitude five" Raizen said. "Maybe higher."

Wind moved the top layer of snow. The trees seemed to lean in to listen.

"Positions" he ordered. "We hold here."

The first one - the spider - dropped.

Raizen dashed, the world compressing into a thin gold line. He took two legs at the joint and rolled under a third, the sweep of it hissing past his back. The spider slammed onto its side, limbs skidding, then kicked in an ugly burst and sent him skidding across the crust. He grunted, let the pain live, and came up again.

The first Nyx - one-armed and healing - lunged at Lynea. Her fragments snapped forward in a single clean loop. It flinched. She sent five more, shallow arcs to nudge it off line. Control. Not waste.

Arashi cradled his cut close, drew his left-hand pistol with his right. He took one breath, set the sight, and fired. The shot cracked the air and chopped a clean notch out of the spider's next leg. The recoil twisted him wrong without the second hand to tame it. He swore, reset, fired again.

"Don't be a hero" Raizen said, feet light.

"Impossible" Arashi said through his teeth. "It's a condition."

The third Nyx came in low, fast, a blur of straight angles. Raizen quarter-turned and met it on the outside, letting speed run its blade along his steel and away. It felt like blocking a car. It recovered too easily. No wildness. Intelligent in the worst way - testing, learning.

"Alteea?" Raizen risked, eyes never leaving the enemy.

Static. Then her voice, thin and stretched: "I'm reading spikes and collapse - your location just… jittered - Hold -" The line drowned in interference.

The spider scissored up again, half its legs missing and still somehow quick. It swung, then fired the remaining rear limb like a spear. Raizen stepped inside the line, put his shoulder under it, and cut upward, separating hardened tendon from joint. The creature pitched forward and, for once, didn't find its feet fast enough.

He finished it. Low and clean. A cross that unstitched it. The body thumped and lost its shape like a shadow breaking.

"Nice" Arashi said, shaky, impressed despite himself.

"Not done yet" Raizen answered.

Lynea's fragments cut an X across the second Nyx's chest. It didn't bleed. It changed the way it moved, angling to force her to defend Arashi. She didn't. She attacked again, harder, loops tightening. Arashi shifted left, gave her the space, fired to herd, not hit. Smart. Good.

The first Nyx had regrown most of its arm. It flexed, and the new length sharpened as Raizen watched. He didn't wait for it to be proud of itself. He went.

Blade, step, breath - simple. He slashed at the wrist to steal precision. It adjusted mid-motion, caught the cut on the flat of its limb, and shoved. Power rippled through him. He let it push him, then used the give in the snow to slide and re-angle.

It came down in a chop that would have split him. He wasn't there by the time it landed.

They traded five, six-seven fast exchanges that felt like falling down stairs and finding the bottom each time by luck. Then he saw it: a tiny stiffness in the new joint as it learned its own shape. He feinted high, cut low, and bit deep. The limb went dead from elbow to tip. He stepped in and drove the short blade into the plate where a shoulder would be.

It jerked away and screeched without a mouth. The air trembled. Raizen's teeth ached.

"Two on me" Lynea called, voice still steady, and that was wrong - he glanced and understood. The one she'd been carving had split its attention, while the third used the angle to try for Arashi's ribs.

Arashi tried to pivot, slipped a fraction on ice under snow, and for a stupid, ugly instant Raizen saw it land - saw the line, the hit, the-

Lynea's hand flicked.

Her fragments changed.

They stopped orbiting and started working in layers - one ring wide and slow, two inside it faster, three smaller yet, like gears - but gears that cut. The nearest Nyx stepped into the outer ring and came out missing a strip of itself. It didn't notice in time to save the rest. She sent a second ring low, three inches off the ground, and it took the thing's ankle in a neat bite. It fell wrong, and that wrong made it open. She drew a line in the air as simple as a child's circle. The shards traced it, returned, traced again, each pass closing the circle in. Meat grinder. Clean.

"Arashi" Raizen snapped, not taking his eyes off his own opponent, "breathe."

Arashi tried to. He set his feet, switched targets, and gave Lynea two perfect cover shots between her rings without clipping a single fragment. The Nyx's midsection tore. Its shape failed. It tried to stand and was not a thing anymore.

Raizen smiled once - tight - and let his body do the next part while his head caught up. The first Nyx came high again. He didn't block. He stepped in, let the blade graze his sleeve, and drove his shoulder into its chest. Then, the only things left to do? He did just that. He pinned, twisted, cut up under the plate into where a neck should have been.

It stopped moving.

He took a single breath that hurt. The world snapped back into layers - wind, cold, distant camp voices, the little hiss of snow under boots.

"Count" he said.

"Two down" Arashi answered. "One -"

The last Nyx came out of the trees in a blur, going for Lynea's back.

"Left!" Raizen shouted.

She didn't look. She snapped her wrist.

Every fragment she'd been keeping leashed lit and went.

They looped, crossed, doubled - more lines than sight should follow. The Nyx hit three at once, lost its forearm and half a face. It tried to dodge the rest and found the pattern had already learned that move. A dozen cuts, none deep alone, together enough. It stumbled, came apart, fell into the snow and tried to pretend it was anything else. It wasn't.

Silence arrived, sudden and ugly. The kind that leaves your breath too loud.

Lynea's shoulders went loose. The fragments snapped back toward her hand in a rush.

"Easyy-" Raizen warned, already moving.

Too late. There were too many. A few skimmed past - one nicked her cheek, another traced her forearm. Shallow, quick, red blooming in little lines.

She dropped to one knee, palm on the snow, breathing like she'd been holding it for a week.

Arashi holstered with one hand, clumsy but stubborn. "You good?"

"I will be" she said, voice thin but not weak.

Raizen turned once, slow. Trees. Wind. Snow. No more shapes moving where shapes shouldn't.

He looked down at the dark smear the spider had left and watched it fade like it had never been. In the wet under it - a faint gold flicker. A pulse. He reached with the tip of a blade and nudged it. The light answered once, a heartbeat of shine, then died.

Alteea's voice ghosted in, shivering with interference, speaking over herself like an echo. "- hold - report -"

"We held" Raizen said. He looked at his team - Arashi grinning through pain like an idiot, Lynea bleeding in neat lines and looking annoyed at the concept. He let himself feel the smallest flick of relief and then set it down.

He raised his blades again, not because he had to, but because the habit reminded his hands they were his.