Harem Points System: Every Touch Counts!

The Nullchain Knight toppled from its perch. Xavier met it on the way down, palm to the anchor cuff, and erased the reel-in motor from within. The chain went slack. The Knight fell without a sound and vanished into the dark below.

The Shield Wall reoriented, doors locking in layers until the bridge became a corridor of steel. Spearheads pushed forward like a thorn hedge. He refused to go through. He went around. He ran the rail, boots light on the ribbed curve while Phantoms flickered in and out beside him like sword-length strobes. He took their timing in three steps. The fourth blink lagged a hair from the second. He laid his lines in the places where they would be. One appeared into a thread-cut already lying across its throat seam. Another formed at his flank and came apart before its blade finished hardening. He stole their future and kept moving.

Warbringers thundered from below and smashed the rail to tear away his path. He dropped. He caught the truss underside with one hand, swung, and shot himself like an arrow through a gap as the bridge behind him blew out in a spray of metal. While he sailed, his other hand opened into a fan of tiny void pins. They struck shield bosses like sleet. Not to break. To desynchronize. A hundredth of a second was enough. A perfect lock became a handful of separate plates that had to think about each other for the first time.

He hit the floor inside the formation. The world narrowed to metal and breath. Projection did not travel here. The Luminary banners were harmonizing the field. Anything flung past a hand span collapsed like water poured on oil. He stopped projecting. He injected. Every palm became a needle. He touched only seams he had already marked with a glance. He did not fight the formation. He flowed through the errors he made. Kicks to shield rims made micro-cliffs. He rolled balance into empty space. Every touch undid a body. Every step cut a thread they did not know existed.

A Nullchain Knight snared for his ankle. He caught the loop with the arch of his foot, rolled with it, and let it throw him into a Warbringer's chest like a stone from a sling. He bounced off plate, hands already in the gaps. Hip. Elbow. Jaw hinge. Three white clicks. Three black silences. The juggernaut went limp and drifted backward like a mannequin pushed by the tide of its brothers.

Up on the ribs, a Luminary lifted its banner until the cloth glowed. The army's pressure spiked. Raw mana turned thick and heavy in his hands like wet sand. He bled a sliver of Moon into it. Not to color. To cohere. The cold geometry of lunar edge gave the uncolored storm a frame. Pure mana stopped slumping and started standing. He pressed a hand to his own ribs, felt them press back, and understood how to hold the thing the banners tried to unmake.

A Phantom woke behind his neck with a blade already moving. He dipped his chin. Steel kissed hair. He widened a seam at his nape by a thread's width and the blade slid into nowhere. He turned and put a pin of void through the visor so close the plates rang against his knuckle. The Knight fell and never finished the sound it began.

The Wall leaked. Without Phantoms to plug, it bled everywhere his hands pressed. He bullied plates into wrong angles and made their stamp-and-step cadence trip itself. Knights stumbled. Murder slits opened where none should. He broke their line into rooms. Each room became a slaughterhouse where only one man breathed.

He started using the dead. Shells fell in stacks. He kicked them at live legs. He wedged them in shield slits. He made the army step on itself. A Warbringer lowered its head and charged to bulldoze him into the rail. He met it with a fallen shield held in a field of raw force and let the juggernaut punch its own boss. Arm to elbow to shoulder. Threads broke like old twine under torque. The body sat down with a hollow groan.

A halberd head hissed and nicked his forearm. Bright pain jumped under skin. He filed the line away and did not leave it uncovered again. Breath in. Breath out. No words.

Two banners moved together and overlapped their halos into a lens. Where the lens pointed, Knights surged in clean waves. The focus tracked him with predictive hunger. He broke his gait by a toe's width mid-stride. The lens lagged. He slid between aim and arrival. His hand found the banner shaft as he passed. He did not destroy the standard. He turned it. For two seconds its lens shone into a Shield Wall stack. The formation clenched where it should have flowed. He killed twenty in the breath that followed with touches laid in joints they had tightened for him.

The algorithm that knitted the army came apart in a hundred tiny places. Orders contradicted orders. Timings that had been a metronome turned into a drumline with a drunk at the cymbals. He accelerated.

He stopped stepping on floor and started stepping on seams. One breath he ran the bridge. The next he existed slightly to the left of a halberd head, and in that sliver a hand lived inside the haft ring long enough to erase the hinge before his shoulder slid past. He walked through a chain net as if it were rain. He drifted under a blade that had been aimed correctly and watched it hang in the pouch of a second that was not there anymore.

Warbringers doubled their fields. Fists roared. He ran the pattern, slid through hammer-falls, and broke anchors in elbows until power died mid-swing. Phantoms tried a blink circle with full squad strength. He turned once and wrote a low line at ankle height where they all meant to land. They arrived and their knees refused to hold them. Nullchains threw a braided web large enough to net a wyvern. He lifted his hand, drew a ring of no in the air, and let the web fall through it in tattered snow.

The Luminaries were alone on the ribs at last. Banners dimmed. Halo fields guttered like lamps in fog. He leapt the gap lit by the pale memory of his own aura. One banner raised to stave him off. He put his palm on the cloth as if smoothing a crease and fed it a breath of raw mana. Glyphs went out like candles in rain. He lowered the banner. The Knight behind it folded in a kneel and lay down like a man choosing sleep.

Silence returned. Not the stiff silence of a room waiting to breathe. The finished kind. The sound that follows a blade returning to its sheath.

Xavier stood at the bridge's center with chest rising and falling, hair plastered to his brow with sweat and silver dust. The ring glittered with armor carcasses. Some lay piled. Some sprawled where they fell. Some draped over rails with legs dangling into the abyss like broken ladders. Blood did not pool. There was none to spill. The only scent was hot metal and burned mana.

He flexed his left hand. Fingers held. The cut on his forearm stung and then settled. He tightened his grip on the dagger until the hilt felt more like his palm than his palm felt like flesh.

He looked across the gap.

On the far side, another gate waited. Narrow, tall, wrought in the likeness of interlocked blades. No locks glowed. The path stood open.

He did not smile. He did not speak.

He walked.

The bridge creaked once and held. A fallen shield slid. It tapped the toe of his boot and skittered. It went over. The sound of its fall dropped for a long time and did not come back.

He reached the door and set a blood-marked fingertip against the metal. It was cold. Older than this spire and anything that fed it. The door recognized nothing and yielded anyway.

Light knifed across his face. White at first, then softer. He stepped forward and the Silver Spire swallowed him again.

He came out into a hall like the inside of a bell. It was not a sphere and not the ring. It was an oval with a floor of mirrored stone and a roof of black crystal latticed with veins of faint light. The air carried order. It held the weight of rules so clean it felt like a hand under a blade urging it straight.

He did not hear marching. He heard breath. One breath, slow and dragged thin across time.

The room's far end held a dais. The dais held a throne. The throne held a Knight that was not like the others. Taller by a head and a half. Broader through the chest. A greatsword rested upright point-down between its feet, both hands on the pommel as if it leaned on a grave marker. A mantle of segmented plates framed its helm. Each rib of that mantle was etched in tight script that crawled and brightened and then dimmed as if whispering to itself.