Chapter 995: The Shape of the Cheating
The sunbrands were tidy lines of golden light laid against the gray stone, warm without being hot. They didn’t fight the miasma. They simply traced the edges where the Archduke’s vows wanted to sit, the way a pencil circle makes a spill of invisible ink visible under glass. For the first time since this fight started, I could see the shape of the cheating.
That didn’t fix the problem. But it made my feet honest.
A small, ugly flicker of envy tried to stand up inside me. He does this like it’s a simple note; I’ve been bleeding for months just for inches. My Harmony sat that feeling down before it could learn to talk. It wasn’t about raw power. Lucifer was a Mid Radiant, same as I was, but his Gift was different. God’s Eyes didn’t throw thunderbolts; it read the fine print. He wasn’t a stronger fighter. He was a better reader. For the first time since I stepped through the seam, I wasn’t entirely alone in my corner of the ring. It wasn’t a rescue, not in the way stories write them. It was a map. And after hours of navigating a hostile country by feel, a map felt like a miracle.
"Use the air," Lucifer said from the rim of the roof, his voice calm, like a man mentioning the obvious. "Stop letting it decide where it wants to sit."
I saw what he meant. He wasn’t telling me to fight the room. He was telling me to have a preference. I took one steady beat from the lattice of his sunbrands, fed it into my forearm for exactly one breath, and then built my own version, small and practical. A swirl of Aegir cool to make the air heavier where it hurt me. A little air hook to encourage a miasma veil to be somewhere else. Not divine, not clever. Just work.
The Archduke didn’t waste a second pretending to be bothered. He slid his blade through one of Lucifer’s sunbrand strands while speaking a vow—"Edges arrive late"—and the strand of light popped with a sharp hiss. A new oath-scar, small and mean, etched itself along his collarbone. He had paid a price in his own power to break Lucifer’s rule and reassert his own.
"Deny-start," I told myself. "Ghost bind. Short thrust. Reset. Stack the starts."
Mythweaver put a tiny, stubborn label near my ankle: ’First step is on time.’ It wasn’t a sermon. It was a sticky note with the force of law.
We traded. The room didn’t tilt in my favor. It just stopped tilting quite so much against me. His sleeve-check found bone. Valeria’s shell cracked and she complained about the fees. He laid a glass ribbon where my slide wanted to be; I saw it outlined in Lucifer’s light, turned it into trash with a hip shield, and stepped high instead, ugly and correct. He put a pressure needle at my mid-shin; I let it roll into a Grey seam that didn’t have any feelings. He snapped a sound pop at my ear; I counted my own breath instead, and the number didn’t change.
Red Hunger tried a different flavor, the warm permission to take a bow when you do something right. Harmony called it weather and refused to draw the curtains. Lucifer, from the rim, pinned something I couldn’t see in the far corner—a thin, descending filament of power from higher up the tower that had been making the roof hum like a guilty tuning fork. The hum eased. His power kept the far corners of the room from inventing new, interesting problems while I dealt with the one in front of me.
My shoulder was a hot, grinding knot of pain from the earlier hit, a constant, screaming protest every time I raised my shield-arm. The miasma burn on my forearm was a cold fire that Harmony could only contain, not extinguish. My lungs felt scraped raw from the effort of fighting the "no breath shall steady" vow. It was like trying to solve three different chess problems at once, while also being on fire and having someone occasionally throw rocks at your head.
The Archduke, seeing his subtle advantages being illuminated and neutralized, changed his approach. He spoke a new vow, his voice a flat, architectural command. "All paths will narrow."
Lucifer’s sunbrands on the floor flickered. The wide, safe lanes they had outlined shrank instantly to the width of a tightrope. The miasma veils on either side pressed in, their hungry edges now a razor-thin margin from the golden lines. One misstep, one loss of balance, and I would fall into a wall of corrupting energy.
"Excellent," Valeria said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Now we’re fighting on a knife’s edge. Literally. Try not to fall off the metaphor."
The Archduke pressed his attack, moving along the narrow lines with an effortless, predatory grace. He was forcing me into a battle of pure, claustrophobic precision. I couldn’t use wide movements. I couldn’t create space. I could only be perfect. My first step was a test: a tiny Grey seam laid over the golden line, a pocket of ordinary to anchor my boot. It held. The next was a lightning-quick ankle-shift to a parallel line three feet away, a move that would have been trivial on an open floor but was now a life-or-death calculation. I unspooled an Aegir water whip, not as an attack, but as a probe, letting its tip touch a sunbrand line ten feet ahead to test its stability before I dared a longer leap.
He cut, a simple, perfect line down the center of the path I was on. I parried, my own blade held in a two-handed grip for stability. The impact jarred me, and I felt my back foot slide a half-inch. The edge of the miasma veil kissed my heel, and a spiderweb of cold numbness spread up my calf.
He had me pinned. He knew it. This was where he ended it.
I did the only thing I could. I let go of the physical fight for a fraction of a second and focused on the conceptual. I looked at his blade, so perfectly controlled, so economical, and used Mythweaver to write a single, rude Edict directly onto it. ’Your edge is heavy.’
For a split second, the Archduke’s perfect economy of motion was disrupted. His own sword, his own limb, suddenly felt unnaturally cumbersome. It wasn’t a powerful spell. It wasn’t a bind. It was a petty, conceptual piece of graffiti, and it was enough. His follow-up cut, the one that would have taken my head, was a fraction of a degree off its intended path.
’A conceptual imposition on a physical object,’ Erebus noted. ’Inefficient, but psychologically effective.’
I used the opening not to attack, but to breathe. I slid back along the sunbrand, putting a few precious feet of honest floor between us. The Archduke’s expression didn’t change, but the pressure in the room intensified. He had been testing me. Now he was annoyed. He let the "narrow path" vow dissolve, and the sunbrands widened again. He was done with finesse.
There is a point in a long fight where the choreography stops being clever and turns into a budget report. A Grey seam cost a spike of concentration. An Aegir ribbon cost a steady breath. A Mythweaver Edict cost a sliver of certainty I had to earn back. He was spending coins. I was spending blood and will.
"All courage will shake," he said, and the room asked my body to wobble. Harmony flattened courage into a simple choice that didn’t care about applause. The shake kept tapping at my wrist, a constant, low-grade vibration of doubt. I chose anyway. Deny-start. Ghost bind. Short thrust. Reset.
He punished the next attempt at a follow-through, a ghost of a habit I hadn’t quite burned out yet. I took the reminder—a shallow cut along my thigh—and threw the habit away for good. The next time my body asked me for a grand finish, I put a Mythweaver Edict on it—’finish is a step’—and the step served me, not a bow on a package I couldn’t carry.
The Archduke finally decided to say something directly to Lucifer. He turned his head a single degree and looked at the twin crowns. "You’re late," he said.
"The door was locked," Lucifer answered, his tone mild. He didn’t move from the rim. He just kept the lattice of truth up for a few seconds at a time, whenever the room got too smug about its own lies.
The red coat re-centered on me. He cut a line that did not need a speech. I met it with a parry that was exactly the right size and no more. A veil drifted into my lane, and I made it somebody else’s problem with a short, rude hook of air. A pressure needle argued with my knee; Grey filed that square of space into a thoughtless ’yes.’
He was still better. I could feel it in the way the ring of his control wouldn’t open and the way my shoulder ached with a deep, grinding pain. Valeria’s bone-shell cracked again and she muttered about suing fate for breach of contract. Erebus slid a second shadow wedge through a place the room had planned to make into a trap and made it forget its purpose for a breath.
"Stop finishing," Julius said a third time in my memory, and I realized I hadn’t tried to for a full minute.
I hit the wall then. The real one. The place where your choices are out of budget and your will is overdrawn. I ran a quick, desperate inventory. My energy reserves were screaming. My body was a roadmap of new aches and old pains. I had used every trick, every lesson, every bit of support from my allies, and it was still not enough. I was still losing. You either break, or you break through.
The Archduke stepped with me, not at me. The ring of his control closed one more breath. He did nothing new. He just did everything right. And something inside me, some final reserve, finally admitted that it wasn’t enough to just be a screwdriver at a house fire.