I whip Pyrphoros at his leg. It snares his calf armor. He jerks his leg away from me to either pull me onto his warsaw or tear the handle from my grasp. I have a Helldiver’s grip and my power armor is not letting go, so I twist right and the saw chews a wedge from my cuirass. I retract the blade and sparks spit as it tries to cut through his leg armor. He brings his warsaw’s hungry teeth toward the whip. I give up my attempt to take his limb and pull the whip back, twist again, and deliver a two-handed chop aimed for his neck.
He just straight-lines for me and hits me in the ribs with his massive, spiked shoulder. I fly back and slam into the dome wall. Only instinct saves me, and I roll left. I don’t even see him, just a metallic blur as he slams into where I once was.
I stumble back to the center, armor dented along my left rib cage, the left breastplate sheared off down to its last protective layer. At least one rib is broken.
Fá stalks after me.
“I see Atlas taught you more than genocide and toxicology,” I call.
He hears the pain in my voice, but he is clearly confused why I have not yet been perceptibly slowed down by the poison on his spikes.
“You will not be the first Willow branch I have broken. I have your measure. You are not as fast as they claim. You are not as strong as my weakest Kinshield. The Morning Star has fallen from the sky. Fear not. Tonight, I will give you wings.”
He knows how to fight Lorn’s style. I didn’t go into this fight intending to use the Willow Way, but in panic we rely on our oldest mechanisms, and being bulldozed by a giant in spiked armor is enough to make any man panic. The puncture in my thigh aches, but only the puncture. I felt a little sluggish from the poison at first, but it’s fading and barely burns anymore. The leech and anti-toxin are doing their job.
My turn to do mine. I will not feign weakness to bait him. No tricks. No devices. This will be a clean kill.
I glance at Cassius. Sure enough, he’s forming a circle with his hands. It’s so easy to forget the lessons we learn. I breathe in and out, centering myself, and find the smallest of Europan breezes making its way into the dome. I realize after a beat that the cold air must be coming up from a crack in the ground, from the hollow core of the island itself. It is, just where Fá’s first strike hit and broke the marble. The stone breathes as it always has.
“The path directs itself to the Vale.” The words escape my mouth before I realize I’ve recalled them. “Same as our breath rejoins the deepmine wind.”
As Fá reaches to pluck Bad Lass from his armor like an inconvenient toothpick, I whip Pyrphoros out and draw the razor out by its pommel. I snatch Bad Lass from the air as it comes back toward me and I assume one of the stances I tested out in my training with Cassius—a nameless hybrid of Lorn’s way, Cassius’s, and my own. I crouch and I hold Thraxa’s razor like a dagger and Pyrphoros like a javelin.
“Atlas is your master.” Clang. Clang. Clang. “Confess.”
Fá tilts his head, amused by my strange form. He comes for me again with confidence and supreme competence. Just like before, he baits me to take to the air. He uses his warsaw to batter at my guard and his body as a ram. I am nimbler, but that advantage in counterattack is mitigated by the weight of his armor. This is what the heavy gear was made for. Closer-quarters meatstraws in ship halls. So this time, instead of bending back and countering with the Way or trying to match his strength as my armor tempts and my ego demands, I simply receive what he gives.
No teeth-chattering blocks. No counterattacks. No lusting for the air.
I deflect and move, always sideways. Never backward. Always at an angle so that I begin to make a wide circle around him, forcing him to constantly turn his hips to face me, upsetting his charges by switching my rotation. Time and again Fá tries to close. It worked against the Willow Way, which depends on maintaining a central axis for movement, like a tree trunk. But in this new form of mine, the center moves along with my target. I exhale and try to find the moving air once again. The path spreads itself out before me; all I need to do is feel the wind and follow it.
For two minutes, I decline any invitation to attack or close. I maneuver. I study. I learn. Fá is the best armored Obsidian fighter I have ever faced. Full stop. He relies on his strength and mass in the attack. An attack so overwhelming he’s never needed to develop his defense. Not with his seemingly invulnerable armor that can soak up slashes and trap thrusts long enough for him to cleave his enemies in half.
I doubt he’s ever had a fight last this long. In fact, I doubt anyone has ever survived more than a minute with him. I barely did. But past our second minute, I see the way to win.
His relentless assault is unsustainable. Even in the armor, his pace has begun to slow, his decisions become more judicious. He’s saving energy. Waiting for me to make a mistake. Preying on that, I set a lure and let him break my circle and push me back toward the dome wall. When he rushes forward to crush me against it, I swim right and hack not at his body or his head but at the spike on his left shoulder. The spike shears off. I slash with my other blade and I take a spike off the elbow. I don’t get greedy. He clears me off with a backswing and I dance away.
Clang. Clang. Clang. “Confess.”
I lure him back to the center, retreating until he tries to charge me again. I take another spike off, and feel myself sinking into the shallows of a flow. He expects me to back off again. I don’t. I accept the flow and strike off another spike. I begin to move around him faster and faster like a vortex of wind, my current shifting directions whenever his balance is uneven. Spike by spike I denude his monstrous armor. When spikes litter the ground, I shout again: “Confess!”
He roars in frustration. To me the sound is ambrosia. I am beyond him now, beyond this plane, submerged in the depths of a battle-flow unlike any I’ve ever felt. My body is not flesh and bone, not a clawDrill, but the wind I sought to emulate. My will is pure current. Pyrphoros and Bad Lass become a rain, state-changing between whip and blade with musical fluidity. The blades whittle the armor, the whips tease the wrists and ankles, forcing Fá to dedicate all his focus to preventing his limbs from being snared lest I sever them.
He starts to curl inward, no longer daring to attack.
I retract my helmet, realizing it’s in my way from feeling the movement of air around me. I laugh like a boy, but not at Fá. It’s because I feel the ascendent rushing through me. It’s swelling inside me. He cannot stop it. For years I’ve used Lorn’s art to make my name. Somewhere along the way, I began to think of him as a god, the custodian of some unimpeachable magic. I thought there was no potential beyond mastery of the Willow Way. Even training with Cassius in the pinched confines of his dueling room I felt as though we were only refining that craft.
No. We were sharpening my fundamentals—so I could then find my art form.
And this is where that art is found: where my breath meets the wind my blades make, the wind up from the stone, the wind of Fá as he flees my attacks.
My worries come and go, easy as an exhalation.
It is beautiful, natural, this movement I’ve stumbled upon. I feel part of nature and part of my past, full and empty, unable to falter or make a mistake because even when I misplace my blade—which I do—or my foot, or my weight, or my intentions, I can flow it into a new movement as if it was the original design. My mistakes become new opportunities, each flowing together like a drunken dance with Eo on the dirt-packed Laureltide floor.