Chapter 133: Really?
Ren stood there looking down at them, Silas and Ezra with him. Silas had sniffed their way here to ensure that they found the count.
"I came here to see the count, and now I am seeing this here," Ren said. He leaped down the rubble and dropped down. Riker and Ezra followed suit.
Both parties looked at him, the man, the dual wielder, and the mage.
"Who are you?" the dual wielder asked, with his sword ready to go.
"Just someone who wants to have a word with the count, and I would love it if you didn’t try to stop me."
The dual wielder pointed his sword at Ren without hesitation.
"Not possible," he said. "Turn around."
Ren looked at the sword. Looked at the man holding it. Looked back at the sword.
"You really want to do this?" he asked.
The dual wielder was already moving.
He came in fast, both blades working in the opening combination, right blade high and left blade cutting across the midsection, the kind of entry that had probably ended most conversations before they started. Ren stepped inside the high blade, let it go past his ear, and used the Soul Eater to redirect the low one sideways, the contact light and precise, just enough to push the angle off without committing to a full block.
The dual wielder recovered immediately and came back with a spinning combination that moved the blades in overlapping arcs, covering the space between them in a continuous pattern that left no obvious gap.
Ren watched it.
Then he stepped through it.
Not around, through, reading the rhythm and finding the half second where both blades were on the same side and walking into the opening it created, the Soul Eater coming up in a short diagonal that forced the dual wielder to break the pattern and reset.
"You’re good," Ren said.
"Shut up," the dual wielder said, and came again.
The exchange that followed moved across the rubble, both of them using the uneven ground without thinking about it, the dual wielder angling his combinations to use the terrain to cut off Ren’s movement, Ren stepping over and around the debris with the ease of someone who had fought on worse surfaces and found this one acceptable. The dual wielder landed two glancing contacts that the Soul Eater caught on the flat rather than the edge, and Ren answered each one with a redirect that pushed a blade wide and created an opening he chose not to use.
He was reading. Not finishing.
The dual wielder drove forward with a thrust from the right blade and swung the left in behind it as the follow-through, the timing designed to punish a block on the first strike. Ren parried the thrust and turned his body sideways to let the follow-through pass beside him, the blade close enough that he felt the air of it, and flicked the Soul Eater across the dual wielder’s sword hand on its way past.
Not a cut. A tap.
The dual wielder’s grip loosened for half a second, and his eyes registered it.
"Still want to keep going?" Ren asked.
The dual wielder tightened his grip and said nothing, which was its own answer.
The man with the bow had not waited for the fight to develop.
The moment the dual wielder engaged Ren, he had broken toward the carriages, fast and low, his bow already across his back and something else in his hand, a short blade for close work, his intention clear.
Silas was already there.
He came in from the side with a wind burst that hit the man before he had covered half the distance, the compressed air slamming into his chest and pushing him sideways off his line. The man absorbed it, planted his foot, and redirected, going around Silas rather than through him.
Silas cut him off again.
The man switched the blade to his other hand and drove a fast combination at Silas’s midsection, three short strikes aimed at finding a gap in his guard. Silas blocked the first with a wind claw, stepped around the second, and caught the third on his forearm, taking it to create the angle for a counter that the man saw coming and slipped away from.
Fast. Trained. Not easily pressured.
The man went back to his bow.
He nocked and drew in a single motion, the arrow already humming with the faint crackle of something building in the tip, and released before Silas had fully closed the distance.
Silas threw his hand out, and the wind diverted the arrow sideways, the lightning in it discharging into a nearby rock and blowing a chunk off the side of it.
The man nocked again.
And again.
The arrows came in rapid succession, each one slightly different, the angles varying, some aimed directly and some curved to come at Silas from the side after release. Silas moved through them, wind pushing the straight ones off course and his body reading the curved ones, his feet quick across the rubble, closing distance between each diversion rather than simply holding ground.
The man stepped back, creating space, and Silas felt the shift in the engagement, the man no longer trying to reach the carriage but focusing entirely on Silas now, the bow working in the kind of rhythm that said this was where he was comfortable.
Silas pressed forward anyway.
He drove through the next arrow, the wind claw eating most of the impact, and closed the final distance in a burst of speed that the man had not fully accounted for.
His fist pulled back.
The man’s eyes tracked it, his body already beginning to move, but the angle was wrong and the distance was gone, and there was nowhere clean left to go. Silas was way too fast, even for him, someone who was extremely nimble and fast. He never thought he would run into someone who could move far better than he could.