CHAPTER 134: DANCE BETWEEN BLADES

The line flexed. Miners stumbled through the corridor Division three and four had carved - their eyes too wide, their faces pale with cold and pain. Gravers limped, blades dull from work, refusing to stop. The next rush pressed at the treeline: silhouettes shaking loose from the dark.

"Shift - left pocket" Raizen called, not too loud, not pleading.

Lynea slid past him.

Two violet rings spun up around her ankles, close and bright as bracelets. They lengthened, and she was gliding - skates of light touching snow, leaving hair-thin purple lines behind. The fragments appeared from her sleeves like a magic trick, humming at a pitch you felt in your teeth.

Hikari took her flank without a word. Her staff swung once, a test, then settled into her palm.

They looked at each other a brief heartbeat, half a smile traded.

"Last one to slow down makes dinner" Lynea murmured, already moving.

"You can barely cook" Hikari replied.

"Exactly."

They joined the battle.

The first Nyx lunged - human shape, just wrong enough to make you doubt every face you ever trusted. Lynea’s skates whistle. She cut a fast S through snow and the fragments lifted off her orbit in a fan. Eight lines. Eight bites. The silhouette came apart. Not like the vegetable she never managed to cut right. (Not with a kitchen knife, of course)

Another Nyx rushed in from the far side. Hikari didn’t hurry. She turned the staff in her grip and aimed with one end of the staff. A devastating ray burned through shoulder and spine. The Nyx collapsed.

Lynea and Hikari? They didn’t fight. They performed.

Lynea was moving in a way only she could understand, fragments snapping out, returning, launching again in clean loops. Hikari’s rhythm was a half-beat behind – but not late, more like... Never in the way, but present. A guard, a partner, a second blade you forgot to fear until it saved you.

A miner with a blood-wet sleeve paused long enough to watch them pass and muttered something. Maybe prayer. Maybe gossip. Maybe praise.

"Left - two" Raizen started to say, but didn’t even need to say.

Lynea rolled her shoulder and was already cutting left. Two Nyxes slid out of the same shadow with different mistakes. The first overreached. The second anticipated and stepped back - into Hikari’s space. The staff moved, and carved a hole through the thing’s chest. Speed wasn’t needed when certainty existed.

The stronger ones noticed. Heavier bodies moved through snow. One’s long arms ended in blunt paddles. Another had two twisted tails.

Lynea cut the first tail and let the rest of her fragments take care of the other. She grinned, high on speed and the feeling of being exactly where she wanted to be.

The thing faked - early.

The second tail – still not completely off - flicked aggressively, catching Lynea off-guard, committed to a turn. The tail touched her thigh in a shallow slice. Pain hit. She lost a fraction of balance. The snow took the opportunity and made her lose balance completely.

Just a tiny bit late, Hikari’s staff drew a blue circle and fired, making two smaller Nyxes kneel, lifeless. She dropped down at Lynea’s side, one hand keeping the staff between them and the next bad idea.

"You okay?" she asked, voice placid as a pond.

Lynea sucked air through her teeth and then laughed at herself, breathless. "You’re really making it hard to impress you."

"Then try harder."

Lynea rolled back to her feet. Purple circles gathered around her ankles again, bright and stubborn.

"On me" Hikari said.

"Yeah, yeah, on you" Lynea echoed, and pushed.

They went back in.

The plated Nyx lifted both paddles in a two-handed smash. Hikari didn’t even bother to block. She stepped into the thing’s space, burned a line through the elbow, and let the swing miss her. Lynea arrived at its ankle and cut everything she found there with three quick slices. The Nyx tilted, fell, and gave up on life.

"Good" Keahi’s voice came through from somewhere close, humor tucked just out of sight. "Keep breathing."

"Try and stop me" Lynea said, kind of breathless.

More kept coming. Mindless didn’t mean slow. The human-like silhouettes were fast and straightforward; the more... Special ones were mean and inventive. They didn’t take turns and they didn’t care about basic movements.

Lynea drew larger loops. Her fragments obeyed and formed a side spiral around her, violet lines rising and falling in a weird, yet organized rythm. She raised her arms, and every single one shot out at once - high, low, mid, everywhere - ricocheting off snow hard enough to spark frost. Three bodies staggered, not dead.... More like reconsidering the concept of death.

Hikari planted herself at the center of the chaos and went still.

Wind pulled the hair at her jaw. She didn’t need to say anything. A simple gesture: she lifted the staff.

Something above cracked.

Not thunder. Not heat. Then, ten, then a hundred, maybe more glowing blue spears found their edges up there all at once. They weren’t placed. They were summoned, as if they were answering a call.

With a flick of the staff, they all fell at once.

The sound was like broken glass trying to become rain. Purple shards cut between the falling lights - Lynea, mid-storm, turning the storm into something far worse. The spears hit ground and Nyxes alike. Those that landed solid ran a meter deep, two maybe, then dissolved into dust and then nothingness. A bigger Nyx took three, staggered, the fourth went in between what you could call shoulders.

Hikari exhaled. The spears answered by dissolving into thin air.

Lynea leaned into the pause, chest moving in irregular movements. "That... Is your definition of fun?"

Hikari wiped melting frost off her knuckles with the back of her wrist, light already fading. "No" she said. "That was... Restraint."

"Show-off."

"You asked."

They didn’t get to keep the quiet for too long.

A sleeker shape cut in low from the right, jawless head lifting, both forearms thin. Too thin. Lynea went to meet it and felt the turn wrong before her skates committed again. It didn’t go for her. It went past her, for the wounded miner behind her, the one who just managed to stand up again.

"Down" Hikari said, already moving.

Lynea dropped, trusting the voice before she decided to. A glowing line passed over her shoulder and split the Nyx. Lynea’s fragments returned on a tight curve and ended the thing’s life.

On the flank, Esen whooped and detonated another pressure wave down one of Ichiro’s carved pillars - shock compressing into a bead and then exploding, gracefully, ending Some smaller Nyxes.

Lynea took the left. A huge Nyx, at least 3 meters tall, cut her off. She split her orbit - half her fragments dropping low as she leaped, the other half going high to annoy the face. The blows missed by an honest bit. She didn’t let it. She landed, purple skates carving a little loop in the snow, and her knee almost gave out. The thigh bruise complained like that one friend that has an obsession with "I told you!"

Hikari’s spears had made an accidental field of pale monuments, already fading, white-blue bleeding back into air. It would have been pretty if you didn’t know what it meant and what it did.

"Reform" Raizen said. Not because they were failing - because staying this pretty would get them killed.

They collapsed back toward the hinge where Keahi held center like a promise. Lynea drifted in beside Hikari, purple orbit twitching in time with her pulse. Hikari rolled her shoulder once, twice.

"Good work" someone muttered with a breath that might have been Keahi’s.

Lynea glanced sideways, caught Hikari watching the tree line with that quiet attention she wore like armor. "Do you ever miss?"

"Yes" Hikari said. "Not today. I got lucky"

"Arrogant."

"Accurate."

From between the trees. Even more Nyxes. Heavier.Stronger.

Keahi stepped forward through the steam.

She didn’t push anyone aside. Snow on the handle of her blade hissed and evaporated. Her breath came slow. Calm.

She looked at the ruin - purple cuts, remnants of blue spears, green burns, shockwave craters - and smiled, amused.

"You two made a mess" she said.

Lynea wiped her chin with her hand. "You’re welcome."

Raizen passed close behind them and didn’t stop moving. "Keahi."

She angled her chin - ready.

"The snow hasn’t melted yet" Hikari said softly, mostly to herself.

"It will" Keahi answered, hand settling on her hilt.

The air around her warmed. A bit too much.