CHAPTER 435: 435: THREE KNIVES FOR A CROWN PART TWO

---

Kai accepted the hit and paid him back by stepping into the blow and jamming a claw into the joint of Skall’s shoulder, ripping out across meat until he felt the arm go dead. Skall’s face changed in a way only men who have lost a limb’s worth of trust understand.

"Sit," Kai said. The word came out colder than the desert ever gets.

He finished it. A short thrust under the heart; a twist to kill kindness; a pull. Skall sagged without drama, exhausted life leaving like a held breath.

[Ding! Level Up: 57. Aura +100. Soul Power +100.]

Oru chose that instant to make art. He came up behind Alka’s shadow, using her edge to hide inside her darkness. Clever. He reached for Kai’s neck with a loop of iron-salted cord meant to blind and burn and choke all at once.

Kai dropped, letting the loop whisper over his crown. He stamped backward on nothing — and found Oru’s instep like a promise. Bones broke under heel. Oru hissed and tried to swallow the sound. Kai’s elbow smashed back and down, found liver through plate seam with a meaty thud, then battered the same spot twice more the way you break a stubborn door.

Oru staggered. Kai spun and saw something rare: Oru’s eyes not calm. The Shadow Runner lifted his blade for a desperate last angle and forgot for one blink that desperation and drift don’t mix.

Kai threw the spear for real this time, point whipping in a flat line. It went in mid-chest and out mid-back. Oru caught the shaft with both hands like a man trying to hold a branch over a flood. He looked down at it as if something had broken in the math he trusted most. He sat. He slid. He was still.

[Ding! Level Up: 58. Aura +100. Soul Power+100.]

Mardek didn’t quit. He understood what "alone" meant now and showed his fangs to it anyway. He changed grip twice, three times; he cut for nerves and soft places; he used his feet, his knees, a pebble, a fallen net, the shadow of a mat, anything. He tried to make Kai hurry. Kai did not.

"Stop hiding in tricks," Kai said evenly, voice roughened by dust and blood. "Die like a man or run like a coward. Decide."

Mardek spat pink and smiled that old easy smile because it was all he had left to pretend with. He lunged.

Kai stepped inside and made it unfair. Predator’s Instinct found the old weakness in Mardek’s left hip from the knee that had taken the earlier blow. Kai kicked that line once, hard, right on the ligament; the joint flashed pain into Mardek’s belly; his guard stuttered. Wrath pressed. Mardek’s hands shook. It was the smallest shake. It was enough.

Kai caught Mardek’s knife wrist and broke it clean with a turn of the forearm that would have served well at a water wheel. The blade fell and kissed Mardek’s boot before the sand accepted it. Kai didn’t let him reach for a second. He took the man by the throat and lifted until his toes found nothing.

"Look," Kai said.

Mardek did, because men always do when that voice tells them to.

He saw Oru with a spear through him. He saw Skall folded in honest dirt. He saw the hawk’s shadow turn once above them like a lid.

"You brought nets to a home," Kai said. "You touched my child. You made a promise to stand on my throat."

Mardek bared his teeth because he had nothing else. "Do it, then. Kill me... I won’t kneel."

Kai’s mouth didn’t move. He drove his free hand into Mardek’s belly, claws short, and dug across until he felt tendons snap under his knuckles, then yanked the man down onto a rising knee. Something inside Mardek broke with a sound that made two nearby soldiers retch. Kai let him fold, then took the spear from Oru’s quiet chest and set its point low.

"Wrath Crown," he whispered, and the air around them went heavy with despair that was not Kai’s to feel.

He pinned Mardek’s boot with one clawed foot. Then he stabbed through the upper thigh into the pelvis, a brutal, anchoring wound that ended any thought of running. Mardek howled — the first true sound he’d given the desert without dressing it in swagger. Kai drew the spear back, let the man feel the hole he had become, then drove the point up under the breastbone and into the heart.

Everything that made Mardek a problem left in one long, rough breath.

[Ding! Level Up: 59. Aura +100. Soul Power+100.]

The sound slid away like heat leaving a blade.

Mardek’s eyes widened, then emptied. His body twitched once around the spear and went slack. The grin he wore so easily did not return to his face. It had never been real enough to die with him.

Kai let the weight sag off the iron and lowered the corpse to the sand with a soldier’s quiet. He did not kick the body. He did not speak to it. He pulled the point free, wiped it once on the dead man’s sash, and let the night take the color back.

Oru sat as if listening to something far away. His lips moved; no words came. For a heartbeat, the drifting eyes focused on Kai.

"Good ending," Oru breathed, and bled out of his last breath in the desert like water into stone.

Skall lay on his side, one hand still stubbornly closed on empty air where a spade should have been. Kai bent, set the spade in that hand, and closed the fingers around the haft. Respect paid; debt settled.

Alka wheeled once above, then fell hard, a controlled crash that made the sand jump. She stalked to Mardek’s body, feathers slicked tight, breath sharp. Her beak dipped as if to tear. She didn’t. She lifted her head instead and fixed her black eye on Kai.

"Done," she rasped.

"Done," he said.