CHAPTER 658: THE UNDEAD BOSS (4)

"You won’t go down," she said.

It sounded like an order. Maybe it was.

He let the corner of his mouth notch up. Good. Anchor me, then.

The sword scythed again. Closer. The whistle above the steel was a naked thing; it had no business being beautiful.

Rodion didn’t try to catch it this time. He stepped half a pace, plates angling to deflect debris lines that his calculus had already drawn in ghost chalk across the air.

Thalatha’s bow crept higher of its own accord. The string hummed against her fingertips, the familiar high note that always felt better than words. Her bad shoulder snarled dull pain that brought water to her eyes and a curse to her tongue, but the line of shot felt true, and true shots forgave almost anything.

Mikhailis sank his weight into the balls of his feet. The nearest hex pulsed, answering some silent now.

He didn’t look at her, but he said, "If I say duck, please duck. I like your head."

"Why would I—"

The blade kissed stone and spat chips the size of teeth. Rodion’s silk caught half. Three shrapnel shrieked through, mean and quick.

"Down!" he shouted.

She dropped. A shard trimmed a lock from her braid instead of an ear. It whirled on past and pinged angrily off the gate.

Her heart took three steps on its own. She popped back up with a glare hot enough to melt a barometer. "Warn earlier!"

"Yes, Captain," he said, and under the ridiculous politeness was real relief.

The colossus leaned with the weight of a cathedral. Close now, the lines etched along the blade revealed themselves—rune-scripts burned into bone, endlessly reheated by Blight until they were ugly mirror. Mikhailis’s eyes, behind those cracked lenses, narrowed. The reflections running across glass told him small truths about speed and vibration.

Three beats on the upswing, he noted. Two on the recoil. The runes brighten half a count before the weight shifts. It telegraphs. Good. Keep talking, big guy.

The bandolier tugged his attention again. Under the human senses, under joke and fear and the thinness of air, something else in him organized. A hive-room got quiet. Doors opened. Ranks stood to.

The talismans trembled harder, harmonics finding each other. The hum wasn’t loud; it pressed on the inside of the teeth and behind the ears, a pressure that made the world feel slightly more there. His hand jerked once, not outward, inward—like a fish nibbling a line.

"All right," he whispered to the medallions. "All hands."

Thalatha heard it and didn’t understand the words, but she understood the tone. Like a captain stepping onto a deck he loved. Like a widow lighting a lamp she’d lit every night since the sea took someone from her. That cadence tugged something inside her that wasn’t Hollowguard at all.

The giant’s foot came down, bolts of pain traveling up through tile into kneecaps not designed for this work. She widened her stance, teeth gritted until her jaw clicked.

Rodion’s optic narrowed. The little machine’s head swiveled to triangulate invisible math in the air.

Advisory: blade path deviating by twelve degrees clockwise. Anticipate secondary sweep from right to left. Angle of incidence currently unfavorable for organic necks.

"Appreciated," Mikhailis said dryly.

His fingers hovered over the next sigil.

He looked ridiculous: coat torn, hair dusty, lenses fractured into a spiderweb of prisms. He also looked like a door opening.

Thalatha’s mouth parted. She didn’t know what she expected to crawl out of that door—light, insects, madness—but the stillness right before it happened tasted like the first snow of winter on the tongue.

The sword rose.

The tiles trembled, and the hemp-lamp flames leaned in one direction like curious children.

No more running mouth, he reminded himself, and felt a laugh bite his throat anyway. Fine. Running hands.

He dipped his chin once, as if agreeing with someone only he could hear.

He flicked his fingers.

Ribbed greaves climbed his calves, plates slotting into places that had been waiting for them. A knotted spinal cuirass flexed over his ribs, not heavy but inevitable. Direwolf-sleek pauldrons settled at his shoulders and turned him into a silhouette hunters would be careful around. Tanglebeetle plates interleaved, thin as leaves and tough as anger. Faint soot-black sigils woke along the seams, old and unshowy.

Scarab backs clicked on his forearms and calves, halves folding until they became motors. Two hard-chitin knives budded into his palms like teeth. They weren’t long; they didn’t need to be.

Thick, braided tendons laced the backs of his knees and thighs. As he shifted his weight, the cords took it and gave him back something springier. His boots found extra skin—traction pads clung to the slick bone seams and the wet root veins that webbed the floor. Somewhere a tiny valve hissed, and cool mana pooled around his ankles, ready to be jets.

A cloak spilled down his back. It should have been heavy; it moved like breathed light. Moth sheen ran down the length of it, and when he walked the fringe made patterns that tricked the eyes into thinking the body beside them was one step to the left.

Wings unfolded, not attached to his shoulder blades but riding the strange air just above them. Translucent pinions bell-opened; the edges of each feather looked like wind given a blade to play with. Talons flexed under the arches of his hands. The air around him smelled suddenly of thunder.

Gloves clicked. The left palmed cold until the skin beneath must have blanched; the right heated until it tasted of ember and ash. Vents at the wrist purred back and forth, breathing frost and heat as if remembering.

Something wet and bright slid up from his hip, coiling like a pet snake. Semi-liquid, it sharpened when he flicked it and went lax when he let the thought go. The underlayer of his armor drank light and then gave it back as a shimmer that blurred edges.

And then the shadows thickened. A thin rim of void-blue stroked his iris; the world sharpened and widened without his consent. He felt a little click at the base of his skull like a door unlocking in a house he’d always lived in but never explored. Distance curled. Angles agreed to be kinder. The hairs along his arms rose, not from fear but from the sense that a different gravity had come to play.

Thalatha stared. The stance was familiar. Not the armor, not the wings—those were new—but the way he set his hips, the way his shoulder rested just off center, the way his feet angled so that any step could be a cut. The diagonal step-through into the cut—she had seen it before. She had felt that pattern slice past her cheek once, close enough to steal a hair.

Flash. Smoke that tasted like rat and fear. A goblin lair, bodies pressed too close. Her own blood in her mouth, copper and shame. A goblin champion with blades like butcher tools, screaming something she didn’t understand. And then a smaller figure had been between her and the scream, a figure in an improvised carapace that wasn’t half as pretty as this, twin knives drawing figure-eights so clean they wrote sentences in the air.

It’s the same. The rhythm. The feints. The brutal economy.

She had wanted—she realized it too late—for that unknown goblin to reappear someday, to say without saying that the world sometimes sent help even into holes. She had wanted proof that she hadn’t invented him to survive the story. A quiet shame touched her tongue. She had been ready to be disappointed when the mask surely came off and showed only a new face.

But Mikhailis moved and there was no mask to tear away, and her heart recognized him before her reason did.

Not imitation—identity. The savior’s style lived in him.

He rolled his wrist once as if to greet old friends, and the knives answered by humming like plucked wires.

"Big guy," he called up to the towering skull. "I’m late to the party, but I brought gifts."

The colossus didn’t answer with words. It didn’t need to. It stomped.

The room lurched a finger-width sideways. The sword scythed, biting stone, dragging a crescent of sparks. Mikhailis sprang, legs not so much pushing as releasing. His body cleared the edge of the blade and then he was running on the blade, frog-fast, close enough to feel heat rising from the hissing runes. The Scurabon knives tapped the giant’s knuckles, little harp-string parries that slid inside gaps between phalanges. Soul-embers shook loose, slow-falling like snow inside a paperweight.

Rodion planted himself like a door someone had learned to trust. Shield-plates took the backlash, skidding but not breaking.

Weakness bands confirmed: wrist carpal lattice, popliteal gap behind knee, sternal sub-core protected by layered runes.

"Noted." Mikhailis cut left and his cloak bloomed. Moiré shimmer poured off the hem. On the high balconies, the orbiting archers—skeletal bodies laced with vine—hesitated. Their arrowheads drifted a hair’s breadth off true as their sightlines fuzzed, and that was enough for Thalatha’s breath to drop into her belly again.

She drew. The whisper-field that had been trying to crawl into her head muffled like someone closing a door with their hip. The shot felt like the first prayer she’d said honestly in years. She loosed.

Mikhailis slammed his left gauntlet into the giant’s ankle. Frost fanned over the ligaments; they went rigid as carved glass. He cracked the right gauntlet down—ember-punch—snapping the frozen cords with a dry sound. The giant listed and—

—Thalatha’s arrow threaded the knee-pit, her fletching kissing rotten tendon, then splitting the spacer bone. The joint clacked. The giant lurched a knee down to keep its balance, and the motion opened its wrist to him.

The greatsword’s backwash hit him. Air went sideways. The Slimeweave under his armor swelled, drank the shock, and belched it back as a short, rude slap. The colossus’s rib rings rattled like bell chimes.

He made a fool’s dash into the hook of a swing, then aleaped. Wings snapped with a whip of wind. The blast peeled fungus off the pillars in ripples that formed blinders; his body slid through the new shadow like he’d known it would be there. The Scurabon knives planted themselves into the wrist seam. He didn’t twist; he dragged-cut and tore through the little bones the way you cut the last threads of a stubborn knot.

Wrist integrity down thirty-seven percent.

"Make it a hundred,"