Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Lay tilted her head.

"Alright," she said. Her voice was quieter now. The mockery was gone. What remained was something close to honest tiredness, and beneath it, the faintest edge of something Kori couldn't quite read - not fear, not resignation, but the calm of a person who had reached the end of a particular game and was waiting to see what the next one was going to be.

"You win."

Then she leaned back.

The motion was so slow that Kori, even with the Chasmis open, saw it as just gravity rather than action. Lay's spine bent backward at the waist. Her arms remained raised in surrender. Her boots stayed on the rooftop's edge. The cloak settled along the curve of her body as her weight shifted, the brass canteen still tucked somewhere in the folds, and her head tilted backward over the few dozen meter drop until the wind from below caught the underside of her hood and lifted it.

Then her feet left the parapet.

She fell down her back.

Osamu's shield came up. A field projected outward from the alloy disc - broader than his earlier barriers, wider, a projection meant to cover an entire descent path. The cube formed in the air with the lower face way below the rooftop's edge, a translucent cuboid of dense Eon-reinforced air that extended upward from the roof, downward from the edge and outward to the sides, sealing off the alley between this building and the next, and eliminating any chance of someone going lower than fifteen meters below the roof's lip. If Lay hit it at terminal velocity, she'd survive - bruised, maybe broken, but still alive.

Him and Kori were both waiting for the muffled sound of a falling body crashing against the Eon field.

But the silence remained the same.

Osamu lowered his shield, but the field remained activated. His chest rose and fell with the deep, slow breathing of a man who had been moving at full output for the last several minutes and was using the moment to recover.

"She has nowhere to go," he mumbled.

Kori was already running to the edge.

The Chasmis had opened wider - wide enough to register what her eyes had failed to catch in the slow lean. Looking down, Kori caught a glimpse – both of Lay's blades snapping forward, extending the spike-tipped blade forward.

She wasn't falling.

She was climbing.

Lay's body twisted in the air below the parapet, one blade catching the underside of the rooftop's lip, her weight pivoting on the anchor as her other arm extended down the building's face and bit into the wall. The blades held against the alloy, biting in the reinforced surface material. Her body rotated. Her boots found the wall. The heel-blade snapped out again. And then she was moving - sideways, fast, her body horizontal against the building's face as she circled it the way a mantis circles a stem.

In less than a second she had cleared Kori's line of sight around the eastern corner.

"Osamu-!" Kori shouted.

He turned his head. The breathing was still deep. His shield was lowered.

"She's not in the field. She's going around."

His expression didn't change, but the shield came up with the quick reflex of a fighter who had been told something his body needed to react to faster than his mind could process. He pivoted to face the northern edge of the rooftop. The cube field below them shimmered once and shrunk as he redirected his channelling into a tighter cube

Lay came up over the roof's lip that was behind Osamu.

She came up fast. The curved swords in her hands, both blades fully drawn. Her boots cleared the parapet at the angle of a launch, her body airborne for a fraction of a second as she crossed the distance between the western edge and Osamu's exposed back, and the strike that landed on him was not a sword cut.

It was a kick.

The heel-blade had snapped out again. The dark spike of steel caught Osamu across the lower spine with the force of an artillery shell, and his body went forward across the rooftop in a long, fast skid that ended when his face hit one of the vertical pipes rising from the roof's edge. The pipe was solid alloy, anchored deep into the building's structural frame. It bent completely under the impact, hissing. Osamu's shoulders cracked against the metal. The pipe groaned.

Kori was already moving. She crossed the rooftop in two strides, her knives glowing brighter as her Eon flowed, both blades held in reverse grips with their points angled outward. Lay was already gone - back below the roof, blades anchoring again, with impossible speed.

She was using the building below Kori's sight to her advantage – moving on the wall like a mantis, or a spider of some sort, pulling herself forward with her spiked blades.

They were both in a trap. Going too close to the ledge would be too dangerous, since Lay could pull them down with her – faster than they could even react.

…And staying in the center meant being attacked from all directions.

The next attack came from the south.

Kori only saw the motion because the Chasmis caught the shadow of Lay's cloak crossing the entire roof half a milisecond before her body did. The blades came up - a downward sweep aimed at Kori's collarbone, fast enough that even with the slowed frame Kori barely had time to bring her right knife across in a deflecting block. The Damascus rang off the luminite-charged steel. Lay pivoted on the contact, her boots already finding the parapet edge again, and she was over it before Kori's counter could complete.

The third strike came from the eastern corner. The fourth from above - Lay launching off the antenna array and dropping onto Osamu's shoulder with both blades scissoring across his guard. He caught one, but the other opened a thin red line across his upper arm.

Kori had registered the pattern by the fifth attack. Lay was not just running the exterior - she was using the entire structure as a combat platform. The walls, the pipes, the antennae, the cooling vents along the parapet's outer face. Every fixed object on or around the building had become an anchor point, and Lay was treating them the way a master swordsman treated grips on their weapon: she pivoted off them, launched from them, used them to redirect her momentum into angles that nothing on a flat surface could have produced. Her speed was not human. Her angles were not human. The mask on her face was doing more than concealing her now - the velocity she was generating across her transitions was producing enough air pressure to require a sealed breathing apparatus to keep her lungs barely functioning.

A vertical pipe at the rooftop's southern edge - Lay caught it on her sixth pass, both spiked blades hooking around the pipe at speed, her body spinning around the steel column. She made a full rotation around the pipe in less than a quarter of a second. The momentum she carried out of the spin doubled. When she released - her blades coming free of the pipe in the moment of maximum velocity - she flew across the rooftop in a flat, horizontal line that hit Osamu in the chest before he could raise the shield.

He went backward. The barrier formed reflexively in front of him, but Lay was already way past it, the spin having carried her around the field's projection radius before he could close it. She landed on the rooftop behind him.

Her left blade swept upward at the back of his neck.

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