Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

Veric explodes toward me.

Azure Trust doesn’t look like a run. It looks like a decision torn out of the ground and shoved forward by compressed OXI. His body comes behind Undertow, and Undertow comes before everything else, covering chest, hip, shoulder, armed arm, intent.

There’s no clean read. No blade in sight. None of that small delay between eye, shoulder, and hand that a person gives away when about to strike.

There’s only shield. A blurred wall rushing in too fast, like a tsunami.

I give half a step back for an angle, but Veric adjusts with me. I hear the chain bound to his arm hum, and the shield stays between us like a door holding back a storm. Strike high, I meet Undertow. Cut low, he drops the wall and swallows me in the advance. Try to circle, and Azure Trust corrects his body before I reach his flank.

Then the wall opens.

The shield drops a fraction, just enough to make a slit in the center of my vision, and the short blade comes out from behind it like an assassin’s knife. No arc. No warning. It comes straight, accelerated by the same drive that carries all of Veric.

Too late for a perfect dodge.

I throw my neck aside and raise Eventide on a late reflex. The gladius point passes where my throat had been an instant before, so close I feel the blade’s cold before the pain. Eventide knocks it off-center and shoves the thrust away, but not before a hot line opens along the side of my neck.

Not deep. But it bleeds.

The blood runs in a thin trail while Veric is already raising Undertow again, hiding the gladius, the torso, the eyes, any sign of the next move. The technique is too simple to be pretty and too clean to be simple. Wall, slit, thrust, wall again. He isn’t trying to beat me on the read. He’s taking the read out of the fight.

I press in before he picks another timing.

If precision finds no opening, force will make one.

Eventide hits Undertow with a heavy impact, top to bottom, not hunting flesh behind the metal. Veric stops his advance and absorbs it with the shield, but his knees flex. The dirt under his feet trembles in a short shockwave. I strike again, changing the angle to the side of the shield, not to displace it but to make his body pay for the defense.

The third blow comes lower.

The fourth, higher.

The fifth lands in the center of Undertow like a hammer on a church bell.

Veric doesn’t open his guard.

That’s the problem.

He knows that if he tries to answer mid-sequence, I’ll enter through the transition. So he stays behind the wall and holds.

But the shield catching the blow doesn’t erase the power. The force has to go somewhere. It runs through the metal, the arm, the shoulder, down the spine, and ends in his feet sinking into the arena floor.

I keep going.

It isn’t the same thing I do to run. It’s the same principle turned inside out. When I want speed, I compress OXI in the right muscles for one short instant: calf, thigh, hip, core. A clean burst, no energy wasted across the whole body.

Now I do it in a chain for impact. Base, hip, lat, shoulder, forearm, wrist. OXI only where the motion exists. No exaggerated glow. No pretty aura. Just kinetics entering through the blade.

Freya had Rank C and enough brute strength to make the world respect her blow. I don’t have that. What I have is control, repetition, and the memory of years fighting enemies who would have killed me if I wasted energy in the wrong place.

Behind Undertow, Veric coughs. The sound comes muffled by the shield. A few drops of blood fall to the dirt near his boot.

He leaps back before I can lock the rhythm again, landing with heavy breath and the shield already lowered. His expression has changed. Not pure surprise. Irritation mixed with recognition.

"You bastard..." He wipes his mouth with the back of the hand holding the gladius. "How do you hit as hard as Freya?"

I don’t answer. The answer would give too much away, and Veric turns explanations into weapons before he even thanks you for them. I let the silence work. If he wants to know whether I can keep hitting like this, better he find out with his arm than his ears.

I press in again.

This time he doesn’t wait for my first blow to land.

"Azure Dividends!"

The name comes out before the impact, and that should have warned me I was walking into his math. But the blade was already dropping, OXI compressed through the whole motion, and I chose to try to break through anyway.

Eventide hits Undertow. Or at least I try.

A bluish film appears around the shield at the moment of contact. Not a large barrier, not a dome. Thin, fixed to the metal, almost too discreet for what it does next.

The force comes back.

Not like an ordinary block. Like my sword struck a titanium anvil angled against me. The shock climbs my wrist, pries my fingers open for a fraction, and throws my hand upward. The whole arm loses its line. My shoulder follows more than it should. Eventide leaves the path I needed to hold.

For an instant too short, my center is exposed.

Veric was already waiting for that instant.

The gladius appears from behind Undertow in the space the rebound created, and this time there’s no theatrical surprise.

There’s planning.

He let me believe my strength was breaking the wall, waited for me to pour more OXI into the next blow, and used Azure Dividends to turn my own impact into the opening.

"Azure Trust."

The thrust comes on the heels of the word.

I try to pull the arm in, twist the hip, bring Eventide back to intercept. Everything arrives late by a small, cruel measure. The gladius point enters my abdomen with a clear, wet sound, heavy enough to cut through the noise of the arena.

The air leaves me.

My feet don’t give, but the body understands before the head does. Veric is too close. Undertow still guards his side. The gladius found flesh, a true, direct hit.

A metallic taste climbs my throat.

Blood reaches my mouth.

And behind the blue shield, Veric keeps his eyes steady on mine.

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