Kagami

The stump moved first.

Black biomass threaded out from the severed shoulder in six tendrils, each one thicker than his forearm had been, and his legs followed a half-second later with a lunge that closed four meters before Kagami registered the distance. He hadn’t told his legs to do that. The knight had.

Will-O-Wisp came out of the left palm and Consuming Maw erupted from the stump at the same time. Two angles. The ghost fire was compressed into flat discs that tracked horizontal and cut clean. The Maw branched from the shoulder in a four-pronged spread that boxed the retreat.

Ezra sidestepped the fire and brought the stick through the gap in the Maw’s spread. His feet stayed planted. The stick caught the widest tendril at the joint and redirected it into the second, tangling both. The knight’s leg swept low and Ezra hopped the sweep, tapped the stick on the ground, and waited.

Stop.

His body pressed again. Lightning threaded off the biomass at the shoulder and arced through the Maw like a circuit. The tendrils went white-hot.

Ezra blocked with the stick planted sideways and the current split around the wood and grounded through his heels. His coat smoked at the hem. He stood through all of it.

The knight was using Kagami’s spells better than Kagami ever had. The Will-O-Wisp didn’t scatter. The lightning ran tight. The Consuming Maw covered vectors, each tendril holding a lane while the others struck.

Older than Bureau training. The knight had fought like this before the fusion, before any of it. Every three-second window Kagami had given it, every time he’d opened the door and counted to three and shut it again, the knight had been logging the body. Memorizing the motor patterns.

Those three seconds were reps.

“You stopped countering.” Kagami’s voice, through Kagami’s jaw. The vowels landed harder than he placed them and the cadence was off by a fraction. The knight spoke through him and didn’t bother matching the fit.

Ezra watched from behind the stick with blood on his lip and his shoulder torn from Kagami’s round. “I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not fighting you, Seneschal.”

The biomass in Kagami’s spine contracted. The knight knew its own title.

Why are you fighting my friend?

The knight didn’t pause. His body kept charging another disc in the left palm while the stump tendrils reset into spread formation. Kagami’s voice inside his own skull meant nothing to it.

He taught me my first spell. He clapped when I held it for four seconds. He—

The knight swung the Maw at Ezra’s midsection in a four-tendril pincer. Ezra parried the first two with the stick and twisted between the second pair. His coat tore at the back and he landed four meters out.

“Your windup is tighter than his.” Ezra rolled the torn shoulder. “But you favor the left. Force of habit.”

The knight charged. Lightning corded down the remaining arm and ghost fire bloomed at the stump in concentrated bursts. The cemetery headstones cracked from proximity heat.

One of the fresh plots caved into ash. Past the tree line another building groaned and came apart.

Ezra circled through it. The stick guided every tendril past him instead of meeting force. He was testing the joints, studying the Maw’s branching pattern the same way he’d studied Kagami’s overcharged windup ten minutes ago.

He’d taken hits from Kagami’s round on purpose because Kagami wasn’t the subject.

You wanted this. All of it. The flood, the arm, the insults—you wanted it out.

His body stopped. The tendrils retracted an inch. His left eye twitched as the stump’s biomass drew too much from the spine.

“You’re managing the bleed wrong.” Ezra pointed the stick at the severed shoulder. “The current is feeding outward. You’re losing mass every thirty seconds.”

“I have enough.”

“You always did. That was never the question.”

The knight pressed again and Kagami caught a hitch in his own gait. The left knee locked a quarter second too long on the pivot. Bureau motor training overwriting Seneschal patterns, two sets of muscle memory fighting for the same joints.

Ezra tracked the knee. The jaw where Kagami’s teeth ground against each other because the knight clenched harder than he did.

The Maw caught Ezra’s stick and Ezra let it. The tendrils wound up the shaft toward his hand and he held on until the last inch before releasing. The stick clattered to the grass, wrapped in cooling biomass. Ezra left it there.

“Eleven seconds.” He met Kagami’s eyes through the knight. “That’s how long he hesitated before he killed the girl.”

The knight picked up the stick with a Maw tendril and snapped it. The dark wood broke clean. Two pieces hit the grass.

“One point five to locate. Two to cross. Seven point five standing over her with his hand on her throat, deciding.” Ezra watched the wood fall and exhaled once, slow and final. “Eleven meant partial integration. Reversible. Under three and the extraction would’ve killed him.”

You let me kill her.

Kagami’s molars cracked. The knight’s grip on his jaw was iron but the teeth breaking against each other were his. Eleven seconds. Ezra sat in that chair and counted every one.

“You didn’t need the dove to find me.” Ezra sidestepped the first orb. “You already knew where I’d be. But I needed to know how far the root system had grown before I pulled it. Her death gave me the measurement.”

You sat in that chair and watched me strangle her and counted the seconds.

“Eleven gave me room to work.” Ezra was backing toward the koi stream now, leading the knight by letting it chase. “So I’m working.”

The knight closed with Maw and lightning fused along the tendrils. Ezra caught the first strike on his forearm, first contact he’d allowed since the knight took control, and the impact sent him sliding backward through dirt. Headstones broke under his heels.

He stopped at the edge of the koi stream. The black fish and the white fish circled each other in the current three feet from a fight that could’ve leveled the block.

Ezra knelt and put his hand in the water. It turned gray around his fingers.

The cemetery went cold. The ghost fire in the rings around them guttered and died. Every sound pulled inward and the koi stream reversed, flowing uphill, toward Ezra’s palm, pooling in his fist.

No.

The knight spoke to Kagami for the first time since taking control.

NO.

Six months of sharing a spine. The elevator pressure. The door. The three-second trick.

In all of it Kagami had heard the knight bored, hungry, furious.

He’d never heard it afraid.`

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep