The world collapsed into claws, stone, and fire.

  The Cliff Stalkers didn’t fight like basilisks or Gnashers; there was no momentum to break, no tide to push back. They fought like shadows… appearing from above, landing in silence, vanishing back into the cliffs with feline grace.

  Every time one leapt, another mirrored, claws flashing in perfect counterpoint.

  As previously agreed, Fty positioned himself in the middle, Lisa just behind him, sparks snapping from her fists like a caged beast begging for release. Together, they were the anchor. If the center broke, the rest would fall.

  Lunaris took their left flank.

  Her swords blurred, rapier striking like a needle, longsword sweeping arcs to parry lunges. She flowed with the rhythm, every motion precise, the song of steel ringing sharp and beautiful. With every strike she turned aside, another came from above, claws scraping sparks against her parries. Her dance was a desperate one now, less joy, more survival.

  On the right, Yuki fought like lightning trying to hold back the storm.

  Palm-sized shields flashed into existence, translucent and fragile, barely big enough to catch a swipe before shattering like glass. Each one bought a heartbeat. She bent light around herself, flickering into afterimages, confusing one stalker for half a second… long enough to slice shallow arcs across its hide.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  A stalker’s claw hammered through her latest shield and raked down her shoulder. Yuki gasped, staggering, blood soaking through her bright robes. The scent of ozone mixed with iron. She raised another mirror desperately, deflecting a killing bite, but her movements slowed, her light dimming.

  “Yuki!” Fty snapped. His staff glowed, threads of green weaving through the air into her wound. He forced the bleeding shut, but it drained him… one heal here meant one less for the others.

  Another stalker slammed into Lunaris from the left.

  She twisted, blades meeting claws with a ringing clang. Her rapier slid between its ribs, but its weight drove her backward, boots skidding on stone. The second stalker darted in low, teeth snapping around her ankle. Lunaris hissed, her dance stuttering. She managed to sever its ear in reply, but when she pulled free, her foot gave a sickening twist.

  She dropped to one knee, swords up, breath fast. Still fighting, but hobbled.

  “Lunaris—hold!” Fty barked. His hand shot out, green light lancing into her, dulling the pain, but the damage was too deep to erase while keeping Yuki alive. He couldn’t be everywhere.

  Then NightSwallow’s voice cut through the chaos. “Mini-boss!”

  And she was gone.

  The shadows swallowed her. When she appeared again, it was in front of a Cliff Stalker larger than the rest, its scales darker, its movements faster, every leap perfectly timed.

  Their clash was blinding. Steel hissed, claws struck sparks off stone. NightSwallow moved faster than Fty could track, darting in and out with impossible economy, each strike angled for tendon or throat. But the beast mirrored her with uncanny precision, its body folding and twisting in rhythm with her feints.

  Every attack she made, it answered. Predator against predator; assassin against assassin.

  Her cry rang once across the battlefield. Then silence. Their duel vanished into the rocks, only flickers of movement hinting at the deadly dance above.

  Fty clenched his jaw and turned back to the center. They had to survive long enough for NightSwallow to win.

  “Kit!” he barked. “The golem. Keep it off us.”

  Katherine’s head snapped toward him, disbelief flashing. “Ya serious? Need to kill tat’ cat!”

  “Now!”

  She groaned, slamming her sword into the dirt for leverage, then heaving it free with a grunt. “Ugh! Fine!” She charged, momentum shaking the ground. The golem turned, its stone chest grinding open as if to laugh. Katherine met it head-on, blade arcing high. Sparks burst as steel met rock, and the two clashed in thunderous rhythm. Dust and stone shards flew with every blow.

  That left the center.

  Lisa’s fire spat from her palms in wild bursts, potshots at anything that moved too close. A stalker lunged at Yuki; flame snarled across its flank, forcing it back. Another circled toward Lunaris; fire hissed past, clipping its tail. She wasn’t unleashing her full fury, not her once-a-day spell, but every flick of her hands sent a message: You step closer, you burn.

  Still, they pressed.

  Fty’s voice cut sharply through the battle. “Shields! Left!”

  Yuki stumbled into position, conjuring a mirror just in time to deflect a swipe aimed at Lisa’s throat. The shield cracked and broke; the impact sent Yuki sprawling again. Blood dripped from her arm, staining her sword hilt.

  “Focus, Yuki!” Fty snapped. He shoved healing energy her way, then flung another thread toward Lunaris, who fought from one knee, parrying both stalkers with grit more than grace. His hands trembled as he tried to juggle their lives, pulling one back from collapse only to see the other falter.

  Lisa’s voice rang hot behind him. “Keep healing, doc! I’ll burn the bastards!” Fire exploded from her palms in another spray, searing the whiskers off a stalking predator.

  The battlefield steadied, but only barely.

  Katherine and the golem smashed into each other, each blow a small earthquake.

  Lunaris and Yuki bled on either side, buying the center with their pain.

  NightSwallow’s duel with the mini-boss flickered like lightning far above, too fast to follow.

  A laugh came first… too loud for the wind, too pleased with itself to belong to anyone with a conscience. Fty’s head snapped up. A figure climbed over the rim of the cliff with the effortless grace of someone who’d made these rocks his throne.

  Dust sloughed off his boots in little avalanches.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Sunlight struck brass buckles, a tarnished gorget, a mismatched collection of trophies: a string of chipped rings looped on a cord, a cracked wolf’s fang wired to a pauldron, a strip of red silk tied to the hilt of a sword like a personal banner. He wore leather hardened with lacquer and studded with hammered coin, a bandit’s patchwork made regal by confidence. His hair was sun-burnt black, tied back with a thong; his beard kept close to the face to deny anyone a handhold.

  A thin scar raked his cheek to the corner of his mouth, pulling the smile there into a permanent sneer. “You fools who stumbled here!” he called, spreading his arms as if greeting guests to his amphitheater. “I always wanted to do a monologue. Old Chief enjoyed those.”

  He paused, taking in the battlefield with an appraiser’s eye. The bandit’s gaze slid over Katherine battering the golem, over Lunaris holding the left on one good foot, over Yuki fencing the right with mirrors that cracked as fast as she made them, over Lisa and Fty in the center then back again.

  He nodded, satisfied with his own conclusions.

  “And I can see why,” he went on, voice dropping into a purr. “Targets fight desperately. I can taste your fear.”

  “Shut up!” Lisa snapped. She flung a fireball with a whip of her arm, a compact star that screamed across the gap. The man dropped into a low crouch with insulting ease. The fireball hit the rock behind him and burst into an angry blossom of heat, scorching the stone, licking air. He rose through the shimmering heat as if he’d choreographed it.

  “Silly woman,” he drawled, flicking two fingers toward somewhere just below the ridge. “Shoots at the side who is winning.”

  Four archers rose in a line from behind a lip of stone, bows already drawn. Their faces were cloth-wrapped, eyes narrow. The bandit leader lifted his sword one-handed. The blade… that was their target. He raised it above his head like a conductor’s baton.

  “I’m the king of this land!”

  “Keep your crown,” Fty said, too low for the man to hear; his voice was for his own focus, not the bandit’s vanity. He pushed power down the length of his staff and split it… one thread to the left, one to the right.

  Lunaris caught his meaning before his magic touched her.

  She had fought until the last minute on a half-ruined ankle and will alone. Now the green thread of his healing slid into the joint, unspooling cool and inexorable; pain dulled, swelling sank, the angry pull of ligaments stilled. The relief didn’t give her joy; joy would come later, but it gave her rhythm back. She rolled to her feet like a dancer reclaiming a stage and let her blades do what they were made for.

  The first Cliff Stalker came from above, all silent muscle and claws. Lunaris’s longsword rose in a wide, flowing parry that redirected the animal’s weight.

  Her rapier flashed, a stitch of silver into the soft seam behind its foreleg. The beast twisted off her blade, landing wrong; her follow-through flicked the rapier back and bit again; turning a wound into a sentence.

  The stalker shuddered and slid.

  She pivoted on her healed foot into the second’s lunge, longsword taking the bite on flat and guard, hip turning to borrow its force, rapier finding the pulsing shadow beneath the jaw. Two strokes, two bodies. Her side went quiet.

  Better than quiet… hers.

  On the right, Yuki was not winning. She turned sideways to make herself smaller, mirrors blooming under her hands like glass flowers… catching, breaking, catching, breaking.

  Every catch cost blood. The Cliff Stalker she’d blinded earlier had recovered enough to fight blind; it hunted heat, motion, the whisper of leather. Another circled, tail switching, head low. Yuki lifted a shield to cover Lisa’s flank as an arrow hissed by, then another, her fragile wall shivering under the impact. She had to choose between saving herself and saving the fire mage.

  She chose wrong by any selfish measure and right by Fty’s.

  The mirror shattered under the next swipe; claws raked her thigh, and she fell into the dust with a cry that turned down in her throat, small and pained. She caught the next bite on the back of her blade, wrists shaking.

  “Hold,” Fty said, voice flat. He shoved everything that wasn’t keeping Lunaris whole into Yuki. Healing force tunneled through him and into her torn flesh; pain dulled to a burn, blood slowed to a seep. “Breathe. Guard up.”

  Lisa stepped over Yuki, feet planted, hands spitting light.

  She snapped potshots, bursts of heat that drove stalkers back on one flank, chased arrows off course by pressure alone. Every time an archer exhaled to loose, she put a hiss of flame in that breath and spoiled the release.

  Her eyes never left the leader.

  On the left, with her corner cleaned, Lunaris didn’t indulge in triumph. She turned on the heel Fty had given back to her and crossed the centerline in a blur, sliding into Yuki’s space like a note finding harmony. Her longsword batted a pouncing stalker away from Yuki’s face; her rapier flicked into the hollow where tendon met knee on the second. “Up,” she said, and somehow made the word both gentle and a command.

  Yuki’s hand closed on Lunaris’s forearm; together they moved, one rising, one circling, a braid of motion that made sense of chaos.

  Above them, NightSwallow’s duel with the mini-boss stalker flashed in lethal glimpses along the cliff: a fall broken by a knife in a crack, a tail swipe that hit nothing, a whisper of steel that left a line along shadow. The two fought like mirrored equations solving toward death.

  Katherine—

  “Tat’ the leader?” Katherine’s shout rumbled out of the dust and stone. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the golem, hadn’t spared more than a glance for the man declaring himself king. She slid her blade off the golem’s forearm and shouldered it back a step. “Go time!”

  Fty knew that tone. He didn’t like it, because it meant she was about to spend something she couldn’t get back until a sunrise and a prayer. He had been saving a ward for her. He didn’t have it to spare.

  Katherine threw her head back and bellowed, voice shaking grit from the cliff face. “[Glorious Fight]!”

  Power took her like an oath fulfilled. It rolled off her skin as heat that wasn’t fire, as pressure that made the air heavy in Fty’s lungs. The ground seemed to accept her weight differently, as if the slope had agreed to be a floor when she stamped.

  She grinned a gladiator’s grin and fed that surge into fury. “[Katherine’s Fury]!” The world around her narrowed to a corridor with her at its center; to step into it was to be burned by presence alone.

  She hit the golem, and the golem groaned like the inside of a mountain.

  Stone split along old fault lines under the strike; her second blow drove into that split and forced it wider, sparks crawling over her blade as if insulted by stone daring to be uncut. The golem shoved back with a slab of an arm; she took it on shoulder and hip and gave ground only to steal balance, then brought her sword up in a backhand that would have gutted a warhorse.

  “Kill her! We can’t lose the golem!” the leader snapped. The four archers loosed as one.

  Arrows stitched the air. Some clanged off her blade because she made it so; some glanced from rock because the angle obeyed her more than physics; some found meat, thudding into arm and thigh and that bare strip beneath the gorget where system never put a plate. She laughed.

  It wasn’t sane.

  It was joy that had found a place it fit: a battlefield, a big problem, an unfair fight she could make fair by refusing to fall.

  Fty’s hands twitched toward her and stopped. Yuki’s pulse stuttered under his magic; Lunaris’s ankle threatened to swell again if he chased folly with pride. He swallowed the protest like a man swallowing glass and returned his focus to the right. “Stay with me,” he told Yuki, and the command steadied them both.

  Lisa covered Katherine without being asked. Fire snapped at arrow flights, turned shafts into spirals of smoke mid-air, burned at the edges of the golem to keep Katherine’s path clear. Every spell she threw was a choice, too: threat or defense, mid-range or close. “Move, mountain!” she snarled, her flames licking along cracks Katherine had made until stone glowed dull red.

  The bandit leader paced above like a spectator in a royal box, enjoying his own play.

  He looked down on Katherine with a too-white smile, then over the field and back to Fty, as if trying to find the place where the healer would break. He found only a man who kept putting people back together faster than they deserved.

  The golem tried to crush Katherine with both hands. She stepped into it, boots grinding grit, and her laugh turned into a roar. She pulled everything she’d gathered into a singularity that was not fire and not steel and not will—but all three.

  “Eat tis’! [Judgment]!”