“You should have chosen differently,” the man said.
Nicholas Draegan drove his sword through the man’s throat.
The blade entered beneath the jaw and punched through the back of the assassin’s neck, severing whatever accusation had been meant to follow. Nick ripped the weapon free and turned before the body struck the floor.
Fire had consumed most of the house.
It crawled along the beams overhead and poured through the walls in branching veins of orange and white, feeding on old timber, curtains, spilled oil, and anything else it could claim. Burning resin dripped from the ceiling and struck the floor with soft pops. Smoke rolled through the corridor in heavy sheets, trapping the heat until every breath scraped deeper into his lungs.
Three assassins remained in front of him.
There had been eleven when they entered.
Nick adjusted his grip on the sword and felt his fingers tremble around the hilt.
Blood soaked through the left side of his shirt where a blade had slipped between his ribs. His right knee threatened to buckle whenever he shifted too much weight onto it, and something inside his shoulder had torn badly enough that lifting the sword sent weakness trembling down his arm.
Those injuries were recent.
They were hardly the ones giving him the most trouble.
Mana moved through his body as naturally as breathing, following pathways shaped by two decades of repetition and scarred by nearly as many mistakes. He could feel every place where the flow narrowed around damaged tissue, every channel that had been burned hollow and forced open again, every joint that no longer accepted power without protest.
His left hand had been numb for seven years.
Tonight, he forced it to close.
Mana gathered through his palm and forced the fingers tighter around his sword. The same pressure traveled upward, bracing the damaged wrist and stabilizing his shoulder before descending through his torso and into the leg beneath him.
The process was excruciating.
That hardly made it unusual.
His body had stopped forgiving him for abusing it years ago. Nick had stopped asking for forgiveness even earlier.
The first remaining assassin lunged.
Nick stepped inside the thrust, caught the man’s wrist against his forearm, and carved his sword upward from hip to sternum. The assassin folded around the wound and fell across the burning floor.
The second man came from Nick’s right with better timing and cleaner form. Their swords met hard enough to send a crack through Nick’s wrist, but mana closed around the damaged joint before the pain could loosen his grip. He turned with the pressure, slid beneath the assassin’s guard, and drove his blade across the man’s throat.
Blood struck the wall and hissed against the heat.
The final assassin retreated through the smoke.
Nick followed him.
“You knew who we were,” he called.
The man backed farther into the burning corridor without answering.
“You knew what would happen.”
Heat had begun to blister the exposed skin along Nick’s face, while smoke clawed at his eyes until the man ahead of him seemed to waver behind curtains of fire.
Something crashed behind him as the eastern wall gave way beneath a burst of mana. Nick knew who it was before he turned.
Seren.
His attention shifted for less than a heartbeat.
The assassin had been waiting for exactly that.
Mana gathered between his hands and fire erupted forward.
Nick felt the spell before he saw it.
The shaping was crude, with far too much power wasted in the release, but the caster had compensated for poor control by pouring nearly everything he had into a single attack.
Years ago, Nick would’ve walked through it.
He would have reinforced his skin, braced the bones beneath it, protected the organs that mattered, and let the rest burn if necessary.
His body could no longer survive that kind of arrogance.
But he didn’t care.
Mana flooded through him.
The old pathways opened beneath pressure, forcing damaged muscles to tighten and scarred channels to carry more than they should. For one brief instant, his body remembered what it had once been capable of.
Then the fire struck.
The blast hit his chest and hurled him backward into one of the support posts. Timber splintered behind him. Several ribs broke beneath the impact, followed by something deeper that tore through his abdomen and filled his mouth with the taste of blood.
He hit the floor.
His sword remained in his hand.
Across the flames, the assassin stared at him.
Nick planted the sword against the floor and forced himself upright.
The man’s expression changed.
“Just… stop,” the man pleaded.
He threw another spell.
Nick moved before the flames finished forming.
His injured leg nearly collapsed beneath the first step, so he drove mana through it until the muscle tore around the knee and forced it to bear his weight anyway. Pain flared white behind his eyes, then faded beneath the effort of staying upright.
One step carried him forward.
The next hurt worse.
He kept moving.
The assassin tried to release the spell.
Nick reached him first and drove the sword through his chest.
For a moment, they stood together in the middle of the burning house.
The assassin’s mouth moved soundlessly.
Nick leaned closer.
“We can still fight,” he whispered. “You should have believed in us.”
He shoved the corpse away.
His leg finally gave out.
Nick dropped to one knee as fire rolled overhead.
The house was dying around him, and he had known for several minutes that he probably was too.
There were wounds that could be healed, wounds that could be endured, and wounds that simply required enough stubbornness to remain alive until someone like Aurelia arrived.
The damage spreading through his body belonged to none of those categories.
Nick reached inward and tried to pull mana away from his leg.
The energy barely moved.
There were too many damaged pathways, too much scar tissue layered over wounds that had never truly healed. He had spent too many years forcing his body through battles it was never meant to survive.
He tried again.
Nothing.
A laugh nearly escaped him.
After everything, his body had finally run out before he did.
“Nick!”
He looked up.
Seren stood within the broken remains of the eastern wall, silver mana fracturing around her in jagged bands as she forced herself through the suppression field surrounding the house. Blood ran from one ear, and her hair whipped wildly around her face in the heat.
Then she saw him.
Seren stopped.
Nick had watched Seren Richter face armies without blinking. He had seen her threaten kings, argue with creatures that called themselves gods, and once explain to Shinhwa in painstaking detail exactly where he could place the holy sword if he ever used it to cut vegetables again.
He had never seen her look afraid.
The expression lasted for less than a second.
Then she moved.
“Stay there,” Nick tried to say.
Smoke stole most of the words.
Seren shoved farther through the barrier.
Something groaned overhead.
Nick looked up.
The ceiling had begun to collapse.
He forced himself upright again.
Pain tore through his abdomen and turned the edges of his vision white. Mana answered reluctantly when he called for it, dragging itself through pathways that could barely be called as such.
He reinforced his spine and locked the ruined knee beneath him. Blood continued pouring somewhere inside his body, so he forced the vessels tighter and drove his heart harder.
It stumbled beneath the pressure.
Caught.
Beat again.
Seren shouted something.
He could barely hear her.
The fire was too loud.
Nick stepped forward.
The ceiling came down.
A burning beam struck between them and exploded across the floor in a shower of sparks. The impact threw Nick backward.
Something punched through his back.
His breath vanished.
Nick looked down.
A jagged length of wood protruded beneath his sternum, blackened at the edges and glowing red where it had passed through him.
His fingers loosened around the sword.
Across the burning room, Seren screamed his name.
Nick tried to answer.
Blood filled his mouth.
His lungs were already drowning.
The room blurred.
For some reason, he remembered her hand resting against his wrist that morning.
It had been warm.
Such a small thing to remember at the end of a life.
He held onto it anyway.
The sword slipped from his grasp.
The last of his mana went with it.
Then the world became light.
