Chapter 119: Golden Lion vs. Purified Water (2)

Regulus didn’t announce the attack. He was simply at a distance, and then he wasn’t, crossing the space between them with a speed that didn’t match the composed calm he’d maintained since appearing in the tunnel.

Ebony twisted her body to the side and the first strike grazed her right shoulder, close enough that the air from the movement shifted her hair. She responded with her left fist wrapped in green fire aimed at the prince’s ribs, but Regulus was already gone.

He was behind her.

The cut reached her arm before she could turn, clean and precise, opening a line from elbow to wrist that started bleeding immediately. Ebony clenched her teeth and completed the turn anyway, throwing her right fist toward where she calculated his face would be.

She was off by half a meter. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"Interesting technique." Regulus looked at her from two steps back with the same expression as always, no sign that the green fire that had passed inches from his face had produced any particular reaction. "Purification fire in hand-to-hand combat. Not the most common choice for a Healer."

"Glad you find it interesting." Ebony squared up facing him with her fists raised, feeling the cut on her arm burn with the specific heat of a fresh wound. "Heal."

{{Life Magic: Healing}}

The wound closed. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough that it stopped being an immediate problem. Regulus watched the process with a genuine attention that had something unsettling about it, as if he were cataloging information rather than simply watching.

"That’s unusual too." He moved to the right with light steps, unhurried, testing angles. "Most Healers need concentration to heal themselves. You do it mid-combat like it’s breathing."

"Done taking notes?" Ebony went at him.

This time she got closer. Her right fist grazed the sleeve of his jacket and the purification fire left a mark in the fabric that spread a few inches before Regulus pulled back, and for the first time something in his expression changed — not much, just enough to be visible.

He looked at the sleeve. Then at Ebony.

"Ah." He said it with the tone of someone confirming a hypothesis. "It burns the magic directly."

He moved again, but this time with more distance between them, shifting the pattern of his previous attacks into something more careful, cutting from ranges where Ebony’s fire couldn’t reach him and retreating before she could close the gap.

Another cut. This one on her side, shallower than the last but enough for the pain to register clearly.

"Heal." Ebony said it without stopping.

"How many times can you do that?" Regulus asked, and the question had no mockery in it, only the genuine curiosity of someone measuring a technical limit.

"More than I need to finish this." Ebony spat on the ground and looked at him. "Do you always talk this much during a fight, or is this something special for me?"

"I like to understand what I’m dealing with." Another cut, this one to the shoulder, with a precision that was starting to feel deliberate, as if he were choosing the points according to some logic Ebony hadn’t fully worked out. "It’s more satisfying that way."

"(Satisfying.)" Ebony processed that word while she healed again, feeling the accumulated cost of each heal in her magic reserves — reserves the elven apple had filled but hadn’t made infinite. "(This guy enjoys this. It’s not just that he’s good at fighting. He actually likes it.)"

"Kanary, run!" She shouted it without taking her eyes off Regulus, calculating the next move.

"No." Kanary’s voice came from behind her with the same firmness it had carried in the tunnel when she said she wasn’t going to run. "I’ve had enough of being told to run tonight."

Ebony opened her mouth to answer and in that moment a water ball the size of a head shot over her left shoulder traveling directly at Regulus, who deflected it with a gesture of his arm without visible effort, though it at least forced him to shift to one side.

"What part of run didn’t—"

"The part where I leave you alone with him." Kanary stepped up beside her with her hands open and the water from the nearby channel responding to the magic flowing from her palms, forming a liquid mass suspended in the air waiting for a direction. "Two against one are better odds."

Ebony looked at her for a second. Then at Regulus. Then exhaled with the specific frustration of someone who knows the argument is already lost and has more pressing things to deal with.

"Stay behind me."

"I’m not a child."

"Stay a little behind me."

They attacked together. Kanary launched water in waves that forced Regulus into predictable movements, and Ebony used those fractions of a second where his path was less free to bring the purification fire close enough to be a real threat.

It worked twice. The third time, Regulus read the pattern.

He stopped instead of dodging the next wave of water and took it head-on, using the golden energy radiating from his body to disperse it before it reached him. The effort cost him something — visible in the brief tension of his jaw — and that was enough for his expression to lose its complete calm for the first time and show something underneath that wasn’t exactly anger but resembled it.

"You’re starting to annoy me." He said it with a quietness that was more threatening than if he’d shouted it.

The golden energy along his arms changed shape. It didn’t disperse but compressed, tightening down his forearms and hands until it formed claws, four on each hand, long and defined, their edges burning with an intensity that made the rest of the tunnel seem darker by comparison.

Kanary took an involuntary step back.

Ebony didn’t move.

The claws were faster than the previous attacks and covered more space, forcing her to dodge wider and lose ground with each exchange. A cut on the leg. Another on the opposite shoulder. Each one calculated, each one placed where it hurt without disabling, with the quality of something being administered according to a deliberate plan.

"Heal." The cost was starting to show. Not in her body but in her magic, which responded with a fraction less speed each time, like a balance approaching its limit without reaching it yet.

Regulus noticed the change. Of course he noticed.

"There’s a ceiling." He said it with something close to satisfaction, deliberately increasing the distance between them, stepping back from the reach of Ebony’s fire with measured steps while the energy claws stayed active on his arms. "Interesting. How much do you have left?"

Ebony looked at him from the middle of the tunnel with her fists still burning and her breathing more labored than she wanted to show. Then she lowered her fists one inch — not all the way, just enough to shift the tone of what came next.

"Listen to me." She said it without the combat edge from before, with the directness of someone who has something real to say and would rather say it before the situation makes it impossible. "Let all of this go. The plan you had, what went wrong tonight, the loose end you came down here to tie up. Leave it."

Regulus didn’t respond immediately, which was itself a response.

"You have a city." Ebony continued. "A city that right now sees you as the man who saved the situation this morning. You didn’t ask for that role but you have it, and if you handle it right you can do something real with it." She paused. "We won’t kill you if you promise to govern those people well. Even if it isn’t your city. Even if you got here for the wrong reasons."

Regulus looked at her for a moment with that cataloging attention he’d shown from the start. Then he smiled, slowly, with the quality of something that has decided a conversation has finished being useful.

"How generous." The sarcasm was light, almost pleasant. "A combat Healer offering to spare my life if I behave." He raised one hand toward the ceiling of the tunnel. "I don’t think you quite understand who you’re talking to."

The golden energy left his palm upward and took shape in the air above their heads.

A lion’s head, enormous, built from compressed light with its jaws open and its eyes burning with the same amber of his previous summons but concentrated, dense, with a different quality that filled the tunnel with a pressure felt in the ears before the sound arrived.

It roared.

The magic wave poured from the open mouth of the lion’s head and traveled through the tunnel in both directions at once, a wall of force and energy that made no distinction between stone, water, or people. It hit Ebony and Kanary at the same time.

And the impact was enough that neither of them could do anything useful in the time it took to go flying backward through the sewer channel, carried off by the current and the wave combined.

Away from the point where Regulus remained standing in the darkness of the tunnel with the golden claws still active and the expression of someone who has closed a conversation and is ready to finish what he started.