Clone 1’s right hand came forward in a slash and the Severance Sword Intent erupted from it, creating five formless swords that fanned outward in a spread that forced Rikilda to move or take all of them simultaneously. The cuts split the ring floor in five clean lines radiating toward her, the dense material opening like paper.

She went airborne, launching off her back leg with enough force to carry her three meters straight up, clearing the spread entirely, and from that height she opened her mouth and breathed.

Fire came down in a column at the ring floor directly beneath clone 1, in a sustained pour that turned the surface from solid to molten in seconds.

Clone 1 left the ground before it reached him, the formless swords pulling tight around his body as he rose, and threw three of them downward into the column.

The intent hit the fire and did nothing, but he had already expected the result.

He redirected the three swords, sending them wide, curving them around the column’s edge and up toward Rikilda’s position in the air.

She read the angles, tucked her body, let two pass close enough that the intent grazed her scales and left white lines across the red, and caught the third on her forearm.

Her forearm vibrated from the block but she shook it off and came down at him like something dropped from a height, both fists driving toward the top of his skull, her full weight and the momentum of the drop behind them, the fire coating her arms concentrating at the point of impact.

The swords rose to meet her.

Six of them converged on her from every angle, the Severance Intent targeting the force driving her downward, severing the momentum from the drop. She felt it and twisted mid-air, converting the downward drive into a sideways rotation that carried her past him rather than into him, the swords passing through the space she’d vacated.

She landed behind him and her tail came around in the same motion, horizontal, aimed at the back of his knees, using the tail’s reach to attack from the angle the swords couldn’t cover because he was already rotating to face her.

It connected and his legs buckled for a single stride and in that stride she was on him — inside the sword formation, inside the range where the swords became dangerous to deploy, her claws driving toward his chest from point-blank range.

He took the hit on crossed forearms.

The claws didn’t tear him. The Severance Intent coating his arms stripped the force from the strike at the moment of contact, the claws pressing against his skin with no power behind them. But she was inside the formation and the heat from her body was immediate, radiating from every scale, flooding the space between them with temperature that pressed against his field from all directions simultaneously.

He felt it and his jaw tightened.

He drove his knee up into her midsection and pushed off her with a telekinetic burst that threw them both apart — him backward, her forward, the separation violent and mutual.

They landed six meters apart and the ring floor between them was on fire. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

Rikilda rolled her neck. Three of the scales on her forearm had cracked where the intent had grazed them on the way past. She looked at the cracks with a mixture of interest and slight concern but didn’t care much about them.

Clone 1’s forearms were burning. The heat she’d flooded the space with during the close exchange had transferred through the field and left the skin red from wrist to elbow on both arms.

He rotated his wrists once, feeling the tightness. It was healing but not as fast as he wanted.

He looked at her for a moment, then sent every sword outward simultaneously.

Every formless blade in the formation launched in every direction at once, filling the entire ring with Severance Intent in a single moment.

The cuts spread across the floor, the ring suddenly looking like something that had been shattered and not yet fallen apart.

Rikilda had nowhere to go that the intent hadn’t already marked.

She did the only thing available — she flooded the entire ring with fire.

It came from her palms, and for three seconds the ring was nothing but red-white flame from barrier to barrier, the temperature spiking so fast the barrier itself flickered at the edges.

Clone 1 compressed his entire telekinetic field inward, pulling it as tight against his body as it would go, and held it.

The fire pressed against the field from every direction.

He felt every centimeter of it. His teeth were clenched. His burned forearms were screaming. The field was holding but the heat was pressing against his consciousness.

He searched for her with his spirit sense and found her through the fire.

She was at the center of the inferno, both arms extended, pouring everything she had into the sustained release. She wasn’t watching him. She was burning the ring down to find out if it was enough.

He launched himself toward her through the fire.

The field held the heat back one layer at a time, each meter costing more than the last. His arms were in agony. The skin on his face felt like it was being pressed against hot metal.

He came out of the fire directly in front of her.

Her eyes went wide.

He drove both palms into her chest with every unit of telekinetic force he could generate, compressing it to a single point of impact, and released it all at once.

The detonation threw her through the fire, through the barrier that shattered immediately.

She hit the arena floor outside the ring boundary and carved a furrow twenty meters long before stopping.

The fire died without her sustaining it. The ring was blackened from barrier to barrier, the floor warped from the heat, every surface carrying the white lines of the Severance cuts. Smoke rose from the cracks.

Clone 1 stood at the ring’s center.

His field was nearly spent. His arms were burned and bleeding. The cracked rib from earlier had become worse during the fire. The skin on his face had blistered across his left cheek.

He was standing but just barely.

Outside the ring, Rikilda pushed herself upright from the furrow.

The crack in her horn had split completely, the top third gone. Three scales on her chest had shattered from the detonation point. Her left arm was held slightly away from her body. The maniacal grin was still on her face.

She looked at the destroyed ring, at the smoke, and at clone 1 standing in the center of it.

She started laughing, like she had finally found what she was looking for.

"You," she said, as her laugh settled. "You are the most interesting thing I had encountered in decades."

She straightened fully, her left arm coming up despite whatever it cost her.

"Again," she said.

Clone 1 looked at her across the destroyed ring, his burned hands hanging at his sides, the formless swords floating in loose orbit around him.

He smiled.

"Again," he said.