They shot into the sky.

Rikilda came at him before the arena ceiling had fully cleared behind them, her claws driving toward his face, the red light burning along her free hand.

Clone 2 took the claw on his forearm and drove his palm into her solar plexus. She absorbed it, grabbed his wrist, and used his upward momentum to throw him higher above her, into the path of her sword already waiting.

He twisted and the blade passed through the space his spine had occupied and he came back down at her, both knees driving toward her shoulders. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

She pulled back. His momentum carried him past her position and he dropped through empty air before his flight caught him and pulled him level. He came back up and they faced each other three hundred meters above the arena.

Below them everything had stopped. Every dragon in the sky had cleared the airspace.

Rikilda raised her hand and the sword appeared in it, the red light at full intensity.

Clone 2 let the formless swords spread into a loose constellation around him.

She came first, with a diagonal slash that carried a crescent of compressed fire and air expanding outward from the strike, the edges of it cutting through the clouds at this altitude. Clone 2 broke left, felt the heat from the crescent across his right side as it passed, and sent three swords back.

She cut two from the air. The third she took on her sword and it threw her back a bit.

She caught and balanced herself, gave a toothy grin and closed the distance.

They met and the collision sent a pressure wave in every direction that shook the arena structure below and broke apart the cloud cover above them.

In close range, the swords were useless here. She worked the blade in tight arcs, her body cutting off every angle he tried to open, her tail sweeping at his legs each time he tried to reset his position in the air. He deflected the blade at the last possible moment on each pass, buying inches of separation, never enough to fully disengage.

Her elbow found his jaw. His head snapped sideways and his vision blurred for a fraction of a second.

He drove a telekinetic burst into her chest from point blank and she flew back ten meters.

He followed without pausing, sending five swords ahead of him, and they converged on her from her back and both sides while he came at her front.

She burned them out of the sky. A circular pulse of fire erupting from her body in every direction, the temperature spiking fast enough that clone 2 felt it on his face before he’d halved the distance. Two swords dissolved in the flame. Three pushed through and grazed her back and left shoulder, leaving white lines that joined the ones already there.

She didn’t flinch. She answered his approach with a full-force swing that he caught on both forearms and the impact drove him back thirty meters before he arrested himself.

His forearms were coming apart. The burns from the ring fight had not healed and the repeated blocking was splitting the damaged skin. Blood ran down both wrists and fell into the open air below.

He looked at his hands, theen at her.

She was bleeding too. Her left shoulder where the three swords had come through was open, the scales around the wound darkened. The crack in her horn had extended.

Neither of them moved for about three seconds, then Rikilda raised her sword above her head with both hands and drove it into the air between them.

The blade connected with nothing and the fire along its edge detonated — a wall of force and heat expanding in every direction at once, carrying everything she had held back.

It hit clone 2 before he could process how fast it was moving. His field screamed against it. The heat pressed through from every surface simultaneously and he was thrown backward through the sky without control, tumbling two hundred meters before he caught himself in the air and stopped the spin.

He hung there, breathing.

She was already crossing the distance.

He released every sword at once.

The entire formation converging from every angle simultaneously, the Severance Intent filling the sky between them, the cuts spreading through clouds and open air until the space looked like glass broken but not yet fallen.

She came through it, with her sword in continuous motion, the fire burning the intent from the air around each arc, her body pushing forward as the swords came apart under the blade or broke against her scales or found no hold against the force she was generating. She came through the far side of the formation with blood running from a dozen new cuts across her arms and face.

Her sword met his crossed forearms and drove him straight down.

They fell together. Her weight pressing, his field resisting, the arena coming up fast beneath them, and he compressed everything remaining in his telekinesis to a single point between his forearms and detonated.

The separation was explosive. She went up. He went down. He caught himself fifty meters above the arena roof and looked up at her.

She steadied in the air above him, shook blood from her sword hand, and looked down.

The damage between them was real now and visible on both sides. His arms were torn open and burned from wrist to elbow. Blood ran freely from the split skin across his jaw and cheekbone. The cracked rib had worsened in the fall.

Her scales were cracked across six sites. One area on her left side had taken a full telekinetic burst and shown the skin beneath. The cut on her shoulder was still open.

Neither of them acknowledged any of it.

She came again and this time there was nothing left of technique or patience in it, but pure force. Both of them hitting everything they had against everything the other had and refusing to move.

He took a sword strike across his upper arm that opened the skin to the bone, but he did not stop.

She took a telekinetic detonation to her right side that shattered three scales clean off her body, but she did not stop.

He drove his knee into her midsection. She caught his leg and slammed him into the air as though it were a solid surface.

He came off it and drove both palms into her face.

She answered with a headbutt that turned his vision white at the edges.

Blood fell between them into the empty sky below.

He pushed her back with a sustained telekinetic wave, pressing forward into it, not giving her room to set herself, driving her back across the sky — and she stopped the wave with a wall of fire dense enough to stand on and launched herself off it.

She came off the fire wall instantaneously and he sent five swords at her face and crossed the distance directly behind them.

She cut three. Two grazed her cheek and opened thin lines of blood. She reached him anyway.

Her fist connected with his chest with the full weight of her acceleration behind it and the rib gave completely.

He went back, caught himself and kept moving forward.

She watched him come — blood down his arm from the bone-deep cut, rib broken, arms burned, still pressing, still sending swords — and something shifted behind her eyes.

The scales spread simultaneously, covering her arms and shoulders and throat and neck. Her fingers lengthened. Her tail thickened and extended behind her. The horns grew, the cracks from the ring already sealed in the new growth, the black deeper and sharper than before.

Her body expanded and the human form she had been wearing came apart. The proportions changed, then the scale of them, then the scale again.

The wings came last. They unfolded from her back in a single motion, each one longer than the ring they had destroyed below, and the pressure wave their extension sent downward was visible, with the air beneath her compressing and spreading outward, buffeting the arena structure and everything still watching from it.

She hung in the sky in her complete form.

Ancient red scales head to tail. Eyes the color of molten stone, fixed on him.

Everything in the training dimension had gone silent.

Clone 2 looked up at her.

His arm was open to the bone. His rib was broken. His field had almost nothing left. Blood ran from both hands and both forearms into the open air.

He spread the remaining formless swords around him in a loose orbit, raised his hand, and held her gaze.

Then a voice came from everywhere, filling every direction simultaneously. It carried no volume in the ordinary sense. It pressed against the ears as presence rather than sound, and the presence behind it was old enough that the air in the entire dimension seemed to recognize it before the word had fully formed.

Enough!

It was one word and it landed in the chest with weight, the resonance spreading outward in every direction, passing through the arena and the sky and the space between every watching dragon in the dimension.

Every dragon went still at once.

Rikilda slowly transformed back to her human form and Clone 2’s remaining swords slowly dissolved.