The woman kept coming back at regular intervals, and over time Jacob could see what she probably thought she was concealing, the steady decline in her strength, a faint but undeniable faltering each time she tried and failed.

He wondered why she had not simply turned to the cardinal and asked that someone else take her place, for it seemed obvious that she was slowly sacrificing her own vitality to carry out this task. The oddness of it troubled him, though he could not say he minded the advantage her stubbornness was creating for him. Still, the more he observed, the more pieces seemed not to fit, as though there were something happening beneath the surface that he had not yet understood.

There was also the matter of the food. They had not offered him another meal after the first attempt, which confirmed what Yggdrasil had warned him, that there had been something wrong with it, some hidden mechanism meant to bind him.

He let the thought pass, but he did not forget. The woman herself had grown more talkative with each visit, though it was not conversation in any real sense, for all she did was spit curses at him, heap threats upon his head, and display the hatred she could no longer restrain behind her usual coldness.

But none of this mattered as much as the simple fact that her rank had slipped. He had learned to gauge such things, and after the last round of attempts she had fallen to rank nine. A few more failures and she would decline further still, and when that happened he would try to fight her.

He was nervous about it, of course, and more aware than most of how far he still was from capable, yet he practiced each time she left, running through exercises in prediction and analysis, trying to shorten the time it took his mind to process and respond, pushing himself to find some small edge.

And yet he continued to fail, again and again. He pictured himself sparring with Jessica, replayed what those exchanges would look like, and each time he could see how slow he was, how clumsy his attempts appeared compared to her sharp movements.

The logical thing would have been to abandon his own way, to throw it aside and instead imitate the methods of others who had already proven themselves. He knew this, he knew it deeply, and yet he refused.

He could not explain it clearly, even to himself, but something in him resisted the thought of becoming a copy of someone else. He wanted to fight in a way that was his own, just as he had to carve out his own runes rather than rely solely on the forms handed down by others. He wanted his fighting style to be different, uniquely his, not because it was easier or stronger but because it was his.

His sigh broke the silence as he heard the now-familiar echo of footsteps approaching down the corridor, and he lifted his head to watch as the woman stepped into the cell. This time she did not bother with pretense or patience; she seized him by the front of his shirt and pulled him up until their faces were almost touching, her breath hot and sharp as her killing intent poured over him, prickling his skin with gooseflesh.

"Once the cardinal has taken what he wants, I'll kill you in the slowest, most agonizing ways I can think of," she hissed, her eyes flashing, "or perhaps I'll simply keep you alive, drain you day by day, and turn you into nothing more than my blood bank."

Jacob had heard variations of the threat many times before. He had felt the weight of her killing intent so often that while his body still reacted—the goosebumps, the tension in his muscles—his mind remained clear. He was beyond fear of her now, not because she was less dangerous but because he knew she would never actually touch him. What he carried inside was too important for her to risk damaging, and that knowledge placed a shield between them that her words could not pierce.

So even as she spoke, he studied her. He noted her height, her build, the span of her arms and legs, the way she balanced her weight when she moved. Piece by piece he was constructing a version of her within his mind, an opponent he could summon in silence, one he could test himself against until the day came when thought and reality overlapped, and the fight he imagined might finally become the fight he could win.

Sometimes he imagined her as a mage, other times as a knight, and sometimes she relied only on the strange, elusive force called faith. From what Yggdrasil had hinted, faith was a power that could be bent to almost anything, as though it obeyed no true boundaries, and that knowledge unsettled Jacob more than he cared to admit.

To make matters worse, she carried within her the racial gifts of vampires, and that meant she could drink blood to restore herself, turn her own lifeblood into a weapon, and call upon the affinity her kind possessed for darkness.

Measured against that, his chances were bleak. His fists were all he truly had, and though he could wrap them in mana, he understood that mana was not designed for such crude use, it would offer at best a faint improvement, and at worst would prove completely worthless.

His only realistic plan was to find a weapon, perhaps one of the knives he had noticed hidden within her cloak, and if he could take one in the middle of the fight he might at least stand on firmer ground, but all of these were speculations and theories, little more than fragments of hope, because he still had no clear sense of her true strength. In the end, everything would hinge on what happened when they finally clashed.

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He did not answer her threats directly, but he held her gaze, and then, against every thread of caution within him, he did something reckless. He shaped his mouth into the kind of smile Samuel would have worn, a smile that carried condescension and mockery in equal measure, and he asked in a steady voice, "Will you reach the cardinal's goal first, or will you sink so low that you are weaker than a child?"

Why had he done it? Perhaps it was to test her reaction, perhaps to unbalance her, perhaps simply to make her angry, for anger could cloud judgment, and once they fought, even the smallest edge might matter. And of course, he carried the knowledge that she would not harm him seriously, not while he held what the cardinal wanted.

As he expected, her eyes narrowed, her breath grew quicker, and her hand clenched harder into his shirt. "Did you just mock me?" she asked, her voice sharp with disbelief.

"Only asked a question," Jacob replied. Outwardly his tone was calm, but his heart was thudding wildly in his chest, each beat too loud, too fast, and he knew she could feel it through the grip she still had on him. His mind was in disarray, part of him regretting the provocation even as another part insisted it had been the right move.

"You're a dead man, Jacob Skydrid. Remember that."

She finally released him, and in the same moment the black liquid welled up once more across her hand. With practiced ease she forced it into his mind, and again the pain tore through them both. But this time he noticed a difference, her body stiffened more violently than his, and though the agony was mutual, she was without doubt suffering more than he was.

The pain that tore through his head was no longer unbearable, no longer the kind that threatened to crush his mind beneath it, but something familiar, something he could endure, not unlike the sharp strain he had once felt when he invoked Knight's Glory, and so while it hurt, it did not frighten him.

The same could not be said for her. Her body trembled violently, and though she tried to hold herself upright the control slipped from her limbs, her jaw clenched until she bit into her own lip hard enough to draw blood, and the expression on her face was that of someone straining against agony far worse than she was willing to admit.

And then, as always, the black liquid pressed into his skull and met the light that lived within him, that immovable barrier that cast it back without mercy, sending the force not into him but into her. The woman faltered, her body shuddering with small, involuntary convulsions, while Jacob exhaled slowly, relieved not only that he had endured again but that she had taken the worse of it.

She was rank ten now, just as he was, and the thought echoed in his mind with an almost solemn weight, it meant the time was drawing close, perhaps even the next attempt would leave her weaker still, and when that happened he would act, he would attack, he would kill her.

His hands curled into fists as he studied her unsteady form, and he allowed himself to speak, testing the edge of his resolve in words: "I feel like I could beat you now."

He waited, listening, because her answer mattered more than he wished it did; it would tell him how confident he should be, whether she still had the strength to dismiss him or whether she was beginning to doubt herself.

She steadied her breathing, wiped the blood from her lip, and after a moment she said, her voice even again though the tremor lingered beneath it, "Just try attacking me. I guarantee you'll lose an arm." With that, she turned and walked away, her steps slow but not unsteady enough to betray how much the exchange had cost her.

"In a few hours," Jacob muttered as he lowered himself to the floor, his breath drawn deep in an attempt to calm the restless pace of his heartbeat, "in a few hours I'll fight her." He repeated the thought as though the words themselves might carve certainty into him, as though rehearsing the promise would keep his fear from breaking through.

He would do it, there was no other path. He would beat her, and then Yggdrasil would guide him beyond this cell, beyond this endless cycle. Everything was prepared, everything was decided. He had to believe that. He had to be ready.

She returned after several hours, just as she always did, though this time there was something different, something in the way she carried herself that set Jacob on edge before a word was spoken. The hood of her cloak was lowered, revealing her features with a clarity she had never permitted until now, and he found himself staring at the pale sharpness of her face, the unnerving contrast of white hair that fell loosely about her shoulders, and the eyes that burned faintly red even in the dim light, eyes that seemed almost fevered.

Yet it was not only the striking qualities of her appearance that caught him, it was also the paleness that bordered on sickly, the faint sheen of sweat along her skin, the subtle tremor in her stance. She held a knife in her hand from the moment she entered, ready before he could even think of moving, and though she looked weaker than before there was a tension in her posture that suggested she had already prepared herself for what was to come.

Without a word, she stood before him and began the ritual once again, her expression twisted with strain almost from the first moment. For Jacob, the sensation was barely more than an irritation now, a pressure that he had grown accustomed to enduring, but for her it was different, the sharp sound of her teeth grinding together, the occasional grunt forced past her lips, the way her body seemed to seize whenever the liquid tried to force itself into his mind. It thrashed and pressed against him as it always did, a tide of black intent pushing forward until at last it collided with the light at the center of him.

And this time, for the first time, something changed.

The light cracked, not shattered, not broken, but chipped, a sliver torn away no larger than the blink of an eye, a weakness repaired almost instantly as though it had never existed, yet the crack had been real, and Jacob knew it. He remembered the words the cardinal had spoken, words that had etched themselves into his memory: it did not matter if it lasted for a second, even a moment was enough.

The liquid recoiled and struck back at her once more, but she did not stagger as she had before. Her eyes widened instead, locked on his. He ignored the sudden throb of pain that bloomed in his skull, ignored the fatigue that lingered after the crack had mended, and held her gaze without flinching.

It was as though the air itself shifted between them, as though both understood in that quiet instant what would come next, and without a signal, without a word, they moved. Both lunged forward, bodies colliding in motion too swift for hesitation, and in that moment Jacob understood with absolute certainty, today, their battle to the death would begin.

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