Snow took the sound and gave it back as a low hiss. Breath fogged, thinned, vanished. The line of trees above them held still like a stage that hadn't decided which play to put on.

They stepped into the gap they'd opened - miners staggering behind Keahi's blade and Hikari's hands, Gravers gritting through wounds that should've put them on their backs. The first rush had broken. The second was waiting.

Shapes shook loose from the dark between trunks.

Not smart. Not coordinated. Just hunger made into angles. Human silhouettes first - the weak ones, almost kind in their wrongness - then taller things with joints where joints shouldn't be, arms too long by an insult, barbs that didn't belong to anything living.

"On me" Raizen said, and didn't bother sounding like a leader. He took the left lane and cut the first one clean as if he'd been born to make that exact shape with his blade. Light flared gold, brief as a heartbeat, then died.

"Roof" Esen said, already moving.

Ichiro's palm ran along a ridge of rock like a hand coaxing a stubborn dog, and the mountain answered - packed ice and hard snow rose in a clean spine, steps beveling themselves as if they'd been planning to exist all morning. Esen hit the first step, ring humming, sprang - another step grew, caught him, flung him higher. He bounced like a coin on glass, grinning through the cold in his teeth.

"Above only" Raizen snapped, because habit was a shield. "Keep air. Don't ground-burst near us."

"Yeah, yeah" Esen sang back, already in the sky.

He clapped.

Hands – rings, however you want to call it. A pressure-pulse fell from him like a heavy drumbeat. It hit a Nyx dead center, the snow at its feet pancaked flat. The creature folded inward, then came apart, shadow unstitched by force instead of edge.

Another pressure. Another. Esen stitched shockwaves down the slope in a ragged, beautiful meter, each one landing where Ichiro's structures angled him. Where there wasn't a stair, one appeared. Where he needed a wall to push against, a wall grew.

"Left - low - two" Ichiro called, voice tight and clean.

"Seen" Esen said, twisted midair, and dropped a blast between them. One collapsed, the other staggered, flailed, lunged. Raizen ran through its lunge and took its head off in a cut so economical it felt like an apology.

The trees fanned and released more of them. A taller shape shouldered out - a split silhouette, something like a man wearing a spider as a jacket. Barbs along its forearms glowed with a thin, hateful light that wasn't Eon and didn't care to be. When it swung, the air snapped not with heat, but with the idea of heat - frost burned where the arc passed.

"High!" Arashi barked, sighting from the pocket on their right. His shot clipped the thing's knee; it didn't fall, but it had to think about balance for one beat too long.

Esen took the beat.

He dove.

The spider-thing faked left, then - impossibly quick - kicked a barbed limb up and across. The arc met Esen at rib-height. Cloth tore. Flesh opened. His breath left him in a shocked exhale, and momentum skidded crooked.

"No!" Ichiro's voice broke. He slammed both palms to the snow.

A column jumped from the ground like a breath turned to stone. Esen hit it instead of the slope, rolled, slid, caught himself with a ring slap that left the air shivering.

Hikari was already moving. Raizen cut a line open to her - two bodies, two strokes, gold in and out. "Hold" she said, and the word was a command, a plea, an insult to pain.

"I c- can't bre- reathe" Esen managed, trying to breathe anyway.

"Shut up" she cut him off. She pressed a small white cloth over the wound. "Temporary. Don't die."

Esen's laugh was a small bark with the edges chewed off. "Temporary is my brand."

"Up" Ichiro said, voice still too bright, like someone whose hands were shaking and had decided no one would notice. Steps grew without his eyes leaving Esen. "Up or I will build around you."

"Give me a moment, geez!" Esen said, grabbed the stair, and went up again, one hand clamped to his ribs.

Three of the human-shaped ones rushed in a line, fast enough that snow trailed off their shins in thin sheets. Raizen stepped into the middle one's space and cut through where a sternum would have been if bodies were honest. He pivoted, let the second overshoot, took its heel with a short chop; it folded wrong, and he finished it before it could understand falling. The third hit Ichiro's new wall face-first and left a smear that evaporated rather than bled.

A heavier body hit Raizen's outside - armored plates grown over a torso like a bad memory layering itself. It swung a blunt mass that had once wanted to be a hand. The impact when he blocked felt like catching a thrown anvil. He slid back, boots chewing the snow into halves.

"Arashi" he said, without looking. "Right hip."

"Right hip" Arashi echoed, and put a couple of rounds there. The thing twisted; Raizen's blade went in where its defense had been… And wasn't anymore.

Static scratched his ear. Arashi cocked his head. "Think Alteea's trying to reconnect -"

"She probably already knows we're here. She'll need coordinates" Raizen said, flat, and broke the link with a palm to the little switch. He didn't have time to want her voice.

The slope erupted into architecture.

Ichiro had stopped reacting and started building. Not one wall. Not one stair. A net of decisions: low ribs to trip, high shoulders to channel, buttresses that caught Esen's shockwaves and drove them forward like a wave in a carved channel. Esen dropped a blast into one such trough and watched it run down the sculpted line, gather, and break against three Nyxes at once. Two fell apart. The third blew backward, hit a tree, and left a dark smear that snow refused to keep.

"Don't you dare fall" Ichiro threw up, voice hardening into command.

"Only with style. Can't promise anything!" Esen said through teeth.

A thin-bodied Nyx sprinted low, knife-arm skittering over the snow like an insect pretending to be a dancer. It cut for Ichiro's feet. Raizen didn't reach it; Lynea's flat pale fragments knifed down from somewhere behind, clipped its edges, made its balance a math problem it couldn't solve. Hikari was there behind her next breath, staff low, a quick stab with the sharp end catching the thing's throat - not enough to kill, enough to make it flinch.

Esen climbed, slipped, cursed, laughed. Every time he fell a little short, Ichiro built a little more, until the slope under them was a map in a language only the two of them spoke. Esen would stomp a heel, and the mountain would give him a friend to jump from. He'd clap, and the air would remember how to hit.

Pain dragged at his breath. The cut sent little lightning pops through his side with every twist. He pressed his elbow in, held himself together, and dropped another pulse that broke a charging body clean in half.

"Don't twist on the landing!" Hikari called, voice cool as a river.

"Will absolutely twist on the landing" Esen replied, and did, and made it look like not dying was a trick he kept in his pocket for moments like this.

Raizen moved in the pocket their work created, not trying to lead, just taking the space offered and cutting anything that tried to occupy it. He moved like someone who'd decided he wasn't allowed to think of anything except the next inch, the next breath, the next shape his blades could make. The Rust Room made him move this way. Fast. Efficient. Deadly.

A bigger one crashed. Its arms ended in flat plates. It hit Ichiro's wall - the wall held, shivered, cracked. Ichiro set his jaw and raised his hands higher. It rebuilt itself. The Nyx hit again. The wall held again, less politely.

Esen dropped behind it, and punched the air. The shockwave drove the thing into the wall like a hammer meeting its nail. The plate-light went out. Hikari went in and ended it.

"You good?" she threw over her shoulder, not a greeting, not a comfort, just a necessary fact.

"Fantastic" Esen lied. Blood had bled through Hikari's tape in three little commas. He touched it, hissed, grinned anyway. "Didn't really need that."

"Stop talking" Ichiro said, and built him another step.

The slope boiled again.

Mindless didn't mean slow. Half a dozen new Nyxes erupted from the treeline, one of them with a barbed tail that wrote ugly lines in the air, another dragging its long knuckles and then lifting them in a two-handed smash that threw powder up in a curtain. They didn't wait their turn. They didn't circle. They came the way a river comes: forward and indiscriminate. Their number was truly uncanny.

Hikari darted through the low gap, hand brushing Lynea's sleeve. "On you" she said.

"On me" Lynea answered, and sent her fragments ahead in a thin, cutting fan that turned one charging shape into a subtraction problem.

A barbed tail lanced for Esen's back. Ichiro didn't think, he overbuilt. A wall grew too fast, too high, too close. Esen's shoulder slammed into it instead of empty air. He yelped, shoved off, almost fell, didn't.

"Sorry!" Ichiro blurted.

Esen landed, stumbled, slapped a ring to reset the world around him, and shot a look down. "Keep talking to me" he said, softer, not joking for once in his life.

"I am" Ichiro said, steadier now, and he was. "Step - two - left - now."

Esen stepped - two - left - now - and the shockwave he dropped landed exactly where it needed to, because the ground he landed on had been waiting for him.

Arashi laughed once, short and unkind. "Got you" he told nothing, spinning one of his pistols, like it was a toy. "Try me again."

"Arashi" Raizen said, and tossed a glance at the slope above. Shadows moved. Too many.

"I know" Arashi said. "I know."

Then, with a big smile on his face, he added:

"My turn now. Get ready."

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