The miasma kept breathing. The steel kept talking. The vows kept landing like quiet, unshakable verdicts. I had finally stopped pretending my swordsmanship could win this fight if it walked alone. It had been demoted from a religion to a screwdriver, and in doing so, had finally become useful again.

The Archduke turned distance into a liar with a single, casual step. I let The Grey file the two squares of stone my feet actually cared about into the category of "ordinary," so his lies about the space between us didn't land there. He tried to sell me a perfect, open lane to his flank; I asked how much it cost, decided it was too expensive, and bought the ugly, cramped one beside it. He seeded after-blades of solid miasma in the shadow of my shoulder; I moved in ways that made my shoulders boring and uninteresting targets.

He layered his spellwork with the effortless grace of a master painter, each stroke a problem for me to solve. A ribbon of glass across the floor. A polite pulse of heat aimed at my eyes. A snappy, irritating pressure against my knee. I answered with the kind of magic that keeps kitchens from burning down: a tiny, focused gust of wind, a quick, palm-sized shield, a mean little sound slap, a patient thread of Aegir water. Nothing flashy. Everything necessary.

He still owned every exchange.

"If he breaks me again," Valeria complained as her bone-shell deflected another cut that would have taken my arm, "I'm adding late fees and emotional damages to the invoice."

"Noted," I said, parrying with no thought past the single inch of steel in front of my nose.

This was the rhythm of the fight now. It wasn't a duel; it was a storm. And I was in a leaky boat, bailing water with a teacup.

A veil of miasma would drift toward me, heavy with the vow that "all courage will shake." Before it could touch me, I'd snag it with a whip of Aegir water and use a quick, ugly Grey seam to dump the whole mess into a pocket of reality that wasn't my problem. That was one leak plugged.

An after-blade would appear behind my back, ready to punish my next pivot. Erebus would slide a whisper-thin shadow wedge through the air, making the blade forget its purpose for a single, crucial half-second. In that moment, my Harmony-infused posture would allow me to shift my weight without a single tell, and the blade would cut empty air. Another leak plugged.

The vow that "edges arrive late" was a constant, grinding tax on my timing. I couldn't afford to fight it everywhere. So I fought it where it mattered. I'd use Mythweaver to write a tiny, stubborn Edict on my own ankle: 'This step is on time.' The world is happiest with small, specific truths. My first step would arrive when I wrote it. The rest of me still paid the tax. That was bailing, not plugging.

The Archduke watched me do all this, his expression unchanging. He was a force of nature, and I was a man with a very complicated series of chores. He chained it all together—the miasma veils, the smart spells, the short, brutal vows, all with no wasted motion—and pressed me into a ten-step circle where everything was wrong by a single, critical degree, and every degree cost blood. A veil got under my guard and kissed my forearm; a black burn bloomed like spilled ink under my skin. I answered by wrapping the limb in a water ribbon, cooling the ruin into something my hand could still pretend was functional.

He was better. My sword art, even at this new, refined level, was a screwdriver at a house fire. Useful, but you weren't going to put out the fire with it. I had to admit it properly. 'The sword is a sentence part,' I told myself. 'A noun, not the headline.'

The roof seemed to hear me. Or maybe it just ran out of jokes. For a single, blessed instant, an honest lane opened up for exactly the length of my reach. I didn't celebrate it. I didn't try to finish the fight with it. I wrote one neat, boring line with Valeria, asked nothing more from fate, and got a fresh, deep scar on his gauntlet leather that hadn't been there before.

He checked his glove like a man noticing a wrinkle on a fine suit. And for the first time, his eyes sharpened with something that felt like genuine, analytical approval. Or perhaps just calculation. It's hard to say. Demons are very good at both.

He pushed his blade forward again. The veils leaned in. The vows breathed in his lungs. The roof waited to see whether I would blink. I was going to lose at this pace. Not this minute. Not even in the next exchange. But soon. The boat was leaking faster than I could bail. Which meant I needed more room inside my own breath, a bigger bucket, or a different boat entirely.

Above us, far beyond the glass and brass ribs of the tower, the Gates of Transcendence were a line of cold, clear blue. Not a call to glory. Just an address. A place I was not. Not yet.

"Stop finishing," Julius's voice said a third time in my memory, because some lessons take three times to stick.

"I have," I whispered to myself, because this one finally had.

"Good," Valeria said, her voice cracked and fierce. "Now cheat."

I breathed in. I breathed out. And I let everything I wasn't using to stay alive simply drop away. It wasn't surrender. It was shedding bulk before a final, desperate swim. The Grey was held close to my knuckles. Harmony was a quiet fire under my ribs. Mythweaver had its cap off, waiting for one ugly, necessary sentence when I found the seam. Soul Resonance was ready to steal exactly one heartbeat, if and when it would matter.

He came on. I stepped into the worst part of the roof on purpose, a square of stone where two of his vows overlapped, and I made it mine for as long as I could afford to. It wasn't enough. Not yet.

But the screwdriver was in the right hand. And the house fire had a door I could put a line through, if the time came.

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