The snow held its breath.

No hiss. No drift. The ridge above wore its shawl of cloud without moving. In the space the wind left behind, heat began to think about existing.

Keahi stepped forward.

She rolled her right shoulder once - the armored one - and reached back. The blade rested on her back, bandage-wrapped because no sheath had ever survived the heat

Her fingers found the grip. She drew.

Cloth whispered. Then the bandages let go all at once, curling through the air like ribbons, fire already hesitating to leave the edge of the blade.

"Stay back" she said, nothing else.

Four shapes slid from the trees as if the trunks had decided to grow predators.

A feline Nyx, low and plated, all grace and claws.

A tall one that shifted its forearms from slab to blade like a weaponsmith that can't decide what tool to use.

A compact thing, behind, almost hiding.

And the fourth - too still - thin and human-shaped. Head tilted. Studying Keahi's stance.

"They're… Learning" Lynea murmured, violet light already ready at her ankles, even though she was resting.

"Doesn't matter if they're dead." Keahi said, and moved.

Heat curled off the blade, flickers of flame appearing more and more often. The feline lunged for the line between foot and knee. She let it fully commit to the attack, and at the last possible second, she stepped off the line, blade drawing a neat, flaming cut along the thing's ribs. It twisted, and went past with an insulted hiss.

The tall one punched the ground. Snow jumped. Then it tried to smas in a clean, hateful arc. Keahi pivoted and used the momentum to whip the blade's edge across its chest. The cut wasn't deep enough to end anything. It just glowed red, already regenerating.

Above, flames started to gather.

Keahi swung once, a wide, deliberate move. Fire knit midair. Flicker by flicker, flame by flame, feather by feather, until the sky held a bird big enough to shadow the slope.

Wings fanned. A molten tail trailing sparks. Snow steamed where embers fell.

"Please don't say it" Hikari said, eyes up.

"I wasn't" Esen said, eyes wider, remembering the last time Keahi made that inside the Heart. Not a pleasant experience...

The Phoenix flew, and dove.

The compact Nyx ducked low. Lynea skated across its path, violet shards lifting to carve thin, mean bites along its flank. The thing corrected - flawlessly. Too flawlessly. It had seen that move five seconds ago and, like Lynea herself said, learned.

"Right. So they're mindless, but not completely dumb…" Raizen said, already there.

The tall one came back with both arms as blades, something like a scissor purely meant to take a person out of the story. Keahi slid in, and delivered a strong blow. Metal touched… Not-metal. Whatever Nyxes are made from. The scissor snapped on nothing. She stepped through the hinge and left a second, brighter groove across its chest. It stumbled, and readied to try again.

The fourth shape hadn't attacked. It shifted its stance. Squared its feet the way Keahi did. Lifted its arms like it had borrowed her bones.

"Keahi" Raizen said, quiet as a heartbeat. "That one's watching you. No- it's... Mimicking you..."

"Let it" she said.

The Phoenix dove from the sky.

It hit the feline-like Nyx hard. A second sweep clipped the tall one's arm, what should have been a blade. The hot air smelled like smoke, even though technically, nothing was on fire.

The watching Nyx tilted its head.

Something unfolded from its back - two wings - if they could be called wings - of thin shards, similar to Lynea's.

The Phoenix cut across the slope again, red and beautiful - too beautiful for this world.

The Nyxed raised both of its arms.

The shards launched.

The first line rose, and then the next, and the next - hundreds of dark knives stitching upward into a single impossible barrage. They hit the Phoenix face-on and passed through, shredding fire into ribbons, ribbons into sparks, sparks into nothingness. The bird tore apart mid-flight, scattered, and went out in a spray of ember and steam.

Keahi stopped moving. One heartbeat too long.

"No…" she said, so small it almost wasn't sound.

The Nyx didn't hesitate. It ran - perfect posture, perfect angle. The tall one pivoted to help, blunt limb already rising.

A golden blur drew a line through the air and stepped into both of them. Not next to, but into.

Raizen.

He met the winged Nyx on the first step, blades crossing, not to block, but to feel - the way a musician touches a string to learn its note. Well, in this case Raizen was testing to see how he can cut it most efficiently...

The Nyx swung right, exactly like her cut, but Raizen wasn't there anymore. He touched a trunk with one boot, vanished into another dash that turned distance into a step, and reappeared behind it with a short cut at its ankles, if they can be called ankles. The thing tried to copy the dash and found out that copying is slower than thinking.

Raizen used a tilted tree like a ladder - one step, then the next - kicking off into a second dash over the Nyx's head. The arms it lifted to catch him didn't find anything, Raizen's blades were already through, his feet already landing.

The Nyx turned and got the answer to its question in the cleanest language available: a diagonal from hip to shoulder. The body paused, considering, then split along the lines and fell, lifeless.

The tall one's limb came down where Raizen had been. He wasn't. He slid under, cut from behind, and let momentum harvest the rest.

"Back" he told Keahi without looking.

She didn't step back.

The heat found her again. She raised the blade and the flames at the edge stopped flickering and started deciding. Each swing left a small wake of air that hummed like it had been struck.

The tall Nyx blocked. She burned through the guard. It tried to barge. She pivoted again, and wrote a line from torso down. Fire crawled into the wound like it had been invited.

"Burn" she said, quietly.

It did. The plates went soft around the cut. Thin smoke leaked, then more. The shape trembled and lost itself. Golden ashes rose.

The feline tried to make tragedy into opportunity. It slid in low for her ankle, silent and elegant. It's always the ankles...

Hikari's staff met its claw with a short, ugly sound. Just to allow Arashi to politely blow the thing up... Another Nyx dead.

The compact runner returned. Esen's ring boomed and drove it into a pine tree, where Raizen turned it into a corpse out of habit more than hate.

The wind carried most of the heat away.

Keahi lowered the blade. Fire sank back into metal. The last of the bandages lay melted in a lazy S behind her boots.

Raizen arrived beside her at a walk he hadn't earned. His breath came faster than his face admitted. Gold dust slid out of the air between them and landed on the snow like the idea of stars.

"You're still burning" he said.

"You're still bleeding" she said, and nodded at the thin line on his sleeve he hadn't bothered to notice.

Across the slope, miners watched openly, too tired to be polite. One made a sign against bad luck and then realized nothing here cared which hand he used.

"Phoenix?" Esen asked carefully, like the word might still be sore.

"Later" Keahi said. It wasn't regret. It was an accounting. "I need to catch my breath"

Lynea drifted in, slowly. Hikari reached her without making a scene and checked the stripe on Lynea's thigh with two gentle fingers. Lynea made a weird face that said it hurt.

"Pretty thing" she said.

"It was" Keahi said. No apology in it. No excuse.

From the trees, far back, the forest rearranged itself into a suggestion of more. Not a rush, not yet. Enough to remind a person the mountain didn't run out.

"That was four" Raizen said, scanning the line, the prints, the places where prints stopped.

"And there are more!?" Keahi asked, rolling her grip. And her eyes.

The only thing that remained after the Nyxes were killed - gilded ashes - lifted when the wind found them.

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