"What are you even talking about?" Aegon managed to speak through the pain. "Is this about Nightwalker?"

He laughed and shook his head. "Keep telling yourself he's the only one." He stepped close, his face grimly satisfied in the thinning fog.

He placed a hand on the wall. The tiles beneath Aegon's feet shimmered, their surface transforming, growing slick with a layer of glistening oil.

Aegon's feet shot out from under him. He fell hard, the wire-net pulling tighter with the impact, driving the breath from his lungs in a wet gasp.

He was on his back, pinned, bleeding from a dozen new cuts. The chemical powder settled around them like toxic snow.

The hitman stood over him. He willed the wire net to dissolve back into smoke, which streamed back into the cigarette in his hand. Aegon was free, but broken. He couldn't rise.

Omniblade looked down at him, a craftsman surveying a finished piece. "The message is delivered."

The cigarette in his fingers lengthened, thickened, its end tapering into a cruel, narrow point. It became a longsword, simple and lethal, the hilt still the filter, the blade emerging from where the ember would glow.

He raised it two-handed, point aimed at Aegon's heart.

This was it.

Aegon's mind, which had been a storm of panic and strategy, went ice-cold and clear. He let his body go limp, let the despair show in his eyes.

He didn't have the strength to phase his whole body. But he didn't need to. He just needed a hole. A sword-sized hole.

Omniblade drove the blade down with silent, professional force.

Aegon focused every shred of his will, every ounce of his power, on a single, specific point in his torso. He phased the molecules of his chest, just along the path of the descending tip.

The sword plunged through him. It sank into the linoleum floor beneath with a solid thunk, pinning his suit but missing every vital organ.

The sensation was beyond agony—a void of impossible cold where steel occupied the same space as his flesh without touching it.

Omniblade's eyes widened in genuine shock. He'd felt no resistance, no impact.

Before he could process, before he could let go of the hilt, Aegon's blood-slick hand shot up. His fingers, trembling with final effort, clamped around Omniblade's wrist where it gripped the sword.

Fifteen seconds.

The knowledge flooded into Aegon—not just the how, but the strain.

The mental weight of holding atomic structures in his mind, the limitation of simple forms, the exhausting focus required. And the intimate, tactile connection to the object.

He understood the cigarette-sword now. He felt its structure in his mind, as if it were an extension of his own nervous system.

With a grin that was all teeth and blood, Aegon poured his will into the blade.

Omniblade felt it. A wrongness in the weapon he'd created. He tried to yank it free, to will it back to smoke.

It was too late.

The solid, single-edged sword rippled. Six inches from the hilt, just above where it emerged from Aegon's phased chest, the back of the blade erupted outward, forging a second, equally sharp edge that curved backwards, forming a vicious, inward-facing hook.

In the same instant, the tip of the sword still buried in the floor did the same, morphing into a mirrored, upward-facing barb.

Omniblade, in the act of pulling the sword out, met sudden, terrible resistance.

Aegon released his phase.

Solidity returned with a nauseating jolt. The newly formed double-edged sword was now inside his body, a searing line of pure fire. But it was also inside Omniblade's.

"Well played." As the hitman pulled back, the backward-hooked edge near the hilt sawed brutally through Aegon's flesh on its way out—a searing new agony.

But the upward barb at the tip, now anchored in the floor, did worse.

It caught, and as Omniblade pulled with all his strength, the barb tore upwards through his own hands, severing tendons, and then, as his grip failed and he fell back, the savage edge near the guard sliced deep across his abdomen and chest.

Aegon lay still, a fresh river of blood pouring from the gruesome wound in his chest.

Omniblade staggered against the opposite wall, staring in disbelief at his ruined hands and the deep, gushing laceration across his torso.

The cigarette, its form shattered by the violent transformation, lay as inert, bloody fragments on the floor between them.

The only sounds were the hiss of the sprinklers, their frantic patter now mixing with the drip of two men's blood onto the flooded, powder-strewn floor.

The fight was over.

Both were on their knees, one by choice, one by ruin.

"What— what heroes were you talking about?" Aegon looked the hitman right in the eye, looking it might be their last moments.

"You really don't know." A tired smile stretched across his lips as he moved a hand for his pocket. "Go find out the truth for yourself." He tossed Aegon a set of keys.

He could barely move his hands to catch them. Turned back to Omniblade just in time to watch his body slump down in a pool of water and blood.

The hospital hallway looked like a charnel house painted in white and red.

Aegon's vision tunneled, the cold from the floor seeping into his bones.

He had won by refusing to lose the only way he knew how: by making his enemy's surest kill into his own desperate, bloody counter.

He blinked up at the flickering fluorescent lights, the world fading in and out to the rhythm of his slowing heart.

And soon after he shut his eyes and fell too.

---

Everything else came in a blur, from the clangor of sounds, sirens and voices, to the EMTs trying to bring him back to life.

It could've been a day, month or decade to him as he'd lost all consciousness, and yet the question drummed at the back of his mind: what was Omniblade talking about?

His eyes fluttered open to white walls, the sharp smell of antiseptics and a numb yet heavy feeling all over.

But at least he was alive, and better yet, he recognised these walls—he was in the academy's hospital.

He tried to focus but it was impossible but his eyes swept the room to see Alex, sitting in a chair beside the bed, legs crossed and changing the television stations like a child.

He finally noticed Aegon's half-lidded eyes open and staring at him.

"You're finally awake." He said cheerfully, gesturing back to the television. "Watch this."

A news station was on, although mute he could still make out the headline written below:

NEXT GEN PROGRAM SUCCESS: Adept student successfully stops infamous hitman, Omniblade.

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