The smoke between them moved.That was the only thing moving for a long moment, the slow lazy curl of battle smoke drifting across the open ground between the four of them, carrying the smell of burnt things and cold air and the specific acrid quality of three hundred flame techniques detonating in a relatively small space over a relatively short period of time.Roderick looked at Web.Web looked at Roderick.Yuki looked at Kyx.Kyx looked at Yuki.Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The wider battle moved around them, the sounds of it, the light from it, but the specific ten feet of ground they were all standing on had gone to a different quality of quiet, the way the eye of something goes quiet while everything around it doesn't.Roderick's hands were loose on both axes.Web's one working arm was at his side.Yuki's sword was up, low guard, the pale flame burning steady along the blade.Kyx had her weight forward on her front foot,the weight of someone who was going to move soon and had alr

He tried to disengage.Roderick smiled.It was a small smile. Brief. The smile of someone who had been waiting for exactly the moment when the person in front of them tried to disengage.Both axes came forward, not the redirecting, absorbing motion of the last thirty seconds, suddenly forward, driving, the weight behind them full and committed. The left caught Web's retreating arm, the right came across underneath it, the two strikes crossing in a motion that had a specific geometry, the geometry of two weapons that had been built to work together by two people who had thought about this for a very long time.Web's guard shattered.Not broken,shattered, the force going through both his arms simultaneously from different angles, the combined output of the crossed strike distributing across his defence in a way that had no clean point of resistance.He went back.Three steps. Hard.Each step a managed fall, his body absorbing what it could, distributing what it couldn't, the specific t

"You're the one who used it on the village." He said. "The clan that was wiped out. The bodies that weren't found." He looked at Gull. "That was you."Gull held his gaze.He didn't confirm it.He didn't deny it.He just held his gaze with the specific expression of someone who has already moved on from a chapter of events and finds revisiting it unproductive.Then he looked down at the circle."Forbidden Flame Technique.” He said. Quietly. Almost to himself.The grey deepened.The circle pulsed.The ground inside it cracked, not from impact, from pressure building beneath it, the specific pressure of something large gathering in the space between the technique's formation and its expression.Then they came through.Not one at a time. All at once, twenty of them, rising from the grey circle in a wave, the sound of their appearance a low resonant pressure that hit the chest before the ears. Flame beasts,massive, their bodies burning with a flame that had the same dark quality as t

Asta kept his eyes on Loki.On Jabber's body standing five feet from Dero with the purple circles spinning at each side, the flame of them throwing deep colour across the grey domain's cold air. The circles moved in slow orbit, not random, deliberate, each one tracking a specific path that had geometry in it, the geometry of someone who had already planned the opening of whatever came next and was building toward it patiently.Loki was patient.That was the thing about him that was different from every other fighter Asta had watched,the patience was not the patience of someone waiting for the right moment. It was the patience of something that existed in a different relationship with time than most things did. Something that had watched a very large number of situations develop at their own pace and had long since stopped feeling the urgency that most creatures felt in dangerous spaces.‘’’Good luck.’’’ Asta thought, at Loki's back.Not out loud. Not even inward in the deliberate w

She leaned back.The elbow passed.Her free hand came up from below, a compressed grey burst, short range, aimed at his chest.He took it.The cold hit him and went through the purple flame running across his surface and hit him and he staggered one step back, his chest bright with the impact, the specific cold of it working through the fabric and into the body underneath.He stayed on his feet."Is that the best you have?" Dero said. Not breathless. Not strained. The tone of someone observing a demonstration that has not yet produced anything interesting. "I expected more. From the Lord of Mischief, I expected considerably more."Loki looked at her.Then both circles reformed, pulling back to their positions at his sides, the orbit resuming, the purple rebuilding at the edges."It seems." Dero said, watching the circles."The student is still far from the master.""You were never my master." Loki said.He came again.……..This time the circles stayed at his sides.He didn't send