Cassian's feet shifted.Not a stumble, the controlled shift of someone absorbing force into the ground, the legs bending at the knee to lower the center of gravity, the weight going into the feet and through the feet into the road and the road receiving it in the specific way hard road stone receives force.Hakuwa was above him.The descent angle unchanged from the moment Cassian had turned,the claw having come from the direction it had been going and Cassian having put himself in the path of it, and now the path was the guard and the guard was holding but the holding required everything the guard had.Asta had moved when Cassian turned.Backward, the specific light backward of someone who had taken themselves out of the situation with the economy of a person who had already determined the geometry and had placed themselves at the edge of it. He landed eight feet back, both feet, the landing of someone who had covered the distance and was now in the position the covering had been for.

Not at Cassian, at Asta.At the seated, cross-legged, completely unhurried Asta eight feet to Cassian's right.The spike traveled the distance in the fraction of a second that fast things travel short distances.The sword moved.Not Asta,the sword, the specific autonomous response of a hand that had been trained long enough that the training was in the hand rather than in the head, the blade deflecting the spike at the precise contact point with the precise angle that sent the spike into the road stone three inches from Asta's right knee.He had not stood up.He had not shifted position.The sword had moved and returned to its position across his knees before the spike had finished producing its small impact crater in the road.Asta looked at the crater.At the sword.Cassian had already launched.The opening, the moment that Hakuwa's wrist had been on the spike rather than the defense, the specific fraction of a second when the offensive output had been divided between the main oppon

The point did not arrive, something else arrived instead.A blur, not the blur of a fast thing moving through a field of vision, the blur of something that had covered a distance that was too large for the time it covered the distance in, the specific visual disturbance that speed produces when the speed is past the threshold that the eye processes cleanly.The screech of metal.Not a clang, a screech, the specific sustained sound of two edges in hard, grinding contact, the sound of a blade not just stopping a blade but pressing against it, both sides pushing in their respective directions with the specific mutual opposition of a save rather than a block.Sparks.Gray flame against origin flame against each other at the junction point, the specific brief pyrotechnics of two different fire expressions making forced contact at the edge, the colors of them mixing in the spark for the fraction of a second the spark existed.Asta.Between Cassian and Hakuwa.His back was to Cassian. His bl

The force field was losing the argument.It had been a good argument for a while, the Knights had built it well, the combined flame output of twelve trained fighters producing a barrier that had more integrity than a single-source field, the overlapping contributions of twelve different flame lineages creating a structure that was harder to find the weak point in because the weak point moved every time the contributing sources adjusted their output.The beasts did not care about integrity.They cared about the specific result of throwing themselves at the barrier with full force at high frequency, which was the result that barriers produce when the things pressing against them have enough weight and frequency and time, the result being that the barrier was no longer what it had been when it was first established.The cracks ran through the visible surface of it like fault lines.Not one,several, the specific distributed fracturing of something that had been hit from multiple points by

"Asta and Cassian.” She said. "They are further out." She pointed in the direction of the direction,away from the convoy, away from the Flame monsterious beast circle, the direction where the gray-flame exchange had been going for the last several minutes and the sound of it had been coming from. "They are in a fight with a man who has…" She stopped. She looked like she was trying to find the word for something that the word-inventory she had available did not fully cover. "The flame aura coming off this man is unlike anything I have run across. My squad's readers went into overload trying to measure it." She looked at Roderick. "They are in serious trouble."Roderick closed his eyes.One second.The second of someone who is doing the thing that has to be done internally before the external thing can proceed, the receiving of information, the placing of it, the specific process of taking the weight of it and distributing it into the places it needed to go.He opened his eyes.