Rise Of The Mirror King

Chapter 18: Two Blades

Time rewound to the moment I heard Lucifero's voice. I shoved Vax out of the way and drew my sword. His attack still caught me. The ice was stinging, and it cut my knuckles.

"You—" I didn't get the rest of the sentence out before he moved again, blade trailing frost, the temperature in the hall dropping fast enough to fog every breath around us.

I brought my sword up to meet the next swing, and the impact sent a shudder up both arms. He wasn't holding back.

Whatever restraint he usually kept wrapped around himself had come completely undone.

"You could have killed her," I snarled.

"I don't care." He said it so flatly, so simply, that it landed harder than if he'd screamed it. "I never have."

That answer told me everything I needed to know and none of what I wanted.

He came at me again, faster this time, ice forming in jagged spears along the floor with every step he took, and I felt the heat build in my chest — the tell I'd learned to recognize by now, the one that meant I was about to spend pieces of my life I couldn't get back.

"Mana Flow State — Flowing Dragon Play."

My body surged forward before I finished the words, meeting his next strike blade to blade, and the force of it sent us both skidding backward across the stone.

Somewhere behind me I heard students screaming, chairs scraping, the sound of a hall trying to empty itself all at once.

"You think this makes you righteous?" I shouted over the ring of steel. "Attacking a child?"

"She's a Wardreth." His eyes were pure ice now, no warmth left in them at all. "Everything that name touches deserves to burn."

He drove his blade down. I caught it against mine, but the cold bled straight through the metal into my hands, numbing my fingers, and I felt my grip start to slip.

"You don't even know what that name means anymore," I said through gritted teeth.

"I know exactly what it means. It means you were handed everything the rest of us had to earn. Magic. Title. Her." His voice cracked on that last word, just enough for me to hear it. "And you never once had to fight for any of it."

He pressed harder, and the ice along his blade cracked outward, spreading across the floor in a widening sheet that threatened to take my footing.

"Fight for it?" I laughed, bitter and short. "You have no idea what I've had to fight for."

"Then show me."

I did.

I don't remember deciding to move. One second his blade was bearing down on mine, the next I was inside his guard, my shoulder driving into his chest, both of us crashing through a row of benches in an explosion of splintered wood.

He recovered faster than I expected, twisting under me and driving his knee up into my ribs — the same ribs Tiger Tail Rewind hadn't quite finished healing — and the pain rippled through my entire body.

I swung anyway. My blade caught his forearm, opened a shallow line of red against his pale skin, and for the first time since this started, something like surprise flickered across his face.

He retaliated with a burst of ice that caught my shoulder point-blank, and I felt the skin there freeze and split at once, cold and pain arriving together in a way that made my vision swim.

We broke apart, both of us breathing hard, both of us bleeding — his arm, my shoulder, my knuckles, my ribs screaming with every breath.

"This ends when one of us can't get up," he said.

"Fine by me." I cursed with half a breath.

Neither of us got the chance to prove it.

"ENOUGH"

The command didn't come from Zudrik. It came from all directions at once — a dozen figures dropping into the hall through windows, doorways, the gaps in the ceiling where the fight had already cracked the stone—the Twelve Commandments.

Baron reached me first, and Baal a half-step behind him, each grabbing one of my arms with an iron grip.

I fought it on instinct, blood roaring in my ears, some part of me that wasn't fully mine anymore screaming that the fight wasn't finished.

"Symon. Symon, look at me." Baron's voice cut through the haze, low and steady. "It's over. Stand down."

Across the wreckage of the hall, Draco had Lucifero locked from behind, arms pinned, still visibly fighting the hold even as frost crept up Draco's sleeves from the contact.

Zudrik strode through the wreckage a moment later, his expression somewhere past fury, into something colder and more dangerous.

"What," he said, "is the meaning of this?"

Nobody answered.

His eyes swept the hall — the shattered benches, the sheet of ice spreading across half the floor, the students pressed against the far wall, too shocked to even whisper.

Then his gaze landed on Vax, still sitting where I'd shoved her, cradling her bleeding arm, tears streaking silently down her face.

"Get the healers," he snapped, and someone bolted from the room.

I was still held fast between Baron and Baal, my whole body shaking now, less from the cold and more from the dissatisfaction of not finishing what Lucifero had started.

My vision kept narrowing at the edges, red creeping in from both sides.

"Let me go," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine.

"Not a chance," Baron muttered.

I looked at Vax again, the blood soaking through her sleeve. She flinched every time someone moved too fast near her.

Something in my chest cracked open, and the heat came roaring back — sharper this time, more desperate, less controlled.

"Grey."

"Lord Symon, I would advise against—"

"I don't care what you'd advise."

I felt the pull of it even before the words left my mouth.

"Mana Flow State — Restoration Flow."

Heat spread from my chest outward, down both arms, into my hands, and I twisted free of Baron and Baal's grip with a strength that made them both stumble back in surprise.

I crossed the hall in three strides and dropped to my knees in front of Vax, pressing both palms against the wound on her arm.

Light bled out from beneath my hands, gold and warm, utterly unlike the cold violence that had torn the hall apart minutes earlier.

Vax gasped as the wound knit itself shut, skin sealing over torn muscle in seconds, and around us the entire hall went dead silent, watching it happen.

When I pulled my hands back, her arm was whole. Unmarked. Like none of it had ever touched her.

I swayed, black spots crowding the edges of my vision, and somewhere behind me I heard Grey's voice, flat and clinical even now.

"That expenditure has cost you four years, three months from your total lifespan. You are now at—"

"Not now," I muttered.

I stood, ignoring the way the room tilted, ignoring Zudrik's stare and the dozen other stares beside it, ignoring Lucifero across the wreckage — still held fast, still watching me with something unreadable behind the ice in his eyes.

I didn't wait for permission. I didn't wait for questions.

I picked Vax up, cradled against my chest, and walked out of the hall, leaving blood and broken benches and an audience full of witnesses behind me.

Nobody stopped me.

I'm not sure anyone could have, even if they'd tried.