When Gods Bleed

The sky had stopped behaving like a sky.

The clouds spiraled inward above the ruined capital, dragged toward a centre that had not existed that morning. The pressure in the air was dense enough to feel like drowning without any water involved. Every broken stone vibrated. Every flame bent toward the middle of the square.

Toward them.

Seraphis stood on the left with golden light moving along his blade like something liquid. Veyren stood on the right, dark mana coiling around him in slow controlled spirals, smoke that only answered to one person.

Between them, a dozen paces out, Mantropis watched.

Not attacked. Watched.

"Your coordination improved,"

he said.

"You adapt quickly. That trait once made your species dangerous."

Seraphis did not answer him.

He moved first.

The ground did not crack under his feet. It crystallized, a path of light going straight toward Mantropis, and Seraphis went down it with the precision of a man who had removed hesitation from his technique a long time ago.

His blade came down in a vertical arc that split the air itself.

The light did not glow. It roared.

Mantropis raised two fingers.

The blade struck and the world flashed white.

Then the shockwave.

Buildings that were already broken finished collapsing. Rubble lifted off the ground and scattered. The street underneath Mantropis caved several meters and he stayed standing at the centre of it, and the light pressed against his fingers and ground and forced his arm back by inches.

Veyren moved into that opening.

He did not run. He was simply gone.

A shadow behind Mantropis twisted the wrong way and he came out of it mid-swing, dark mana condensed so tightly along the edge that it shrieked coming through the air.

The strike landed across Mantropis's shoulder.

Not shallow. Not glancing.

Deep.

Black energy tore through ancient cloth and into what was underneath it.

And for the first time since he arrived on this continent, Mantropis took a step he had not chosen.

The battlefield went quiet.

Even the fighting further out seemed to drop in volume.

A thin line of dark blood ran down from the wound. It evaporated before it reached the stone.

Seraphis did not hesitate.

"Now."

Light exploded outward from him in a radial burst and formed a dome that slammed inward from every side at once.

Veyren crossed his blade through the air and carved sigils in forbidden script that locked the space around him. Chains materialized that were not physical, binding the area rather than the man.

Mantropis looked at the wound on his shoulder.

Then at the two of them.

The smile was gone.

"Interesting."

They came again together.

Seraphis low, blade angled for the midsection. Veyren from above, descending with enough force behind him to open a stone wall.

Mantropis twisted.

Not fast enough.

Seraphis's blade went through his side. Veyren's followed it down into the collarbone and drove him to one knee.

The ground cracked into a crater around the three of them and a pulse of light and dark detonated outward and flattened what was left of the surrounding ruins.

I felt it from four streets away.

I turned mid-strike with the ancient mana still burning around my fists and watched the light go up over the rooftops.

"They're pushing him back."

Kaelra wiped blood off her cheek.

"They're actually doing it."

Talen laughed in disbelief while putting a spear of lightning through three things at once.

"About time somebody wiped that expression off."

Seraphis drove his blade deeper.

"You are not reducing this world to ash."

Veyren's eyes burned.

"Fall."

Mantropis lowered his head.

Then he chuckled.

It was quiet. Soft. Almost disappointed.

"You misunderstand."

The air changed.

It did not get heavier. It got hollow.

The chains Veyren had carved began to decay. Not breaking. Unraveling into dust in the air.

The dome of light did not shatter. It thinned, the way things thin when they age several centuries in the space of a breath.

Seraphis felt it first. The mana sustaining his blade started to rot.

Not go out. Spoil.

He pulled back instantly and leapt clear as Mantropis rose smoothly to his feet.

The wounds stayed visible for a heartbeat longer.

Then they sealed.

Not healed. Erased.

Veyren's eyes narrowed.

"You are not regenerating."

Mantropis brushed invisible dust off his shoulder.

"There is nothing to regenerate. What you struck no longer applies."

The two of them exchanged the briefest glance and something passed between them.

He was not durable.

He was rewriting the consequences after the fact.

"You press me with admirable effort,"

Mantropis said.

"For a moment you resembled the warriors who once opposed extinction. That was refreshing."

Veyren moved without waiting for a signal.

He went in a spiral, blade cutting through space in vectors that did not follow from each other. His magic came out not as force but as distortion, bending angles, twisting trajectories, every swing arriving from a direction that had not existed a moment earlier.

Seraphis followed with clean precise strikes that forced reactions. Light carved corridors through the warped space Veyren was creating, turning the chaos into geometry with a purpose.

Mantropis retreated one step.

Then two.

"You are still using Academy footwork,"

Veyren said, mid-motion.

"It still works,"

Seraphis answered.

A slash opened across Mantropis's thigh. Another across his arm.

The ground fractured under the three of them and shockwaves rolled outward in expanding rings. The ruins stopped being ruins and started being gravel.

Seraphis pivoted and released a horizontal arc of radiance that forced both arms up.

Veyren appeared directly in front of him and thrust for the heart.

The strike connected fully.

Dark mana detonated inside his chest in a concentrated implosion, and for a fraction of a second the body split with cracks of black light.

The battlefield held its breath.

Mantropis tilted his head.

His eyes, calm and detached the entire time until then, focused fully on Veyren.

The amusement had gone.

"You carry it."

Veyren did not withdraw the blade.

"Carry what."

"The residue."

Seraphis stepped in and slashed across his torso to force separation.

Mantropis staggered backward several steps and the fracture across his chest stayed there.

It stayed.

I saw it from where I was.

"He's bleeding."

Kaelra exhaled hard.

"Then he can fall."

Mantropis touched the fracture across his chest.

His fingers came away dark.

He looked at them for a long moment.

And something in his expression changed. Not anger. Not pain.

Recognition.

"You dare."

Seraphis advanced.

"You are not untouchable."

Veyren's voice was low.

"You overestimated your reach."

Mantropis straightened.

The fractures did not vanish. They deepened and spread, and not the way wounds spread.

Like cracks in porcelain.

His aura expanded and the shadows across the continent answered it instantly. The lesser creatures near us froze for half a second and then went violently unstable, doubling in size, splitting into limbs they had not possessed, eyes opening along their arms.

Talen swallowed.

"That's bad."

"I entertained your defiance,"

Mantropis said, and his voice had nothing warm left in it.

"I permitted the illusion that your strikes carried weight."

The cracks shattered outward in a burst of black radiance and the shape they had been fighting came apart like a shell.

What stood in its place was taller.

Not monstrous. Stripped.

The ancient garments burned away into drifting ash. His body was carved with shifting patterns of decay and lightless void, as though a number of galaxies had collapsed and been set under translucent skin.

His eyes were not glowing anymore.

They were empty horizons.

Seraphis's breath faltered. Veyren's grip tightened.

"You forced acknowledgement,"

Mantropis said.

"Do not confuse that with vulnerability."

He moved.

Not a step. A disappearance.

Seraphis barely got his blade up. The impact was not magical. It was physical, and it was past what a body is built to receive. He went across the square and through layers of stone and buried foundation before he stopped in a trail of destruction.

Veyren attacked from the flank.

Mantropis caught the blade with one hand.

Not blocked. Caught.

The dark mana around the edge began to unravel at the point of contact, coming apart like thread.

Veyren's eyes widened.

Mantropis pulled him forward and drove a fist into his abdomen.

The sound was not a crack. It was a collapse.

Veyren folded around it and the shockwave split the earth in a jagged line that ran the length of the square. He hit the ground hard enough to bury himself halfway into it.

I felt it in my own bones.

"No—"

Seraphis came out of the rubble in a burst of gold with nothing restrained about it.

He did not speak.

Light condensed around him in wings and he surged forward and the blade carved a path of pure brilliance toward Mantropis's head.

Mantropis turned calmly and raised one hand.

The light slowed.

Not blocked. Slowed, as though it were moving through thickened time.

Seraphis pushed harder, veins straining, aura going brighter than I had ever seen it from any distance.

Mantropis's fingers closed around the blade.

The light screamed and dimmed under his grip.

"You cannot purify inevitability."

He twisted.

The sword cracked.

Not shattered. Cracked.

Seraphis did not let go. He drove his free hand forward and put the entire breadth of his light magic into a point blank detonation.

The explosion swallowed both of them.

When it cleared, Mantropis had not moved.

Seraphis was on one knee, breathing hard, his blade fractured and still in his hand.

Veyren rose out of the broken ground behind him with blood at the corner of his mouth.

"Together."

Seraphis nodded once.

They moved again, and this time not as two people.

Light and shadow went together seamlessly. Veyren's distortions amplified Seraphis's precision. Seraphis's radiance stabilized what Veyren was doing to the space around them. They forced Mantropis to defend from planes of attack that should not have been available simultaneously.

They cut him again. And again.

Each wound stayed longer than the last.

For several seconds that felt considerably longer, they had him.

Mantropis retreated under it, absorbing, deflecting, calculating.

Then he exhaled.

The world dimmed.

Not visually. Conceptually.

The attacks slowed mid-air. Seraphis felt his swing lose velocity. Veyren felt the space he had warped stabilize itself against his will.

Mantropis stepped forward into their combined assault the way a man walks through rain.

"You mistake resistance for progress."

He put one hand on Seraphis's chest and the other on Veyren's shoulder.

He did not strike. He pressed.

Rot spread from both contact points. Not burning and not freezing. Aging. Armor dulled. Cloth frayed. Skin went numb.

Seraphis roared and blasted himself free with a burst of light.

Veyren twisted out of the grip through shadow and reappeared several meters away.

They both landed hard.

Mantropis stood between them, and the wounds from the last two minutes had gone entirely.

His gaze went over both of them without any anger in it.

"You cannot win,"

he said.

No theatrics. No cruelty. He said it the way you tell someone the road ahead is flooded.

Seraphis got up slowly with the fractured blade still in his hand.

Veyren wiped the blood off his lip and steadied his stance.

Neither of them moved back.

And I understood, watching it from four streets away with a shadow's claw still stuck in my shoulder, that something had shifted and not in our direction.

They had not pushed him to a limit.

They had persuaded him to stand up.

Mantropis looked at the two of them for a while.

"I have indulged this long enough."

The shadows across the horizon surged in unison and he did not resemble something playing with remnants anymore.

He raised one hand.

And then he stopped.

It was not something either of them had done.

It was a sound from the far end of the battlefield.

"Left!"

Kaelra's voice, sharp across the ruined ground.

"I saw it!"

"You did not."

"I saw it."

"Talen, if you had seen it you would not be bleeding."

There was a wet crunch as Talen put something down, and then his voice again, ragged and entirely unbothered.

"Still standing though."

"For now."

Ordinary. Irritated. Two people who had been fighting next to each other long enough to argue while doing it.

Mantropis's hand stayed where it was.

He was not looking at Seraphis or Veyren anymore.

He was looking down the length of the ruined street toward the three of us.

And his expression had done something I did not have a name for at that distance.

Seraphis noticed it before I did.

"What is it."

Mantropis did not answer.

The hand lowered slowly.

"Nothing,"

he said.

It was the first thing he had said all night that was obviously untrue.