Dawn Walker

—

Mihos stepped into that realization with ruthless timing and drove his elbow toward Sekhmet’s temple. Sekhmet ducked and turned his body, taking the blow across the upper shoulder instead of the head.

The pain rang through the joint. He answered with a short range strike to Mihos’s sternum, followed immediately by a blood hardened edge from the other hand aimed low for the liver.

Mihos blocked one, took the other, and smiled again.

That smile was beginning to piss Sekhmet off. Anger had uses if kept leashed.

They separated at barely a pace. Then closed in again.

This time the force of the exchange became obvious to everyone watching.

Mihos fought like a true heir should have fought if the family had done at least one thing honestly in his life. No wasted flourish. No lazy overconfidence in the actual movement itself, even if the arrogance around it stank from ten roads away. His body was trained. His Chaos shaping was brutal and efficient. He did not telegraph where he did not have to. He attacked with the ease of a man who had never truly tasted defeat in his generation and therefore had built his confidence not only on praise, but on repeated proof.

And Sekhmet felt it. For the first time in a long while, the fight was hard. Not dramatically hard.

Not ’he might kill me in the next second’ hard.

The more frustrating kind.

The kind where his body and instincts kept arriving correctly, but the outcome of each exchange still fell short by a margin that should not have been there. He had fought above rank before. He had killed above expectation before. But those victories had always come through some edge. Hunger. Bloodline surprise. Ruthlessness of blood lust. Better instincts. Enemies too arrogant or too stupid to understand what he was until it was too late.

Mihos was arrogant. But Mihos was not stupid. And his Chaos purity changed everything.

Every time Sekhmet’s force met Mihos directly, the answer came back harsher than it should have. Every defensive layer Mihos built felt denser. Every strike carried cleaner penetration through blocks. The two-rank difference mattered, yes.

Chaos Rank Five against Chaos Rank Three was already tough enough. But the real poison was refinement. Mihos’s power moved like forged steel where Sekhmet’s still moved, at times, like sharpened ore.

That made each exchange more expensive.

Sekhmet took a strike to the ribs and felt the force ring inward farther than it should have through simple contact. He answered with a slicing blood arc across Mihos’s forearm. This time he cut skin, and a line of red appeared.

Sekhmet thought, “So the bastard bled.”

Mihos looked at the cut. Then at Sekhmet. And his eyes lit with something colder than mockery.

“You are better than I expected,” he said. “I will stop playing around. Get ready.”

Then he attacked properly. The next sequence drove Sekhmet back three full steps.

A left hand wrapped in Chaos force.

A shoulder crash.

A downward hammering blow.

A rising backfist.

Sekhmet blocked the first, twisted off the second, caught the third partly on his wrist and partly on his shoulder, but the fourth clipped his jaw hard enough to turn his head and send white pain flashing through his vision for one brutal second.

The guards saw it. They were happy about it.

Sekhmet came back immediately with blood control snapping outward in three cutting threads. Mihos broke one with his hand, let one glance off his side, and evaded the third by inches before slamming his own Chaos-covered fist toward Sekhmet’s centerline again.

This time Sekhmet felt the need for more decisive force.

He pulled blood from a cut at his own lip and from the opened line on Mihos’s arm, spun both through his control, and shaped them in one smooth motion.

Blood Sword.

It formed in his hand with a red-black flash, thin and sharp and cruel at the edge. The weapon lengthened into shape as he stepped in, cutting diagonally from shoulder to waist with enough speed that several guards at the edge visibly flinched.

Mihos saw it too late to evade cleanly. So he did something else. He drove his Chaos-covered fist directly into the blade.

The sound that followed was wrong. Not metal on metal. Not blood on flesh.

A cracking impact, sharp and violent, like hardened glass meeting a hammer swung by a weapon Smith.

Sekhmet felt it through his whole arm. And then his Blood Sword broke…

For the first time since he gained the skill, it broke. Not chipped. Not deflected.

Broken.

The red blade shattered apart from the point of Mihos’s strike, fragments of blood-hardened force exploding outward into the night like red crystal shards before dissolving into mist.

The shock hit Sekhmet hard enough to matter. His eyes widened for one honest fraction of a second.

Mihos saw it. Of course he did. And laughed.

Actually laughed.

“There it is,” he said. “That face.”

Something dark and immediate moved through Sekhmet then.

It was not panic. Not even fear. It was Fury.

Cold and hot at once.

His Blood Sword had never broken before. Never. He had trusted that edge. Built instinct around it. Used it as certainty in too many fights.

And Mihos had broken it with a punch.

Then the heir had earned what came next.

Sekhmet pulled inward.

Every scrap of loose blood force. Every fragment of the broken sword. Every active current of Chaos in his body. He drew them in hard enough that even Elena’s eyes sharpened from the side.

He fed his own fury into structure. Not wildness but Structure. The broken blood sword reformed in his grip, not fully restored, but denser through the center, shorter, heavier, uglier. A weapon not of elegance now, but of concentrated violence.

Mihos recognized the change at once. His own expression altered. For the first time since the fight began, he stopped smiling.

“Good. Come at me with all.”

The heir drew in too.