The attack comes without ceremony.

  Four presences resolve from four directions simultaneously. North. South. East. West. Grey robes visible through the prismatic distortion of my shell, silver coating gleaming on their arms and hands. No words or challenges or posturing.

  They simply arrive and begin.

  Inside the silver rotation, the world exists as painted silence. My breathing. My heartbeat. The Skathrith's steady hum above me, expectant and hungry. I see them converging through the shell's barrier, watch their approach in crystalline clarity, and cannot do anything about it.

  The shell protects.

  The shell isolates.

  I cannot strike while wrapped in its spinning light.

  The northern Optimate moves wrong. Not running toward me but falling upward, gravity bending around his form like water around a stone. He approaches from an impossible angle, rising through air that should pull him down, and the physics of his ascent make my shell stutter.

  Orientation snaps.

  My rotation struggles against conflicting gravitational frames. The world tilts, rights itself, tilts again. I feel the shell destabilize, the careful spin that keeps me aloft fighting against laws of motion that no longer agree on which direction is down.

  Binah moves.

  I do not see her strings. I see their effect. The northern Optimate's impossible trajectory shatters mid-flight. His gravity manipulation tears apart around him like wet paper, ripped by forces I cannot perceive. One moment he is falling upward toward my throat. The next he is simply falling.

  The slam comes with profound silence.

  He hits the metal ground hard enough to crater the surface, hard enough to shatter ribs and collapse a lung, hard enough to end his participation in this fight. But not hard enough to kill. The impact rings through the maze, debris shuddering from the force, and when the dust clears the Optimate lies gasping in the depression his body carved.

  Alive.

  Barely conscious.

  Semblance collapsed completely.

  Through the bond, the Skathrith's song shifts.

  The change is subtle at first. A note that was not there before, threading through the hungry hum. Mournful. Wounded. The sound of a meal denied, of expectation unfulfilled. It resonates through my chest, my ribs, the spaces behind my eyes.

  The Skathrith wanted that kill.

  I feel its disappointment like a weight in my bones.

  Something wobbles inside me. The partitioned space where I push unwanted emotions, the walls I built to contain what I cannot afford to feel. The wobble is barely perceptible. A tremor in architecture I once thought stable.

  I file it away. There is no time for internal examination.

  No more flight-capable enemies in the first wave. I alone own the air now. But the other three are still moving, and one of them is already gone.

  Light.

  Foden, another one of my cousins, appears beside me without warning. One instant the space is empty. The next he exists within arm's reach, blinking into visibility at light-speed from some position I never saw him leave. Wreathed in strange radiance, his fist is already swinging.

  Not just his Semblance's light.

  Something else coats his striking arm. Silver, but wrong. Sharper. Hungrier. A Skathrith's edge wrapped around flesh and bone.

  The strike crashes against my prismatic barrier.

  Not a glancing blow. A hammer strike that sends fracture lines spider-webbing through the rotation. The shell holds, but barely. Silver light bleeds from the impact point, disrupted flow visible even through the distortion.

  But I cannot counter. Cannot reach through the protection to touch him. Cannot do anything but watch as gravity claims him for the fraction of a second before his Semblance engages again.

  He blinks away.

  Reappears on debris below. Safe. Untouched. Watching me from his new position with eyes that calculate angles and timing.

  I am not stupid. I immediately create stress points within my shell.

  The flow of the rotation curves, tosses me away from his position with increasing speed. The world outside the shell blurs and distorts, colors bleeding together at the edges where reality meets cutting edge.

  The pattern is clear.

  Foden will blink to me. Strike. Fall. Blink to safety. Repeat.

  And I cannot survive more strikes like the first for long. He knows it. His smile says he knows it.

  The other two Optimates position themselves on the ground. They do not need to reach me in the air. They only need to control what happens when I come down.

  The shell protects. The shell isolates. The shell makes me a spectator in my own fight.

  I watch Foden reposition, calculating his next blink. Watch the ground-based Optimates spread to cover escape vectors. Something goes wrong. The stress points within my shell change without my conscious direction, and my forward motion stalls.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  This must be one of the other Optimates' Semblance, I think in sudden panic. Perception Desync, or something like it.

  Foden blinks.

  Appears at my right. Strikes. The shell deflects again but the impact sends me spinning, rotation disrupted, orientation lost for a critical instant. He falls. Blinks away. But I do not see him reappear below.

  Another blow catches me from the back.

  The shell collapses.

  Gravity returns like a hammer trailing lightning. The world snaps back to full volume. Sound crashes over me in waves of distant screaming from the pinned and the clicking of settling debris. Wind tears at my face as I fall toward the maze of twisted metal that Binah built.

  I resummon the shell.

  The power responds slower than before. Sluggish. As though the Skathrith resists the manifestation, unhappy with a wielder who refuses to feed it properly. The delay is fractional but noticeable.

  Rage bubbles at the back of my throat, escapes as a hissing snarl.

  No. No—

  The shell reforms a foot above the ground.

  Gravity removes her embrace. Silence returns with a heart-clenching pang. Dust and dirt spiral away from my hovering form, caught in the rotation's edge and flung outward in lazy spirals. The world becomes painted glass again, colors bleeding at the edges where cutting light meets air.

  I hang suspended in that impossible stillness.

  My shoulder screams, already healing. The wound from Foden's strike pulses with each heartbeat, blood seeping through a robe more holes than gray cloth. The pain exists as something remote, filtered through the shell's isolation.

  Below me, the three remaining Optimates freeze.

  I watch their faces shift through the prismatic distortion. Surprise first. Then calculation. The one who fell from impossible heights still lies in his crater, breathing shallow, fight finished. But the other three remain standing, and their eyes track my hovering form with predatory patience.

  Foden blinks away. Reappears on a twisted spire of metal, twenty meters distant. His silver-coated arm hangs at his side, ready. Waiting.

  Then it happens again. The stress points within my shell activate without my will. The shell spins quicker. The ground rises to meet me.

  I land hard, grunt, then fling myself along the iron floor using new stress points. My feet dangle above the ground. The shell wobbles but holds, leaking eddies of light.

  The surface beneath me buckles immediately. Another Semblance making the ground hostile, metal folding upward to trap my ankles, debris shifting to throw off my balance. I am already moving when the surface betrays me, the shell's power carrying me through the grabbing terrain toward my first target.

  The Optimate with the Perception Desync Semblance stands three meters away.

  His silver coating gleams on his forearms. Partial protection. Enough to block but not to truly threaten. He sees me coming. Raises his guard. Prepares to counter.

  His timing is perfect.

  Mine is wrong.

  My shell stays in existence for an instant too long, then another desync hits me mid-strike, my reactions lagging by critical fractions. I know where my fist should be. I know when it should arrive. But the knowledge and the action separate, a gap opening between intention and execution that should not exist. My strike lands late. His block catches it cleanly.

  I adjust.

  Mother's training surfaces through the interference. Not thinking. Feeling. Reading the lag and incorporating it into my movements. If my reactions delay by a fraction, I begin a fraction early. If my timing skews, I account for the skew.

  My second strike breaks his forearm.

  The bone gives way with a sound like wet wood snapping. His guard collapses. His scream begins. I hyperextend his elbow with the follow-through, silver-coated palm driving the joint past its limits. He stumbles back, arm hanging useless, eyes wide with shock until my roundhouse kick throws him into unconsciousness.

  He should hit the ground.

  He does not.

  His body jerks once in mid-air, momentum snapping to nothing. The fall arrests so abruptly it makes my teeth ache. Fabric pulls tight around his torso, invisible forces biting into cloth and flesh alike, holding him upright where gravity should have claimed him.

  Suspended.

  Pinned in a web I cannot see.

  Not dead.

  The Skathrith's song shifts again.

  Aggrieved now, not merely sad but wounded, betrayed. The sound vibrates through my teeth, my jaw. I taste copper that is not blood. The mournful note deepens into something that demands rather than mourns.

  Inside me, the wobble becomes a shake.

  The partitioned space trembles. Something presses against the walls I built, testing their strength. Not breaking through, not yet, but present, aware, waiting.

  The terrain collapses beneath my feet.

  I re-engage the shell mid-stumble, barely achieving rotation before the ground tries to swallow me. The reformation takes longer than it should. Two seconds. Maybe three. The Skathrith's resistance makes everything cost more, every technique requiring additional effort to manifest.

  A kill-box forms around me.

  The other remaining Optimate makes the debris close inward. Twisted metal shifts on all sides, reducing my space, eliminating escape vectors.

  Foden blinks in during the transition.

  He appears while my shell is still forming, catching me in the instant between vulnerability and protection. His strike connects with my ribs. Pain explodes through my side, white-hot and immediate. I feel something crack. Something shift. The shell completes its formation and he falls, blinks away, leaves me spinning and damaged in his wake.

  He thinks he has learned my rhythm.

  He is wrong. I allow the shell to fall away.

  Binah moves as my feet touch the ground.

  I feel it more than see it. The maze responds to her presence, broken spires lifting around the two Optimates. Shadows stretch and cling to their limbs like anchors. Metal bends in response to strings I cannot perceive.

  Terrain Semantics tries to resist. His power pushes back against the rising spires, metal groaning under conflicting forces. Foden blinks away repeatedly, much too quickly to track.

  Resistance fails.

  Metal spears punch through the Optimate with the Terrain Semantics Semblance.

  Through biceps. Through thighs. Pinning him to the ground like a specimen prepared for dissection. The placement is surgical. Major muscle groups destroyed. No arterial rupture. Maximum immobilization with minimum death risk.

  He screams.

  Conscious and aware and unable to move, watching everything that happens next. Blood pools beneath him, expanding in patterns that reflect the bioluminescent light from above.

  One more kill denied.

  The Skathrith's song is angry now.

  Demanding. Insistent. The mournful quality has burned away, replaced by something that scrapes inside my chest like claws. Three kills denied. Three meals refused. The bond between us strains under the weight of repeated disappointment.

  Inside me, the bashing begins.

  Something strikes the interior walls of my partitioned space hard enough to make me flinch. The impact registers physically, my concentration fracturing for a critical instant. I nearly miss Foden's return. He stares down at me from an overturned structure.

  His silver-coated arm hangs at his side. His expression is unreadable.

  His gaze moves from the pinned body to the suspended Optimate caught in the invisible web. His eyes track the pattern of the strings, following them to places I cannot see.

  “So it is true,” he says quietly.

  He steps closer, eyes fixed on the figure hanging in the strings.

  “What exactly is your Semblance?” Foden asks. Then, after a pause, “Enna…”

  The name echoes somewhere inside me.

  Enna.

  The Inner Hell convulses.

  The partitioned space shudders violently, walls buckling as something inside slams against them with sudden, furious force. Pressure floods my chest. My vision dims at the edges.

  I refuse the memory.

  The refusal costs me. Blood fills my mouth from a bitten tongue. My hands shake.

  “It is over, Foden," I hear myself say. "You are not enough."

  Foden’s hands tremble.

  Fear. Rage. Something close to relief.

  Then he smiles.

  Not at me.

  I turn.

  Figures resolve along the upper edge of the barricade, stepping out of nothingness as though the Labyrinth itself exhales them into being.

  Eight.

  They stand in silence, watching.

  The white beam above me tightens.

  The Inner Hell shakes harder than it ever has.

  Book One of Shattered Empire is now complete on Patreon.

  Book Two — Scions of the Dularch — has begun on Patreon.

  Want more?

  Shattered Empire is 20 chapters ahead on Patreon, and the next arc is already unfolding.

  ? Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)

  ? Ablations (ongoing)