Serah attacked first.

Not with technique — with everything she had.

Her primordial aura expanded at the moment of impact and the entire chamber shook.

Lira didn’t retreat.

She absorbed the blow with a blood magic field she materialized at the last second — not a solid shield, something more like a fluid, the kind that yields and recovers instead of resisting.

Serah tore through it anyway.

Lira stepped back two paces.

The first two steps she’d taken back since emerging from the darkness.

She looked at them.

"Good," she said.

---

Serah didn’t answer.

She launched primordial ice — not the speed lance she’d used in training with Kai, but something broader.

A wave.

Lira flew to the ceiling.

The ice hit the back wall and coated it completely — the catacomb stone vanishing under a layer of white that wasn’t normal ice.

It was denser.

More still.

The kind that doesn’t melt at room temperature but waits.

Lira, from the ceiling, looked down at her.

"Always so direct," she said. "How boring."

Serah looked up.

"Come down."

"No." Lira moved across the ceiling with the same ease the S-rank vampires used on the walls — as if gravity were an opinion. "I’m still assessing."

"You’ve been assessing for four hundred years."

"And you’ve been a block of ice that hits things for four hundred years." Lira tilted her head. "Neither of us has changed much."

---

Lira came down.

Not directly — in a spiral, using the ceiling and walls in the descent, the kind of movement that has no clear point of origin and therefore no predictable point of arrival.

Serah turned with her.

Lira materialized blood magic in the air — not from her hands, from the space around her. Small spheres of condensed dark liquid that floated in specific patterns before launching.

Not all at once.

In sequence.

One, pause, two, long pause, three in a row.

The irregular rhythm made dodging the first useless if you didn’t calculate when the second was coming.

Serah didn’t dodge the first.

She froze it in midair with a touch of aura.

The blood sphere solidified — suspended, motionless, glowing the dark red of something that should be flowing and wasn’t.

Lira looked at it.

"Interesting."

"Am I still boring?"

"A little less."

---

The second sphere came from the flank.

Serah froze that one too.

The third, fourth, and fifth came in a rapid burst — too fast to freeze one by one.

Serah didn’t try.

She generated a temperature field in a two-meter radius around her — not directed, ambient, the kind that affected anything entering the radius regardless of direction.

All five spheres solidified at the same moment they crossed the edge of the field.

Five fixed red points in the air around Serah.

Lira landed in front of her.

She looked at them.

"You didn’t do that before."

"I learned."

"From whom?"

Serah didn’t answer.

Lira noticed.

Her eyes moved briefly toward the hallway where Eris and Kai were still fighting.

Then back to Serah.

"Ah," she said.

---

They lunged at the same time.

Not like the start — no assessment, no probing.

Direct.

Serah with partially transformed claws and speed that compressed the air between them before impact.

Lira with blood magic active in both hands — not spheres, currents, the kind that wrapped around the target instead of hitting head-on.

The first exchange lasted a second.

The result: Serah with a red line on her forearm where the blood magic had grazed before freezing.

Lira with a silver mark on her shoulder where the primordial aura had struck through her field.

They separated.

They lunged again.

---

The second exchange lasted three seconds.

Serah tried to circle Lira — the circular movement predators use to destabilize their opponent, forcing them to turn constantly and lose their axis.

Lira didn’t turn.

She generated a blood magic field in the radius around her position — dense, almost solid — and made it rotate in the opposite direction to Serah.

Two fields spinning in opposite directions.

Serah’s field struck Lira’s and the two partially canceled each other out — enough that Serah’s next blow lost a third of its force.

Lira took advantage of that third.

Blood current straight to Serah’s neck — not to cut, to wrap around.

Serah’s silver markings flared and froze the current before it closed.

Lira looked at her from behind the dissolved field.

"You’re still slow at processing area magic," she said.

"It was always your weak point."

Serah turned.

"And you still talk too much."

"It’s a charming trait."

"It’s not."

---

Third exchange.

Lira changed tactics completely — she stopped using area magic and concentrated all her blood magic into a single point.

Her right hand.

Condensed.

The kind of concentration that can’t be sustained long but while it lasts turns the hand into something that can pierce things normally impervious.

She launched a single current — thin, fast, the kind that doesn’t take up enough space for primordial aura to detect before it arrives.

Serah detected it anyway.

But late.

The current struck her right shoulder and coiled before freezing, leaving a red mark deeper than the previous ones, the kind that doesn’t fade for hours.

Serah felt her shoulder.

She moved it.

It responded.

With effort.

Lira saw it.

"First real damage," she said, with the specific tone of someone who’s been waiting for that moment a long time.

Serah didn’t respond.

The shoulder responds but not at a hundred percent, she thought. The concentrated current pierces the aura if it’s thin enough. I need to anticipate before it enters the radius, not when it’s already inside.

How do you anticipate something that doesn’t take up visible space?

She thought of Kai.

Of what Kai had said about the memory room in the dungeon.

Control starts before contact. Not during.

---

Lira prepared another concentrated current.

Serah saw it the moment the magic began to condense — before it took shape, in the instant the air around Lira’s hand changed temperature from the concentration of energy.

She expanded the ambient temperature field.

Not to two meters — to four. Thinner, less dense, but enough that anything entering the radius lost temperature before arriving.

Lira’s current entered the field.

It slowed.

Didn’t stop — but slowed enough for Serah to read it and move.

Serah moved.

And counterattacked with her good shoulder — direct hit, no additional magic, pure weight and primordial speed concentrated at the point of impact.

Lira took it.

This time she staggered back three steps.

The two looked at the space between them.

The first exchange where neither had a clear advantage.

---

Lira wiped the corner of her mouth.

She looked at what was on her hand.

Not blood from a wound — blood from the magic, the physical cost of maintaining concentrated currents for too long. The body collected that eventually.

She looked at it with the same expression she’d had when she looked at the cut in her dress when Vayne struck her.

Then she looked at Serah.

"You learned from him," she said.

Not like before — as an accusation, as an insult.

"Yes."

"How much?"

Serah didn’t answer right away.

She thought of the treacherous floor.

Of the memory room.

Of the training session where Kai had corrected her stance sixteen times without losing patience.

"Enough that this won’t be as easy as you thought," she said.

Lira looked at her.

"I didn’t think it would be easy," she said.

"It was never easy with you."

A pause.

"That’s what I liked about it."

---

They lunged again.

Without the weight of the previous words. Just the combat — which after four hundred years without seeing each other and hours in the catacombs, still had no clear victor.

The chamber kept shaking.

The ice on the walls expanded.

The blood in the air solidified and dissolved and solidified again.

And in the side hallway, the sounds of the fight between Kai and Eris continued — slower now, heavier, the rhythm of something reaching its endpoint.

But the fight in the main chamber wasn’t over yet.