Finn’s eyes had gone red, the pupils slit like Nyx’s. The fear he had been trying to hide was gone. He was grinning, the pale blade caught in his bare hand.

"You should’ve killed me when you had the chance."

The blue light behind the Knight’s visor brightened.

It kicked him. Finn went skidding across the chamber and fetched up against the far wall.

He looked down at his hand. The cut where he had caught the blade was closing. He watched it close.

When he looked up the Knight of Vow was on him, blade arcing for his neck.

He saw it coming. Before, the Knight had moved like a smear of light. Now it moved like a man.

He tilted his head, and the swing passed by his ear, and he caught the Knight by the helmet and slammed it into the ground.

The flagstones cracked. A thin crater opened around the helm. The Knight came up off the ground without effort, took the sword in two hands, and swung the flat of it at him.

Finn raised his guard. The blow caught him square across the shoulder and threw him sideways, skipping him along the chamber like a stone across water.

He twisted in the air. His feet found the wall. The stone splintered under his heels and he pushed off.

The Knight of Vow turned to meet him. He hit it shoulder-first.

They went together across the chamber, the Knight’s pauldron screaming against the flagstones, sparks fountaining where the armour dragged. Finn came up on top of it with his knee on its breastplate and brought his fist down into the helmet.

The metal dented. The blue light inside guttered, came back.

He hit it again.

And again.

The Knight’s gauntleted hand closed on his wrist. Squeezed. The bones in Finn’s forearm went, audibly and reknit before the Knight had finished the motion of throwing him.

He landed on his feet.

The Knight of vow raised its free arm, gesturing Finn to have at him.

Finn obliged.

☼☼☼

It was, by any reasonable measure, a slaughter.

The Knight of vow was twenty levels above them. He had been twenty levels above them when Finn was bleeding out and Nyx was screaming, and he was twenty levels above them now that Finn was on his feet with red eyes and Nyx was angry.

Resonance did not change the math. It only changed who got to do the math longer.

The first exchange took fourteen seconds.

Finn went in low. The Knight of vow’s blade came down in an arc that should have opened him from shoulder to hip again, and Finn caught it on the broken hilt of his longsword, which he had not consciously remembered picking up.

The blade did not break this time, because Finn had ducked the moment it bit and let the angle slide past him.

The Knight of vow’s free hand, the one with the long fingers, came around in a backhand that was meant to remove Finn’s jaw.

Nyx’s daggers caught the wrist mid-arc. Both of them. She drove the Broodmother’s Fang in to the hilt and dragged.

[CRITICAL HIT!]

[POISON STATUS APPLIED.]

The Knight of vow’s hand did not come off. The poison did not take. But the wrist cracked, audibly, and the Knight of vow drew the arm back.

He pivoted.

Nyx vanished into shadow before his blade reached her. The flagstone where she had been split lengthwise.

Finn leapt up and landed on the Knight of vow’s shoulder, before he drove the broken hilt of the longsword into the join where the armour plate met the long, gaunt throat.

The blade went in three inches. The Knight of vow made a small, dry sound that might have been a laugh.

Then the long fingers closed around Finn’s ankle, and he was airborne again.

He hit the column Nyx had been sheltering behind.

He bounced off it and felt his ribs break only for the ends to grind back together with the same unpleasant heat that had closed his chest.

[Resonance duration: 1m 32s remaining]

He went back in.

The next exchange took longer. Forty seconds, perhaps. He could not tell. Time had gone strange.

He fought beside Nyx the way he had fought beside her in the alley with the Hollow Knight, except now he was the one who could take a hit, and she was the one who could not, and the geometry of it kept inverting itself in ways the Knight of vow kept failing, by fractions, to predict.

Finn took a blade through the meat of his shoulder. It came out. The flesh closed.

He caught a backhand that broke his nose. It set itself.

Nyx, in the shadows along the walls, was a knife in the dark. She did not engage the Knight of vow directly. She did not need to. Every time he committed to a strike on Finn, she opened a new line on his back, his knee, the inside of his elbow.

Each cut was small. Each cut was poisoned. The poison did not take, but the cuts did, and after the eighth one the Knight of vow’s left arm had begun to move a fraction slower than his right.

It was Nyx who saw it first.

’Bearer. His left.’

’I see it.’

’Take it.’

He went in low again, and when the Knight of vow’s right blade came down, Finn caught it on his forearm. His bone broke then reset. He drove the broken hilt up into the join of the left shoulder, the one Nyx had been working at, and he twisted.

Something inside the armour plate gave.

The Knight of vow made a sound that was not a laugh this time. It was a long, dry hiss, and the left arm dropped, the long fingers going limp.

Finn pulled the broken hilt out. It came with a strand of something pale and stringy hanging from its tip. He flicked it off and stepped back, breathing hard.

[HP: 22%]

[Resonance duration: 41s remaining]

The numbers caught up with him.

He had a minute.

He had a minute, and then the healing stopped, and then the next clean hit from the Knight of vow would do exactly what the first one had done.

The Knight of vow knew it. He could see it in the way Finn’s stance had begun, fractionally, to tilt. The Resonance was a candle, and the candle was guttering.

He raised his remaining blade.

Nyx stepped out of the wall.

Not from a shadow. From the wall itself, from the small, dim space between two stones where the Shadow Veil had been clinging unseen for the last forty seconds. The Knight of vow had stopped tracking her. He had been counting Finn down.

He had not been counting her.

She drove the Broodmother’s Fang in under his jaw, point upward, with both hands, and her full weight behind it.

The blade went in to the cross-guard.

The Knight of vow’s glowing eyes went, for the first time, wide.

He did not fall. Not at first. He stood for a moment with the dagger in his throat and the broken plate on his shoulder, and he looked at Nyx with an expression that was almost satisfaction.

It seemed like he had something to say, but before he could, he came apart.

Then he came apart. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Not into mist, the way the Glutton and the Warden had. He simply stopped being held together. The armour plate fell first, in a clatter of pieces.

The long, gaunt frame inside it followed, sagging into a heap of something that was already turning to fine grey ash by the time it touched the flagstones.

The pale blade dropped last.

It hit the ground with a single, clean toll, the same sound his footsteps had made, and then it, too, crumbled.

For a long moment, the hallway was silent.

The blue flames in the sconces, one by one, went out.

In the new dark, two pairs of crimson eyes faced each other across the wreckage.