Parasitic Regrowth could have handled the damage. The thought arrived with the defensive instinct of someone looking for reassurance. He let it arrive and then set it aside honestly. There was a category of injury that existed above what regeneration could address in any practical combat timeframe, and a foot-long bone fragment moving at projectile velocity through the skull was likely in that category. Letting it land to find out was not a research methodology he wanted to adopt.

Defense talent. The note placed itself in the back of his mind with the quiet, firm quality of a decision being made for later — not an abstract preference but a concrete priority, elevated by the specific, visceral education of the last three seconds into something he intended to address at the earliest available opportunity.

He pushed Meteor Momentum further.

The talent responded — his body accelerating past the comfortable range and into the territory his recent breakthrough had opened, the feedback from the strain present at the edges of his awareness as a continuous, low-grade signal that his frame was operating at a level that was sustainable only in the short term and would present a cost if sustained beyond it. He accepted the cost and kept pushing.

The afterimages multiplied behind him.

Five. Ten. A dozen ghost-impressions of his position scattered across the bone-filled space, each one already wrong by the time it formed, the gap between where he appeared to be and where he actually was growing with each additional increment of speed. Dozens of meters collapsed in intervals too brief to track cleanly.

The chamber blurred around him. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Ahead, the corridor waited — and beyond the corridor, whatever had come to find him.

The lightning serpent’s cavern had not recovered from what had happened to it.

The evidence was everywhere — the scorched stone, the deep gouges in the cavern walls where the battle had pressed against the environment with enough force to leave permanent records, the bloodied surface that the passage of time had not yet done anything to normalize. The space carried the specific atmosphere of a site where something significant had occurred recently, the residual energy of the conflict still present in the air in the way that certain events linger beyond their own conclusion.

The woman moved through it without hurry.

Her two slender eyes moved across the scattered remains with the calm, systematic attention of someone conducting an assessment rather than a search — not looking for something specific, but receiving everything available and processing it with a precision that missed nothing. Cold. Calculating. The gaze of someone for whom information was not a byproduct of observation but its entire purpose.

Her wrist moved.

A section of the lightning serpent’s spine rose from where it had come to rest — the piece Lukas’s blade had separated from the rest, the cut surface still carrying the clean geometry of a strike that had known exactly where it was going. It floated before her at eye level, and she examined it with an attention that the object probably didn’t warrant and received anyway.

The cut was not rough. Not the jagged, force-dependent separation of something broken rather than divided. It was precise — the specific, exacting precision of a blade that had been guided by someone who understood exactly what they were asking it to do and had the skill to ask it correctly.

Something moved in her eyes.

Such proficient sword skills.

The thought arrived with genuine appreciation — the specific quality of someone who recognizes excellence in a domain they understand well enough to evaluate it properly. Not the reflexive acknowledgment of something impressive seen from a distance, but the informed recognition of one practitioner encountering the work of another and finding it unexpectedly worthy.

To think I would encounter someone with such ability on a backwater planet like this.

The faint quality of something that was not quite a smile moved across her expression — contained, brief, but present.

Interesting.

She set the spine section down in the air and let it return to where it had been. Her gaze moved to the deeper darkness of the cave system — the passage that led inward, toward whatever the tracing device had been positioned to guard.

This is starting to get seriously interesting.

The thought had barely completed itself when her head moved.

Not gradually — the sharp, instantaneous reorientation of someone whose perception operates at a level where threats do not get the courtesy of being processed through the full sequence of awareness. Her eyes fixed on a specific point in the surrounding space with the locked, absolute focus of someone who has located something that was attempting not to be located.

The killing intent that ignited in her gaze was not a warm thing.

Dare to act so brazenly in front of me?

The words came out with the flat, controlled quality of someone who is not yet fully angry and does not need to be — the specific register of someone operating from such a substantial position of confidence that anger would be redundant. Do you think of me as blind?

Her fist moved.

The white light that erupted from her arm did not behave like a conventional strike — it expanded outward with the specific, pressurized force of something that had been contained and had been given permission to stop being contained, filling the available space between her fist and its target in the fraction of a second between intention and arrival.

Hitting.

The cavern walls absorbed the impact and disagreed with it — heaving outward from the point of contact, the stone expressing its objection to the force it had received through a comprehensive redistribution of itself. White mist flooded the space, thick and immediate, replacing visibility with a uniform blankness that would have served as cover for anyone who had not already been precisely located.

Damn it.

The word formed in Lukas’s mind with the particular, compressed frustration of someone whose plan has just failed in the most direct way available — not gradually, not through a series of compounding complications, but instantly and completely. He had been trying to erase his presence — Phase Steps doing what it was capable of doing, which was considerable under normal circumstances, which these were not. The approach had seemed worth attempting. A woman of this caliber, focused on the space ahead of her rather than the periphery, might have allowed a sufficiently careful exit to complete itself undetected.

He had been thinking too much.

She had found him before he had covered enough distance for it to matter, and the strike that had forced him into the open had communicated, in the brief, unambiguous language of force and precision, something that his survival instincts were already assembling into a comprehensive assessment.

The gap between them was not comfortable.

He came out of Phase Steps and looked at her across the white mist and the disturbed stone and the residual light of her strike, and the calculation that ran through his mind in the available seconds was honest and unhurried and arrived at a conclusion he did not particularly enjoy.

Think. There has to be something here.

He looked at her. At the hooded figures distributed behind her with the practiced arrangement of a trained unit. At the cavern around them — its geometry, its damage, its one exit. At Tommy, whose ember-light was still burning in the deeper darkness behind him.

The situation looked impossible.

Lukas had survived a number of situations that had looked impossible.

He intended to make this one of them.