The question was not, strictly speaking, whether the world was round. That part was settled. Observations had been made, measurements had been taken, and the curvature of the horizon had been documented by enough separate parties across enough separate disciplines that to dispute the shape of the planet was not a matter of inquiry but choosing not to look at the available evidence. The world was round. That was a fact.
The question, the one that persisted underneath the fact, was when a person came to believe it.
A child, born into the world, did not know the world was round. The child knew the floor was flat and the walls were straight and the ceiling was above them. The child's body learned the geometry of surfaces long before the child's mind learned the vocabulary of spheres. The world, as experienced by the child. It extended outward in all directions and stopped only where vision stopped, and vision stopped at walls and horizons and the limits of a small body's reach. The child lived, for years, on a flat earth. The evidence of their senses told them so.
Then, at some point, the child was told otherwise.
It might have been in a classroom. A teacher pointing to a diagram of the solar system, the planets arranged in their orderly orbits, each one a rough ball of rock or gas or something in between. The child would have looked at the diagram and accepted it, because children accepted most things that came from the front of a classroom with the proper authority attached. But acceptance was not the same as belief. Acceptance was a surface transaction. Belief is required to sink down through the layers of accumulated experience and find the place where the flat-earth knowledge lived, and then to displace it.
That displacement took time. It happened slowly, imperceptibly, across years of looking at photographs taken from high enough up that the curve became visible, of hearing the word round applied to the planet often enough that it stopped sounding like a metaphor and started sounding like a description. At some point the child, now older, would have looked at the horizon and seen not an edge but a bend. The world had become round in their mind, not because they had learned a new fact but because the old fact had finally worn thin enough to let the new one through.
But there was another way.
The kindness in the corner of the world. That was how some people arrived at the roundness. They heard, perhaps from a story or a stranger or a fragment of something overheard, that there was kindness tucked into a corner of the world. A specific corner. A place where the sharp angles of living softened into something bearable. And they went looking for it. They walked the perimeter of their experience, checking every corner they passed, and each one was empty. The kindness was not there.
And then, somewhere in the walking, the realization arrived. If the world had corners, there would be a finite number of them. A person could check them all, given enough time. But if the world was round, there were no corners. Only a continuous surface that returned to itself. The kindness was not in a corner because there were no corners to hold it. The kindness, if it existed at all, was somewhere on the surface. Distributed. Not hidden in a place that could be reached by walking to the edge, but present or absent in the walking itself.
That was a harder belief to hold. It required accepting that the search for the corner had been a search for something that did not exist in the shape the searcher had imagined. It required letting go of the image of a tucked-away place, a crevice where the world's harshness could not follow, and accepting instead that the world was continuous and unbroken and that any kindness found upon it would be found in the open, exposed to the same forces that wore down everything else.
The question of when a person came to believe the world was round was, in this sense, two questions that shared a vocabulary but diverged in their destination. One was about astronomy. The other was about the shape of hope. And the answer to both was the same in its incompleteness, it happened slowly, and it happened incompletely, and even after the belief had settled into the bones there remained a part of the mind that remembered the flat earth, that still looked for corners, that still expected the world to end somewhere.
The world was round. That was a fact.
Whether a person lived as though they believed it was another matter entirely. And the distance between knowing the shape of the world and living according to that knowledge was the distance that every life, sooner or later, was asked to cross. Some crossed it. Some did not. Most spent their whole lives in the crossing, one foot on the flat earth of childhood, one foot on the curved surface of everything that came after.
The world was round.
The Proxy's eyes settled on Kamina with the weight of something that had already decided what came next. The black spheres that had been bouncing through the bus gathered at his feet, inert for the moment but present, waiting. The piece of paper in his right hand caught the midday light, its contents visible only to the man who held it.
He looked at Kamina the way a man looked at an obstacle he had not anticipated but was fully prepared to remove.
"You," the Proxy said. His voice was not loud. "The one who stepped forward. The one who put himself between me and my work." He tilted his head slightly. "Do you believe the earth is round?"
Kamina's brow furrowed. His hand remained on the hilt of his katana, not drawing, just present. "What kind of question is that?"
The Proxy did not blink. "The question I asked."
"And what do I get from answering it?"
The Proxy's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The aggression was not in his volume. It was in the stillness, in the way his grip on the Prescript flexed once and then relaxed. "Depending on the answer," he said, each word placed with care, "I will act accordingly. The Prescript wills it. I do not ask for my own curiosity. I ask because the paper tells me to ask. And the papers will tell me what to do with your answer."
Kamina considered this for a moment. Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Can another person help come up with the answer with me?"
The Proxy's eyes shifted. Shmuel and Imogen moved to stand beside Kamina, one on each side, forming a line of three in the narrow aisle of the bus.
The Proxy watched them assemble. His expression did not soften. If anything, the lines of his face hardened further, the patience of a man who was being made to wait for something he considered inevitable.
He nodded once. A single, sharp motion.
"I will ask again," he said. "Do you believe the earth is round?"
Kamina turned to Shmuel. Shmuel looked back at him with the expression of someone who was trying to determine whether this was a genuine philosophical inquiry or the preamble to violence. Given the context, he assumed both.
"Yes," Shmuel said. "It's round. That's established."
Kamina turned to Imogen. She shrugged one shoulder, her hand resting on the strap of her rifle case. "Obviously," she said. "Why would anyone think otherwise?"
Kamina nodded slowly, as though weighing their input with great seriousness. Then he turned back to the Proxy and spread his hands wide.
"I believe the earth is both round and flat," he said.
The bus went very quiet.
Shmuel's head turned toward Kamina slowly. Imogen's mouth opened slightly and then closed again, the question how forming and dying on her lips.
The Proxy stared at Kamina. The aggression in his posture flickered, disrupted by something that might have been confusion or might have been the particular irritation of a man who dealt in absolutes being presented with an answer that refused to resolve into one.
"Explain," the Proxy said. It was out of curiosity.
"It's both," Kamina said, with the easy confidence of a person who found this self-evident. "It's round from far away. You go up high enough, you see the curve. But when you're standing on it?" He stomped one foot on the floor of the bus. "It's flat. You walk, it's flat. You live on it, it's flat. Both things are true at the same time. It depends on where you're standing."
Shmuel closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. Imogen made a small sound that might have been the beginning of a protest and then abandoned it.
The Proxy was silent for a long moment. The black spheres at his feet stirred, their surfaces catching the light, and then they began to move. Converging. Each sphere rolled toward the Proxy's outstretched hand, and as they touched his palm they merged, flowing together like liquid drawn into a single shape. The mass grew and elongated, the matte black surface resolving into edges and planes and the particular weight of a weapon designed to end things.
When the last sphere had been absorbed, the Proxy held a greatsword. Broad-bladed, black from hilt to tip, the surface drinking the midday light rather than reflecting it. It was too large for a man his size to wield comfortably, and he held it as though comfort had never been a consideration.
"Then before I do anything," the Proxy said, and his voice had changed. The flatness was gone, replaced by something sharper, something that had been waiting underneath the calm the entire time. "The Prescript told me I must relay its words to you before I act on what it commands."
He raised the greatsword and rested the flat of the blade against his shoulder. The weight of it should have been unbearable. He bore it without apparent effort.
"The Prescript says I must kill the person who challenges my view of the world," he said. "After I ask the question I have always asked. The question I ask everyone. The question no one answers correctly."
His eyes fixed on Kamina with an intensity that bordered on fervor.
"You answered incorrectly," he said. "And you challenged my view in the answering. That satisfies the conditions."
The greatsword came off his shoulder in a single fluid motion, the tip dropping toward the floor of the bus and then rising again, describing an arc that terminated in a guard position, the blade between him and the three fixers standing in the aisle.
"I am Samuel Rowbotham," he said. "Proxy of the Index. And the Prescript has told me what comes next."
The greatsword moved.
There was no windup, no telegraphing of intent. One moment the blade rested against Rowbotham's shoulder, and the next it was in motion, describing a horizontal arc that filled the width of the bus aisle. The air itself seemed to part before it, displaced by the sheer mass of the weapon, and Kamina's body reacted before his mind had finished registering the movement.
His katana came up. Both hands on the hilt, stance wide, the blade angled to deflect rather than block outright. He had turned aside heavier weapons before. He had redirected force that should have crushed him.
The greatsword met the katana.
And the katana did not matter.
The impact traveled up Kamina's arms and into his shoulders and down his spine with the indifference of a force that had not noticed the obstruction. His feet left the floor of the bus. The world became a blur of motion and noise and the particular disorientation of a body moving through space without consent. He was aware, distantly, of the bus interior sliding past him, of the exploded rear section yawning open, of the afternoon light rushing in.
Then hands caught him.
Shmuel's mechanical arms closed around Kamina's torso, the servos screaming as they absorbed the transferred momentum. For a fraction of a second, Shmuel held. His feet planted against the remains of the back row, his legs braced, every joint in his augmented body fighting against the force that Rowbotham had generated with a single, casual swing.
The fraction passed.
The back of the bus exploded outward.
Shmuel and Kamina tumbled through the opening together, a tangle of limbs and steel and the trailing edge of Kamina's cloak. They hit the road surface beyond the bus in a controlled slide rather than a catastrophic impact, their bodies finding the ground at an angle that dispersed rather than concentrated the remaining force. Kamina's boots carved twin gouges into the asphalt. Shmuel's mechanical arms left furrows of their own, the fingers digging in to arrest their momentum.
They came to a stop twenty meters from the bus. Both of them on their feet. Both of them breathing hard.
Kamina looked down at his hands. They were shaking. From the vibration still traveling through his bones, the aftershock of an impact that had treated his block as a suggestion rather than a barrier. A thin line of blood traced its way from the corner of his mouth down to his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and looked at the smear of red across his knuckles.
Shmuel was beside him, one mechanical arm hanging at an angle that suggested something internal had been jarred loose. His breathing was controlled but shallow, the rhythm of someone cataloguing damage and finding it manageable but present. The plating on his left forearm had buckled slightly, a shallow dent where the force had concentrated.
Neither of them spoke. They were both looking at the bus.
Inside the ruined vehicle, Imogen moved.
Her hand found the rifle case on the floor beside where she had been standing. The mechanism was not a latch or a clasp but something more intuitive, a pressure plate calibrated to her grip and her grip alone. Her fingers closed around the handle and the case responded instantly, the seals releasing, the lid opening, the interior presenting the Barrett-11 to her waiting hand in a single fluid motion.
One second. Perhaps less.
The rifle came up. Her cheek found the stock. Her eye found the scope. The crosshairs settled on the center of Rowbotham's forehead, where the pale skin met the dark hairline, a target she could hit in her sleep, a target she had hit a hundred times in practice and in combat and in the quiet moments between when practice became something else.
She fired.
The shot cracked through the confined space of the bus, the sound bouncing off the remaining windows and the metal walls and the roof. The round crossed the distance between her and the Proxy in less time than it took to blink.
Rowbotham's greatsword was already there.
He had not moved it into position. He had not reacted to the shot. The blade was simply where it needed to be, as though it had always been there, as though the trajectory of the bullet and the position of the sword had been arranged in advance by some coordinating intelligence that existed outside the normal flow of cause and effect. The round struck the flat of the black blade and fragmented, pieces of it scattering across the bus interior like hail.
Rowbotham absorbed the impact without shifting his weight. His eyes, which had been fixed on the space where Kamina and Shmuel had been, moved to Imogen. The greatsword remained steady. The expression on his face did not change.
Imogen did not wait to see what came next.
She was already moving, the rifle tucked against her body, her legs carrying her toward the shattered rear of the bus. The opening where the back wall had been yawned wide, jagged edges of metal and torn seating framing the road beyond. She reached it in four strides and launched herself through without breaking pace, her body curling into a controlled roll as she hit the asphalt.
She came up running. Three more strides brought her to Kamina and Shmuel's position. She turned, the rifle coming back to her shoulder, her scope finding the bus again, waiting for the shape in the white cloak to emerge from the wreckage.
Kamina was still looking at his hands. The shaking had mostly stopped. He flexed his fingers once, twice, feeling the ache in the joints, the particular soreness of bones that had been asked to absorb more than they were designed for. He looked at the bus. At the figure still standing in the aisle, visible through the torn opening, unmoving, patient.
"That guy," Kamina said. His voice was steady despite the blood still wet on his chin. "He's as strong as the Docent we faced in the Ring's corridor."
Shmuel looked at him. Imogen's grip on the rifle tightened.
Neither of them asked if he was sure. They had both been there. They both remembered the Pointillist Docent, the way his spear had moved through the Merchant's Ledger fixers like a brush through wet ink, the way Kamina and Shmuel had survived that encounter through luck and intervention rather than any realistic parity of strength. The Docent had been a wall they could not climb. They had only found a way around it.
Rowbotham stepped out of the bus.
He did not jump or climb or hurry. He walked through the torn opening at the rear as though it were a door, the greatsword resting once more against his shoulder, his white cloak unstained by the chaos of the previous seconds. The black formal attire beneath it was immaculate. His expression had not changed.
He stopped at the edge of the road and looked at the three fixers standing twenty meters away.
"The Prescript," he said, "does not require me to explain myself further. But I will tell you this much." His grip on the greatsword shifted slightly, the blade catching the afternoon light for the first time, a glint of something almost reflective across the matte black surface. "I have asked that question to eighty-three people. Eighty-two of them answered incorrectly. Eighty-two of them are no longer capable of answering anything."
He began to walk toward them. His pace was unhurried. The greatsword remained on his shoulder.
"You are the eighty-fourth," he said. "And your answer was the worst of all of them."
The air around Imogen changed.
It began as heat, a distortion in the light that made the road surface shimmer and warp. Then the heat became something visible, a glow that started at her chest and spread outward, racing along her limbs and up her neck and into her face until her entire body was limned in pale, flickering radiance. The blue dress dissolved. In its place, ceremonial robes unfurled, deep crimson bleeding to black at the hems, gold veins pulsing across the fabric like cooling lava. Embers lifted from her sleeves, drifting upward, vanishing into the afternoon sky.
Upon her head, a crown of blackened wood. Branches twisted and delicate, each tip bearing a small, eternal flame that danced without consuming.
[Effloresced E.G.O :: Wedlocked]
The Barrett-11 in her hands was no longer steel. It was magma given shape, a weapon that existed at the precise boundary between solid and liquid, its surface rippling with contained heat. She raised it to her shoulder. Her mechanical eyes shifted from white to burning red, blood already beginning to seep from the corners, the price of seeing the world at a speed her body was never meant to process.
She fired.
The sound was not a gunshot. It was a furnace door opening. A spear of combustible light tore across the twenty meters between her and Rowbotham, the air itself igniting in its wake, and struck him square in the center of his chest.
Rowbotham's greatsword had been moving to intercept. It did not arrive in time.
The impact lifted him off his feet. His white cloak billowed outward, scorched at the edges, and his body described a short, violent arc through the air before his boots found the asphalt again. He landed hard, one knee buckling, the greatsword's tip gouging a furrow into the road surface as he used it to steady himself. His head was down. His breathing, for the first time, was audible.
The front of his black formal attire was scorched open, the fabric burned away to reveal the pale skin beneath. That skin was reddened, blistered at the center where the shot had struck, but it was not broken. It was not bleeding. The force that should have vaporized concrete and melted steel had left him staggered but intact.
He raised his head. His eyes found Imogen.
And in that moment of recognition, in that fraction of a second where his attention was fixed on the girl in the burning robes, Kamina and Shmuel moved.
They did not need to speak. They had fought beside each other long enough that certain things had become instinct. The first shot from Imogen's E.G.O. had created an opening. The second shot, if it came at all, would not find him unprepared. Rowbotham had felt the weight of what she could do, and he would adjust. He would not let it happen again. So the window was now, and the window was narrow, and the only thing to do with a narrow window was go through it.
Kamina closed the distance in three strides, his katana already in motion. The blade came in low, aiming for the space between Rowbotham's ribs and hip, a cut designed to slip past armor and find the soft tissue beneath. Rowbotham's greatsword swept down to meet it, the black blade moving with the same impossible speed it had shown inside the bus, and steel met steel with a sound like a bell cracking.
The katana bounced. It did not deflect the greatsword so much as it was simply denied, the heavier weapon absorbing the strike and pushing back with enough force to send a vibration up Kamina's arm that numbed his fingers.
Shmuel was already there.
He came in from the left, mechanical fist driving toward Rowbotham's kidney. The Proxy twisted, the greatsword coming around in a horizontal sweep that should have bisected Shmuel at the waist, but Shmuel's other hand was already up, the reinforced palm meeting the flat of the blade and shoving it outward. The servos in his arm screamed. The metal of his palm deformed slightly, a shallow groove carved into the plating where the edge had bitten. But the blade's path shifted. It passed over Shmuel's head instead of through his torso.
Kamina used the opening. His katana slashed across Rowbotham's exposed back, the edge biting into the white cloak and the black fabric beneath. It should have opened a wound. It left a line. A shallow scratch across the skin, barely deep enough to bead with blood, as though the Proxy's flesh was simply denser than the steel asked to cut it.
Rowbotham turned into the strike. His elbow caught Kamina in the sternum and Kamina felt something in his chest compress in a way that chests were not meant to compress. He stumbled back, gasping, his vision swimming.
Shmuel pressed the attack. Both mechanical arms working in tandem, left hand grabbing for the greatsword's hilt to lock it in place, right hand coming around in a hammer blow aimed at Rowbotham's temple. The Proxy let him grab the hilt. He let Shmuel's fingers close around the black metal. Then he simply wrenched the weapon sideways, and Shmuel's grip, which had held against forces that would have torn human tendons from bone, was broken like a child's. The greatsword came free and swept upward, the edge aimed at Shmuel's throat.
The shot came from Imogen's rifle.
Not the furnace roar of her E.G.O. This was a conventional round, fired from the Barrett-11 in its standard configuration, because she had seen the greatsword rising and she had understood, in the accelerated cognition her mechanical eyes granted her, that Shmuel would not be able to avoid it. The bullet crossed the distance and struck Rowbotham's shoulder, the same shoulder that had been scorched by her first shot.
It did not penetrate.
The round flattened against his skin and fell to the asphalt, a small disc of deformed metal. But the force of it, the kinetic energy transferred into his joint, was enough. The greatsword's arc faltered. The blade passed in front of Shmuel's throat rather than through it, close enough to draw a thin line of red across the skin, a warning written in blood.
Rowbotham's head turned toward Imogen. His expression had changed. Not anger. Not pain. Something closer to interest, the way a scholar might regard an unexpected variable in an equation he had long since solved.
"The second shot," he said. "Clever. You understood I would not allow it to land as the first did. So you gave me something I would not bother to block."
He rolled his shoulder once. The skin where the bullet had struck was reddened. That was all.
"But it will not work again."
He turned back to Kamina and Shmuel, the greatsword rising into a guard position, and began to walk toward them with the same unhurried pace as before. The scorched fabric of his attire fluttered in the breeze. The shallow scratches on his back had already stopped bleeding.
Kamina forced himself upright, one hand pressed to his sternum. Shmuel touched his throat and looked at the blood on his mechanical fingers. Imogen, still wreathed in her burning robes, worked the bolt of her rifle and chambered another round, her red eyes tracking Rowbotham's every movement.
The distance between them shrank.
Rowbotham's greatsword swept out in a wide, flat arc.
It was not aimed at either of them. The blade described a circle with himself at the center, a barrier of black steel that forced Kamina and Shmuel to retreat or be cut in half. They retreated. The asphalt where they had been standing a moment before bore a fresh gouge, the surface split open like skin, and Rowbotham used the space he had created to launch himself upward.
He rose with the terrible, weightless ease. Twenty meters. Thirty. His white cloak billowed around him, the scorched edges catching the wind, and at the apex of his ascent the greatsword in his hands dissolved.
It did not break. It flowed. The black metal lost its rigid shape and became liquid, then liquid became separate, each portion coalescing into a sphere roughly the size of a human head. Ten of them. Twelve. They hung in the air around him like a constellation of dark moons, each one rotating slowly, each one dense with the promise of impact.
Rowbotham's hand closed around the nearest sphere. He drew it back.
And he punched it downward.
The sphere screamed toward Imogen. She was still wreathed in her burning robes, the Barrett-11 raised to track the Proxy's position, and her mechanical eyes processed the incoming threat in the accelerated timescale her E.G.O. granted her. She saw the trajectory. She saw the velocity. She understood, in the fraction of a second before it arrived, that she could not dodge and maintain her firing solution.
Kamina was already moving.
He crossed the distance between them in a blur of red cloak and desperate speed, his katana coming up in both hands. He did not try to cut the sphere. He met it with the flat of the blade, the way he had inside the bus, angling the steel to deflect rather than absorb.
The impact drove him to one knee. The vibration traveled up his arms and into his shoulders and down his spine, and he felt something in his left wrist give way with a sharp, bright pain that he filed away for later. The sphere rebounded, angling off toward the empty road, where it struck the asphalt and cratered it.
"Shmuel!" Kamina's voice was strained.
Shmuel was already there, positioning himself between Imogen and the next sphere. Rowbotham had already released it, his hand punching forward with the same mechanical precision as before, and this one came in lower, aimed at Imogen's legs. Shmuel caught it with both mechanical hands, the servos in his arms howling as they fought to arrest the momentum. His feet slid backward across the asphalt, carving two shallow trenches, and when the sphere finally stopped he hurled it sideways with a grunt of effort.
The third sphere came before he had recovered. Kamina met it, his katana screaming in protest, and this time the deflection was less clean. The sphere clipped his shoulder as it passed, spinning him half around, and he felt the joint grind in a way that suggested something important had been bruised if not broken.
The fourth sphere Shmuel caught. The fifth Kamina deflected. The sixth Shmuel caught again, and this time his left arm made a sound that was not a servo whine but a mechanical scream, something internal cracking under the repeated abuse. He ignored it.
The seventh sphere came down like a meteor.
Kamina stepped into its path. His katana rose. The sphere met the blade and the blade held for a single, suspended moment, and then Kamina's legs buckled. He went down to both knees, the asphalt beneath him spiderwebbing outward from the point of impact, and the sphere continued to press down, down, the flat of the katana bending toward his face.
He held. His arms shook. The tendons in his neck stood out like cables.
But he would not hold an eighth.
Imogen's eyes, burning red, tracked upward past the descending spheres to the figure suspended above them. Rowbotham's hand was drawn back for the fifth punch, the next sphere already rotating into position, his expression unchanged, his focus absolute.
She shifted her aim.
The Barrett-11, molten and rippling with contained heat, found the center of his chest again. Not the shoulder. Not a conventional round. The full, furnace-roar force channeled through the weapon and released in a single, blinding discharge.
The combustible round struck Rowbotham square in the sternum.
The sound was thunder. The light was a second sun. The Proxy's body was flung backward through the air as though swatted by a god, his white cloak trailing behind him, the remaining spheres scattering from his grip and falling to the road below like discarded stones. He traveled twenty meters, thirty, and then the concrete wall of a half-constructed building at the edge of the road stopped him.
The impact cratered the wall. Cracks spiderwebbed outward from the point of collision, and dust and debris bloomed into the afternoon air. Rowbotham hung there for a moment, embedded in the concrete, his head down, his limbs limp.
Imogen lowered the rifle. Her breathing was ragged. The blood from her eyes had tracked down her cheeks and was dripping from her chin, falling to the asphalt where it sizzled faintly against the residual heat of her robes.
"Did that…" Shmuel started.
The rubble shifted.
Rowbotham pushed himself out of the crater. Concrete dust fell from his shoulders. His white cloak was in tatters now, the gold trim hanging in shreds, but the body beneath it was intact. The scorch mark on his chest had darkened, the skin blackened at the center, but it had not broken.
In his hand, the black spheres were already flowing back together, merging and solidifying into the familiar shape of the greatsword. He held it loosely at his side, its tip resting on the rubble at his feet, and he looked across the distance at the three fixers with an expression that had finally shed its patience.
He moved.
The dash was faster than anything he had shown before. The road between them vanished under his stride, each step eating meters, the greatsword coming up into a two-handed grip. The ground seemed to shake with his approach.
Imogen did not aim at him. She aimed at the ground ten feet in front of him.
The combustible round left her rifle and struck the asphalt. The explosion was not contained. A pillar of fire and molten debris erupted upward, a wall of heat and force that forced Rowbotham to check his momentum, to plant his feet and raise an arm against the blast. He did not stop. But he slowed.
And in that slowing, Kamina and Shmuel moved.
Kamina's katana found his hand. Shmuel's mechanical arms, one of them sparking from the damaged servo, came up into a guard position. They closed the distance together, Kamina low and Shmuel high, the way they had practiced, the way they had learned to fight as two halves of a single weapon.
Kamina's blade slashed at Rowbotham's knee. Shmuel's fist drove toward his throat.
Rowbotham's greatsword swept down to meet the katana, deflecting it into the asphalt, and his free hand caught Shmuel's mechanical fist in an open palm. The impact rang out like a hammer on an anvil. Shmuel's arm shuddered. Rowbotham's grip tightened.
Behind them, Imogen was already moving.
She did not stay in one place. Her burning robes left trails of embers in the air as she circled wide, her mechanical eyes processing angles and trajectories and the shifting geometry of the fight. The Barrett-11 was at her shoulder, the scope finding gaps in the chaos, waiting for the moment when Rowbotham's attention would be divided just long enough.
She found her angle.
She did not fire. Not yet. She waited, her breathing controlled, her finger resting on the trigger, watching Kamina's katana scrape across Rowbotham's ribs without drawing blood, watching Shmuel's second punch be turned aside by the flat of the greatsword, watching the Proxy move through their combined assault with the grim, unstoppable patience of a man who had done this many times before and knew how it would end.
She waited for the opening.
And when it came, she would be ready.
Rowbotham's greatsword came down like a falling building.
Shmuel saw it coming. His mechanical arms came up, crossed at the wrists, the reinforced plating of his forearms presenting a unified surface to meet the blade. It was the same block he had used inside the bus, the same desperate of survival, and he had learned nothing from the first time because there was nothing to learn. The greatsword would hit him, and he would either hold or he would not.
The blade met his arms.
And Shmuel did not hold.
The force traveled through his mechanical limbs and into his torso and out through his legs, and his feet left the asphalt as though they had never been attached to it. He flew backward, a tangle of sparking servos and flailing limbs, and the road rushed up to meet him twenty meters away. He hit hard, rolling, the impact carving a shallow trench through the asphalt before he came to a stop. His left arm was sparking steadily now, the internal damage from the spheres compounded by the new trauma. His right arm pushed him upright, trembling.
Rowbotham did not watch him fall. His attention was already on Kamina.
The greatsword swept sideways. Kamina's katana met it, and the clash rang out across the empty road like a hammer striking an anvil. Kamina's arms shuddered. His boots slid back an inch, then another, the asphalt crumbling beneath his heels. Rowbotham pressed forward, the greatsword bearing down, and Kamina's blade began to bend.
"Aren't you doing too much," Kamina ground out through clenched teeth, "for a simple question?"
Rowbotham's expression did not change. The pressure on the greatsword did not lessen. "It is within my belief," he said, each word placed with the same deliberate precision as his footwork, "to think that your answer deserves death." He leaned into the blade. Kamina's knees buckled. "It is too illogical for this world."
Kamina's arms were shaking. His lungs burned. The greatsword was inches from his face, the black steel drinking the afternoon light, and he could feel the heat of his own exertion mingling with the cold dread of a fight he was losing.
Then he laughed.
It was not a laugh of humor. It was the laugh of a man who had found the bottom of something and discovered, against all expectation, that there was a door.
"THEN THE WORLD NEEDS TO BE ILLOGICAL!"
His voice tore out of him, loud enough to carry past Rowbotham, past the ruined bus, past the empty road and into the indifferent afternoon sky. And in the same breath, he disengaged. A repositioning. He threw himself backward, boots skidding across the asphalt, putting ten feet between himself and the Proxy in a single explosive motion.
He turned his head toward Imogen.
"Dunno how this works," he shouted, "but let's do it. IMOGEN! SHOOT THE BULLET AT ME!"
Imogen's burning red eyes widened. Her finger was on the trigger. The Barrett-11 was at her shoulder, the molten surface of the weapon rippling with contained heat, and every instinct she had developed across months of training and combat screamed at her that this was wrong, that this was insane, that you did not shoot your allies, that the bullet she fired would vaporize concrete and melt steel and Kamina was flesh and blood and…
But the world was always illogical when Kamina was around.
She did not question it.
She fired.
The combustible round left the barrel in a roar of light and heat. It crossed the distance between her and Kamina in a fraction of a heartbeat, and it struck him square in the center of his chest.
And the world folded inward.
Imogen's E.G.O. cut out. The burning robes dissolved into embers and then into nothing, the crown of blackened wood fading like smoke, her mechanical eyes dimming from red to white. She was standing in her blue dress again, the Barrett-11 cold steel in her hands, her breathing ragged, her cheeks streaked with drying blood.
At Kamina's place, a light collapsed into a single point.
Then it bloomed.
Fire erupted outward, but it was not the wild, consuming flame of Imogen's shot. It was structured. Ceremonial. The fire folded itself into shapes that had meaning, that carried intention, that built something new from the destruction. His clothes burned away into ash and reformed instantly. A black pastor's suit wrapped his body, the fabric crisp and formal, lined with veins of molten gold that pulsed like a living heartbeat. The collar was high, the cut severe, the whole ensemble radiating an authority that Kamina's usual posture actively undermined.
Heat shimmered off him in waves. The air around him warped and danced.
His katana melted in his hand. The steel ran like liquid sunlight, dripping brightness that vanished before it could fall, and then it reformed. The blade was longer now, its edges indistinct, its surface flowing with the same slow, golden current as the veins in his suit. He held it loosely, and where the tip passed, the air itself seemed to ignite and then extinguish in the same breath.
[Synchronize E.G.O: Wedlocked]
Kamina looked down at himself. At the black pastor's suit. At the veins of gold. At the severe collar and the formal cut and the general impression of a man who had been dressed by someone else's vision of solemnity.
He frowned.
"We really should think about how to change the outfit," he said, turning his head toward Imogen. "Because this outfit doesn't fit me."
Imogen's voice came back across the distance, raw and strained and carrying the particular frustration of someone who had just been asked to do the impossible and was now being critiqued on the aesthetic results.
"NOT MY FAULT MY PSYCHOMENT LOOKS LIKE THAT!"
Kamina shrugged, the motion casual despite the molten gold pulsing through his veins. Then he turned back to Rowbotham.
The Proxy had not moved during the transformation. He stood where he had been, the greatsword in his hands, his expression caught between assessment and something that might have been the first stirrings of genuine interest. The scorched fabric of his attire fluttered in the breeze. His eyes tracked the liquid sunlight blade as it moved through the air.
Kamina pointed the sword at him.
"Let me show you," he said, "how illogical I can be."
The gold veins in his suit pulsed, bright and synchronized with his heartbeat.
And then he moved.