When the two swordsmen stopped moving, the room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet after violence — not peaceful, just empty.
I went to the monitors.
Camera fourteen.
She was running.
Moving fast through one of the lower corridors, heading for an exit.
I took both swords and went after her.
The air outside the surveillance room smelled like a mortuary - chemical and cold, the particular scent of a place that processes death and calls it something else.
The passage was long.
I closed the distance anyway.
Then the trap.
An axe - massive, the kind of thing built for a doorway, not a person — came out of the wall directly in front of me.
I got the swords up in time to catch it.
It didn't matter.
The force sent me airborne, and I hit the wall behind me hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
I reduced the distance I flew.
That was the best I could do.
When I looked up she was almost at the exit - crawling now, dragging herself toward the opening.
I raised my right arm and threw.
The sound my arm made doing it - bone and muscle both - was something I filed away and didn't think about.
The sword found her right thigh.
She dropped.
I ran.
She was still crawling when I reached her.
I grabbed her, got my hand around her throat, and came close to finishing it right there.
Then a thought arrived:
Why not take my time?
Two punches to the face.
Then I dragged her by the ankle - she had nothing left to defend herself with - hauled her upright and pulled her out of the underground entirely.
The air outside hit me like water. Clean and cold. I felt something in my chest reset slightly.
I dragged her to the nearest room and threw her inside.
I turned to close the door.
That was the moment she used.
She came from behind while my back was turned and drove a dagger into my shoulder.
I reached back, found her hand — still wrapped around the handle - and broke it. Completely.
Every bone in it.
The dagger stayed in my shoulder.
I turned around slowly. And smiled at her.
I pulled the blade out myself.
She collapsed from pure fear before I touched her again.
Her expression moved through its stages - anxiety to terror to something past terror, into the territory where the body just gives up pretending.
She was backing away. I was walking toward her.
One step for every one of hers.
A punch to the face. She tried to say something. I didn't listen. I kept hitting.
I found a wooden chair behind me. I brought it over, put her in it, stripped the curtain from the window rod, and tied her to it.
Then I took her right index finger and pulled the nail free with my bare hands.
She screamed.
I smiled - and it wasn't a normal smile.
"What a beautiful sound," I said. "Louder. Make it louder for me"
Ilooked at her directly.
"Don't think for a moment that I'm going to let you live. I'm going to pull your life out of you piece by piece. I'm going to make you drink every drop of what pain tastes like."
I broke the finger at the joint and cut it free.
Blood across my face.
———
The door opened.
A man stepped through - old, squinting, moving like someone whose eyes had stopped serving him well. He could barely see. He found his daughter first, fixed on her, hadn't located me yet.
I was in the dark.
He said: "What is that - what is that thing -"
"Welcome"" I said. "An honor to have you here.
Good to see you again, Your Honor."
His face collapsed.
I threw his daughter's glasses at him.
"I want to kill you," I said. "I want to kill you. I want to kill you." A pause. "And I will."
He screamed.
Ten men came through the door behind him.
———
The first one moved with a pistol already raised - a black scar cutting through his eye like a mark carved specifically to announce what he was.
Something in me ignited. Every nerve in my body pulled tight.
One bullet? That's not going to be enough for anyone in this room.
I went for him before he could fire. I took his wrist and bent it past what wrists are built for - felt the small bones give - stripped the gun from his hand and put it through his skull. He was already falling when I stopped looking at him.
———
Five with katanas. Two with rifles. They didn't wait for an invitation.
The first katana swing came for my left eye.
The world on that side went dark.
My inner voice didn't comfort me. It just said: Tai.
Handle them.
I screamed — pain and rage combined into something that didn't distinguish between the two - and it didn't break me. It released
something.
My right eye sharpened into a state I can't fully describe. Every movement in the room registered with absolute clarity. Every threat, every angle, every intention before it became action.
———
I went straight at the nearest blade. Grabbed the sword, drove the man backward off his own weapon. The dagger I'd taken from the girl found him before he hit the ground. A katana came from my left and I redirected the carrier into the one beside him — the blade meant for me found its owner's companion instead, and he dropped like something that had never learned to fall.
I didn't give the room space to breathe. Every movement fed the next. Every opponent became a stepping stone. Every weapon that left a dead hand became mine.
———
The three with pistols tried to fire simultaneously.
I was already between them.
I grabbed the nearest one by the skull and drove his head into the wall. Took his gun. Shot the second through the heart. Pressed the third's face into the floor using his own weapon as leverage.
Their guns became my guns. Their momentum became my momentum.
———
Five remained — mixed blades and rifle. They came without hesitating, which I respected and ignored. I moved through them like a shadow that had learned to cut — slipping between their formations, striking with whatever was in my hands, throwing blades at the ones outside reach.
Every one of them hit the floor before they made contact with me.
———
One of them tried a katana thrust. I rotated into it, broke the blade against his own force, caught the flying shard midair, and drove it into his throat. He screamed. I lifted him off the ground and kept driving it in, again, again, again, until the sound he was making stopped.
———
The rifleman raised his weapon. I threw the broken katana section and it found his head. I crossed the room before he finished falling, took the rifle, stripped the second broken blade, and went for the last shooter — severed the nerves in his wrist in one motion, buried the shard in his larynx, and pressed the barrel of the rifle into his mouth.
Both men folded at the same moment.
———
The last katana fighter tried.
I used his own sword to break his balance — a single redirected movement - drove the blade into his thigh and ended the conversation with the rifle across his face.
He stopped. Permanently.
———
The screaming, the ring of steel on steel, the wet sounds - all of it receded into a kind of background frequency, something beneath the sound of my own heartbeat, which had become the loudest thing in the room.
Savage. Furious. Absolute.
Minutes that felt like a different unit of time entirely.
Then all ten were on the floor. Eyes open, fixed on nothing. Every threat in the room - neutralized, erased, finished.
———
I stood in the center of it.
Blood running from multiple places. The left side of my face burning where the blade had found my eye. The shoulder where she'd put the dagger.
Various other points that would make themselves known later, when the adrenaline decided to leave.
But the pride in my chest was louder than any of it. It moved through my veins like molten metal - heavy, burning, entirely my own.
The tension, the rage, the pain- they had all converted into something else. Into force. Into clarity.
I reached down and picked up the last weapon still lying on the floor.
And smiled.
———
I walked toward the judge slowly.
He was shaking. Pressed against the far wall, surrounded by the bodies of every man he'd brought with him — looking at the blood of his own followers and finding no comfort in it.
Up close he looked exactly like what he was.
Small. Weak. A man who had wielded power so long he'd forgotten that power had always belonged to someone else, and could be taken back.
His eyes begged.
He already knew there was no exit from this room that he was walking out of.
I stopped in front of him and let the silence sit for a moment.
Then I said, quietly — the quietest I'd spoken all night:
"And now. It's your turn."
A pause.
"Are you ready?"
The room held still around us. Everything waiting.
The wolf standing over what remained of the hunt
— furious, merciless, and moving, always moving, toward the only thing left that mattered.
Nino.
(End of Chapter 36)