By the time the Nameless Sun finished its second lazy arc over the horizon since Juno's confession, life inside Bongo had fallen into a strange, busy rhythm.
They slept in shifts. They ate whenever they wanted. But most of the time, they were working.
It was honestly a little exhausting for Juno, having to pretend to come up with his great plan. He just stole the whole thing from the original timeline, but had to market it differently.
Turns out, Juno did not like performing. It was exhausting and difficult, pretending to be stupid. From his old life, he already knew he didn't like to sugarcoat things or pretend to be kinder than he was. Now, needing to seem like he didn't know anything was just as difficult.
Also, without Cassie's vision, there was a lot more arguing.
Nephis wanted the rough structure nailed down before they ever saw the Ashen Barrow. Sunny wanted to see it first, then improvise. Cassie wanted to know how she could be of use or stay out of the way. It also turned out that Juno had the best handwriting, so he was forced to take notes along with his participation in the planning.
Finally, on the third day, many things changed.
After over two days of nonstop planning, both by talking and scouting, Juno had gotten fed up. A reason Juno had only ever gotten twos and threes back in Bucharest was that the same thing got boring after some time, and these days were a lot of the exact same thing.
A particularly annoying session of crafting the Centurion on top of Sunny's Echo had concluded, and everyone was doing their own thing. Cassie was lazing around, Juno and Sunny were practicing katas, and Nephis was watching them.
Nephis had already seen Juno practicing swordsmanship, for better or for worse. She had also seen the incessant spars he had with Sunny, which usually ended with his victory. He didn't usually win without Aspects, but when he did use them, he won quickly. Seeing the battle way slower and thinking way faster would make battles quite easy, especially since Juno had been getting more and more used to the load it brought him.
After a while, she pushed off the bone and walked over.
"Hold," Nephis said.
Both of them stopped. Sunny let his arms drop with obvious relief. Juno straightened, catching his breath.
Nephis looked at Juno's stance for a moment, then said, very matter‑of‑factly:
"Do you want some pointers?"
Juno blinked. "On the katas? Or on things like relationships?"
"Swordsmanship in general," she said. "You're doing some things right and some things wrong. It would be a waste not to fix the wrong ones. With how you have progressed, you could make your blade way sharper, way faster."
Sunny snorted. "Told you she wasn't impressed with you."
Without glancing at Sunny, Juno replied simply with "39 to 17 says what?" and that shut him up real quick.
Nephis stepped closer and tapped his front foot lightly with her boot.
"Move this a little back," she said. "You're overcommitting. And your grip—loser. You're strangling the hilt."
Juno adjusted. She nodded once.
"We'll start with the basics," Nephis said. "Then we can talk about the other things you're trying to do in a fight."
Juno ran through the opening sequence of the kata. Cut, step, guard, recover. This time he tried to do it exactly as he had before, just with his front foot a touch further back and his grip a little looser. The adjustment was quite easy.
This went on for a while. He and Sunny would do different katas, Nephis would fix their form, and everything would improve. It was quite fun and way better than maps.
"So," he said, "this counts as lesson one?"
Nephis nodded.
"Lesson one," she agreed. "Fix your posture and grip. Everything else stands on that."
There was a slight pause, then Nephis asked the fateful question.
"What do you think is the essence of combat?"
Inwardly, Juno smiled. Truly, no matter who she taught, she would always ask the thing that her swordsmanship was built upon.
What, perhaps, was one of humanity's strongest Awakened swordsmanship was built upon.
Obviously, Juno knew the right answer for Nephis. He also knew why murder was the correct answer in most situations, but that wasn't his answer. He also believed that following that doctrine of combat was incorrect, as every human wielded their blades differently.
'Heh, if all humans had collectively agreed that combat had one reason, different sword arts wouldn't exist, would they?'
Turning to Nephis, Juno answered without any hesitation.
"The essence of combat is what you gain from it."
Nephis frowned slightly, as if the answer had come from a direction she hadn't prepared for.
Sunny squinted at him. "What does that even mean?"
Juno rolled his eyes at Sunny. Out of everyone present, he at least should've been able to connect the dots. His damn True Name literally gave the answer away!
"Well, combat is a bid for survival," he began. "We all get that much. You fight so you don't die, or so the people you care about don't die. But fights don't just happen in a void. There's always a reason it started. Something in the middle that both sides want."
He tapped the bone floor with the tip of the blade.
"Territory. Food. Shards. Pride. Freedom. Information. Glory. Money. Women. Whatever. Call it a spoil of war if you like. The point is, you don't draw a blade for nothing. There's always a prize on the table."
Cassie shifted a little where she sat, listening; Sunny's frown had flattened into a more thoughtful line. He had seemingly connected the dots.
"So when I say the essence of combat is what you gain from it," Juno went on, "I mean that's what everything in a fight bends around. Every swing, every dodge, every risk you take is about taking hold of that thing—or keeping it out of someone else's hands. Surviving is part of it, sure. Killing is part of it, too. But neither is the whole picture."
He shrugged.
"If all of humanity really believed there was one pure 'reason' for combat, we'd all fight the same way. But we don't. Different sword styles, different doctrines, different priorities. Some people will happily die if it means their side keeps the city. Some people will run as soon as the odds look bad because they value their own skin more than any flag."
His eyes flicked between Nephis and Sunny.
"For me? The essence of combat is simple. There's something on the table. I intend to walk away holding it, whether it be the strength I get from a Nightmare Creature, or the skin on my back."
Nephis was quiet for a few moments, weighing that. It clearly wasn't the answer she was looking for, but it wasn't one she could dismiss as nonsense, either.
"…Spoils for the winner," Sunny muttered. "Figures."
Juno smiled faintly.
"Exactly," he said. "The rest is just how creative you're willing to be to make sure the winner is you."
…
'Be runnin' up that road.
Be runnin' up that hill.
Be runnin' up that building.
Say, if I only could, ohhhhhh.'
Juno, Sunny, Nephis, and Cassie were currently running up that ashen hill. Gracefully too.
Ash slid under their feet, a lot like sand but somehow worse. Every step dug in, slipped half a pace, then found purchase again by sheer stubbornness.
Sunny was in front, the rucksack of centipede oil thumping against his back with every lunge. Nephis kept slightly to his left, eyes on the pale trunk above rather than the ground in front of her, measuring the distance with that calm, relentless focus.
Juno came last, Cassie on his back, her arms looped tight around his neck and shoulders.
"Almost there," Sunny panted.
"Not helping," Juno muttered.
The Ashen Barrow's slope was steeper up close, the ashen sand thinner over hard-packed bone. Pale roots were starting to show through the grey, curved ridges of something that wasn't quite wood or stone, rising out of the hill like the knuckles of some buried giant.
Cassie's voice was thin near his ear. "He's… moving. The Demon. He's not on top anymore."
"Good," Juno said. "Means the idiot centurion did its job."
He didn't risk looking back to check. The sound was enough: a distant, irregular thunder of chitin and metal lower down the hill, punctuated every so often by a sharper crack of something heavier hitting the ash. Their fake centurion would already be dead. Sunny's Echo would be busy buying them whatever seconds it could.
Those seconds were bleeding away fast.
Nephis hit the first of the exposed roots and changed her stride without breaking pace, trading the sliding give of ash for the harder, slicker surface of the tree's skeleton. Her hand went out automatically to test a groove, then she pulled herself up and onward, already turning the uphill sprint into a climb.
Sunny followed, half‑jumping the last stretch of ash to catch the same root Nephis had trusted. The rucksack skidded once as he shifted it, then settled again. After a few scrambling seconds, he was climbing too, boots and fingers searching out cracks.
Juno arrived in a heartbeat later. Cassie squeezed tighter as the ground fell away beneath them.
"Don't look down," he told her, mostly out of habit.
"I can't," she pointed out, a little dry.
"Perfect," he said. "You're ahead of the curve… Ahead of the climb, dare I say."
"Let me be frank, your puns suck."
The onyx bark of the tree itself was… wrong. Too smooth, too cold. It flexed slightly under his hands, like a stone that had learned how to breathe. Cracks and knotted imperfections served as handholds. He did his best not to think about the fact that he was climbing something that had been quietly rotting in this place since before the Nightmare Spell descended on the War Realm. Perhaps it had been here for millennia.
'Damn this tree. One day, I'm going to kill this thing. Damn, Sunny's future revenge, I want to kill this thing. Oh, imagine the Memory I would get! Oh, how wonderful that would be.'
Below, the thunder of the Demon's steps grew louder. It had destroyed Sunny's Echo and was quickly heading for the rest of the invaders.
There was a brief moment where Juno's foot slipped off a smooth patch, and his stomach dropped out from under him, but his fingers held, and his shoulder didn't tear, so he swore under his breath and kept going.
'What bad luck I have…'
The first thick branch jutted out not that far above their heads—thick enough for all four of them to crouch on it without being seen from below, Nephis had judged earlier. Reaching it felt like cresting a wave.
Nephis swung herself up first, rolling onto the flat of it with practiced ease. She immediately turned and offered a hand down. Sunny pushed the rucksack up, then hauled himself over the edge, ribs scraping bark. Between the two of them, they got Cassie onto the branch next.
Juno went last.
He hooked an elbow over the lip, braced his feet, and levered himself up with a graceless grunt. For a moment, he just lay there on his back, sucking in breath, the canopy of scarlet leaves turning the sky into a dim, reddish ceiling.
"Everyone here?" Nephis asked.
"Yes," Cassie said quietly.
"Present," Sunny said.
Juno raised a hand, then dropped it. "Aici."
Cassie let out a little sound of recognition. If they weren't in the situation they were currently in, Juno would've asked if Romanian still existed as a language, but that could wait. How sad.
Nephis gave him a flat look he chose to interpret as tolerance and shuffled back from the edge of the branch, keeping low. Sunny eased away from the lip as well, carefully setting the rucksack down where it wouldn't slide.
"Stay behind the trunk," Nephis said. "It must not see us."
Together, they pressed closer to the bark. From their current angle, the Demon was hidden, but the noises it made as it moved still reminded them it was there. It was still waiting for them to come down from the tree.
Quietly, they waited for the sun to set.
Soon, the light disappeared, and the sea returned.
When the last smear of sunlight vanished, Nephis moved.
"Ready," she said.
Sunny eased the rucksack open. Two clay jars bumped softly inside, full of separated centipede oil. Juno could smell it even through the clay—sharp, bitter, wrong.
"Don't drop them," he murmured.
"I like my hands," Sunny muttered back.
Nephis summoned a torch—a length of bone wrapped in seaweed fiber. White radiance flickered under her skin; a heartbeat later, pale flame caught and held.
The torch's glow picked out the curve of the trunk and the edge of the branch. Below, metal gleamed.
The Demon stepped closer, drawn to the light, single eye fixed on the sudden star under its tree.
"Now," Nephis said.
Sunny and Juno slid to the lip of the branch, each taking a jar. The clay felt too fragile in Juno's hands.
"On three," Sunny whispered. "One, two—"
They threw.
Scythes flashed up, shattering both jars mid‑air. Clay rang off armor; oil burst free and rained down, splashing across plates and joints.
For a breath, nothing.
Then Nephis hurled the torch.
It spun once, twice, then struck the Demon's torso. Fire leapt. In an instant, the giant turned into a walking blaze, oil‑fed flames racing over its shell, droplets hissing as they hit the ash.
The light was brutal. Juno had to squint.
"Beautiful," he heard himself say.
"Everyone," Cassie answered. "Close your eyes."
The flames weren't meant to kill. They were to be seen.
The Sea obliged.
The sound of the waves deepened, as something vast had shifted just beneath the surface. Cold mist began to crawl over the edge of the island, spilling across the Barrow against the wind.
Cassie's hand closed on Juno's sleeve.
"Close your eyes," she whispered again, voice tight. "Now. Don't open them until I say so."
After that, there was only sound and movement: the suffocating brush of fog, the hateful, many‑throated whisper wearing Cassie's voice too close to his ear, the Demon's roar, the bone‑deep impacts as it collided with something huge and wrong from the Sea.
The tree shook under them. Once, the branch lurched so hard that Juno's grip slid, and he barely caught himself. He kept his eyes shut and hung on.
In time, the tremors weakened. Metal screams and inhuman howls faded. The Sea's steady murmur crept back in, along with the dry rustle of leaves.
"You can look," Cassie said at last, hoarse.