Lady Ankerita Solhani — because it was her, unmistakably her, the same dark eyes, the same severe brow, the same contained, private amusement now directed at a hegoblin instead of a young mercenary in a courtyard — didn't look at him.
She was already moving.
The hegoblin charged.
She stepped.
It was the only word for it — not a dodge, not a dive, a single lateral step, perfectly timed, that put her out of the creature's path while simultaneously bringing her inside its reach, and the blade in her right hand came up in an ascending cut that opened the side of the hegoblin's neck with the clean economy of someone who had found the exact line and committed to it completely.
The creature staggered.
She stayed with it. Left hand — the hook-blade, the custom thing, coming across in a follow stroke that caught the wound and used it, and then she was moving around it, behind it, the whole sequence flowing with a momentum that didn't break or hesitate or reconsider.
The hegoblin went down.
Not immediately; large things never went down immediately. But it went down decided, the way things went down when someone who knew what they were doing had made a choice about them, and by the time it had finished the process of falling, she was already standing clear of it, weapons loose and ready, watching it complete its collapse with the patient attention of a professional confirming a job finished.
Silence.
The clearing held it for a moment.
Then from the southeast treeline, from wherever she'd come from — voices.
Her men, pouring into the clearing now that the immediate threat was resolved, a half-dozen of them in the Solhani burgundy and silver that Jake recognized from earlier, all of them armed and moving and arriving in the aftermath rather than the middle of it, because that told you something about how fast the whole thing had gone.
One of them — young, bright-faced, with the loosely contained energy of someone who was still learning to be professionally restrained about his enthusiasm — looked at the fallen hegoblin, looked at his lady, and raised his fist.
"Adolina!"
The others caught it.
"Adolina! Adolina!"
Her name — or the name they used for her in this mode, in this context — cresting in the clearing like a wave, warm and genuine, the cheer of men who believed in someone.
Jake lay on his back on the forest floor.
The name landed in his chest like a key finding a lock he hadn't known was there.
Adolina.
He knew that name.
Not from this world — not from this life, not from eighteen years of his Lane and Guild offices and Chelsea's kitchen and the mercenary district.
From before.
From screens and late nights and the blue-white glow of a monitor in a dark room, from a game that he had poured — gods, how many hours into it? Hundreds.
From a character with dark hair and composed eyes and weapons that didn't fit any single category, a short blade and a custom hook-weapon and a short bow, a moveset that the developers had described as adaptive, fluid, designed around finding the exact opening and committing to it completely.
The name, weapons and the way she moved.
Adolina the Wandering Blade.
That was what the game had called her.
A fan-favorite.
A character with a community behind her, people who had studied her techniques and written long forum posts about the ideas behind her fighting style and drawn her face in a hundred different styles.
Jake stared at the sky through the canopy.
His ribs were reporting in with detailed updates he wasn't currently equipped to process.
The System pulsed once, quietly and attentively.
She turned — Lady Ankerita, Adolina, whatever the correct answer was — and her dark eyes found him on the ground with the same clean, brief precision they'd found him with in the courtyard and the rest stop.
She looked at him lying there in the mud and dead leaves of the Greyswood floor. She looked at the shadows at the clearing's edge that were still, if you were paying attention, sitting at a slightly wrong angle.
She looked back at his face.
Something moved in her expression.
"You're injured," she said.
"Ribs," Jake said.
"Possibly. Probably," he paused.
"Nice weapons."
Her eyes dropped to the blade in her right hand.
Then back up to his.
The careful something in her expression moved again.
"Can you move? I will ask my men to tend to you," she said.
"Your group can debrief when you're upright."
She walked past him, back toward her men, and the cheering was winding down into the cheerful, post-combat chatter of soldiers who had followed someone competent into a fight and come out the other side intact.
Jake lay on his back.
Eskar appeared above him, looking down with the expression of a man conducting a rapid damage assessment.
"Can you stand?"
"In a minute."
"You held it for thirty seconds."
"I held it for thirty seconds," Jake agreed.
He paused.
"Eskar."
"What."
"What's her name? The lady."
Eskar's expression shifted into something that was too tired to be suspicious and too knowing to be neutral.
He looked at Jake on the ground. He looked at the woman across the clearing, currently receiving a report from one of her men with her weapons still loose in her hands and her hair coming down from whatever it had been pinned in.
"Altoras," he said.
"Her name."
"Lady Ankerita Solhani. As you knew."
"No," Jake said.
He turned his head sideways, watching her across the forest floor.
"Her name."
There was a pause.
"Rest," Eskar said.
"We'll talk when you're standing."
He walked away.
Jake stared at the canopy.
Adolina, the clearing's echo said.
His ribs disagreed with most of his plans for the immediate future, but somewhere underneath that, underneath the pain and the mud and the turning sky, something that had been sitting dormant since a goddess with lightning in her beauty had handed him a system and said I thought you might do better here, woke up one degree further.
She's like me, he thought.
The forest settled around him. The shadows at the depression's edge straightened slowly back to where shadows were supposed to be.
She's exactly like me.