The moment Mia recognised Erik, she forgot about Tim's withered arm entirely. Her crystal blade swung down, not toward Tim, but toward Erik. The strike stopped above his head with a sharp clang as Tim drew his short sword with his right hand and caught the blow.
"I can't let you do that to my friend," he said, without raising his voice.
Mia turned to face him. Before she could react, Tim's boot connected with her chest and sent her crashing into the rubble of the ruined library. A cloud of dust rose where she landed.
Erik watched from where he knelt, still recovering. "Don't forget she's still a woman," he said.
Tim took a fighting stance, sword raised, eyes fixed on the dust cloud. There was no hatred in his expression, and no pleasure either. "It doesn't matter," he said flatly. "She's tainted."
"Being tainted doesn't make her less of a person!" Ana said sharply from beside Erik.
Tim didn't look away from the cloud. "I'm saying this isn't even a real fight for her." His voice carried more edge than before. "Which means I'm not fighting a woman. For her, this is a game." Mia rose from the dust unharmed, her broken blade already dissolving. She drew mana from the air around her and shaped a new crystal sword as she stepped forward.
Tim closed his left eye.
As Mia charged, she swung at his open left flank, the withered one. He stepped aside. She followed with a series of wide, wild strikes, each one aimed to kill, and that was her mistake. The moment she committed to a downward blow, her torso was exposed. Tim's boot found it again, and she flew back into the ruins for the second time.
Tim exhaled, almost out of breath. He turned to his friends and found two confused faces looking back at him. Erik pushed himself to his feet. "When did you get that good at fighting?" he asked, with enough sarcasm to suggest he meant the opposite.
Tim lowered his sword with visible disappointment. "I literally told you both this morning, killing intent makes people predictable."
Mia stood again. The scales along her arms and face caught the grey light as she walked toward them, forming yet another crystal blade without breaking stride. Her voice was strained, caught somewhere between fury and disbelief. "You read my killing intent? Impossible. You already used a technique for healing... you can't use two different techniques. It's impossible!"
Tim pointed his short sword at her, and for a moment the tension held still.
"Magic techniques?" He tilted his head slightly. "I don't use any of those. What I do can only be described as magic tricks." A faint smile crossed his face. "You can call me the Magician, if you like."
Erik already knew the truth. Tim's tricks weren't half as refined as proper techniques. They were a lot weaker. But they were at least twice as irritating to fight against. Erik himself had only mastered a handful of these tricks, but as he got to his feet and stepped up beside Tim, he stood there as if the difference meant nothing.
"I can help," he said. "What's the plan?"
Tim glanced at him with a smile that held equal parts warmth and amusement. "What plan? Running away doesn't need a plan. We just run... away from her." Erik stared back with wide eyes. Then the chill hit him.
Killing intent washed over him like cold water. His thoughts emptied. Mia launched herself at Erik, blade first and found only air. He had vanished before she arrived.
She spun toward Tim and swung. He caught it with his sword. From somewhere behind her, a whisper reached her ear. "Weak. You are simply weak." She turned, but there was no one there. Then she caught the blur of a familiar boot and barely leaned out of the way as Tim's kick cut through the space beside her, pointing into the library rubble.
Ana, meanwhile, had been quietly moving away from the fight, step by careful step, doing her best to go unnoticed.
Erik came back into sight long enough to scoop Ana up and break into a run. Mia spotted him the moment he stopped sneaking, but before she could give chase, she was hit from behind by a kick that had her name on it. Tim sent her into the ruins of the library for what was becoming a habit.
"You're just a big fish in a small pond!" Tim called after her.
Erik slowed. Something in Tim's voice made him stop entirely. All his concentration was on Tim, as though he had been told something he should have understood, but didn't. Ana, still in Erik's arms, watched Tim for a moment before looking up at Erik. "Is that one of those codes you two use? I don't get it."
Erik kept his eyes on Tim. "Me neither."
Tim wasn't finished. "If you'd just use your magic technique more creatively, maybe to create a white sanctuary... you'd win this without breaking a sweat." He pointed his sword at Mia as she rose again, slower this time, with less fury in her face and more concentration.
Erik's mind was racing. White sanctuary, a fog technique that turned ambient mana to mist. Or was the code connected to the man who invented it, who had served the Red King under the name Sky Dragon? It wasn't a code for anything he recognised. Was it a signal to use the technique himself? But neither of them could perform it. So why say it?
Ana murmured to herself, working through it in her own way. "Is he trying to convince her to use that spell?" Erik answered without hiding his disbelief. "Surely not. I'd never think my opponent was that easily manipulated." He paused. "I mean... who casts a spell because their enemy told them to?"
Mia raised her hand toward the sky. "A nice idea," she said, with a thin smile. "I think I will." The mana around her shifted, thinning, spreading, turning to white mist that curled outward from her body. Within moments it had expanded to a radius of two metres, then wider, swallowing the ruins, the street, the space between them all. Erik lost sight of her entirely.
Tim had gone still, watching the fog with a serious expression. Then he leaned his torso to the right, not far, just enough. A crystal spear cut through the air where his chest had been. A roar came from somewhere inside the white.
The fog kept spreading. It swallowed the street in both directions, rolled across the rubble and up the sides of the broken buildings, and showed no sign of stopping. Erik couldn't see the fight anymore. He couldn't see much of anything.
So he ran.
* * *
Erik carried Ana through empty, fog-filled streets, moving as fast as possible. Ana kept her eyes on the white behind them.
"Is he going to be alright?" she asked.
Erik's voice was slightly breathless. "Of course he will. It was his plan, fill the whole area with fog so we can escape. He has the layout memorised, and in dense mana like this, his Aura sense works better than usual. He can track her killing intent and stay one step ahead." He almost smiled. "She won't be able to touch him."
Ana looked up at him. That had been a very long explanation, and Erik didn't usually give those. She noticed something careful in his voice, something he was working to sound confident about. The obvious question sat at the edge of her thoughts: what happens if Mia stops intending to kill him and just attacks? Ana kept it to herself.
"You're right," she said quietly. "He's my reliable older brother, after all."
Erik got them back to camp without incident, if you didn't count the wall he nearly ran into at a crossroads. He set Ana down gently and turned back toward the town. Ana noticed immediately.
"You can't seriously want to go back," she said.
He stopped. Ana watched his shoulders, waiting. There were things he could have said... things she might have even understood, if he'd tried. That he owed Mia an apology. That he wasn´t running away from problems anymore.
"He's my friend," was all he said. He didn't look at her, and he didn't turn around, and then he was gone.
* * *
He ran back toward the library on the logic that Tim would have tried to contain the damage, keeping the fight close to the ruins already standing, rather than pulling it into the streets.
Inside the white fog, he slowed. The world shrank to a few paces in every direction. His foot struck something with a metallic ring. He looked down. Tim's short sword lay in the dust.
The sound of the fight continued somewhere ahead. Erik steadied himself. Tim didn't need a weapon to manage, his tricks weren't built only around a blade. But carrying the sword back to him felt like the right thing to do, so Erik picked it up.
He closed his eyes. In mana this dense, Aura moved differently... easier to sense, easier to follow. They had used a small fog in a bottle at camp for practice, and he knew the feeling. If anyone in range decided to attack him, he would sense the intent before the movement. The plan was simple: close the distance, slip past Mia, put the sword in Tim's hand, and leave.
No possible miscalculation.
He dashed forward.
There was an arm on the ground. Erik's foot hooked behind it and he went down hard, his head connecting with the cobblestones. The sword clattered away into the fog.
The arm belonged to Greg. The cursed man lay in the rubble where he had fallen, still breathing, apparently comfortable, and entirely forgotten by everyone involved... including Erik, who had just paid for that oversight in full.
The fog rolled quietly overhead. Somewhere in the white, the sounds of the fight went on without him.