The commander's corpse hit the stone in two pieces.
Inside Jack, the swordsman gave the split body one cold measure. Ninth.
Jack barely had time to breathe before the double doors behind the ruined desk opened inward on their own.
The Duke stepped through them like the hall had been holding its breath for him.
He wore blackened court armor over dark, rotting cloth. The ducal crest on his breast had cracked down the center and been stitched together by ridges of white bone. One side of his face was the stern, narrow face from the swordsman's memories, pale and severe. The other had sunk tight over cheek and jaw, threaded through with black veins. In his hand he carried a longsword that leaked dead silver light, but deep inside that light Jack glimpsed buried colors, as if a sunrise had been trapped under ash.
Every corpse in the hall bowed its head.
The Duke looked first at the fallen Ninth Rank, then at Jack. A pressure like a mountain settling lowered over the room.
"Court," he said. His voice scraped like rusted metal dragged across stone. "Receive them. The son is mine."
At once the dead ranks broke away from Jack and poured toward Lily, Dex, and Marcus in disciplined lines.
"Go!" Lily shouted before Jack could turn. Gold flashed from both her hands, burning through the first pair of charging retainers. "We've got our side!"
Dex backpedaled toward a shattered pillar, planting orange-white charges with shaking fingers. "By 'got' she means 'barely,' so hurry!"
Marcus rammed his shoulder into a shield-bearing knight and bellowed, "Finish your fight, Jack!"
The Duke moved.
Jack saw the first cut begin and still nearly died. He threw a gravity wedge across his body. The Duke's sword slid through it, slowed for only a breath, and carved a white-silver line across Jack's shirt and skin. Pain flashed hot. The second cut came before he recovered, driving him three steps backward. The third split a fallen desk and the floor under Jack's feet.
He met steel with steel. The impact numbed both arms to the shoulder.
The swordsman shoved for angle. Jack reached for weight. The two instincts tangled for half a heartbeat.
It was enough. The Duke's hilt smashed into Jack's mouth. Blood filled his taste. A kick to the chest launched him through a drift of rotten ledgers. He hit stone hard enough to see sparks.
The Duke advanced, sword low, posture perfect.
"Again!" he barked.
The word landed wrong. Rot dragged through it. Yet underneath the corruption Jack heard the crack of a training-court command, the same merciless demand the swordsman had lived under for years.
Jack got up.
The next exchange was worse.
Every attack from the Duke forced him back. Jack tried widening gravity around the man's knees. The Duke cut through the thickened space with a clean diagonal stroke. Jack tried pulling himself off-line with a sideways yank. The Duke changed angle mid-swing and chased him anyway. Sword aura screamed from the older man's blade in narrow, efficient lines that shattered pillars, sliced curtains, and sent chips of stone stinging across Jack's face.
There was nothing wild in it. No rage. No wasted motion.
It felt like drowning in skill.
Behind him, the dead court crashed into the others. Holy fire boomed to Jack's right as Dex brought down part of a balcony. Marcus answered with a golden shockwave that flung armored retainers off the platform. Lily's voice kept cutting through the noise, calling targets, warning flanks, refusing to sound afraid even when Jack heard fear under it.
He could not help them. The Duke would not allow it.
A thrust slipped under Jack's guard and bit into his side. He wrenched away, leaving the blade with a wet scrape. The swordsman fed him the right counter. Jack overlaid too much force trying to make it stronger.
Their timing split.
The Duke turned the ruined strike aside and hit Jack across the temple with the flat of his sword. The hall lurched sideways. Jack dropped to one knee.
Too much, the swordsman said.
Then stop waiting until after I'm bleeding to say it, Jack snapped back.
The Duke's boot slammed into his shoulder and flattened him. Jack's weapon skidded from numb fingers, then jumped back into his hand on a desperate gravity tug an instant before the Duke's descending blade pinned him through the chest.
It drove through his sleeve and into the stone beside his ribs instead.
The Duke leaned down. The one human eye he still had was cloudy with death, but not empty.
"Again," he said, quieter this time. Not mercy. Demand.
Jack stared up at him. So did the swordsman.
Some part of the Duke was still following the shape of an old lesson.
Jack rolled away as the blade ripped free. He came up breathing hard, blood running down his side and arm. Across the hall Lily stumbled under a rain of cuts from three aura-using retainers. Dex blew one apart at the waist. Marcus took a sword through the forearm and kept swinging.
There was no room left for fighting himself.
One road, Jack thought.
Silence answered him for a beat.
Then the swordsman said, Yes.
The change was not dramatic at first. Jack did not surrender the body, and the swordsman did not lunge for it. Jack stopped making brute-force gravity pulls that wrecked the blade line. The swordsman stopped driving for perfect forms that ignored the battlefield Jack could feel in mass and motion. Jack handled ounces, inches, fractions of a second. The swordsman spent them.
The Duke cut high. Jack made the older man's front foot a shade heavier. The swordsman turned the tiny hitch into a riposte across the gauntlet. The Duke withdrew, not wounded badly, but forced to adjust.
He cut low. Jack lightened his own step. The swordsman let the counter fall like water into the space that opened.
For the first time, the Duke gave ground.
Not much. One measured step. But Jack felt it.
The older man answered by becoming faster.
Aura swelled around his blade, silver gone foul at the edges. He blurred forward. Jack caught one strike, failed to catch the next, and felt a hot line open across his chest. He bent under a third and saw the fourth only through the swordsman's warning. Gravity folded around him, sword aura led him through it, and he escaped by the width of a fingernail.
Still the Duke pressed. Each exchange cost Jack skin, breath, strength. His reserves were falling. Lily's light had gone thinner. Dex's blasts came farther apart. Marcus had started favoring one leg.
"Any day now, Jack!" Dex shouted, laughing the way people did when things were too bad not to.
The Duke heard it too. He glanced once toward the others, and the dead ranks closed tighter around them, keeping the four battles separate. Then he returned his full attention to Jack and lifted his sword.
The whole hall leaned with it.
Jack knew what was coming before the swordsman named it. The Duke had used this on a mountain in memory. A descending cut that did not merely strike but divided everything beneath it into before and after.
If he tried to block it as Jack, he would die.
If he tried to answer it as the swordsman, he would die.
Together, Jack said.
No other voice answered. It did not need to.
He stepped forward.
Gravity gathered not around the Duke this time but along Jack's own path, turning the floor beneath him into a falling road. Sword aura ran the length of that invisible slope, silver-white threaded with deep-buried color. From Jack's chest, Lily-taught gold rose to meet both powers, not laid on top of them but through them, cleansing the rot from the edge before it was ever born.
For one impossible heartbeat the three forces stopped being separate things he managed and became a single motion.
The Duke's blade came down.
Jack met it.
The clash blew every remaining window out of the hall. Dead daylight burst inward with a scream of glass. Pressure ripped banners from their poles and flung corpses sideways. Jack felt his knees nearly fold. The Duke's strength was still greater. It drove through his arms, down his spine, into the floor.
Then Jack turned that force one inch to the side.
One inch was enough.
The descending cut slid past his neck. Jack crossed inside it, gravity dragging him under the Duke's guard while sword memory knew exactly where the opening would be. Their blade rose in a black-gold arc rimmed in white.
It struck the Duke from hip to shoulder.
The armor split.
So did the corruption beneath it.
Blackness poured out like smoke yanked from a chimney. The Duke staggered. Jack should have followed with a finishing blow, but his arms were shaking too badly and the sight of the older man unraveling held him still.
The Duke lifted his sword once more. Jack raised his own on instinct.
But the older man did not attack.
The rot in his face burned back in thin lines where the divine energy had cut deepest. For a breath, then two, the man from the swordsman's memories stood there clearer than the corpse had any right to allow. Tired. Proud. Heartbroken.
His gaze fixed not on Jack alone, but somewhere deeper, through bone and blood and dream, to the son he had trained.
"I knew," he said, and now the voice sounded like itself. It wavered, but it was his. "You would climb."
Inside Jack, the swordsman went utterly still.
The Duke turned his blade and offered the hilt.
"I am proud of you, my son."
Jack's throat closed. His own hand trembled as he reached out. When his fingers wrapped the hilt, it felt like gripping a live wire buried inside ice.
The Duke exhaled.
Light moved.
It ran from the old sword into Jack's arms, but not into Jack alone. Channels inside him that had never belonged to gravity opened like gates blasted from within. The swordsman surged upward, no longer an echo standing behind his thoughts but a full, clear presence aligned with every breath and movement. A rank of pressure he had only touched before fell away beneath him. A final barrier shattered in a silent, immeasurable rush.
Tenth Rank.
Jack knew it not as a number but as a sudden, immense steadiness, as if a blade that had been ringing for chapters of his life had finally come to rest on its true note.
The weapon in his hand changed with the inheritance. The improvised edge he had carried this far dissolved into silver-white lines and rebuilt itself as the Duke's true sword, long and clean and deadly, its aura quiet only because it no longer needed to shout.
The Duke's fingers loosened. Relief, brief and human, crossed his face.
"Finish the climb," he said.
Then his body broke into pale ash and black smoke, and the smoke did not reform.
For half a second the dead court faltered.
It was enough.
Jack turned.
He did not need to ask the swordsman what to do. There was no divide left wide enough for asking.
He moved off the platform and the hall seemed too small for him. Gravity bent beneath each step, carrying him faster than a sprint without wasting motion. The Duke's sword described one calm line through the air. An entire rank of undead retainers lost their heads before their bodies realized they had been cut. Jack reversed, sent a crescent of black-gold-white force across the chamber, and six more came apart in a spray of rotten steel and ash.
Dex stared for half a beat, then barked out a savage laugh. "Okay. That's new."
"Use it!" Lily shouted.
She threw a net of gold over a cluster of advancing officers. Jack's next step folded gravity inward around them; the divine light pinned their corruption in place, and his following cut erased them. Marcus smashed through the opening with both hands on his weapon, golden power flaring around him like banked fire.
What had been a siege became execution.
The court still fought with skill, but their center was gone and Jack now met skill with something colder and surer than he had possessed five minutes earlier. He skimmed across the ruined hall, where weight and blade and holy force obeyed the same intent. Dex detonated the stunned survivors Jack drove together. Lily burned whatever pieces tried to crawl. Marcus broke the last shield line with a roar and sent its captain into the wall hard enough to crater stone.
Then there were only a handful left.
Jack crossed the distance to the final standard-bearer in three impossible steps. The old retainer tried to salute before attacking. Jack answered with a clean, merciful strike that took head, pole, and corruption all at once.
Silence dropped.
Not complete silence. The hall still crackled with settling fire, trickled with dust, breathed through broken windows. But the fighting was over.
Lily bent at the waist, hands on her knees, gold light guttering around her fingers. Dex leaned against a snapped pillar with soot on his face and blood on one sleeve. Marcus pulled a blade fragment out of his forearm with his teeth, spat it away, and gave Jack a long look.
"That him? It looked like him" Marcus asked quietly.
Jack looked at the sword in his hand. It felt old, earned, and heavier than metal.
"Yeah," he said. His voice came out rough. "That was him."
Lily straightened and studied his face, maybe hearing the difference she could not see. "And you?"
Jack glanced toward the back of the chamber. The manor walls were already dimming, office concrete showing through the fading illusion. Above them, somewhere past the ceiling, a weight vast as weather shifted once on the roof.
He closed his hand around the Duke's sword.
"Still me," he said. "Just... more of it."
At the far end of the ruined office, a final stair door clicked open by itself.