Chapter 107: It Imitated Them
They didn’t look long. The bodies were enough.
Hikari crouched first, steady hands finding steadier breath. She didn’t touch. She didn’t need to.
"Not human" she said. "A cut like this? No chatter in the edge. No hesitation."
Obi hovered, for once not performing. "Nyx kills are messy" he muttered. "Claw, tear, shatter. Not -" He gestured at the clean lines that weren’t supposed to exist.
Raizen knelt opposite Hikari and let the picture settle. No spray. No stumble marks. The snow around the breaks sat smug and smooth, like the world had been asked to hold still and did. He watched the way the fibers of the suit met the open air - burnless, tearless, ends so uniform they almost looked... perfect.
"Speed" he said. "So fast the body didn’t have time to argue..."
"You’re telling me a Nyx did that?" Obi asked, half-hoping to be argued with.
"If it’s a human" Raizen said, eyes still on the edges, "they can run at the speed of a thought and draw a line straighter than math."
"Okay" Obi answered. "So not a human."
Raizen’s comm popped to life and bit his ear.
"Team One" Alteea snapped, breathless, sirens bleeding through again, closer now. "I just got a spike - your sector - there’s an active read -"
The channel shredded itself into undistinguishable noise.
Raizen looked up, skin prickling in the same direction his eyes found: the shadow of a cargo crate at the basin edge. It was big enough to hive a car. Big enough to lie.
A shape detached from the crate and stood.
Tall. Too tall. Arms too long by an insult. Each forelimb ended not in hands but in lengths of blade - flat, flawless planes, edges so bare of frost it was like the air declined to touch them. Its spine arched, a slow curve crowned with a plate that rose and fell as if it were breathing through the wrong part of its body. No eyes. Just a slick of darker matter where a face might have been, glossy with cold. Snow did not land on it. The snow forgot.
Obi raised his hands like he was calming a horse and whispered through his teeth "Well... Uh... That is... new."
The Nyx tilted its head. The blade arms angled a fraction inward, like a mantis considering prayer.
"Back off" Raizen said, but a bit too late. Hikari was already moving.
Her staff snapped into her palm from the sling at her back. She planted, braced, and sent a line of white-blue straight into the Nyx’s middle.
It walked through the light.
Not fast. Not even stubborn. It just let the ray touch and be there and not matter. The beam scattered off the edges of its arms. The staff’s housing hissed, overclocked. Hikari flinched as the heat surged up the shaft and into her shoulder.
"Stop" Raizen said, already closing in. "Save it."
The Nyx watched him come. Its posture said patience. Its posture said test. Something you’d never see at a Nyx.
Raizen circled, the twin blades at his hips parallel and quiet. He cut left and feinted high to see if it tracked, then cut right and feinted lower to see if it learned. The arm came down in a clean, quiet line that would have split him from thought to heel if he’d been dumb by half an inch. He wasn’t. He let the blade miss by the width of a nerve, and even the wind seemed impressed.
No weak spots. No seams. No glow. Just geometry.
"Obi" Raizen said without moving his mouth. "Make noise."
"Finally" Obi breathed, and obliged.
He darted toward the Nyx at an angle it didn’t owe respect, snatched one of Raizen’s twin blades without breaking stride, and clanged steel against the Nyx’s left arm. The sound... Strangely, like metal meeting metal. It was like a bell finding out it had a twin.
The Nyx turned.
Obi danced backward, swinging at the blade-arms not to wound but to invite. It looked like he was trying to charm a monkey, by imitating a dance, but somehow, it worked. The right arm came for his chest, too straight, too fast. Raizen threw his blade up and caught the strike on the flat. The shock chewed down his wrist and into his elbow - his shoulder sang a bright note of pain.
"Left shoulder!" he shouted, breathless. "Less sentimental!"
Hikari had already moved. She’d looped out to the Nyx’s rear the moment its attention tilted, boots soundless. Staff tucked in close now, not as a conduit but as a spear. The Nyx’s spine plate rose as if to listen. Hikari jumped off a big box that was supposed to house a cart.
For a second, everything was only air and intent.
The sharp end of her staff found the impact where plate met back. Momentum did what permission wouldn’t. The staff sank through. The Nyx folded a fraction, a slow, surprised bow. Its arms stilled. Its whole body went wary and quiet, like a lake deciding whether to make a ripple. It didn’t screech. It didn’t even make a sound.
"Down" Raizen shouted, ready to take away its options.
The right arm twitched. Then lifted.
It didn’t slash. It felt for him and swung by choice, a calm lateral that would have taken him at the ribs.
Obi shoved himself into the line, braced the stolen blade with both hands, and met the force he had no business meeting. The impact tore the skin at the web of his thumb inside the glove and sent sparks skittering off the edge into the snow, where they died like bugs in winter.
"Working on it!" Hikari hissed, and drove her staff deeper. The plate gave another centimeter with a sound that was less a crack and more a permission rescinded. Something inside the Nyx hummed harder, then stuttered, like a motor on a dying grid.
For a heartbeat it was still.
Raizen stepped in, pivoted, and set his remaining blade against the angle under its right arm, testing for give. None. The edge shivered as if bored. He swallowed the urge to curse. You don’t insult a thing you’re still inside of.
The Nyx turned its head toward him in a motion almost human, as though cataloguing the problem he represented. Then it did the one thing none of them expected.
It just... Left.
Not a scramble. Not a panic. It pulled itself forward out of Hikari’s staff like skin from a thorn and went low and fast, arms tucked in to avoid the scaffolds, body a single line of motion across the basin. It didn’t look back. It didn’t have to. It knew they couldn’t catch it without steps they didn’t have permission to make.
"Hey - hey!" Obi tried a throw with the borrowed blade, knew it wouldn’t land, threw anyway. The steel bit into a crate, righteous and useless.
Hikari dropped to a knee, both hands on the staff, chest heaving, shoulder burning through her coat. The staff’s tip steamed in the air, faint black smoke winding away like the mountain had learned incense. She swore once, softly, in a language she only used when she remembered it existed.
Raizen tracked the Nyx until it became motion, then until the motion became nothing. The hum under the snow didn’t go with it. The hum stayed and smirked.
Silence. Broken a few moments later, when Alteea’s voice finally clawed back through the static. "- reading just spiked and fell - talk to me - what did you engage - Team One, report -"
"Interference" Hikari said into the channel. "We can’t -" Static swallowed the rest.
Then, through the static, an imitation of Obi from five minutes ago: "- fun fact -" Then the line went blind again.
Obi leaned on his thighs and let his grin come back slowly, cracked and honest. Blood from his palm seeped into the glove and made his grip feel warmer than it should. He wiggled his fingers and winced. "Friendly fellow. Good talk." Then he wiped his palm on his coat and handed Raizen’s blade back, handle-first. "Your toy. Very shiny. Almost lost a thumb for it. But I’m glad I made it. It really sings beautifully."
"Thanks, but don’t fall in love with it again" Raizen said, meaning it. He slid the blade home, the motion second nature and calming. "Let’s move. We can’t talk here."
They cut a careful path back around the lip, retracing, resisting the urge to hurry. Hikari clipped herself closer on the rope without comment. Obi walked off the pain like he was courting it.
Near the corner where the Nyx had dissapeared, something tugged Raizen’s eye.
"Hold" he murmured.
Hikari followed his sightline. Obi followed theirs.
Two blades lay on another, smaller crate. Not dropped so much as set down. Each the length of a man’s arm doubled, straight along the spine, edges flawless as thought.
They were the same exact shape the Nyx had worn for arms.
Hikari crouched and watched them with a careful interest. "They... Match" she said. "Exactly. Dimensions, ratio, everything."
Obi bent a little, hands on his knees, as if proximity might make sense cheaper. "Did it... drop them?"
"No. It wasn’t losing limbs. It... learned shapes." Raizen’s answer came, absolute. "The blades..."
"It imitated them."