"You…!" Alarion growled out from between clenched teeth.

He might have said more, but the fiend was wholly uninterested in conversation. It advanced upon him in a dash, closing the distance between them before Alarion had finished drawing his backup weapon, let alone thrown it as he had intended. In a breath, the two resumed their waltz, Alarion only one step ahead of jagged white talons that sought to do to his flesh what they had done to his sword.

Except that wasn't right. Alarion dodged, then again. Then a third time. The pressure was still omnipresent, but he wasn't one step ahead. He was two. He was much faster when not carrying around a substantial portion of his body weight in Vitrian steel.

Who could have guessed?

Of course, he couldn't play defense forever. The brute showed no sign of slowing down, while Alarion had lost nearly a third of his stamina through the ongoing bouts. Even if he could keep up this pace indefinitely, lacking a proper weapon meant he couldn't block or punish. Eventually, the fiend would trip him up, and with nothing to stem its aggression, it became more reckless by the moment.

Which was what Alarion had been waiting for.

One moment, the young man was unarmed, but for a dagger so small that the fiend didn't even recognize it as a threat. An instant later, Alarion pivoted from defense to offense as five feet of black and violet metal arced violently upward and removed its already maimed right arm at the elbow.

The fiend didn't scream. It didn't roar or flinch back. It attacked, punishing the boy for having the temerity to over-commit with such an unwieldy weapon. The beast had shattered one sword; it could destroy a second.

Alarion swore he could almost taste the thing's confusion when its claws tore through empty air.

Throwing the greatsword had been Alarion's first insight into the weapon, but over weeks of training, he realized that little trick had only scratched the surface of the [Shifting Imperial Greatsword's] potential. While the shifting function couldn't deal damage directly, as it stopped growing the moment the tip encountered resistance, it could befuddle an opponent in melee combat by attacking from outside a predictable range, to escape a blade bind, or to block or parry unexpectedly. All were powerful advantages, though they quickly dropped off once the novelty of the weapon was exhausted.

The true strength, however, came from a technique ZEKE had taught him called quick-shifting. With careful usage of the shifting function, Alarion could minimize the wind-up and cool-down times from each of his attacks. He could enlarge the sword mid-swing to lash out faster and maximize his recovery by shrinking the blade rather than withdrawing naturally.

A flurry of such attacks quickly put the fiend on its back foot for the first time, carving three deep gouges in rock-hard muscle and bone in as many swings.

There were, unfortunately, still numerous kinks to work out.

For one, the technique was worthless in combinations. The blade could shrink or grow in half a second, which meant a full second between repeat attacks—an eternity when trying to keep pressure on a skilled opponent. Resizing the weapon also drastically altered its momentum. Given that the eleventh rite was built around the management of momentum, this was less than ideal.

Even those were only secondary concerns. The most troublesome aspect was the mental load. Alarion spent weeks drilling the rite into his very bones, going through the same motions over and over, and the training itself was designed to accommodate that. The goal was to make fighting with an Imperial Greatsword as effortless as fighting with one's own fists. But fighting with a shifting weapon required an unnatural sense of timing. Alarion needed to focus on his own body, his opponent, but also on the changing reality of his weapon.

Shift the weapon too early, and a slash would miss entirely. Too late, and the damage would be flimsy. In practice, he'd once shrunk the blade mid-attack because his mind was already focused on what came after.

All of which was to say that he was not ready to practice such a complicated style in live combat.

Not that the brute cared.

If anything, it seemed angry at the disordered nature of their second round. Alarion couldn't explain it. The fiend was no different in its persistence, and it had made no grunt or scowl that would give away that it had any emotion beyond a seething desire to mutilate his body and feed it to some thrice damned infection. But it felt angry.

Losing a hand had not proven to be too much of a liability. The fiend was large and strong enough that swiping at Alarion with a bloody stump was still a powerful deterrent. A glancing blow from that limb would hurt, and Alarion could scarcely afford to be wounded again. The malus from substantial potion sickness would be a death knell, even if he survived the wounding blow.

Worst of all, that low cunning reared its ugly head as the fight dragged on. Twice more, Alarion had tried to spring a surprise attack on the fiend by shifting his weapon, and twice more, the fiend punished him. The fiend was uncomplicated, but it wasn't stupid. It had trouble compensating for his shifting style, but it wouldn't let him cheap out a win so easily.

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That left him evenly matched at best against an enemy all too happy to lose, so long as it took him down in the process.

"Sierra?"

"What is wrong?" Her voice came over his simu almost instantly, filled with dread.

"This might be more than I can handle," Alarion said honestly, "I-"

"I'm on my way back," she cut in quickly, "But it will take me a minute. These godless things had more friends nearby. Just hang on."

Alarion frowned. He'd assumed she was already nearby. Some inner part of him had been certain that he could count on her swift intervention if push came to shove. A wave of dread washed over him, pushed down as quickly as it rose. He didn't have the luxury of fear.

"Okay," Alarion said, more to himself than to Sierra as he skipped out of the path of a haphazard swing by the one-armed fiend. He flourished his blade once, then dropped into a mid-guard, his greatsword held in both hands, the tip angled toward his opponent's eye as the fiend closed in.

He thrust as the brute swiped, his blade sinking into the fiend's palm and holding it at bay long enough for him to cycle into a reverse cut and shove the limb upward. Its severed arm came in from the right, and Alarion ducked beneath it, raking his weapon across the fiend's abdomen, then its ankle as he pivoted further to the right.

Alarion caught the monster's counterattack on the flat of his blade. The sheer force of the impact wrenched something in his shoulder and spiked a damage notification into his peripheral vision. He'd hurt it, but given that total lack of feedback as the fiend came for him again, it was hard to tell which one of them had done more meaningful damage.

Another exchange followed. Then another. Alarion had given up on his hope for a clean win, decisive blow, or a coup de main, even without trickery. For every staggering strike he landed on the fiend, it retaliated in kind. Eventually, one of them would drop. The only problem was who.

At least, that had been the only problem.

A creature as big as the brute necessarily set the tempo of their fight. It had an advantage in both reach and gait, which meant that Alarion had no choice but to follow when it led. If it launched a flurry of blows, it could control him, force him in a direction of its choosing by making the other options dangerous or unpalatable.

So it was that the fiend had, little by little, begun corralling Alarion back toward the pit.

That was a more apt name for it, Alarion had decided, for this was no mere hole, as they had first surmised at a distance. Set slightly off center from the heart of the clearing, the pit was a roughly hewn vertical drop fifteen feet across and at least three times that in depth. He couldn't begin to guess how it had been created, or for what purpose, but none of that mattered.

Not when his back was, almost quite literally, to the pit.

He tried to break out. To force a confrontation. To punish the brute for trying to box him in. None of it worked. Alarion claimed a prize of two fingers in the name of his escape attempt, but eventually he was forced back, the circle ever tightening as the fiend pressed closer. Closing its trap.

The end of their duel did not come in an instant, but over the course of a few panicked moments. Alarion felt the ground slope behind him as he avoided one of the fiend's attacks. He blocked another, and his back leg slipped off the edge, dropping him to one knee. He rolled out from beneath a devastating overhand but had no answer for the kick that finally sent him over the edge.

His stomach lurched as he fell into the pit, its dark bottom rushing up to meet him. But the fiend had over-committed. It had hit him too hard, hard enough that he slammed into the far wall some fifteen feet below its opening. Hard enough that Alarion was able to desperately grab hold of the pit's rough interior and arrest what would have otherwise been a lethal fall.

Dirt and debris rained down from above as the frustrated fiend slashed at the pit's edge to dislodge Alarion from his tenuous handhold. Fortunately, the soil was too loose for the impromptu projectiles to do more than sting Alarion's eyes and put his current peril in full context.

His choice was threefold. To go up, he would need to face the fiend from an impossibly disadvantaged position. It would cut him to ribbons or throw him to the bottom of the pit properly this time. Climbing down seemed the safer option, but he did not know what lay beneath him and was not a particularly good climber besides. If he could hold on, Sierra would come to his rescue, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Pity then, that the brute had a fourth idea.

Another fighter would not have recognized the danger in time. Only someone with a purely one-track mind, a fiend's mind, could have read his opponent's intentions in time to avoid the plummeting mountain of muscle.

The fiend did not care if it won; only that Alarion lost.

If it had to jump into the pit to kill him, so be it.

The starscaped edge of Alarion's rapidly growing greatsword streaked across the pit, embedding itself halfway to the hilt a mere second before its owner made a leap of faith. He had no idea if the weapon would hold his weight, if the hilt would snap, or the soil would give way and send him tumbling into the depths.

His hand caught just below the guard, and the Imperial Greatsword moved within its earthen sheath. Moved, but did not fall free.

Dangling from the hilt of his weapon, Alarion turned to find the fiend in a similar predicament on the opposite side of the pit. Its good arm had caught the wall and arrested its fall slightly below Alarion, but the hooked nails of its misshapen feet were still scrabbling, trying to find purchase. Its red eyes burned back at Alarion, then quickly shifted as its head flicked like a cat measuring the distance before a difficult pounce.

Alarion refused to give it a chance.

He wrapped both hands around the hilt and pulled, lifting himself above the blade. Carefully, he swung a knee up and over until he knelt on the hilt and guard of his magic sword, wondering where this battle had all gone so horribly wrong. Across from him, the fiend had collected itself, presumably without the introspection. It braced to pounce, but for once, Alarion had the edge.

"No, you don't!" Alarion shouted as he braced one leg back against the wall, activated his shifting enchantment, and shoved off with everything he had. The blade shrank just long enough for Alarion to whirl it above his head, then grew just in time for a downward strike that took another hefty chunk off the fiend's wrist before it buried into its skull.

Alarion landed on the brute's shoulder as the beast thrashed in a furious attempt to dislodge him. This proved to be its undoing, as the sudden jerking motion shifted the position of Alarion's blade, sinking its tip in a few more inches.

All at once, the fiend twitched, then grew slack as a puppet with its strings cut. Its clawed hand held it aloft for a moment, but as muscles relaxed, so did its grip. Alarion reached for the wall to save himself, but gravity won out before he could, sending the two tumbling together into darkness.

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