The two of them circled like predators who had learned the same lessons in different tongues bone against blade, discipline against abyss. Smoke and ash spun between their feet; the ruin of the village rang with the percussion of combat.

Juno planted his boots and barked, voice raw through the wind. "What happened to Master Vince?!"

Alaric laughed, no mirth, only a brittle edge. He slapped the open wound on his shoulder, the scar a pale crescent against burned flesh. "That old man? Beats me, that's what I'm asking for. We're looking for him."

"Looking? What for?" Juno demanded, every syllable a hammer.

Alaric's eyes glittered gold. "To kill him. To have our revenge. He almost killed us." He leaned in as if confession could sharpen the blade. "I will never forget what he did."

Juno's jaw tightened. "It was your fault that you became like that anyway."

The golden-eyed man's grin didn't falter. "Well… not gonna lie, it is our fault. But it doesn't matter—I'm still gonna kill him."

"Then I'll stop you myself!" Juno roared, and with that challenge he launched.

He moved like a coiled machine Gate Five burning beneath skin, every tendon and tendon gate singing a single note: strike, survive, hold. Voidborn tore at him in waves and he cleaved through them with raw weight; his fist was a falling tree, his elbows hammers driving the world away from the villagers.

Alaric melted into shadow, the darkness swallowing the space between strikes. He called it out in a soft, terrible tone: "Echo Art — Veil of the Abyss."

The air around him folded. Shadows pooled at his boots and ran like ink, and for a breath the battlefield lost track of where he was. Voidborn that charged his direction vanished as if consumed by a hole in the world.

Juno bristled at the sound of the word. "Echo Art? Not Void Art…" he spat, disbelief and anger mixing.

Selene, watching from the rim, cocked her head. "You're doing it, huh, brother?" Her voice was small, like the whisper of a thing learned in sleep. There was an edge equal parts curiosity and pity.

Alaric's presence wavered then reformed like a mirage; he stepped through Juno's guard with a blade-slick whisper and slashed at his ribs. Pain flared white-hot where the edge bit, but Juno's Iron Nerve swallowed the howl and turned it into fuel.

"You talk too much," Juno ground out, and answered with motion: a Tendon Coil, a Bone Gate strike, the sound of impact like a distant drum. He felt the Gate's toll numbness clawing at his fingertips, the cold aftertaste of pushed limits but the pulse of Vince's name was a weight that would not allow him to stop.

Alaric staggered back after a heavy shoulder blow; a sliver of blood flashed at the corner of his mouth. When he spat it out he laughed sharp, dangerous. "So stubborn. So righteous. You have a good heart, Taishin."

Juno's voice dropped, close and without flair. "That heart's got to learn to stop running toward every ghost."

Alaric's jaw tightened. "You wouldn't understand—"

Juno moved like a storm. He slammed a palm into the ground and the earth answered, bone-shock ripple that threw a pack of voidborn off balance. He used the moment to close, fists a blur, each strike measured to shatter not just flesh but the pattern of the Veil. Each hit snapped a thread of Alaric's shadow-mist; at the edges, the Veil frayed.

Selene hissed, slinging another siphon-tendril thin, needle-like shadows that sought the gaps beneath Juno's ribs. The tendrils skittered and found purchase; pain bloomed, hot and dangerous, but Juno twisted through it, using her own pull as leverage Taishin pivot, tendon snap, he madethe dark strike into his advantage and flung Selene aside.

"You see?" Alaric gasped after a brutal counter. "You fight well. Your master made a good student."

Juno's breath was a furnace. "I'll be the one to finish this. I don't care whose fault it was."

They traded strikes until the air tasted like metal. Each blow left imprints in the soil; each exchange carved a small truth into the night. Around them the village fought on villagers and Taishin alike driving back the lesser shadows Robi and the captains pinned in a controlled, bone-deep defense. Khael's wind tore lanes through the swarm; Ceyla's lightning finished what Juno and the villagers opened.

At one point, Alaric drove his blade up under Juno's guard in a clean line aimed for the heart. For a second everything froze, a breath like an oath. Juno took it on his forearm, the blade scoring skin and tendon. He bared his teeth and answered with a palm to Alaric's sternum so fierce the twin staggered, shadows peeling from his form like smoke from wet cloth.

Alaric staggered, eyes briefly clear of the Abyss. "You—" He coughed. "You're different."

Juno's hand shook as blood ran between his fingers where the blade had nicked him. "So are you," he said simply. "You're not the monster you think you are."

Alaric's face hardened into that familiar mixture of hunger and hurt. "Perhaps. But we will have our ending."

"Not today," Juno replied, and pushed forward again Gate five burning, discipline and fury braided into a single hammer blow that sent Alaric crashing into a ring of broken soil and spent voidborn.

Selene, rising, met Khael's burning gaze across the field. The Dragon Knight's aura was a promise and a threat, all at once, he would not let Vince become a corpse of forgotten names. Selene's shadow fingers clawed at the air, but she hesitated; faintly, something in her eyes faltered memory, pain, doubt.

Alaric coughed, spitting blood, and looked up at Juno with a strange expression that might have been respect or simple, raw recognition of a shared cost. "We'll see you again, Taishin. This isn't over."

Juno's chest heaved; his Gate sang like a wound. "Then be ready. I'll be waiting."

Around them, the tide held. Villagers shoveled and formed and breathed; Khael stalked the twin, measuring and waiting; Robi roared and held the line like iron. The twins melted into the black trees and were gone ghosts slipping through that night's seam leaving behind the marks of their passage and a promise that the hunt was not finished.

Juno sank to one knee, the aftershocks of the Gate rolling through his limbs. He grabbed his wound, breathed hard, and looked up at Khael.

"Master Vince," he said, voice cracked but steady, "I'll find him. I'll bring him home."

Khael crouched beside him, red scales dimming to a steady glow. He laid a hand on Juno's shoulder not to stop him, but to anchor him. "We will," he said. "Together."

For a long moment the ruined plain was only the sound of breathing and the whisper of wind. Then, slowly, the villagers rose and against fear and ash began to help the wounded. The twins' shadows lingered in the trees like a stain; the hunt had only widened its map.

To be continue

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