Chapter 35 – Gratitude

He didn’t think about his ankle. He didn’t think about the odds. He thought about the fact that the person holding his gun had hesitated, had posed, and that the half-second they spent looking impressive was a half-second they weren’t pulling the trigger.

He covered the distance in three strides, his right leg doing the work of two. He dropped his shoulder and drove it into the figure’s midsection, wrapping his arms around their torso and lifting. The impact was jarring—they were lighter than he expected, the body beneath the tablecloth narrow and compact—and his momentum carried them both backward in a stumbling, graceless trajectory.

The figure tried to bring the gun up. Thomas’s left hand found their wrist and slammed it sideways, once, twice, the knuckles cracking against the jagged edge of a splintered table leg. On the second impact, the fingers opened. The revolver spun free, clattering across the debris-strewn floor and vanishing into the shadow beneath a collapsed section of wall.

They hit a pile of overturned tables and went down.

The crash was spectacular—mahogany splintering, a cascade of broken crockery and bent silverware, a tablecloth (the real one, not the figure’s improvised cloak) billowing up like a ghost before settling over them both. They rolled through the wreckage, a tangle of limbs and debris, each fighting for position.

Thomas scrambled upright first. His ankle screamed. He filed it and got his feet under him—left foot forward, right foot back, weight over the hips, chin tucked.

The figure rose from the debris a half-second behind him. They were fast, faster than the ankle would allow him to be. They rolled sideways, found their footing on a section of intact floorboard, and came up in a steady stance.

Thomas threw the first punch.

A straight right, aimed at the center of the mask. The figure slipped it, their head moving a precise two inches to the left, the fist grazing the smooth metal with a sound like a fingernail drawn across porcelain. Their counter came immediately, a short left hook that Thomas caught on his forearm, the impact jolting up to his shoulder.

Strong. Stronger than they should be. The augmentation was real, and it was consistent—every blow carried the dense, heavy-boned authority of a Tier 5 combatant, which made the slender frame delivering them deeply disorienting.

They exchanged. Three hits, four, five—a rapid, percussive sequence of strikes and parries that echoed off the gutted walls like a second firefight. Thomas pressed forward, using his reach advantage, keeping his combinations tight and economical. The figure gave ground, absorbing what they couldn’t slip, their guard adapting with each exchange.

Thomas launched a jab-cross combination, textbook, fast, aimed at splitting the guard. The figure parried the jab with an outside deflection, rolled their shoulder to absorb the cross, and countered with an overhand right that Thomas barely got his elbow up in time to block.

He frowned.

That overhand right. It was his overhand right. Not the angle—the setup. The slight drop of the lead shoulder to bait the guard high, the half-step offline to create the lane, the hip torque that loaded the punch before the arm ever moved. It was D.A.A. technique, drilled into Thomas’s bones by his Instructor over three years of dawn sessions on the heavy bag.

He disengaged, resetting his guard, and watched.

The figure settled into their stance. It was subtle, the kind of thing only someone intimately familiar with the original would catch. The guard was Thomas’s guard. The footwork was Thomas’s footwork. Not a mirror, not a parrot repeating syllables—they were fighting in his language. Using his vocabulary, his grammar, his preferred sentence structure, but rearranging the words to suit their own body.

They’ve been studying me since the brawl started, Thomas realized. The overhand, the chopping hook, the weight loading—all pulled from the last two minutes. No human eye was that efficient.

Artifact. Has to be. Kid’s carrying around an entire armory.

Thomas adjusted.

He stopped attacking. He planted his feet, dropped into his standard guard, left foot forward, right foot back, weight shifted off the damaged ankle, and waited.

The figure read the stance. He watched them settle into it, the same asymmetric weight distribution, the same bias toward the rear leg, the same slight cant of the hips that Thomas used to protect the left side. They wore it well. They wore it like someone who had been handed a tailored coat and found that it fit.

But it was his coat. Cut for his injuries.

The figure’s left leg was carrying the lighter load, compensating for a torn ligament that didn’t exist in their body. On Thomas, the stance was a necessity. On two healthy ankles, it was an invitation.

Thomas threw a lazy jab. Slow, arm-only, dead on arrival. The figure slipped it, already loading their counter.

He swept the left leg.

It was not a clean technique. It was a brawler’s sweep, his right shin hooking behind the figure’s unburdened left ankle and ripping forward with the full torque of his hip. The leg came out from under them like a tablecloth yanked off a set dinner.

The figure’s left foot came off the floor. Their balance broke. They twisted, trying to recover, but Thomas was already on them, his hand catching the front of the tablecloth cloak and hauling downward as the figure’s center of gravity betrayed them.

They hit the floor hard. Thomas followed them down, driving a knee toward the sternum, trying to pin. The figure rolled, fast, fluid, desperate, and scrambled sideways on their hands and knees through a scatter of broken glass. Thomas grabbed for the ankle. His fingers closed on the hem of the tablecloth. It tore free, leaving a fistful of white linen in his grip and nothing else.

The figure surged to their feet three paces away. Their breathing was audible now, quick, controlled, but elevated. The tablecloth was gone, stripped away by the scramble, and the dark clothing beneath was visible. A dark dress, high-collared and fitted at the waist, a silhouette that confirmed what Thomas’s grip had already told him. Slender. Young..

“You’re not bad, kid,” Thomas said, straightening up. He was breathing hard himself, his ankle pulsing with a deep, structural throb that Florence’s healing was barely keeping at bay. He wiped blood from his split lip with the back of his hand. “Quick, strong, decent instincts. But you’re running out of tricks, and I’ve got fifty pounds on you. So how about we— “

He stopped.

Something had changed.

It was not a sound, not a movement. It was a shift in quality—a subtle but unmistakable alteration in the way the figure held themselves, as though someone had reached inside their body and adjusted the tension of every wire simultaneously. The guard dropped two inches. The shoulders rolled backward, settling into a position that was wider, looser, almost indolent. The chin came up. The feet repositioned, not the squared, weight-forward stance that he was familiar with, but something older. Something that carried the easy, rolling arrogance of a style built for exhibition as much as execution.

Thomas’s eyes narrowed.

The figure’s left hand came up, open-palmed, hovering at chest height. The right dropped low, almost to the hip, the fingers curled loosely. The weight shifted to the balls of the feet, and the whole posture acquired a rolling, almost musical rhythm—a boxer’s sway, but aristocratic. Refined. The kind of footwork you learned from private tutors in private gymnasiums, with padded floors and Kingsbury rules embroidered on the wall.

The figure moved first.

The jab came from an angle Thomas didn’t expect, low, rising, targeting the solar plexus rather than the face. He dropped his guard to block and the right hand whipped over the top in a looping overhand that caught him on the temple. The impact rang his skull like a bell, bright and sharp, and before he could reset, a short uppercut drove into the gap beneath his ribs, folding him forward.

Thomas backpedaled. The figure pursued, not with the cautious, probing advances of their earlier exchanges but with a predatory, rolling pressure that ate up the ground between them. The combinations were wild but devastatingly precise, each blow arriving from an unexpected angle, the rhythm syncopated and deceptive, mixing feints with genuine strikes in patterns that Thomas’s trained instincts kept misreading. He would commit to a parry and find the blow had been a phantom; he would dismiss a feint and eat a hook that turned his vision white.

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Whoever they’re mimicking is a lunatic, Thomas thought, catching a left hook on his forearm and eating the follow-up body shot that the hook had been screening. A sophisticated lunatic. But a lunatic.

He was giving ground. He knew it. The shift in the figure’s style had wrong-footed him, and the combination of his compromised ankle and the sheer unpredictability of the new approach was costing him positioning. A liver shot drove him sideways. A quick one-two forced him to shell up, and the figure used the opening to crack a hard right across his guard that split the skin above his eyebrow.

But a Tier 5 was a Tier 5, and his opponent was merely a pretender.

Thomas set his jaw, planted his good foot, and stopped retreating.

The figure’s next combination, a feinting jab into a rear uppercut, met the wall of Thomas’s forearms and went nowhere. The uppercut connected, but Thomas absorbed it, the impact spreading through fifty pounds of muscle and bone and reinforced leather. It hurt. It was not enough.

He fired back. A straight right that the figure swayed away from, followed by a left hook that they didn’t. The blow caught them on the side of the head, just above the ear, and Thomas felt the impact travel through his knuckles, solid, crunching, the kind of hit that rearranged priorities. The figure staggered sideways, their rhythm broken for the first time.

Thomas didn’t let them recover. He pressed forward with the methodical, grinding pressure of a man who understood that attrition was his ally. He threw a body shot that the figure barely checked, followed by a clinch, his arms locking around their torso, pinning the elbows, using his weight to smother the lateral movement that made the new style dangerous. The figure squirmed, throwing short punches to his ribs that landed with diminishing force, but Thomas’s mass and leverage were crushing the space they needed to operate.

He threw them.

It was not elegant. It was a wrestler’s hip toss, crude, powerful, the kind of technique that worked because physics didn’t care about style. The figure went airborne for a brief, graceless moment, then crashed onto their back across a pile of shattered crockery, the debris scattering under the impact.

Thomas was on them before they could rise. His knee came down on their chest, his hands finding their wrists, pinning them to the rubble-strewn floor with the practiced efficiency of a man who had made a thousand arrests and knew exactly how to make a body stop moving.

“Gotcha.”

The word was quiet, almost gentle, undercut by the ragged edge of his breathing.

The figure was not gentle. They thrashed beneath him, a wild, convulsive struggle that bucked and twisted with a ferocity that made the pinned wrists burn in his grip. Heat bloomed again under his palms, that same Tier 6 pyromancy signature flaring in the tissue, the lattice forming and collapsing and forming again as Thomas snuffed each attempt before it could manifest. It was futile, and they both knew it. The mana pooled and died, pooled and died, a candle being lit and blown out in the same breath.

“Stop,” Thomas said, leaning his weight down. “It’s over. I’m not going to hurt you. But you need to— “

“Thomas, please stop.”