He smelled the old man before he found the cavalry.
Ash — settled ash, the kind that means something burned completely and left behind only the record of having existed. It moved through the battlefield stench of blood and horse and cold iron with the quiet authority of a smell that had been part of someone for so long it had stopped announcing itself. He filed it under anomaly, origin unknown and kept moving.
The valley's outer edge was worse than the mountainside. Up there, the war had been something happening at a distance. Down here it was the weather — the medium through which everything else occurred, the condition rather than the event. Soldiers fought in pairs, in clusters, some just moving through smoke looking for a direction that didn't lead to dying. He moved through them the way water moves through a crowd, the body making decisions he hadn't finished formulating.
He was getting used to that. The gap between intention and execution — the fraction of a second where Anko's training answered before Light's brain arrived. He had stopped fighting it after the third time it saved him. Now he watched it the way you watch a stranger drive a car you're sitting in: attentive, cataloguing, occasionally alarmed.
A spear whistled past his ear — not aimed at him, just aimed at the space he happened to occupy.
Wrong place, wrong time, wrong body. The complete story of my current existence. Still fits in six words.
He ducked behind a siege engine split in half by something he didn't want to think about. The wood was still warm. Still smoking. Whatever had destroyed it had been operating at a scale that made the borrowed katana feel less like a weapon and more like a letter of apology he hadn't been asked to write.
He pressed his back against the ruined wood and breathed.
His hand found the small pouch at his belt without deciding to — not the throwing stars, not the rope, the small one, the separate one. He pressed his thumb against the cloth through the leather. The specific shape of it. Two figures. A tree or a fire. A name he couldn't read.
Not mine. The second half of that thought didn't come.
Then the cavalry found him.
Two riders. Black-and-crimson armour, heavy warhorses in lacquered bronze plate, moving with the coordinated precision of animals trained alongside each other long enough to share instincts. The lead rider carried a naginata — long, the blade layered with blood in geological strata, old and fresh, a record of everyone who had underestimated the reach. The second carried a war bow, already drawn, already aimed, with the patient stillness of someone who had learned that patience was the most efficient form of violence.
Archer holds position. Lancer closes distance. Four seconds, generously estimated.
He moved — sideways, putting the ruined siege engine between him and the archer's line. The arrow hit the wood where his spine had been, the impact carrying through the timber into his palms.
The lancer adjusted. His horse surged forward, rounding the wreckage. The naginata swept low — a harvesting motion, designed to catch runners at the ankles and turn retreat into something permanent.
He jumped. The borrowed body had reflexes he couldn't fully access — the way a word sits at the edge of memory, familiar and unavailable simultaneously. He cleared the blade by inches and landed badly, one knee hitting ice, the katana nearly slipping from numb fingers.
The horse wheeled. Second pass, faster.
Then the ash arrived.
It erupted from between two overturned supply carts where no fire burned — grey and fine, billowing across the rider's path like a curtain being drawn across something that didn't want to be seen. The horse screamed and reared, the lancer fighting for control while the animal tried to escape something its body had classified as wrong before its mind could explain why.
From the ash, a man stepped out.
Old — the kind of old that stops being a number and becomes a texture. Skin like parchment folded and unfolded too many times. A frame that should have been frail but carried itself with the structural certainty of something built to outlast the things built to outlast things. In his hands: an odachi too large for his body, too heavy for his age, held with the casual authority of someone who had stopped thinking about the weapon decades ago and had simply become whatever came after thinking about it.
He didn't look at Light. His eyes tracked the naginata's recovery arc with the patience of something that understood timing the way water understands gravity — not as a choice, but as a condition.
The lancer regained control and charged.
Light had seen combat every night for as long as he could remember — performed by a figure in black whose technique was flawless and whose blade arrived like inevitability given an edge.
This was different.
The figure in black fought with the precision of something that had transcended effort. The old man fought with the precision of something that had endured it. Every movement carried the visible weight of a body that had been doing this for a very long time and knew exactly what each exchange would cost. His left hip favoured slightly. His breath came harder after each block. He was burning through reserves that didn't have much left to burn.
But the technique.
The naginata came down — overhead, a killing stroke with the horse's momentum behind it.
The old man didn't block. He redirected. The odachi's flat caught the shaft six inches below the blade and guided it, changed its vector, turned a vertical death sentence into a diagonal miss that buried the naginata's point in frozen ground.
The rider was still processing the miss when the old man's elbow found the horse's jaw.
The animal lurched sideways. The rider compensated — years of training converting surprise into adjustment — wrenched the naginata free, reversed his grip, thrust.
The old man wasn't there. Two steps, precise, placing himself at the one angle where the naginata's length became its liability. Too close for the blade. Too far for the shaft.
His odachi came up — not a slash, a statement. The edge caught the rider's forearm guard, sheared through lacquer and leather and the ambitions beneath.
The rider screamed. The horse bolted.
Then — the arrow.
The second rider, still there, still patient, waiting for the moment his companion's body was no longer in the line of fire.
The old man heard it. Light saw his shoulders register the sound before he could act on it — recognition arriving in the body a fraction of a second before the mathematics resolved, and the mathematics said the fraction was all there was.
Light threw the katana.
The worst throw in the history of projectile combat — unbalanced, untrained, the blade tumbling end over end with all the aerodynamic elegance of a falling roof tile. The katana's guard clipped the arrow mid-flight, deflected it four degrees, and it passed through the space where the old man's neck had been and buried itself in a dead horse's flank.
The old man turned. His expression wasn't grateful — it was evaluative. The look of someone who has just watched something happen that doesn't fit any available category and is deciding whether to build a new one or simply note the anomaly and continue.
"Anko!" he barked. "Move your ass!"
Anko.
The body answered before Light finished deciding not to. That was the strange thing — not the name, but how easily a shape accepts a name that wasn't made for it, when the original occupant is gone and the shape still needs filling.
What is lost when a name stops belonging to anyone, something thought, from a place that wasn't the marketing brain.
And what is it, when it starts belonging to someone new.
He was unarmed. The old man was already closing distance on the dismounted lancer.
"The bow! Take the damn bow!"
The archer's horse shifted — nervous, the animal sensing the handler's tension before the handler was ready to show it. Light ran toward the horse rather than the rider.
He grabbed the reins. The horse reared — he held on, letting its momentum swing him sideways, putting the animal's bulk between himself and the arrow. The archer tried to adjust, aiming down from the saddle, but the horse was spinning now and precision requires a stable platform.
He pulled. The rein wrapped around his forearm — leverage rather than strength. The horse's head came down. Its balance broke.
The archer chose the saddle over the bow. The bow dropped.
Light caught it. The nocked arrow fell loose, but the quiver was still strapped to the saddle.
The archer drew a short sword — fast, the transition from range to close quarters executed with the fluency of someone who had rehearsed it until the rehearsal disappeared. But he was on a panicking horse, and Light was on the ground, and the geometry didn't favour the man on the horse.
Light slapped the horse's flank with the bow's limb. The animal screamed and bolted, the archer grabbing mane with both hands as the sword became irrelevant.
Horse and rider disappeared into the smoke.
The relative silence that followed had the quality of an intermission — the battle still grinding somewhere beyond the smoke, but in this particular pocket of ice and ash and dead horses, the immediate negotiation was concluded.
The old man cleaned his blade on the dead lancer's cloak with the ritualistic focus of someone performing a task so familiar it had become its own kind of prayer.
"Not bad, kid," he said without looking up. "For a boy who throws a sword like he's never held one."
"I was aiming for the arrow."
"You hit the arrow."
"I was aiming for the archer."
He looked at Light. The evaluative expression deepened into something that wasn't quite approval and wasn't quite suspicion — a middle category he seemed to be constructing for the occasion.
"You're not Ankor."
"Close enough," Light said.
"No." He stood slowly, joints registering the objection. The odachi settled on his shoulder with the ease of long habit. "Ankor was a coward who killed well. You're a fool who kills badly. Different creature entirely."
The words landed and sat there. Light didn't answer. There was nothing to answer with — the assessment was accurate and he didn't have the history to dispute it or the context to confirm it.
"Does it matter?" he asked. "I just saved your life."
"Maybe." The old man scanned the battlefield with the systematic attention of someone who had been counting threats for so long it had become the way he looked at things. "Or maybe you just bought us a few more seconds."
The smoke around them was thickening — not from the battle, from something deeper in the valley. Something burning with a heat that turned snow to steam before it reached the ground.
"More coming," the old man said. His voice carried nothing except information. "Twelve riders, judging by the hoofbeats. Three minutes."
Twelve. Against a tired old man and a fool with a borrowed bow and six arrows.
"Which way?" Light asked.
He pointed toward the ridgeline — a shelf of dark rock jutting from the mountainside above the valley floor, high enough to see but sheltered enough to disappear.
"Up. Always up. The dead stay in the valleys, boy."
He started moving. Didn't wait.
Light followed.
His thumb found the small pouch again as he ran — the cloth through the leather, the specific shape of it, the weight of something carried carefully for a long time by hands that were no longer here to carry it.
Survive.
Just survive.