Chapter 282: The Duel, Part 3
A power sword carried one absolute property: anything it touched, it cut. Armour met a disruptor field the way butter met a hot blade. Both fighters knew it. One clean hit and the fight was over.
Both were operating at the absolute edge of their focus, exchanging blows so fast the crowd watching on screens across the Hive could barely register individual strikes. Fourteen exchanges in five seconds, each one throwing another burst of sparks into the air.
Kian drove a heavy overhead cut downward with both hands. The force behind it was enough that the Aeldari warrior, down to one arm, chose not to block it. She stepped back and let it sail past.
He recovered, rolled a quick flourish to reset his grip, and studied her across the gap. That exchange had told him something useful.
Her strength was below his.
His current stats, combat-boosted with every compound he'd brought: Strength 63, Endurance 63, Focus 70. Every attribute maxed. She was a duellist built for speed, not raw power, and he estimated her strength ran three to five points below his. Her speed was likely five to ten points above his, but that gap had narrowed considerably given her condition: a month of continuous fighting, two days of sprinting three hundred kilometres, and a missing arm.
The pressure he was feeling was real, but manageable.
Both fighters had stepped back to reset. He watched her chest rising and falling, breathing harder than she should have been. He activated his helmet's internal vox.
"Hydration."
A drinking tube extended from the inner lining. He clamped it between his teeth and pulled down a full bottle of energy drink in a few swallows. His stamina bar climbed back to full.
He charged.
The Aeldari warrior blinked. This human didn't need to recover at all.
She was running on fumes. Days of combat, almost no sleep, the long approach march, and now this. Her endurance reserves were nearly empty. Every exchange required a withdrawal period to rebuild. He wasn't giving her one.
He understood what he was looking at. She needed rest and he had a bottomless supply of energy drinks. The arithmetic was simple: keep pressing, deny her any recovery time, run her into the ground.
She had no choice but to meet him. Their blades clashed again, disruptor fields screaming against each other, sparks cascading off both of them.
He drove forward with both hands on the grip, cutting fast and relentlessly. She was on the back foot now, blocking with one arm, and her blocks were barely holding. His force kept compressing her guard. Three times his cuts came close enough that only precise deflection, redirecting his momentum rather than stopping it, kept his blade from finding her body.
Two minutes of sustained exchange. Her breathing became ragged. He showed no sign of slowing.
She seized a gap: during his windup on a heavy swing, she drove a straight thrust at his throat.
He pulled back hard to block.
It was a feint. She used his retreat to disengage, bounding sideways and creating fifty metres of distance in a single movement.
He cursed himself, downed another energy drink, and went after her.
She ran.
Not panicked running, tactical running, putting distance between them, giving herself space to breathe. For a being of her physiological calibre, even movement at a moderate pace allowed partial recovery. If he let her circle long enough, she'd rebuild enough endurance to be dangerous again.
He pressed the pursuit. She was faster than him in a straight line and she knew it, weaving through the terrain and staying just out of reach.
Frustrated, he drew his bolt pistol and fired at her back.
She'd anticipated it. She jinked left and right as she ran, reading his movements. He was firing on the move with poor stability, and all four shots hit empty ground.
He stopped.
She heard the pursuit end and turned around.
Kian was standing still, bolt pistol raised, muzzle pressed against a soul stone hanging from a chain in his other hand.
He watched her face him.
He smiled and pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flare swallowed the stone. It disintegrated.
The Aeldari warrior felt it happen in the same instant, a psychic awareness of a soul being seized before it had spent a single moment free. Torn straight from the shattered stone into the Warp, into the hands of something that had been waiting.
Slaanesh had the soul.
What awaited it was endless.
She screamed.
The sound came out of her as something raw and beyond language, and she was already moving, closing the distance toward him with everything she had left.
He dropped the pistol, gripped his sword in both hands, and ran to meet her.
"There it is! Stop running and fight! Fight until one of us is done!"
They collided again. Blades moving like wind, disruptor fields throwing cascading detonations with each contact.
She was burning everything she had left. Three blisteringly fast cuts, the kind that had been ending fights for centuries. He caught all three, straining, taking the impacts through his arms and into his chest.
Then it was his turn.
Left cut, right cut, high diagonal, low diagonal, centre thrust.
Each swing carried the full output of a body built through four months of brutal conditioning, every muscle driving force through his arms and into the grip. The impacts staggered her, her guard buckling under the weight of successive blows.
On one exchange her block deformed under the pressure. His blade pushed through the deflection and caught her shoulder, the disruptor field scoring a blackened cut through the wraithbone armour. Blood sprayed from the wound. She dropped her centre of gravity just fast enough to keep from being split down to the waist.
She was nearly finished. She knew it.
She had one option left. If she didn't use it now, she wasn't going to get another chance.
She ducked under his next horizontal sweep and dropped into a crouch, her back low, her helmet tilting upward directly toward his chest and torso.
Psychic energy gathered inside the war mask, dense and pressurised.
Then the external vox array on her helmet discharged it all at once.
A shriek tore through the air, high-pitched and focused, sharp enough to split eardrums at close range.
"AAAAHHH!"
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