Luc ran.
The creature was already descending — wings folded, neck extended, locked onto the woman at the end of the alley. Too fast. He saw it in the first half-second. No angle, no time, no way to intercept it cleanly.
So he didn't try.
He lowered his shoulder and hit them both.
All three went down hard — his shoulder into the woman's side, the child crushed briefly between them, the alley floor coming up fast. The creature tore through the space they'd occupied a heartbeat ago. Stone cracked behind them. Dust and chips of masonry scattered across the ground.
The woman made a sound when they hit — sharp, involuntary, the specific sound of an injury being reintroduced to itself. Her arm buckled. She'd been holding it pressed against her side and the fall had moved it and she couldn't stop the noise that came out.
Luc pushed himself up first.
"Run," he said.
She looked at him — one second, just one, the assessment of a person deciding whether to trust a stranger in an alley. Then she grabbed the child and moved, one arm still clutched to her side, fast enough.
He turned around.
The creature had pulled up from its missed dive and was hovering now — low, maybe four meters off the ground, wings beating in short controlled bursts that kept it stationary. Its eyes had found him.
Not hunger in them. Something past that.
Anger.
Good, he thought. Stay with me.
It moved.
Fast — faster than the Veld-hound, faster than anything he'd seen yet, the speed of something that had never needed to develop patience. He stepped right and the air snapped where his head had been. He swung.
Too wide. Too slow. The blade cut nothing.
The wing caught him on the backswing.
It wasn't the talons — just the leading edge of the wing, hard as a struck beam, and it hit him across the chest and sent him sideways into the alley wall. He hit shoulder-first, the impact jarring up through his collarbone, and for a moment his lungs simply declined to work.
He didn't stay down.
Couldn't.
He forced himself back up, one hand against the wall, the other still somehow holding the sword. His chest burned. The leather vest had taken some of it — more than the hoodie would have. He made a note about the smith and kept moving.
The creature had landed at the alley entrance. Blocking it. Wings half-spread, head low, and that neck moving in the slow independent way that meant it was tracking.
He looked at the alley behind him.
Narrow. Maybe a meter and a half wide. No room for wing angles, no room for the banking cuts it had been using out in the open. Just straight lines and close walls.
Better than open ground.
He turned and ran deeper in.
The creature followed immediately. Of course it did — he was the thing that had hit it, and things like this didn't let that go. The wing beats were short and awkward in the confined space, the walls forcing it into a straight pursuit it wasn't built for.
He hit the far end of the alley, turned, raised the sword, and waited.
His wrist was shaking. He couldn't tell if it was the grip or his hands.
It came straight at him.
Faster than before, the confined space compressing everything — distance, time, the window of any decision he might make. He adjusted his angle —
Too late.
The impact caught him across the side, talons raking across the leather vest, and he felt two of them get through — a bright lateral pain across his ribs that he immediately pushed into a box and closed. His arm moved anyway. Muscle memory of nothing, instinct of nothing, just the arm going where the arm went.
The blade went in.
Not clean. Not deep. Somewhere in the neck where the neck met the shoulder, and the angle was wrong and his grip was still off-balance and none of it mattered because it was in.
They both went down.
He hit the ground hard, the sword still in his hand, the creature on top of him and thrashing — the wings useless in the alley width, the talons scraping stone, the neck twisting trying to reach him while making a noise that made others wished they didn't had the capabilities to hear.
He didn't think. He pulled the blade free and drove it back down. Once. The creature convulsed. Again. Again — each time less certain than the last, less technique and more desperation, more the simple insistence of someone who was not going to stop until it did.
And finally, it stopped.
The alley went quiet.
Luc lay under it for a moment, breathing. Then he pushed the body off him, which took more effort than he wanted to admit, and sat up against the wall.
The sword was still in his hand. He looked at it. Then at the creature. Then at the blood on the leather vest that he was fairly sure was mostly not his.
Fairly sure.
His ribs argued the point.
He hadn't been in control of that fight. Not once. From the first swing to the last, he'd been reacting — to its speed, to its angle, to its anger. The alley had done more work than he had. If it had been open ground, he'd be dead.
He sat with that for a moment. Let it be true without flinching from it.
His hand was still shaking. When he tried to close his grip fully on the pommel, something in the fingers wouldn't commit — a deep muscular tremor that had nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with what the body remembered.
He didn't fight it. Just noted it.
Then the System spoke.
Kill registered.
Target eliminated.
Reward: +1 stat point.
A pause. Longer than usual.
Execution quality: poor.
Luc exhaled slowly.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Working on it."
He put one hand on the wall and stood up.