The Extra's Rise

Arthur stood inside the Pond's fading calm. He drew in a steady breath and reached for the miracle he had rebuilt twice already.

The Wings of Eclipse unfolded.

Once, they were Purelight—radiance that cut and healed together. Later, he had threaded Deepdark through them so they could fold light as well as cast it. Now he changed the base material. Grey gathered—not as color, but as refusal to be color—and the wings bloomed from his back like two clean, flat planes of idea. They were not feathers. They were pages. They bent adjacency in a six-meter arc and made far feel near.

He flexed them.

The world no longer demanded that point A be next to point B for him. He could step from one to the other if the page said they touched.

One beat later he surfaced at Tiamat's flank with a cut that started behind the thought of "guard" and ended at the scale itself. Lucent Harmony filled the line with elemental truth; Mythweaver wrote the predicate; Sword Unity made the idea into edge.

The thin red thread on her wrist deepened by a shade.

'Good.'

Tiamat's eyebrows rose, just a fraction. On her, that was surprise.

"Well," she said, soft. "Hello, wings."

Arthur pressed. The Grey pages let him chain positions that shouldn't connect. Spectral Sword stopped being "illusions" and instead became a menu of real Arthurs the eye could choose from; whichever one you answered, his real edge greeted you there. Tempest Dance kept his feet exact. Stellar Cascade loaded the field again, this time from odd angles. God Flash threaded through the gaps with clean, bright speed. Hollow Eclipse dropped in as the hammer when the field handed him a nail.

For the first time, Tiamat's stance changed with care.

Luna breathed out at the edge of the cavern, eyes wide, hands tight at her chest. She didn't speak. The bond hummed steady and warm.

Arthur marked the opening. The field was right. The drain would be heavy, but the line was clean.

'Now.'

He raised his sword.

World's Edge came alive—the most powerful cut he owned, born of Grey, meant to divide false from true. The ring of it formed, thin and bright. It did not trap Tiamat; it framed a truth: inside this line, the cut will reach.

He brought it down.

The cavern did not shatter. It learned. Light bled to the sides as if making room. The cut passed through dragon law, through scale, through the small red thread he had already drawn—

—and halted a hair's breadth before it counted.

Tiamat's right hand was there, palm up, relaxed. She had not blocked the edge. She had told the world, very gently, to hold.

Arthur let the follow-through end without fighting it. He did not force the result. He did not have it to force.

Tiamat looked at the Grey wings, at the ring still fading from World's Edge, and then met his eyes.

"You learn quickly," she said. "And now you will learn what stands in front of you."

Her aura changed.

It did not grow louder. It grew cleaner. The crystal ribs of the lair brightened as lines straightened. Constants stopped wobbling. Probabilities held still. The Crown of Twilight above Arthur's brow rang clearer, then steadied under a gentle weight.

'She's using more power.'

It felt like ten parts out of a hundred. No declaration. No drama. Just the world deciding to be exact.

Arthur's Grey wings trembled as their pages met a smoother surface than they were built for. They still worked. They just bit less deep. Mythweaver still wrote notes; the page beneath had turned from paper to glass.

Tiamat moved.

Arthur tried to meet her with God Flash speed. Absolute did not fail him, but his target no longer left gaps for Absolute to bite. Her knuckle kissed his sternum. His chest drank the death cleanly and handed it back as heat to his muscles. He rotated with the strike, snapped a zero-inch punch that unpacked a slice inside the breath—found her scale a millimeter farther than the world had reported.

Her tail drew a line in air. That line turned into the only safe place his left foot could land if he wanted to stay upright. He took it—he very much wanted to stay upright—and she was there, palm hovering a whisper from his cheek. His inner ear believed it had been struck. He corrected, laughing under his breath despite the ache blooming through his ribs.

She let him ride the edge of options for five more exchanges. It was a kindness and a lesson. Then she closed the book.

Her fingertip touched the empty air above his heart. The Crown of Twilight tuned in answer. His arts lined up—Spectral Sword, Tempest Dance, the CQC string, God Flash and its forms, Hollow Eclipse, Stellar Cascade, Pond of Tranquility, World's Edge—perfect, filed, available, and for one short moment entirely hers to read.

Arthur set the tip of his blade to the floor. The Pond rose fast—his best defense, a calm ring that erased incoming force. Tiamat stepped across the boundary as if it were a warm breeze. The lake did what it promised within its range; she simply did not give it a chance to matter.

He tried to load another Stellar Cascade. She changed the ceiling on how much energy the room would hold for him and the Cascade shrank to a shower. He tried to force a Hollow Eclipse. She twined her wrist through his guard and the power bled away before it formed. He flashed—Purelight clean and sharp—and met a closed door that had not been there a breath ago. He adjusted to hit the hinge instead and found the hinge had never been real.

Her thumb rested gently on his sternum.

"Enough," Tiamat said, soft and final.

The Grey above his brow rang once and settled. The Necropolis choir folded their song back into bone. The Cenotaph Engines spun down. Erebus inclined his head once, unreadable, then stepped back into the quiet corner.

Arthur held her gaze and let his breath even out. His chest ached where the Meridian had done its work. The small red thread on her wrist—his best 'cut'—was still there, thin as hair.

'So that's ten percent,' he thought, not in despair, but with a smile that surprised even him. 'Good. That means I can grow into this.'

Tiamat's eyes flicked to his wings again. "Those," she said, nodding at the Grey pages, "are good work. Surprising, even."

He grinned, winced, and then grinned more. "Noted."

Her smile tilted to something more predatory. "Again."

Arthur rolled his shoulders. The Crown of Twilight hummed like a tuned blade. The Wings of Eclipse flexed once, steady now even against the cleaner world she held around them. He set the tip of his sword down, let the Pond bloom—and Tiamat's pupils narrowed the way a cat's do when the game turns to hunt.

She moved.

It wasn't louder than before. It was sharper. The moment between the Pond's first ripple and its full set is a sliver most opponents never find. She stepped through that sliver as if it had been marked on the floor.

Arthur reacted on reflex—God Flash press, a short Stellar Cascade to load the angles, Hollow Eclipse coiled as hammer—only to meet a palm that seemed to arrive from the breath after this one. Her knuckle kissed his jaw with perfect economy; his balance broke by a hair. A second touch like a soft drumbeat landed over his solar plexus. The Phylactery Meridian didn't trigger—nothing fatal had been asked of it. His lungs forgot how to draw air for a heartbeat too long.

'Ah,' he thought as the Grey pages stuttered and folded, the world tilting to black at the edges. 'Ten percent really is—'

Everything went dark.

He didn't hit the floor. Tiamat caught him under one arm, power snapping down to a whisper as fast as it had risen. The clean pressure in the lair eased. The constants let themselves wobble again.

"Too far," she murmured, chiding herself more than anyone else. "I got excited."

Luna was already there, eyes wide, hands hovering. "Arthur—"

"He's fine," Tiamat said, gentling his head with one hand. A warm pulse moved through her palm, smoothing the shock, knitting what the two taps had rattled loose. "Non-lethal, but my combat mode is a bad habit."

Luna swallowed, then nodded, trusting despite the fear in her eyes.

Tiamat glanced at the faint red line on her wrist and huffed a soft laugh. "He drew on me. That is not nothing."