The Extra's Rise

The blossoms that touch my cheek are not black after all. Up close they are Grey—petals the color of refusal. They do not float. They choose. They cross the air as if distance is a suggestion and land with a soft sting that makes the lair sing like glass.

Then they come in a wave.

Grey plum blossoms burst outward from Arthur in a slow spiral that is not slow at all. The room fills with a light mist that smells faintly of rain on stone. Petals drift, then turn sharp in the same breath, tilting edge-on as they pass. Where they cut, light frays a hair.

I know this pattern. It has walked across battlefields I remember. Mount Hua's Violet Mist Divine Art—Grade 6. A gentle art when done by the book, a storm when held by a hand that means it. But the color is wrong.

He has poured Grey into it.

'You little thief,' I think, and I am pleased. 'Good choice.'

Arthur's Crown of Twilight steadies above his brow. The Grey around him is not thin anymore. It stacks, it breathes. His new rank settles in my lair like a second heartbeat.

Mid Radiant.

The change is simple to describe and hard to fake: he can feed the Grey faster now, and he can decide with it instead of begging it. The pages of his Wings flex once, deeper, thicker, like paper switched for hammered leaf. Valeria arcs along his arm as liquid armor and then forms a clean blade without a seam. Erebus's presence tucks itself close—Domain held back, engines quiet—because the room belongs to someone else for the next few breaths, and the Lich King has good manners when awe walks by.

Blossoms reach me.

I step into them without blinking. They are not fire. They are not knives. They are choices written small. The first brush kisses my cheekbone; the second skates my jaw; the third turns its face to me and tries to become a seal on my wrist. I roll my wrist and the petal slides off with a soft hiss. Pretty. Hungry.

Arthur moves.

No shout. No flaring aura. He vanishes and appears a half-step to my right—the clean, bright snap of God Flash. Pure speed in Purelight, but now the mist hides the frame he deletes. His after-image doesn't lag; it blends. Valeria's edge comes for my shoulder in a cut that begins inside the falling blossoms and arrives covered in them, like rain wrapping a line.

I meet the cut with a turned palm. The edge stops. His arm doesn't. He lets the stop turn into a pivot and steps through the space where my hip would be if I were lazy. He's not guessing anymore. He's reading.

The blossoms answer his step. A dozen tilt and move, not random—guided. Grey runs along their veins like ink pulled by capillary force. They find angles on my forearms and throat as if they have seen this exchange before. This is Mount Hua's art, yes, but in Mount Hua the flowers distract; here they aim.

He loads a soft Stellar Cascade inside the mist—small, star-bright cuts that don't chase me, they wait for me. He puts three at my wrist bones and one behind my heel. They don't hurt. They ask the room to remember them when my hand passes. I feel the tug and smile. He is finally using barrage to change rhythm, not just to fill space.

"Hoh," I say, because I allow myself that much sound. "Pretty."

Arthur does not answer. Good. He is busy.

He plants Valeria's tip for a breath. Pond of Tranquility blooms low and clear around his feet. A ring of calm that eats incoming force within reach of the blade. He has learned to set it and step off it in the same motion—no leaning, no hiding. I test it with a simple shove of air. The shove becomes warm water and rolls away. He is already gone, using the Pond as a breath and not a house.

The Grey blossoms swarm again.

This time they don't drift. They line up in strings like beadwork and sweep in from behind me, where my tail makes angles nobody else sees. They aren't trying to cut scale. They're trying to catch timing. I turn my tail a hair and three strings miss. The fourth nicks the place where power starts in a dragon's shoulder. It doesn't hurt. It does make me admit he aimed well.

He keeps pressing. I can feel it in the floor—the way his weight starts living under him instead of falling to the edges. He chains Arc Hook Spiral into Ground Reversal Stomp and does not say their names with his body. He just does them. The stomp flips the pull of the room for a breath; the blossoms slide with it and become a low curtain on my shin. He tries to make me lift my foot. I do not. He does not pout. He flows into a Phantom Step Knee that appears from a dead angle; I sway and hear the wind of it whistle my coat. Good noise.

He disappears again. God Flash: Absolute—waste shaved clean—into my shadow; Singularity stitches the straightest line to my throat. I turn my head a finger-width and let the line pass in front of my eyes. It cuts a blossom in two. The two halves keep flying like broken moons.

He bleeds from the lip where I touched him earlier, and now he smiles with it. The Grey likes that. It gets brighter, not larger—denser. The Crown above him hums like a sword being tuned. The pages of his Wings flare once, and the room folds an inch.

I step forward into him and throw a straight fist at his chest from a distance that should be too close to draw real power. He reads it. He accepts it. He brings Valeria up not to block, but to meet me, and his star-cuts at my wrist delay my hand a breath—and that breath is the one he uses for a Zero-Inch Punch hidden inside his guard.

It lands. It does not hurt me. It tells me he found the door.

'There you are,' I think, teeth showing now. 'Hello, mid Radiant.'

The blossoms thicken.

The mist turns into veils. I've seen this trick—the way Mount Hua hides a blade inside fall of flower. But Arthur uses Grey, and Grey is not perfume. It is sentence. The veils aren't hiding his blade. They are carrying it.

He steps through two veils—pages of refusal—then appears at my back without the world drawing the line in between. Wings of Eclipse flex and let him choose where adjacent lives. Valeria bites for the place just under my left shoulder blade. I move the scale. He doesn't fight the miss. He uses the momentum to draw a clean half-moon across my waist and then lets the blade fall for my ankle as if he's known me for a century.

I answer in simple ways because simple makes truth clear. A small turn of the hip. A short lift of the foot. A palm that talks to his forearm like two old friends. He reads them all.

He pushes harder.