A wall of shields rolled in to crush him. He went low, dagger biting sparks off the floor as he slid. A Knight stomped for his chest. He hooked the ankle with the dagger's guard, twisted hard, and toppled it. Before it hit stone he was upright again, palm to its knee seam. A downward snap of his wrist blew the joint out from within. He heaved the hollow limb into the next rank. It clipped a sword arm, opening a sliver, and that was enough. A straight thrust of pure mana, no chant and no flourish, threaded the gap and unwove the center Knight from inside his cuirass.

The squad tried to adapt. Their footwork recalibrated. Thrusts came in staggered timings to break his counters. Blades varied height and angles. Shields stopped ramming and began cutting.

Xavier laughed under his breath and changed with them.

He let the dagger go quiet, using it only where metal met metal. All killing went to the other hand. He painted the world in lines only he could see: seams, hinges, slip planes where plates overlapped. Then he hunted the strings, those taut white threads of condensed control that pulsed faintly inside every gap.

He did not need wide beams now. He sharpened the output to hair-thin filaments, using short taps instead of blows. Flick and cut. Tap and sever. Kiss and unmake. Knights fell in his wake like wheat under a scythe they could not see.

The chamber answered with heavier units. Tower shields. Halberds inscribed with suppression glyphs that spat static as they chopped. For a moment, the air thickened. Their field dampened mana output, enough to matter. A halberd hissed down for his skull, the glyphs crawling across the metal like frost.

He stepped in rather than out. The haft met his forearm. He rolled it across the ridge of bone, bled its bite into a spin, and drove his knee into the bearer's inner thigh. The halberd dropped. He caught it by the head and shoved the butt through a second Knight's visor with a wooden crack. He let go and swam forward under a third's guard, shoulder to breastplate, and his palm found the narrow seam beneath the chest.

"Pulse."

The Knight convulsed from the inside, the shock snapping its threads at once. It fell into him. He let it, used the collapse to ride into a low turn that scythed the legs of another from under it. Before that armor hit, two more taps, hip seam and spine base, and both died.

A shield hammered his ribs and he tasted metal in his mouth. He let himself go with it, rolling over the shield, boots finding the rim. He stomped hard and drove the Knight to a knee. He palmed the elbow. A whisper of mana and it was gone.

They tried a pincer. He drew them wide with a feinting retreat, then baited two squads into crossing lanes. At the last instant he dropped flat. Their own blades clanged together in a stuttering mess, stun-locking their timing for a fraction. He flipped backward on one hand, clearing the knot as he sent a wide shear of raw mana across their ankles, not to cut the metal but to erase the threads inside the greaves. Ten collapsed like puppets with their strings cut.

He stole from the chamber next. Armor chunks, discarded swords, shattered shield rims—he scooped them with telekinetic flicks of mana and set them in spinning orbits around him. Every time a Knight stepped, a plate kissed a wrist or turned a blade a thumb's breadth. Every time a sword raised, a rim clipped a guard. Death came through those slivers of disturbance: a pinprick beam to the armpit, a whisper through the hinge of a knuckle, a needle through the hip seam. The floor filled with hollow shells.

Two Knights vaulted off opposite pillars, blades inverted for plunges. He looked up, felt the timing, and threw his dagger straight up, not to kill but to intersect. It rang off one sword at a perfect angle. The deflection turned that blade into the other Knight's pauldron. The glancing blow swung a gorget open like a door. Xavier's palm rose and spoke invisibly. Both fell before they landed.

The chamber's runes pulsed brighter, as if recalculating. Now came the shock units: gauntlets branded with impact sigils, fists like meteors. They piled in tight, suffocating space, trying to smother him with mass where precision failed.

He brought his right foot down hard.

Mana spiked into the floor in a circular shock, a null ring that crawled along stone like ripples on still water. Knights that crossed it stuttered. Their puppet lines fuzzed for an instant. He moved through that stagger, a surgeon among statues, and every touch he placed erased a life.

They adjusted again, stepping in unison to keep swords outside the ring, shields braced, letting halberds and thrusts restrict his stance. He obliged, and went vertical.

A blink and he was running a pillar, then the wall, then the ceiling. Gravity was forgotten beneath the storm of his aura. The Knights pivoted with clockwork grace, tracking him up the curve. He flung a disc of condensed mana not at them but at the ceiling runes: a ricochet geometry he had marked minutes ago. The disc kissed a sigil, split into five needles, and each found a waiting joint below. Five Knights dropped in a neat star.

He fell through the gap they left, inverted, a hand outstretched. A beam lanced past his wrist, threading a visor slot at an angle he should not have had time to calculate. The Knight folded like silk.

He landed on a knee and a palm, slid, then sprang as a halberd cleaved the air where his head had been. He caught the haft on the rebound, yanked, and stepped into a short hook that crushed the bearer's elbow inward. Not physically, but by erasing the thread tension that kept it rigid. The arm went slack. The halberd crashed to the floor. A point-blank tap under the brim finished it.

The next wave carried banner-spears etched with field glyphs strong enough to make the air taste of iron. His beams shortened by a thumb's width, then two. He smiled. Good. He wanted the handicap.

He wove deeper. He let the banners crowd him, let their fields chew the edge of his cast, and he learned to cast inside those fields. No distance. No travel. Just a bloom of unpowered space that happened within a joint the same breath his palm touched metal. He stopped saying the names. The fight had moved past words.

He began breaking them with timing alone. A half-step earlier here, a touch later there. He cut not where they were open, but where their next motion would create a line, and he put the beam in the place a future seam would be. The Knights walked into their own deaths.

His dagger whirled back to his hand on a leash of force and rejoined its dance, turning wrists, snagging shield rims, tapping a knee to ruin a lunge's balance. It never once tried to cut. It did not need to. It was the hand that set the throat for the other hand to close.

They tried to bury him in bodies. He went small, shoulder to shield, hip to greave, fighting in the space between rib and arm where swords could not swing. Every breath was a kill. Every step a severance. He became a pressure in their ranks, a current that flowed along their formation and turned it inside out.

Minutes passed. Or an hour. Time thinned into the rhythm of steel and hollow thunder.

The floor lay carpeted in fallen shells, stacked two and three deep. Silver smoke drifted from joint gaps where threads had burned away. The air was hot now, the chamber heavy with the scent of scorched mana and old metal.

A captain-class Knight strode through the wreckage at last. Taller plates, broader shoulders, a greatsword with twin glyph lines that shed sparks where it cut the air. Its first stroke chopped a crater into the floor at his toes, the suppression field thick enough to make his teeth hum.

He grinned.

"Finally."

It swung again, downward and absolute. He stepped inside, let his dagger kiss the flat, and rolled under the hilt. The pommel skimmed his spine. His left hand rose to the captain's gorget seam.

No beam. Not yet.

He pushed nothing into the seam, pure absence, a void the size of a needle's eye. For a heartbeat, the puppet threads lost their place.

Then he put a whisper of mana into that void and watched it blossom like winter over water.

The captain clanged once, vast and hollow, and collapsed in a cascade of plates that rang out across the chamber like a bell tolling surrender.

Silence held for a breath.

Then doors groaned again. More Knights marched. Columns of them, endless, their helms reflecting the dull light of the sigils in cold, unblinking lines.

Xavier rolled his neck, spat blood to the side, and lifted his dagger until its edge traced a silver crescent in front of his eyes. The other hand opened, and raw mana gathered until the air trembled with it.

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