Kori heaved. Both arms pulled in unison, the chain wrenching upward in a single, unbroken motion that lifted the figure abruptly from below the ledge. The cloak whipped past Kori’s face. The woman’s body crested the lip of the rooftop, still wrapped in two tight loops of steel, her arms pinned against her sides by the line. Kori did not pause – on the contrary, she swung as hard as she could. The knife at the far end of the line flared in its white-blue light, Luminite amplification working.
The arc was full-body. Her shoulders pivoted with her hips, her grip on the chain tightened, and the woman at the end of the line traced a wide circular path through the air - over Kori’s head, around her flank, then down. Snow trailed behind the chain in a white curve that hung in the air for a heartbeat before falling apart.
Pale blue light bloomed along the blade as Eon poured into the luminite core at its centre, the entire knife glowing now, the steel haloed by a cold radiance that cast its own shadows across the rooftop. Kori had channelled into the bonded weapon at the apex of her swing - extra weight, extra force, the Eon making the strike heavier than physics alone would have allowed.
The woman slammed into the rooftop, impact cratering the alloy. The surface beneath her body fractured outward, the concrete-reinforced sublayer beneath the alloy plate cracking with the deep, low thud. Dust exploded upward, and a small white cloud lifted from the impact point, the powdered concrete and the dislodged frost from Kori’s swing mixing in the cold air and rising in a slow, expanding plume that blocked Kori’s view of the figure entirely.
Kori unlocked the chain.
A flick of her wrist and the loops released - the woven chain pulling free of the body it had wrapped, retracting toward Kori’s hand in a fast, controlled coil. The knife came back to her palm quickly. She gripped both knives now, one in each hand, the pale blue luminite cores still humming softly against her palms.
She dropped into her stance.
Knees bent, weight forward. Both blades held in reverse grips with their points angled outward, ice already curling at her boots - small, deliberate frost patterns spreading across the alloy roof in a circle around her, a sign that her Eon was running and her reserves, however low or used, were ready to release.
"Identify yourself." She shouted into the night,
The dust cloud didn’t dissipate. It should have settled within a few seconds – the cold air, the lack of wind on the upper face of the building, and the size of the disturbance all argued for fast dispersal. But the cloud was not settling. It hung in the air like a constant steam vapor – except this one was dusty and grey, occupying the impact zone and several metres of space around it, the particles refusing to fall at any rate Kori found reasonable.
She focused her Chasmis.
The eye focused beneath her hair. Time did not slow this time - she could not afford another full activation - but the eye’s secondary capacity, the passive Eon-and-thermal scan, came on-line with the soft cost of a low-output channel. The dust cloud became more legible. Her vision overlaid with the faint, dispersing heat signatures that the cloud was holding within itself: patches of warmer air where the figure’s body had displaced cooler air, the slow rise of her body heat through the dust, the localised disturbance of breathing.
The figure was standing up. Slowly, the thermal pattern resolving into a standing posture, the heat traces around what would have been the woman’s shoulders and head rising in the cloud like ink dropped into water.
"They call me many things..."
The voice came from the cloud. It was deep, even, warm in a way that almost defused Kori’s stance by reflex - that voice did not belong to a person who was about to attack. It belonged to a person you might find in a bar, two drinks in, telling stories that were mostly true and entirely entertaining. The fact that the voice was emerging from the same body that had cracked Kori’s jaw with an open palm thirty seconds ago was the most disorienting part of the encounter so far.
"Down there," the voice continued, "if you know what I mean."
Kori did not answer. She kept her stance. The Chasmis tracked the figure through the dust, yet the heat reflected and dissipated in the dust particles, so it was quite difficult to figure out exactly where she was standing.
"Some call me Man Breaker," the voice continued.
The sound was not coming from a single point. It resonated through the cloud in a way that made the source ambiguous, the words seeming to drift from multiple directions at once. The dust acted as a diffuser, scattering the audio.
"Or Iron Lady..."
A faint sound almost made Kori flinch – footsteps, quiet ones, slow – coming from somewhere in the cloud. She focused her hearing and caught the pattern - the figure was walking, not running, taking deliberate steps through the rubble of the roof.
Toward Kori.
"Heck, some even call me Boss Mama."
On the last remarkthe voice sounded almost amused, but closer now - three metres, maybe four, still inside the dust cloud but moving steadily through it. Kori’s instincts began running combat scenarios - the angles a strike could come from, the timing of a draw, the time she had to react. The frost at her boots thickened by a degree, the ice creeping outward by another few centimetres without her consciously directing it.
"Oh yeah?" Kori said. Her voice flat. "And what do you call yourself?"
A short, amused exhale from somewhere in the cloud.
"Interesting question. You mean you’ve never heard of me?"
"Well... None of those cute nicknames ring a bell."
Kori rolled her neck once. The vertebrae popped softly. She kept her grip on the knives steady, her Chasmis tracking the heat signature drifting closer through the dust.
"Hmm. Disappointing."
A pause.
Then, a subtle metallic click. The sound of a sword harness - but not the sound of one opening. The sound of one closing. The blades had been free since the woman’s fall over the ledge, and now they were being put away. Locked back into their housings.
The cloud began to thin.
Just at the edges. The dust that had been suspended from the impact for half a minute was finally giving way to the air’s natural currents – very faint, since all the petals were now closed. The figure’s silhouette resolved within it - closer than Kori had expected, perhaps two and a half metres from her, hands now at her sides, both blades stowed in the harness at her back.
She had walked herself into striking range with her weapons sheathed, one hand on her hip, the other completely relaxed.
"Well then..."
The voice was clear now, no more diffusion. The cloud thinned around the silhouette as it stepped forward, the woman’s head tilting just slightly under the hood.
"Nice to meet you."
The cloud cleared the last of the way. Kori saw her properly for the first time - the sharp jawline beneath the hood, the dark, relatively short hair almost brushing her shoulders, the lazy half-smile playing across a mouth that suggested the entire encounter had been, for her, mildly entertaining.
"I’m Lay."