“You are an anachronism,” she said. “A symbol powerful enough to frighten modern kingdoms. If you rise again, the Mages will come out.”

Idris laughed under his breath. “Of course they will. Because they want me dead.”

“I seek that,” she continued. “If you fall under my banner, my domain extends to you. Any attack on you becomes an act against Qahila. Which gives me enough legal clearing to wage war on them, and wipe them out once and for all.”

Idris’s eyes burned now, alight with something feral and delighted.

“So that’s the catch,” he murmured, glancing past her shoulder, nostrils flaring again. Stronger now. “You want me alive because you need a weapon.”

Ramzah shifted uneasily. “Princess—”

Too late.

In a blur of motion that left several guards unaware, Idris moved.

His hand dipped to Ramzah’s belt.

Steel flashed.

Idris straightened with a dagger in hand, already smiling, wicked and sharp as a crescent moon. Ramzah looked as if he was going to attack, but something kept him in his place. Fear?

“Fine. I accept. All we need now,” he said lightly, “is a vow. Old words. An oath. I swear it’s painless.”

Weapons snapped up instantly as they realised what he was brandishing. Shouts erupted.

“DOWN—”
“GET HIM—”
“PRINCESS MOVE—”

She did not.

Instead, she spoke.

“I vow,” she began, eyes never leaving Idris’s, “by the one above, that Qahila shall stand as shield and sanction to Idris of Darkthorn—”

“Hold that thought,” Idris said softly.

And then he moved.

Not toward her.

Past her.

He vanished in a blur of pale motion, boots barely whispering against the forest ground as he dashed behind the Princess. The dagger in his hand came up in a sharp, rising arc, blade angled toward the sky.

In his mind, the calculation was instantaneous.

I’ll cut right through his blade, and then it'll take his head.

The assassin was coming high and fast from the rear left quadrant, descending through layered concealment. The strike would be vertical—clean, surgical—meant to bisect the Princess before anyone could register the shimmer. He would intercept that.

Idris swung upward.

Steel met something that was not steel.

A shriek split the air.

A blade of condensed mana, shaped like a longsword but humming with geometric sigils, collided with Idris’s dagger in a burst of violent light. The impact cratered the earth beneath his boots.

The forest exploded into motion.

Leaves tore free. Bark split. Shockwaves rippled outward in visible rings.

And then—

The impossible.

The two blades held.

For half a heartbeat, mana and steel locked together. 

Idris’s eyes widened in shock. I don’t sense any mana coming from him… It’s only his damned blade. So how. How is he physically matching me! A human is physically matching me? Impossible!

The shriek of colliding forces became a physical weight against Idris. Sparks of steel flew like shrapnel. The dagger was solid, well-forged steel, yet it did not just break. It shattered, exploding backward in a spray of molten fragments. One shard sliced a deep, burning line across his cheek, drawing a hiss from his lips. The assassins blade slashed down on his arm, bringing out a wince.

But his grip had already adjusted. His empty hand snapped forward, not away from the deadly mana blade, but into its humming heart.

The assassin had expected his strike to carve through flesh and bone. He had not expected his target to vanish, nor for a vampire to materialize in his path. He certainly had not expected the vampire to catch his blade.

Idris’s fingers closed around the solidified light. It was like grasping a lightning bolt. Agony, white and pure, shot up his arm. His skin smoked. The mana blade’s hum stuttered, its geometric sigils flaring in protest.

For a fraction of a second, they were locked again. The assassin, suspended in the momentum of his killing lunge, and Idris, rooted to the earth, holding back a sun.

Idris’s pink eyes, burning with fury and sudden, intense curiosity, met the assassin’s golden ones through the dissipating smoke of the encounter.

He saw a man. A human man. soft features, framed by white hair that hung loosely. He wore silver plate armor etched with fine threads of gold. He was more a knight than an assassin. There was no aura of enhanced magic about his form, no demonic pact shimmering in his gaze. Just the terrifying, impossible power in the blade he wielded, and the trained, perfect strength in the body behind it.

How?

The question was a roar in Idris’s mind. No human, not even the mightiest Mage-warrior of his age, could generate this kind of raw, physical force. It defied his reality.

The assassin’s own shock was a mirror in his golden eyes. He had been prepared for guards, for spells, for panic. He was not prepared for this: a creature of legend, moving faster than him, stopping a mana-severance strike with bare hands, and staring back at him with the wrath of a bygone age.

The stalemate broke.

Idris, using his hold on the blade as a pivot, twisted his body. He drove his foot into the assassin’s midsection, a brutal side kick that channeled all his coiled, supernatural strength. The impact was a dull, awful thud, like a battering ram hitting a fortress gate.

The assassin’s breath exploded from his lungs. The mana blade tore from both their grips, spinning away to dissipate in a shower of fading sparks. The man himself flew backward as if launched from a trebuchet, crashing through a thicket of glowing ferns and slamming into the broad trunk of a sentinel tree with a crack that echoed through the clearing. He slumped to the mossy ground.

Silence, more profound than before, rushed in.

Idris stood panting, his injured arm hanging at his side, blood and ethereal burns mingling. Damn it, I’m still too weak and hungry to heal. I might be screwed here. He stared at his own smoking palm, then at the distant, rising form in the shadows. The forest air, once fragrant, now stank of blood.

He slowly turned his head, his golden eyes finding the Princess. She had not flinched. Her guards had finally closed ranks around her, weapons pointing shakily in all directions. He stood up, taking in Idris one last time. Idris didn’t miss it. The face of that assassin became sour. It wrinkled and twisted to a disgust and hate he had never seen before he disapeared in a flash of sparks. Idris finally began to breathe again. He couldn't smell him anymore. He left. I should be alright…for now.

“What,” Idris asked, his voice a low, ragged thing, “was that?”

The Princess’s head rose, as if turning her gaze to the sky, but with calculation, not fear. She looked from the stunned Idris to where the assassin had been. 

“A Crescent. They are warriors the magicians concocted,” her guards began slowly dispersing from her side. “As you can see, the world is very different, Count Idris.” 

“Yeah…Clearly.”