Chapter 11: The Witch vs Nikolai

Steel flashed.

Nikolai threw himself sideways, pain exploding behind his eyes, but instinct moved faster than thought. The knife sliced empty air where his throat had been. He crashed to the floor, coughing blood, his vision fracturing—but he forced himself up again, half-crouched, teeth bared.

Wanda advanced, bone-handled blade steady in her grip. The ritualist, the seer, now a predator. Her blue eyes burned with a lethal certainty.

"You are a mistake that should be erased," she hissed, voice low and absolute, as she slashed at him again.

He staggered backward, narrowly avoiding the strike. Agony sang through his torn muscles, but something deeper—new—answered: not strength, but refusal. His body moved with stubborn will, driven by the hunger that refused to die.

Wanda moved with terrifying precision. She did not waste energy. Every thrust, every swipe aimed to cripple him. To finish him.

She whispered again.

The air around her seemed to shimmer, buckling under an unseen pressure. Reality itself seemed to stutter, doubling Wanda's image, then tripling it. Three figures now stood before him, identical down to the cold fire in their eyes and the glint of steel in their hands. They moved with a fluid, disjointed grace, their attacks weaving together—a feint from the left, a slash from the right, a thrust from behind where no one should have been. The sensory overload was staggering; the scrape of three blades on stone echoed when only one should sound.

Nikolai barely ducked under the first phantom slash. Felt the second tear his sleeve. Rolled sideways as the third stabbed low.

The room spun. He lost track of the real Wanda.

Pain blurred the edges of the world. The echoes of phantom blades sang around him, but the blood was real—dripping from cuts he couldn't fully remember receiving. Each graze, each wound felt distant and immediate all at once, the illusions distorting the true pain.

No.

He gritted his teeth, grounding himself. He forced his senses—still new, still wild—to find the truth.

The real Wanda breathed.

A heartbeat. A warmth in the air.

He found it—a slight shuffle of cloth, a flex of fingers tightening on a real hilt. He found the anchor point—the real Wanda orchestrating the phantoms.

He ignored the phantoms lunging at him, ignored the phantom pain blooming across his skin. Focusing all his remaining strength, all his desperate will on that single point of reality he'd found, he roared again, lashing out not blindly this time, but with focused intent—and his fist connected.

The illusion shattered. The phantom Wandas dissolved like mist.

The real Wanda stumbled back, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth where his blow had landed. The knife was still clutched in her hand, but her stance was wary now, her blue eyes wide with something that might have been shock, or perhaps validation of her earlier foresight.

For a heartbeat, she looked at him—really looked—and he saw it:

Fear.

Validation.

The future she had foreseen was already moving. Already beginning.

She made her decision in that same breath.

With a hissed curse, she turned and fled, vanishing through the heavy door and into the dark corridors beyond.

Nikolai lurched forward, driven by a primal urge to pursue, to finish it. But his body screamed betrayal. The fragile strength lent by the ritual's peak surge evaporated like mist, leaving only the raw, tearing agony of transformation beneath. His vision swam, reduced to fractured light and deepening shadow. The ritual chamber, heavy with the scent of blood and burnt herbs, seemed to tilt on an unstable axis.

He collapsed at the threshold of the door Wanda had disappeared through, his bloodied hands scrabbling uselessly at the cold stone. The darkness beckoned, promising oblivion, an end to the fire carving new pathways through his veins. But the hunger—that newly awakened, gnawing void inside—snarled against it. It demanded survival. Demanded more.

He pressed his forehead to the floor, grit embedding itself in his skin, each ragged breath a testament to stubborn refusal. The strange glyphs carved into the nearby walls seemed to throb in time with his hammering pulse, pulsing with a faint, residual power that resonated with the unfinished changes wracking his frame. The ritual wasn't done. He was still on the anvil, the hammer still falling, reshaping him into something unknown.

Far above, beyond the stone ceiling, beyond the bruised night sky, he could almost feel the indifferent weight of the Eye. Watching. Waiting. Observing the outcome of its ancient, unknowable games.

Wanda was gone. Escaped into the wilderness that was her element. But the image of her fleeing—the flicker of fear in those ancient eyes—burned itself into his memory. She would not run forever. On the cold stone, bleeding and broken but undeniably alive, Nikolai swore it, a silent vow forged in pain and the nascent, terrible power stirring within him.