The Knight moved before Finn finished drawing breath.

It crossed the chamber in three strides. A man’s strides, not a monster’s, which made it worse, somehow. There was no animal in the motion. Nothing thrashing or rearing or telegraphing itself.

It walked, and the walk ate twenty feet, and then the sword was already in motion, a long horizontal sweep at chest height, and only Nyx’s voice in his head saved him.

’DOWN—’

He dropped.

The sword passed over his shoulder close enough to lift the hair on the back of his neck. The wind of its passing chased him a half-second behind, a thin shockwave that cracked the marble where it ran along the floor.

He rolled. Came up in a crouch with the longsword raised. His hands were already shaking.

Across the chamber, Nyx flickered. She stepped out of the shadow under a pillar fifteen feet from where she had been standing, daggers reversed in her grip, and from behind the Knight she struck.

It was a precise, beautiful upward cut at the soft seam where the helm met the gorget.

The Knight did not turn.

It simply leaned. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Its shoulder dipped an inch. The Broodmother’s Fang skidded along the plate with a sound like a knife on a whetstone, leaving a faint silver line and nothing else. The off-hand dagger glanced off the cloak and snagged briefly in the frosted hem.

Then the Knight’s free hand came up, almost lazily, and caught Nyx by the front of the hoodie.

She did not have time to Shadow Step.

The Knight pivoted on the heel of one boot and threw her.

Just threw her. The way a man might toss a coat onto a chair. There was no apparent effort in it. She sailed across twenty feet of open air and struck a pillar with a sound that turned Finn’s blood to water.

[Nyx — HP: 41%]

"NYX—"

"I’m fine!" she coughed, already pushing herself up on one elbow, blood at the corner of her mouth, the hoodie hanging askew. "Bearer, watch your—"

He turned.

The Knight was already on him.

The sword came down in a vertical strike that he caught on the longsword by pure reflex and not enough technique. The impact ran up his arms, through his shoulders, and into a place behind his sternum that had not previously hurt. His knees buckled. The marble cracked under his boots.

[-23% HP]

The longsword screamed in protest. A new chip opened along the edge.

’Bearer, the seam in the breastplate. The left side, below the arm—’

’I see it—’

He didn’t see it. He hoped he saw it. He shoved the Knight’s blade off-line and stepped inside its reach, the way he had stepped inside the Hollow Knight’s, the way he had stepped inside the Glutton’s.

The kind of move he had only ever survived because every monster he’d faced so far had been a monster.

This thing wasn’t.

It twisted at the waist, the way a swordsman twists, and brought the pommel of the greatsword down on his shoulder.

[-14% HP]

He felt something in the joint give. The longsword slipped in his fingers. He stumbled past the Knight’s hip with the world tilting badly to one side, and the Knight, unhurried, completed its turn and kicked him in the chest.

The kick lifted him off the floor.

He landed on his back ten feet away. Slid another six. Came to rest against the bottom step of the dais with the throne looming over him.

[HP: 38%]

His ears were ringing. The chamber had gone underwater. He could see the Knight, in pieces, the boot, the cloak, the long ribbon of the sword as it lifted again, but his eyes weren’t tracking properly.

The blue light in the helm had bloomed brighter, twin small suns at the end of a tunnel, and he understood, with a kind of cold clarity, that this was what dying looked like when the one killing you was a knight.

It wasn’t roaring. It wasn’t even angry.

It was being courteous.

He pushed himself up on one elbow.

"Nyx," he rasped. "Any bright ideas?."

’I am thinking...!’

He registered, then, that the Knight’s helm wasn’t pointed at him.

It was pointed at her.

She had got herself up. She was on her feet at the base of her pillar, one hand braced against the stone, the other lifting the Broodmother’s Fang in a guard that wouldn’t hold for two seconds against what was coming.

Her face was very pale. A thin line of blood ran from her nose to her chin. The Hunter’s Bone Necklace, sat against her throat as though it had been put there for the express purpose of catching the light.

The Knight chose her.

Its body angled. The sword came up. He could see the exact line the blade would travel. From her left shoulder, down through her sternum, exiting somewhere below the ribs on the right side.

She had nowhere to go.

The pillar was behind her. The shadow under it was too small to step into. Shadow Veil took two seconds to cast and she did not have two seconds.

[Nyx — HP: 41%]

Finn was not aware of standing up.

He was aware of being on his feet, and then of running, and then of the marble disappearing under him in a way that suggested his Agility stat had finally, at long last, been worth something.

The world narrowed to the distance between him and her and the line of the sword.

He hit her at the shoulder, hard enough that she made a small startled sound, and his momentum carried her sideways and down, into the shadow at the base of the pillar.

He stayed where she had been.

The sword arrived.

It caught him across the chest, exactly along the line he had seen.

For a fraction of a second, there was no pain. Just a sense of being intruded upon, of something that should not have been able to get inside him having got there anyway.

Then everything else arrived at once, heat, cold, a wet sound, the smell of his own blood, and the Knight, almost gentle, completed the swing.

The flat of the blade hit him on the recoil and launched him.

He flew.

The chamber turned over once, twice. He saw the throne upside down. He saw the broken pillars wheel past. He saw, briefly and with terrible clarity, Nyx’s face, white and small and turning toward him in slow-motion horror from the shadow of the pillar.

Then he hit the far wall.

He didn’t feel that part.

He slid down it in a long red smear and came to rest in a crumpled shape that did not match the shape of a person. The longsword fell from his hand and rang against the marble like a struck bell.

Somewhere very far away, a notification was blooming.

[Finn Morrow — HP: 6%]

[CRITICAL WOUND.] [BLEEDING.]

[STATUS: UNCONSCIOUS.]

The blue light in the chamber dimmed.

The hum behind his eyes went out.