The needle crossed the distance between them before the sound could catch it.

It was nearly invisible, a silver-black line fired from beneath his left wrist while Moses’s attention sat on the daggers. Moses twisted his shoulder. The needle missed his throat, scraped across the horned edge of his collar, and sank into the narrow join between pauldron and gorget.

The poison entered.

Moses felt it at once. A small burn. A crawling numbness beneath the armor, trying to slow the muscle that guided his shoulder. His purple eyes brightened, not with alarm, but with interest.

"You and your cheap tricks, the same Caelum as always."

"Effective," Caelum said.

Moses swung his shoulder once. Dark veins of demonic mana crawled under his skin and devoured the numbness before it could spread. The needle snapped, forced out by pressure from beneath the flesh, and fell to the floor with a tiny metallic tick.

"Almost," Moses said.

Caelum was already moving.

A pellet slipped from his right sleeve and struck the cracked floor between them. Smoke erupted upward in a dense gray bloom, bitter with powdered crystal and old herbs. It swallowed the cold light, smeared the shadows wider, and turned the chamber into a place of broken distances. For a lesser swordsman, it would have been enough. For a nervous one, it would have been death.

Moses lowered his sword until the tip nearly touched the ground.

The smoke shifted. Three Caelums moved inside it, their steps too soft to trust. One came from the left, another from the broken floor ahead, the last from behind a pillar where the light died. Moses inhaled once, and the air around him thickened.

His demonic aura rolled outward.

The smoke sank toward the floor as if pressed under invisible weight. One clone staggered mid-step, its outline flickering. Another kept moving, but the shadow beneath its feet lagged wrong. Moses marked both without needing to name them. His sword swept up in a tight, disciplined cut that destroyed the nearest false body and ripped a corridor through the smoke.

Caelum used that corridor.

Mana threads snapped from his bare fingers, fine and dark, glinting only where they crossed the mana light. They coiled around Moses’s sword arm before the next cut could fall, wrapping gauntlet, elbow, and the lower edge of his pauldron. The threads did not stop him. Nothing that thin should have dreamed of stopping Moses. They pulled instead, angling the strike a few crucial centimeters away from Caelum’s path.

The greatsword crashed down beside him.

Stone exploded. Fragments tore through the smoke, and one clipped Caelum’s coat near the hip. He stepped inside the blast instead of away from it, daggers driving toward Moses’s exposed side, one for the seam below the ribs, the other for the inside of the arm where the armor had opened with the swing.

For an instant, the plan worked.

The threads held. Moses’s sword arm dragged wide. Caelum entered the space the larger man should have owned, impolute as ever, his face cold and focused, every line of his body turned into calculation.

Moses drove his shoulder forward.

The movement was not elegant. It did not need to be. Demonic aura roared through his arm, snapping three threads at once and dragging the others with them. The broken strands whipped back across Caelum’s fingers, cutting thin red lines over the knuckles. Before the daggers could bite, Moses slammed the armored side of his forearm into Caelum’s chest and threw him backward.

Caelum crossed several meters through the smoke.

His boots struck stone, slid over frost, and found purchase on the raised edge of a dark metal vein. He did not fall. His coat settled back into place around him almost perfectly, though one line of blood marked the corner of his mouth and the fingers of his left hand flexed once before going still again.

Moses rolled his shoulder, testing the place where the needle had entered. "You fight the mistake before a man makes it."

Caelum wiped the blood from his lip with his thumb. His expression remained unchanged. "You talk a lot, you know?"

Moses grinned. "I talk when I am enjoying myself."

"You must be very bored most days."

The grin widened, but the weight in the chamber had changed. Moses had learned the first layer. Clones could be weighed down. Smoke could be crushed. Threads could shift a strike, but force enough could turn the trick back on the hand that cast it. Caelum had learned his own truths as well. The aura did not simply pressure mana; it interfered with constructed bodies, dragged on false movement, and fed Moses’s blood fast enough to burn weaker poisons before they took root.

Information was the only honest currency in a fight like this.

Caelum shifted his stance by a finger’s breadth. One dagger angled lower. The other rose near his ribs. Three more needles sat hidden in his sleeve, two smoke pellets remained, and the broken floor now offered six ridges, three shadowed pockets, and a long split where a light-footed rogue could vanish for half a breath. He looked as pristine as before, if one ignored the blood. With Caelum, ignoring blood was often the polite thing to do.

Moses planted his sword point into the floor.

The chamber shuddered.

"Enough measuring each other," he said, voice dropping into something heavier. "Let us see how much of the old shadow is worth keeping."

Both of his hands wrapped around the hilt for the first time.

The runes along the greatsword woke with a dull purple glow. Demonic aura poured from Moses’s armor and crawled into the blade, thickening around the steel until the weapon looked less held than fed. Frost cracked outward from his boots. The smoke flattened against the floor. One of Caelum’s half-formed clones froze beside a pillar, its edges trembling as the aura pinned it in place.

Caelum’s eyes narrowed by the smallest degree.

Moses raised the sword.

[Demonic Warblade Art: First Fang Descent]