The instant the Force convulsed outward from Lysander, Shade felt the warning—not in a conscious thought, not in a shift of muscle, but in that thin, liminal space between one heartbeat and the next where instinct and experience merged into something sharper than fear. The air changed first, tightening as though drawn through an unseen funnel, and in that fractional moment, she knew what was coming. The Dark Side erupted from him, not in a focused strike but in a violent bloom, a tidal shockwave born of rage and something far more corrupted than simple fury. It aimed to crush, to dominate, to obliterate everything in its path. But Shade had spent her entire life living in the quiet margins between such storms, learning the art of survival not by force but by disappearance.
So she did not brace for the attack. She did not harden against it. She vanished.
Her presence folded inward with the precision of a flame snuffed between fingertips, her signature collapsing into nothingness as Shadow Veil curled around her like smoke devoured by the night. To Lysander's senses, she ceased to exist. The moment his hand snapped toward her—fingers splayed, intent honed into a spear meant to impale anything in its reach—there was nothing left to grasp, nothing left to crush but the space she had occupied a breath before.
His blast hit the empty air where she had stood, and the world buckled under the force of it. Crates shattered against the far wall, metal bent and shrieked as if something enormous had torn through it, and a violent ripple tore along the dusty floor in a jagged line. The shockwave whipped past her, dragging her braid across her cheek as though trying to reclaim the ghost it had missed.
But Shade was already moving—low, fluid, an Ataru sidestep that skimmed beneath the destructive arc of his attack with impossible precision. Her knee grazed the broken ground, her weight sliding across debris without disturbing even the smallest splinter, her entire form flowing around the blast the way a shadow slipped around flame—untouched, unbroken, impossibly controlled. She rose from the motion in a single breath, silent as dusk settling over stone, her posture steady and unfazed despite the violence that had torn through the corridor.
Her crimson eyes tracked him, narrowing—not with fear, not with adrenaline, but with cold calculation. Lysander was powerful, undeniably. Dangerous even to those who could sense the storm gathering inside him. But Shade had fought power before. Power was predictable. Power was reckless. Power was vulnerable to its own weight. And his was compromised.
She felt the fracture in his aura as clearly as she felt the shift in the air. His energy spasmed beneath something foreign—something clawing through his thoughts rather than fueling them, twisting the channels of the Dark not with clarity but with hunger. It wasn't strength guiding him. It wasn't instinct. It was corruption masquerading as power.
Shade rose fully from her movement, the faint whisper of her boots brushing the rubble. When she spoke, her voice cut through the turmoil like a scalpel through cloth—cold, level, and precise in a way that stripped the chaos of its volume.
"Your anger makes you loud."
The shadows around her thickened, not visually but in the subtle distortions of the air. A ripple of Suppression Field radiated outward hopefully, dampening the edges of precognition, muddying the flow of his instincts, throwing the Dark's guidance off by a fraction, if he even noticed—just enough to make him question what he sensed, what he reached for, what he believed he could predict. She didn't overwhelm him. She didn't try to dominate. She only dulled, disrupted, and unsettled. Just enough to give him doubt.
Shade stepped forward, each movement cutting clean lines through the debris-strewn corridor. She didn't rush. She didn't posture. She didn't strike. Her agility remained a quiet counterpoint to his roaring storm, a thread of stillness pulling his attention like gravity.
"And loud opponents are easy to cut down."
Her voice held no heat, no triumph—only truth. The truth of someone who had lived in silence long enough to know how it bent its victims. The truth of someone who saw every weakness, even the ones wrapped in power. She closed the distance another step, not enough to provoke, not enough to crowd, but enough to shape the battlefield with her presence alone.
Shade did not draw her weapon. She didn't need to. Her hand merely hovered near the hilt at her thigh—a suggestion, a promise, a line of intent waiting to be crossed.
Her eyes locked onto his—not the twisted void, not the sickly fire he was burning through, but the war behind both. The part of him wrestling with the corruption that had wrapped itself around his thoughts, pulling at the edges of his focus like parasites gnawing at the mind.
"If you want me," she murmured, the words sliding across the chaos like something cold dragged along steel,
"…you'll need more than borrowed strength."
The air trembled between them—Darkness trying to devour, stillness refusing to move. Shade sank into her stance, open but immovable, her balance rooted while the storm tore around her. She was ready. And she would not break.
Lysander von Ascania
Jonyna Si
Mykel Dawson
Naniti
Shade
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