Page 52 of Thexan
Kaer’vas blocked with his own blade.
Light met light with a sound that made my teeth ache.
For the first time, the two Mesaarkans stood close enough that I could see the differences between them. Thexan’s body still carried injury, but there was something in him Kaer’vas lacked. Not strength. Not skill.
Purpose.
Kaer’vas fought to eliminate a deviation.
Thexan fought to protect something chosen.
That difference mattered.
Kaer’vas drove him back half a step, then another, forcing pressure toward the injured side. Thexan absorbed the first shift, but the second cost him. I saw it in the tightening through his torso, the brief compression of breath.
“Thexan,” I called.
Not a warning.
An anchor.
His focus sharpened.
He changed tactics instantly, disengaging instead of resisting, letting Kaer’vas overcommit by the smallest margin. It was barely visible. One misjudged step. One fraction of imbalance.
But Thexan had been waiting for it.
He brought the recovered weapon up and fired at the ground behind Kaer’vas, not at him. The impact shattered the stone at his heel, forcing his weight forward into the line of Thexan’s blade.
The energy edge passed cleanly through.
Kaer’vas stopped.
For a moment, he remained upright, his gaze fixed on Thexan with something that might have been disbelief if he had possessed enough emotion to shape it.
“You chose this,” he said.
Thexan held the blade steady. “Yes.”
Kaer’vas dropped.
This time, Thexan did not catch him.
The body struck the stone and went still.
For several seconds, neither of us moved. The dust drifted slowly around us, settling over the broken ground, the weapons, the bodies of the hunters who had come here certain they would remove a problem before anyone knew they had arrived.
Thexan deactivated his blade.
Only then did I go to him.
He turned toward me before I reached him, and whatever I had meant to say vanished when I saw the blood seeping along the edge of the reinforced bandage.
“You tore it open.”
“Partially.”
“That is not better.”
