Kei had done it.

He had thought the reversed hands would make the tinkering hard, but he took to it quickly, and the work went easily after that. He used the weapon parts he had bought from the shop, and modified one of his Tier-4 arm-gloves, and out of them made a pair of weapons.

He looked at what he had built and was pleased with it. He stripped, and put the weapons on, and worked them onto his hands until they sat right. They fit perfectly.

They were like a pair of gloves. Four curved talons apiece, each about thirty centimeters, fitted into sockets on a rotatable metal crossbar that ran along the back of the hand and the palm — the crossbar joined by a thin flexible metal strip to a light bracelet-bar around the forearm. When Kei made a hard fist, the contraction of his hand drew the strip tight, and the tightening drove the talons out of their sockets. On the surface it looked as though the talons sprang from the perforations at the finger-joints of his arm-gloves, jutting outward from the backs of his hands — as though, apart from his thumbs, he had a second set of four fingers on each hand, facing opposite the first.

The image was a strange one: hands with claws standing off the backs of them, so that a closed fist became a thing that bristled both ways.

Since he still could not draw the claws from his own hands, he had made these instead.

The talons had come from a set of spiked hammers at the weapon shop — the claws of some high-level winged beast. The caretaker had let slip that they were harder than Rakshasa claws, and so Kei had made them break the hammer-set down and had taken the talons out of it.

They let him guard against an incoming attack with the fist and, in the same motion, make a sudden killing strike at close range — because few enemies watched the backs of a man’s hands. And the rotatable crossbar meant he could turn the talons to face out from the palm instead, and use them to climb a wall or a tree.

He began to practice, slashing at a thick woolen bedroll, working the movements.

His Rakshasa body held far more stamina than his human one ever had, and he felt it, and kept going. Before long he had worked out three moves of his own, and set about perfecting them.

The first he named Sky Slash.

A sudden upward spin of the fist, meant to catch an opponent’s throat on the talons and carry on rising — the tightened fist driving up toward the sky while the talons kept tearing the throat apart on the way.

The second he named Third Slash.

Three attacks in it. The first two came together, with conventional weapons — made deliberately weak, weak enough to be blocked, a decoy to force the opponent to commit both hands. And the instant both hands were committed to the block, the third attack — the Third Slash — came with the talons, a hard diagonal cut aimed to take off the wrist that held the weapon. If the opponent was armed in both hands, only one wrist was taken, from a safe distance.

He practiced the diagonal on a locked metal locker, and found the talons hard enough to bite into the metal too, and kept at it without holding back.

The locker door parted like cheese and fell away.

Inside was only a pouch. He opened it, and found Rasvet’s last letter to Kaiser, and a blue pill, and a prism-shaped white bone bead.

He stored the letter and the blue pill in their beads. The prism bead he tried to nurture, to bind with his blood — and it would not take. Nor would it fit the indents of his bracelet. White beads were unheard of, and prism-shaped ones too, and the strangeness of it caught at his curiosity. But he set it aside for later, put it back in the pouch, and slid the pouch into the pocket of his leg-wear, and turned to the third move.

The third he named Holy Slash.

The two fists brought together, the way one brings the hands together in prayer, and as the two sets of talons met, a single straight-line stroke — vertical or horizontal, as the moment asked — that would run all eight talons clean through whatever stood in front of them. He perfected the straight-line stroke on the bedroll too, making certain every one of the eight talons sank deep.

When the three moves were as sharp as he could make them, Kei rested.

Then he pulled on his cheap brown hooded garb and left the house. He was hungry.

Evening had come. The sky had gone to dark grey.