Gilded Ashes-Chapter 341: Barely Enough

What if he just... Pushed harder?

Raizen dropped into his stance. His hands found his blades. The handles were warm from the heat of his palms, the grip worn smooth from months of use. He drew them - both at once, the twin edges clearing their sheaths with a whisper of dark metal and luminite hum.

He closed his eyes and exhaled, fully focusing.

The last of his Eon gathered. Thin, flickering, barely enough to hold. He pushed it into his legs, his core, his arms, his blades - everywhere at once, spread thin, the final embers of a fire that was almost out.

His eyes snapped open.

The first dash covered ten meters in less than a blink - the familiar fold of distance, the lurch, the world compressing and snapping back. He came out of it low and fast, right blade leading, dull side aimed at Kenzo’s left hip. Worst case, Raizen was going to shallowly cut Kenzo – but there was no way he would let him: Kenzo was already parrying. The hammer swept across his body in a preventive arc, the heavy head cutting through the space where Raizen’s blade should have been.

Raizen wasn’t there.

He’d dashed again. Before the first dash finished settling, before his feet had fully committed to the ground, he compressed and pushed, and the second fold took him sideways - three meters to the left, behind Kenzo’s turning shoulder, already mid-kick.

Kenzo’s head snapped around. His eyes found Raizen in the new position, and his forearm came up to block with a speed that shouldn’t have existed in a body that large - pure reflex, the ingrained response of a fighter who’d been ambushed too many times to be ambushed again.

The block connected, Raizen’s shin hit forearm... And he was already gone.

Third dash. Right. Fourth dash. Above - launching off a low branch, the bark cracking under the force of his push-off, his body inverting as the speed carried him over Kenzo’s head. Fifth dash. Behind again. Sixth and seventh in rapid succession - two folds so close together that the air between them popped, a small subsonic snap that echoed off the trunks.

Kenzo turned. Blocked. Turned again. The hammer moved in continuous arcs now, sweeping through positions that covered every angle, every approach, every line of attack that a person could reasonably come from.

Raizen wasn’t coming from reasonable angles.

He dashed from one foot, the other leg already swinging. He dashed from mid-air, his body horizontal, blades extended like the wings of something built for speed and nothing else. He dashed from a handstand, palms flat against the moss, the dashes carrying him upward and sideways simultaneously. He dashed off a trunk - his foot hitting bark, the reinforcement in his leg absorbing the impact and converting it into a launch point, and the fold taking him from the trunk’s surface to a position three meters behind Kenzo’s right ear in less time than it took to think the word fast.

Ten seconds of continuous dashing. The clearing lit up.

Each fold left a trace - a bright line in the air where Raizen’s body had been, Eon residue taking the form of small lightning and sparks. The lines flickered and faded within a second, but new ones appeared faster than the old ones died, and the clearing filled with them - crossing, intersecting, layering on top of each other in a web of golden light that turned the dim forest floor into something that looked like the inside of a raging gold thunderstorm.

Fifteen seconds. The traces multiplied. Raizen was everywhere - above, below, left, right, centre. He appeared at Kenzo’s ankle and vanished before the hammer could drop. He materialized at shoulder height and was gone before the shaft could swing. He came from behind and was past before Kenzo’s body finished rotating.

From the jacket on the root, a movement. The lizard’s head emerged from the pocket - slowly, the spikes flat, the pale gold eyes rising above the fabric’s edge. It didn’t speak, or even comment. It didn’t offer a rating or an insult or a critique. It just watched, pupils fully dilated, its tiny face illuminated by the golden traces that filled the clearing in intersecting arcs. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Its mouth hung open. Just slightly. The wide jaw slack.

Twenty seconds. Raizen’s body was operating beyond anything he’d done before, beyond anything he’d been taught or told was possible. The dashes weren’t individual decisions anymore - they were a continuous stream, each one bleeding into the next, the space between them shrinking until distance stopped making sense at all. He wasn’t dashing from point to point. It looked like he was existing in all the points simultaneously, his body occupying a blur of positions that no single pair of normal eyes could track.

Kenzo had stopped trying to find him.

The Phalanx stood in the centre of the storm, hammer moving on pure instinct, his head twisting left and right and above again as golden traces streaked past from every direction. He blocked a strike that came from below. Parried a kick that came from the right. Caught a blade’s flat part on the hammer’s shaft from directly above. Each block was just barely enough - arriving at the last possible instant, the margin between contact and miss measured in millimetres.

He’d lost count. Lost track. Lost Raizen entirely.

The boy was a blur inside his own light, moving so fast that the traces overlapped and merged until the entire clearing was a cage of golden lines with Kenzo at its centre and Raizen somewhere inside the walls, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Now behind him. Now sliding between his feet. Now at his shoulder, now at his knee, now above his head, each position held for less than a heartbeat before the next dash erased it.

Kenzo blocked on instinct. Blocked everything. The hammer moved in arcs he hadn’t planned, his body responding to threats his brain hadn’t fully processed, years of combat experience compressed into a continuous defensive rotation that covered every angle his muscles remembered.

It was barely - barely enough.

Then, for a split second - less than a second, a millisecond, a gap between one heartbeat and the next - Kenzo didn’t see Raizen.

The traces were everywhere. The light filled the clearing. But the boy - the actual, physical body behind all the light and all the speed - was gone. Absent from every position Kenzo’s instincts were tracking, invisible to every sense he had.

And then he felt it.

Above his right shoulder. Close. Too close, too late, already committed.