Every instinct in Orton's brain screamed for him to retreat. But Enna was might still be in the bookstore; he had no idea how long it would take her to find the book and abscond, so he needed to stand his ground for as long as possible. Worse yet, if the engram had been telling the truth, this timeline's version of Nej was Entangled with him, so running or hiding would be useless. He gulped and withdrew the butterfly knife from his pocket, barely able to believe what he was doing.

Nej's blade glowed purple, shot through with streaks of red -- that was a blend of sahasrara and muladhara energies, unimaginably potent. Most spellcasters would only be able to reify a single principle, and for Nej to be able to fuse the core concepts of "strength" and "infinity" was dangerous in the extreme; the blade would cleave or smash through any obstruction, no matter how strong. Orton's only hope was to reify a primal concept capable of transfinite resistance, but he only had a small handful of options at his disposal: the vital dyad, the four Greek classical elements, the lower six chakras, and about half of the Taoist bagua. This was going to suck.

Touching his finger to the tip of the blade, he made his choice and enacted his rituals in his mind. The knife lengthened, stretching out to nearly a meter as its dull steel began to glow with a bright golden light. Flowing, amorphous flames bloomed from the metal, shot through with flares of reflected sunlight in clear water.

Nej nodded. "Ain't a bad choice. Hold out as long as your willpower does, at least. Likely to drain you quick, though."

Orton shrugged, bringing the blade -- now a long, narrow sword representing the concept of the manipura chakra with elements of its representation in the shui trigram -- up into a guard position. "Better than getting my head chopped off on my first parry." He shuffled forward a little, trying to goad Nej into the first attack.

The old shopkeeper waggled his blade a little, grinning, then made a careful lunge for Orton's wrist. Orton dodged back, then stepped forward into Nej's open spot and made a cautious jab at the other man's knee. He expected that it would miss or be blocked, but he wanted to at least make Nej think he was trying to fight; but the not-so-decrepit sorcerer executed a flawless aú batido, dropping his free hand to the ground and cartwheeling over it to deliver an inverted kick to Orton's face. Orton stumbled back, cursing, as servitor-Nej whooped with fresh mockery into his thoughts. Whassa matter, Orton, cain't keep up with a old grandpa?

Tell me, Nej, thought Orton back icily as he scrambled backwards out of his opponent's reach, exactly what do you think will happen to you if he kills me?

Well, I expect you'll start the loop over, ruminated the engram. Ain't likely he'll kill ya in one blow before you can get a dyin' spell off, as I figure it.

Orton grimaced. Uh huh. And exactly how am I going to do that without the amulet, not to mention without access to a khetsanah? He barely dodged a swipe of still-alive Nej's blade, elected not to take an opening that was almost certainly a feint, and scrambled out of reach of a kick that would have shattered his kneecap. I guess you haven't been listening when I've been telling Enna that I can't regress for another five years.

Boy, exactly how dumb do you think I am? the engram shot back. I know you was just makin' that up. Makin' her feel necessary, I expect.

Fuck that, Orton shouted back mentally as he assayed a cautious slash and nearly got his arm chopped off by the riposte. I was dead serious, you prick. If your meat-self kills me, we both die. So great job with your asinine plot.

Yer bluffin' responded engram-Nej, somewhat less than confidently. Yer just tryin' ta get me to help your dumb ass.

In desperation, Orton dumped the entirety of his truth-concept into the engram's process, revealing for a brief second every secret, shameful thought, and self-deception in his vast memory -- revealing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was telling the absolute truth. You believe me now, shithead?! A brief, shocked silence echoed through his mind, followed by a quiet, terrified squeak. That's what I fucking thought, Orton fumed as he batted away another of Nej's thrusts. In a straight-up fight, he would have been dead long ago, but because he was fighting entirely defensively (and because old Nej was toying with him), he'd managed to stay alive this long. But eventually the older sorcerer was going to tire of the game, and then he'd be toast -- either because Nej would stop fooling around with physical combat and just tear him apart magically, or because he'd stop playing with him and attack with intent to kill. Orton hadn't even begun training his body for physical combat this early in the loop; and old Nej, at his stage of spiritual mastery, could pull off martial feats that looked like wire-fu without even breaking a sweat.

Orton gambled on a feint towards his opponent's eyes, then risked a quick step-in in an attempt to force the other man into a backstep. Old Nej, laughing, merely jumped backwards and balanced onto a trash can without so much as backwards look. "Boy, you fight about as well my gran-maw. And she dead." He flipped himself forward in a spiral, blade lashing out with each rotation, and Orton had to block desperately while scrambling backwards just to avoid being carved into ragged strips. With each parry, he felt the sword drain more of his power; in another minute or two, he'd be tapped out, and then he'd die no matter what.

Help me, you fuck, he snarled at engram-Nej. If you don't do something, we're screwed!

I cain't, Orton! the servitor howled back. A servitor cain't be compelled against itself!

You can't be compelled, thought Orton back furiously as he dodged a swipe that would have split his head like a melon, but you can do it of your own free will! So stop fucking around!

Fine! Uh... the engram paused, then grudgingly revealed its weaknesses. My true name is... Jiann. An' I got a hinky left hip when I ain't juicin' it with qi, so if you gonna strike for a weak spot, try there. But you gotta disrupt my -- I mean, his -- concentration, first. Damn, if this ain't a weird situation.

Orton grimaced. Nej's true name would be a powerful weapon against him, but only if Orton could catch him off-guard -- and currently he had bigger problems. He parried another thrust (this one aimed at his groin), ducked under a slash at his shoulder, and took a step forward in another attempt to prolong the contest. And then his foot, descending towards the pavement, slipped on one of the beer bottles he'd discarded earlier.

Suddenly, everything seemed to slow down. His foot skated out from under him, and his mouth opened in a surprised O as his back spasmed in a vain attempt to keep himself upright. Nej, grinning viciously, leapt into the air in an impossible swan-like pose, his sword aimed directly at Orton's stomach. It was a true finishing blow; in one shot, it would sever Orton's connection with his manipura chakra (which was fueling his reified blade), cripple the path of his shén kuṇḍalinī and disrupt his magical powers, and also sever his spine and give him a mortal wound that would be impossible to stanch or heal. The fight was at an end.

Orton raged inside his mind as time slowed; if he had access to even the most basic of fighting reflexes, he could twist or flip backwards and have a hope, however miniscule, of surviving the attack. But the only set of reactive nerve impulses his body possessed were those of his eighteen-year-old self; disjointed sports and dance maneuvers, a handful of shitty magic tricks, and the detritus of various other repetitious acts of a muscular nature such as fishing, mopping, and scrubbing dishes. Those goddamn dishes.

Fuck this, Orton thought, and changed the game.

In a fraction of an instant, his mind split into an infinity of parallel processing. He dedicated one track to simply screaming Shit shit shit over and over, then pointed it at engram-Nej, isolated it, and shoved it out of the way. The rest of his mental tracks separated every one of the combat paradigms in his considerable experience, broke them down into their constituent actions, then sorted those based on a linear regression of their required movements to build a fat stack of undifferentiated neuro-muscular instruction sets. Then he mapped them blindly onto his existing physiology, forced his conscious mind to shut the fuck up, and flowed.

Orton's body did a fluid and impossibly fast split, then surged sideways in a trout-like movement constructed of a dry heave and a rolling-out-of-bed sequence. He spun, upside-down, in a circular four-limbed parry-sweep combination made out of a spastic flail and a spinning-in-an-office-chair reflex, then surged upright in a kip-up cobbled together from a fetal curl impulse and a staccato crackle of stretch responses. Nej, who was badly out of position, took two blows to the face and a third to the sternum from his teenage opponent's lightning-fast and impeccably aimed application of Orton-fu.

He flipped backwards, but Orton was on him before he even landed, moving with the impossibly fast grace of lucky stumbles and accidental whoops-oh-shit falls. Nej brought his blade up to parry, but Orton's glowing yellow blade was spinning and jabbing in an impossibly tight spiral made from dish-scrubbing movements; not even one of the seventy-six forms of Martial Perfection he'd mastered could do a damn thing about such craziness. He panted for breath; any second, the damn fool boy would have to pause, and then he'd end this, but first he --

Nej's concentration lapsed as Orton's fist shuddered in a rattling-a-spray-paint-can shake mid-stab, and the tip of his blade jumped chaotically around Nej's own sword and punctured his wrist. A sharp bolt of burning agony jolted through him, breaking his martial trance for a split second, and with impeccable timing Orton kicked him with the force of a field goal directly in his arthritic hip joint. Nej's universe exploded with pain.

As his foe fell to the ground, Orton savagely kicked away the deadly blade, which shriveled back into a mundane dagger as it skittered off into the shadows. Nej wasn't even close to being finished, Orton knew; a practitioner of his caliber could fight with four broken limbs and half their head missing, and as soon as the old sorcerer recovered his equilibrium, he'd blast Orton to atoms or heal himself or both. He only had a single moment to strike, and he had to do it properly. Jiann! he ordered servitor-Nej, dumping the engram's sole mental process into control of his body, shatter his pneuma!

The servitor, caught off guard, nevertheless was compelled by the power of its true name to act; it channeled all of Orton's magical power directly into a vicious palm strike to Nej's ka, sending a devastating wave of qi into every pressure point and meridian in his opponent's body simultaneously. Blood erupted from the old sorcerer's mouth as his body, wracked and fractured by the strike, turned against itself in a cascade of ruptures and spasms. Orton's body -- still controlled by the engram -- collapsed on top of Nej's, and their eyes met.

For Orton, everything seemed to go white -- his senses faded to nothing in the light of the blast of pure puissance which cascaded through him like lightning. Too late, he remembered: Nej's death curse, the magical trap that had gotten him stuck with the engram in the first place two loops ago. He shuddered involuntarily; he didn't know if he could deal with two copies of Nej. Death might be preferable.

Slowly, the haze receded, and normality reasserted itself; he was holding a blazing yellow lightsaber-like sword while sprawled on top of an old black man in an alley. Who's the baddest jedi now, mothafucka, he thought mirthlessly as he heaved himself off of Nej's body. Then, to his surprise, the other man sat up as well.

"Damn," Nej croaked, rubbing his chest. "I cain't believe I got away with that shit."

"What?" Orton blinked in confusion. "How are you even alive?"

"I ain't," the old sorcerer responded with a wink. "I'm dead, remember?"

Shocked realization flooded through Orton. "Nej?! I mean... what?!"

The dead man laughed -- a watery, crackling sound -- as his broken body, magically animated by an externally-originating self-engram, hoisted itself into a shambling, half-toppled mockery of a standing pose. "Was a bit of a long shot, I'll admit. But you cain't win if'n you don't roll the dice, boy."

Orton whistled. "Holy shit. How did you even come up with this?" He chuckled. "Not that I'm complaining, by the way. Having you out of my head is a welcome gift, even if I had to almost die to get it."

"I figgered you'd see it a bit like that." Servitor-turned-revenant Nej stretched, crackling grotesquely as his shattered bones and tendons shifted around. "Lucky for me you had a mental image of me as a corpse for your own amusement; otherwise, this'd be downright unsettlin'."

"Oh, no, it's still pretty unsettling, I assure you." Orton let his reified blade lapse, and closed the knife with a flourish before pocketing it again. "What happened to original-flavor Nej? Did you eat him, or something?"

"Mmm." The revenant rubbed its chin contemplatively. "Merged, more like. Prolly wouldn't have worked if I'd tried it on anyone but m'self."

"So what now?" Orton sat down, exhausted. "If you still want to kill me, you won't have a better chance. I'm about tapped out."

Corpse-Nej -- actually Jiann, Orton supposed -- shook his head. "As pleasin' as that would be, I reckon I got a vested interest in Gentry not destroyin' the world, same as you. And, as much as I'd like to be rid o' your annoyin' cracker ass, workin' together is obviously the smart play."

Orton nodded. "Good. Guess even evil undead assholes don't want the world destroyed."

"Well, I figger it's like that blue fella said in that cartoon you made me watch," opined Nej. "I cain't let 'im destroy the world -- that's where I keep all my stuff."

"Fair enough." Orton rose, dusting himself off. "I guess we should go track down Enna, then. Hell, I guess we might not even need to destroy the book now? I'll have to update my plans for 'Nej isn't an asshole', which is going to shift a lot of crap around."

"Oh, I don't reckon you'll have to go far," drawled a voice from the shadows. Orton whirled, pulse thumping, to see Cameron shuffle cautiously out of the shadows, a hostage held in front of him.

"Aw, no." Orton did not like this at all. "You were supposed to run."

Enna trembled, doing her best to remain brave despite the huge revolver held to her head. "Sorry." A single tear trickled down her cheek as she shook. "I guess I shouldn't have stopped for snacks first."