Raksha pushed the Conflagration through his fourth Solar Gate, letting it burn at its hottest. Its strength poured through his limbs and honed his senses to painful keenness.

But it was still barely enough for him to see the flight of the Hunter’s arrow as it shrieked through the night, barely enough for him to deflect its point with Steelbreaker.

Sparks flew as sorcerous bone slammed into steel once more. The impact halted Raksha dead in his headlong charge and knocked him off his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Hunter’s arrow spin harmlessly away, its momentum spent.

Raksha twisted his body in mid-air, landing on his feet. Another incoming arrow filled his vision. He yanked his head to the side, away from its path. A tremendous rush of air scraped along his cheek, powerful enough to elicit protesting feedback from his aegis.

Then he had to swing Steelbreaker up and about, aligning its edge with a third arrow. The sword trembled as it cleaved the arrow down its length, but failed to halt its flight entirely. Shaven slivers of sorcerous bone hurtled past the point of impact and into Raksha’s shoulders and chest.

They cut through his aegis with horrifying ease, tore through his body, and exited through his back in crimson spirals of rent flesh. Raksha, his senses heightened, felt it all with agonizing clarity. He went down to one knee, plunging Steelbreaker point-first into the dirt so that he didn’t fall all the way. Blood poured from his mouth and the dozens of puncture wounds in his torso.

Punctured lung. Grazed heart. Two ribs severed. Not broken, severed. Focusing his mind and pulsing his internal energy through his body, Raksha took stock of his injuries. Intestinal bleeding. Ruptured spleen. But spine is untouched, so that’s good.

Raksha looked up. He’d been wounded before, and much more grievously, too. Already, his aegis was repairing the damage.

“That’s all you’ve got?” he growled at the Hunter.

The mutant’s misshapen face was awash in evident astonishment. He held his bow in one hand, but the other was empty. He shook his head slowly. “Not bad, Raksha, not bad at all. I’ve killed several martial scientists in my time, and though I’m not sure you were the strongest of them all, you’ve certainly lasted the longest against me.”

Raksha surged to his feet, coughing a mouthful of blood from his re-inflating lung. He brought Steelbreaker to bear and began advancing once more. To his surprise, the Hunter slung his bow and unhitched a pair of flint hatchets from his belt.

“No more arrows?”

The Hunter shrugged as he walked forward to meet Raksha. “I’m out. I truly did not expect to use all my enchanted shafts on you and still leave you standing. I still have a dozen or so of my more mundane arrows left, but those won’t do me any good against you, I suspect. You’ll have to settle for being hacked to pieces.”

“No, you.” Raksha drew back his blade in readiness to strike. The Hunter was barely a pace away from him.

“Oh, such wit.” The Hunter flashed a grin filled with sharp, yellow teeth. “Though I have to admit, this has been the most fun I’ve had in a while.”

Raksha lashed out with a horizontal, decapitating cut, moving his blade in a left-to-right arc. The Hunter ducked underneath Steelbreaker’s whistling edge and streaked closer, his movements as fluid and swift as flowing quicksilver. The mutant’s hatchets spun in, edges aligned with the sides of Raksha’s neck. Their heads were adorned with runes that blazed with a sickly green light.

Releasing his left-hand grip on Steelbreaker’s hilt, Raksha slammed the heel of his free palm into the Hunter’s face. The mutant reeled back, spraying blood and tooth fragments. Before he could recover, Raksha hit him in the ribs with a solid round-house kick. The wet crunch of bone breaking beneath blunt force was briefly audible before being swallowed by the manic singing that filled the night air.

Even as he folded over Raksha’s shin, the Hunter chopped at his collar bone with a hatchet. Its sorcerous edge shrieked painfully against his aegis before bouncing off, leaving a red welt across his flesh. Snarling, Raksha struck out with Steelbreaker once more, but the Hunter managed to bring his other hatchet into the blade’s path. Enchanted stone clashed against aegis-imbued steel. The former flew apart into stinging shards that peppered both of them, slicing open cloth and flesh and glancing across bone.

Raksha staggered back, bleeding anew, as did the Hunter. He spat out blood and a piece of broken stone that had punched through his cheek and ended up in his mouth, before readying his blade once more.

This time, it was the Hunter on one knee, coughing and gasping. He had one hand grasping the dirt. Words Raksha didn’t understand streamed from his inhuman lips.

More sorcery! Raksha hacked down with Steelbreaker, but something caught the scruff of his collar and yanked him backward. The edge of his sword flashed down uselessly, a hair’s breadth from splitting the Hunter’s skull.

Looking over his shoulder, Raksha saw that he’d been seized by a cluster of twisted, tendril-like roots that had sprouted from the dirt behind him. Even as he tried to pull free, they wrapped themselves around his neck and began to tighten.

“Alright, fine,” the Hunter wheezed as he stood, clutching his broken ribs. “Up close, you’ve got the upper hand. But at a distance, I take the day, wouldn’t you say?”

“Still managed to get close enough and kick your ribs in,” Raksha snarled, pulling at the roots thickening around his throat.

“Ha! You did, one way or the other. Fair enough.” The Hunter chuckled. “My name is Herne. I think you’ve earned the right to know that much, at least, Raksha.”

“Who cares? You’ll be just another dead mutant once I’m done with you.”

“You toss that term out so readily. ‘Mutant’ this, ‘heretic’ that.” The Hunter picked up his cap, which had fallen sometime during the fight, dusted it off, and placed it back on his leathery scalp. “Is your definition of what constitutes humanity so limited?”

“You are a monster that twists people’s minds and makes them do horrible things!”

The Hunter nodded at Ignatius’s corpse. “I’m not the only one. In any case, I think that’s enough from you for tonight. Sit back and enjoy the rest of the festivities, won’t you?”