This was how he died.

He couldn’t think at the speeds he should have with the venom burning in his meridians, but he had time for one thought as the barrels rose to end the splitting pain surging through his soul, one thought for the pointless absurdity of dying to save someone he didn’t even care for, and probably hadn’t even really saved if the adept decided to end them as well once he was gone, then the pistol flared, the air shook, and smoke billowed from the last barrel of the arquebus while the ceiling groaned above them, and someone screamed.

Breath surged in front of Marroo. It came together like a tide of broken glass to coalesce into the roaring figure of a man built from a thousand cuts slashed into the air itself. The bullet slammed into the figure’s chest as it formed in front of Marroo and blew chunks of it through the air, but the bullet itself disintegrated amongst the razorwire lines of the figure’s shape, even the venom disappeared amidst the cuts while the world roared and the adept’s bloodshot eyes widened in surprise.

The ceiling collapsed around them. It thundered as it fell between them, great slabs and beams and sheafs of roof tiles crashing into the rubble strewn floor in an avalanche of wreckage. A beam slammed through the geist between Marroo and the adept and it blew apart into a cloud of swords, so clearly manifested that they looked to Marroo’s hazy vision as though he could have plucked them from the air as they flew around him. Marroo buried his face in the floor as he waited for a beam to crush him but he felt only pieces no larger than his hand rain into his back and sides as the roof fell and then settled, and he unclenched himself enough to look up again.

His father’s geist stood over him, glaring down at Marroo with silver eyes that constituted the only color amidst the roiling mass of spiritual blades that made up the rest of the figure’s body.

Marroo turned away from the figure and reached for the sword. His spirit still convulsed and shook within him, but he could feel the venom adept beyond the wall of rubble that had fallen between them, and knew he would not have time to clear it all from his channels before he had to face the adept again. He leaned on the sword as he pushed himself to his feet, then staggered and put a hand on a fallen beam to steady himself without meeting his father’s eyes.

His shirt was a tattered ruin from its contact with the adept’s poison. One of his shoes was gone and his pants were fraying, but his shirt hung around his shoulder in rags. He grabbed a fistful of it and tore it away, still without looking at his father while he studied the tattered remains and remembered the bullet shattering as it struck the spirit’s chest.

“You would never have done that while you were alive.” He said. He turned, finally, to the two glaring silver eyes and met them with a glare of his own. “Why now?”

“Battle comes.” The geist intoned, just as it had on the rooftop, and with just as much inflection.

The venom adept shifted behind the stack of rubble between them and Marroo felt the blast of venom that bit into the opposite side of the fallen roof without penetrating to their own. The geist’s head swiveled to pin the poisonous aura with its glare.

Marroo blew out the air in his lungs and closed his eyes as he leaned against the sword and felt a few more wisps of the poison circulating in his meridians dissipate through his external meridians. More poison punched into the wall of debris making the venom in him writhe and fight his spirit with renewed vigor and Marroo opened his eyes to stand next to his father’s ghost and raise his sword.

He felt his father’s memories in the sword, memories of a boy opening meridians one by one, breaking the ribs of a boy who was bigger and older than him, and cutting down the gang that tried to jump him when he was in one of the pits where he’d grown up before moving his wife into the daylight that couldn’t truly make her happy.

The geist dissipated, turning into a tornado of whilring blades that spun to surround Marroo around the edges of his aura. “Battle,” the ghost whispered as it disappeared, “always comes.”

Marroo closed his eyes. “I wish you had more to say.” He flicked the sword with his spirit and felt the whirling breath his father had left him respond as though it was his own. Then he raised the sword and sent its breath whirling through the barrier that still stood between him and the man he’d come here to kill.

Marroo’s first cut when he crashed through the barrier of rubble between him and the venom adept missed the adept completely, but it wasn’t meant to hit. He was out of breath, not the breath locked within his veil, but out of any usable breath he could divert from fighting with the venom in his spirit, so unlike every other time he’d swung the sword at the adept with the intention of projecting the strike beyond the distance he could reasonably reach, he didn’t launch his spirit down its length. Yet the sword still fired a projection as the adept ducked out of the blade’s path.

The cut shook the mansion as a line six feet across carved its way through walls and floors for a dozen yards beyond the tip of Marroo’s sword. His father’s spirit slashed through Marroo’s meridians as it slid around him with the momentum of the swing to manifest in a razor storm flying for the adept’s face. The adept had taken the time to reload at least one of his pistol’s barrels while Marroo recovered after the ceiling collapsed and he jabbed the barrel forward as he met the storm of swords with a pulse of venom to fire it at point blank range towards Marroo’s chest.

Marroo slid out of the way as the ball sailed past then rammed his sword forward. The adept cried out and batted it aside with the smoking pistol barrel only for the geist of Marroo’s father to manifest on his other side and send a razor sharpened palm at his face. The adept pushed backwards on the wall he’d been pinned against and it crumbled to let him fall away from the attacking ghost while he shot another projection at Marroo’s face.

Marroo kept his eyes open as the beam of venom washed over his face. It hurt. The agony redoubled as his spirit fought with the poison that stuck to his channels and poured down them like molten lead. He stepped forward and slammed his sword point towards the adept’s chest only to have it knocked away again before he raised it and repeated the motion while the adept tried to slither away across the floor.

It only took three tries to succeed.

The sword shot through the adept’s chest as he attempted to knock to fire a projection at Marroo’s face. Marroo felt the blade scrape bone before it slammed through the floor and pinned the adept where he’d fallen.

Marroo stumbled as he let go of his sword and let his back hit the wall before he slid down to the floor of the kitchen they’d broken into.

The adept’s pistol clattered to the floor as he scrabbled at the sword and kicked feebly at the floor in an attempt to escape. He managed to get a grip on the blade and it grated against his ribs as he shoved it out of his lung. He made a strangled noise as it came free and coughed up more blood while he floped away from Marroo. Marroo felt more poison wash over him while the floor and kitchen cabinets darkened with corruption around the fallen adept, but he didn’t care. It hurt, but it wouldn’t kill him. Not anymore.

“I didn’t want this.” Marroo said as his vision wavered from the pulse of poison.

The adept’s breath rattled as he clutched at the hole in his ribs and glared at Marroo.

“I’m sorry.”

Breath carried memories. When they came, as the adept lay gasping his last on the floor beyond Marroo while his spirit turned the world black with it’s corruption, Marroo thought at first that they were just hallucinations brought on by his battle with the poison moving through his mind, until he recognized the black sky of the Dregs proper, and the sharp outline of an aura that he recognized from only one man.

The sword adept was not his frist adept, though he was his first, as an adept himself. That changed little in the manner in which he prepared. Adepts were all the same, arrogant in their power. It made them easy marks.

When Marroo realized who’s mind he’d touched, he crawled forward to take the adept’s hand in his own. The adept clutched at him as blood ran from his eyes and gurgled from the wound to his chest. He clutched him and poured venom into his hand while Marroo fought it off with his veil and absorbed the memories handed to him by this adept’s last attempt to kill him.

He lived a lifetime in those memories, saw wonders, took the lives of two adepts, and watched his wife die from the same poison that would take his life. He watched his daughters grow up, and did his best to make sure they would not be alone when he was gone.

He stood at the gate to the underworld and saw wonders as he gazed into the brilliant light of the heavens, then he died, clutching the hand of the boy that killed him when he failed in his final task to keep his daughter’s safe.

The memories were not the man.

As they dissipated with the breath that finally filtered out of Marroo’s meridians to fume away through his aura he watched the body of the man wither and blacken in the aura of his own lingering breath until there was little more than blackened bones and flaking ash amidst a tangle of snow white hair.

Marroo turned to the spirit that still hovered behind him in the rubble and looked at the glaring silver eyes in the head of the silhouette.

They looked at one another for a long moment while water cascaded from the broken pipes above the crater in this part of the hosue before Marroo picked up his sword and looked at the blade.

He felt the memories churning there too, different ones, but many similar to those he’d just absorbed from the corpse in front of him.

“You aren’t him.” Marroo finally said as he looked back up at the spirit.

The geist didn’t respond and Marroo spared a bit of his newly cleansed spirit in order to summon the geist back into the blade that spawned it. It faded in a haze of whirling blades until it no longer felt like a storm, but a single huge impression of the sword icon staring down at Marroo through the silver imitations of his father’s eyes.

Then it was gone.

Marroo followed its example and left.