The creature was learning.

  Peter noticed it on the fourth exchange — the way its tentacles adjusted half a beat faster than before, the way his follow-through was getting caught instead of landing clean. He'd broken through its defenses once. Now it remembered how he'd done it.

  Of course it does.

  He reset his stance and went again. Sword met darkness, resistance pushed back, and Peter felt the shift in his arms — each parry costing more than the last, his strikes losing depth. The creature wasn't just holding on. It was adapting. Actively. Like it was filing away every pattern he had and building a counter for it in real time.

  His body was fine — Josephine's skill was handling that — but fine and effective were different things, and right now he was barely effective.

  He took a step back and actually looked at it.

  He thought of Josephine in the training courtyard.

  He'd watched her demonstrate her technique once, arms crossed, certain he was about to pick it apart. On paper it looked like a mess — openings everywhere, loose, almost reckless. He'd been ready to say so.

  Then she moved.

  Every gap was a trap. Every apparent weakness was bait. The whole thing was a machine designed to make opponents commit to something and punish them for it, and it worked because it looked like it shouldn't. She'd taken him apart with it in under a minute and then looked vaguely disappointed that it had taken that long.

  "In tough situations, calm down. Nervousness makes you clumsy. You already know what to do — stop getting in your own way."

  He'd heard that and thought he understood it.

  He hadn't. Not really.

  Peter exhaled. Stopped trying to outpace the thing. Stopped chasing.

  Wait.

  The creature came at him — tentacle from the left, feint, real attack from the right. He'd seen that sequence twice already. He let it develop one beat further than before, felt it commit—

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  Now.

  He moved. One vertical slash, clean and deliberate. The tentacle came off.

  Before it could recalibrate, he did it again. Same motion, same timing, trusting the pattern. Another one gone. Then another. Ten came at him and he worked through them methodically, not fast, just accurate — Josephine's rhythm in his hands instead of his own.

  The creature hesitated.

  That was new. Peter pressed forward, blade carving through its form, hitting things that had been deflecting him for the entire fight. He could feel it — something clicking into place, technique working the way technique was supposed to work when you stopped forcing it.

  He drove his sword into its core.

  The creature shuddered. Black ichor spilled from the wound.

  Then it screamed.

  The miasma around them lurched inward, drawn toward it like a vacuum. The air thickened fast — heavy, wrong, the kind of heavy that meant something was changing. The creature pulled itself inward, collapsing into a dense cocoon of swirling darkness.

  Peter took a step back.

  The cocoon pulsed.

  Shattered.

  What stood in its place wasn't a mass of tentacles anymore.

  It was humanoid. Roughly. Limbs too long, skin pale and pulled too tight over the bones underneath it. Hollow eyes with a sickly glow. Mouth open in a silent scream that the air around it seemed to physically respond to.

  The aura coming off it was different. Heavier. The kind of weight that didn't sit on your shoulders — it sat on your chest, inside your ribs, like it was already inside you.

  Peter didn't finish forming the thought before it moved.

  The foot connected with his chest before he registered the distance closing. He went through two buildings. Maybe three. Lost count somewhere in the rubble.

  He got up.

  The creature was already there.

  The fists came in a sequence that didn't have a pattern he could find — fast, brutal, each hit landing before he'd finished processing the last one. He tried to parry. Too slow. Tried to create distance. It closed the gap faster than he could open it. His blocks were getting through but not stopping anything, just redirecting force into his arms instead of his face.

  He was being taken apart.

  The tentacles came back — the new form still had them, apparently — coiling around his limbs, pulling him in, and the next blow to his abdomen was the kind that made his vision white out for a second.

  He hit the ground.

  Get up.

  He got up.

  Got hit again. Harder.

  Get up.

  His body moved slower than the command.

  For the first time in a long time, Peter felt it — actual fear. Not nerves before a fight, not the controlled adrenaline of a duel. Fear. The kind that lives in the space between I can't and I won't and doesn't care which one wins.

  He'd climbed this far. He'd trained under Josephine, taken everything she'd thrown at him, dragged himself up from nothing. And this thing was going to put him in the ground anyway.

  Am I really not enough.

  The creature loomed over him. Raised its arm.

  I can't lose. I won't—

  Darkness.