Page 52 of Orc’s Hex

They work the room.

He has never fought alongside anyone who reads a battlefield the way she does.

Most people he’s fought beside require verbal coordination. Varek, Garrok, the garrison warriors across a century of conflicts—calls, signals, position announcements. It takes processing. It takes time.

Ziva doesn’t need calls.

She reads him mid-move and adjusts before he’s finished. He drives the fifth construct toward her position and she’s already there, already working the thread before he’s handed the construct off. He redirects the sixth toward Varek’s section and she’s already shifted her attention to the seventh, which has been testing the archway behind him. She sees the battlefield in the same shape he does and moves through it like she’s been fighting beside him for years.

The curse has been trying to make him lethal to everyone close enough to matter.

What it has actually produced is a woman who fights like she’s accounted for everything he’s going to do before he does it.

He has opinions about what the curse deserves for that.

The fifth construct drops under Ziva’s threading. The sixth disperses under Varek’s impact work at the threshold—he’s been watching Drazhul’s technique and adapting it, which is why Drazhul trusts him.

The seventh is the one from the east wall. The large one. He takes it alone.

It’s the hardest fight in the hall—denser than the others, less willing to disperse. It doesn’t fight like the others fought, either. The first six responded to impact the way shadow responds to impact: staggering, dispersing, reassembling. The seventh absorbs his first strike and keeps coming, and he understands, half a second too late, that this one has learned from watching the others fail.

It’s adapting. They’re all connected to the same source. Every one that goes down teaches the ones still standing.

He doesn’t have time to think about what that means for how many more of these there will eventually be.

It gets a limb around his bad shoulder—the one already compromised from the fourth construct’s impact—and the wrongness of the grip, cold and absolute and entirely without the give of muscle or tendon, drags a sound out of him he doesn’t examine. He drives his good elbow into where a sternum would be if the thing had one. It barely registers. He tries again, lower, aiming for the same compressed density that worked on the third construct.

It works. Barely.

The construct staggers, and he presses the advantage before it can recover, driving it back three full strides into the floor and pinning it with his whole weight, his forearm across what serves as its throat, the strapped ribs screaming with every motion.

It doesn’t disperse.

It fights him on the ground the way nothing shadow-built has any right to fight—clawing, twisting, a raw physical struggle that has nothing elegant left in it, both of them past technique and into simple attrition. He takes three strikes to the face that would have broken a lesser jaw. He doesn’t let go.

Hold. Just hold. It has to run out before you do.

He doesn’t know, in the moment, which of them is right about that. He holds anyway, because holding is the only plan left, and he stays on it until the last of the shadow architecture collapses under his weight and it disperses completely—the wrongness draining out of the space between his hands all at once, like a held breath finally let go.

He stays down another second longer than he needs to. Just breathing. Blood in his mouth from a split lip he doesn’t remember taking.

Silence.

All seven down.

The cracks in the floor are still open.

The first construct begins to return.

He watches the scattered pieces—shadow and oath-residue and all that compressed denied potential—draw back in on themselves from the floor, slow and deliberate.

Ziva is watching it too.

Then the second.

Then the third.

All seven, rising again from the same cracks in the same floor with the same wrong proportions and the same singular purpose.