The sun stood at its zenith, drenching the floating island in merciless light as Eni lunged. Her heavy boots tore into the manicured turf, and her magical stockings pulled taut to their limit, translating every muscular impulse into pure motion. She drew her sword—a massive, predatory blade—and poured all her fury into a vertical descending strike.
The Plague Doctor didn't flinch until the final millisecond. Only when the tip was about to rend the black fabric of his robe did he slightly shift his weight. Eni’s sword, meeting no resistance, plunged deep into the earth by its own momentum. The metal gave a piteous chime as it struck the stone of the foundation.
Gritting her teeth, Eni wrenched the blade free and, spinning on her heels, launched a wide arc attack. The air whistled, sliced by steel, but the Doctor was once again unreachable. He moved fluidly, almost lazily, as if he knew the trajectory of every dust mote in the air. While Eni struggled to regain her balance for a new thrust, he calmly extracted a small device from the folds of his garment. A short click—and a long, coal-black cane with a matte pommel unfolded in his hands.
With one short motion, he parried Eni’s next strike. A sharp clang rang out. Before Eni could swing again, the Doctor suddenly closed the distance and stepped on the toe of her boot, pinning her movement. A light, almost weightless shove to the shoulder—and Eni, losing her footing, tumbled onto her back.
"Your skills are meager," the Doctor’s cold, emotionless voice drifted from beneath the mask. "You are using someone else's rhythm. That sword is too heavy for your anthropometry; it is entirely ill-suited for a woman of your build unless she possesses titanic strength. Choose a one-handed blade or change your specialization. One does not need to be a pure swordsman to kill."
"Again!" Eni scrambled up, ignoring his words. Her gaze burned with stubbornness.
"Very well," the Doctor replied dismissively, a faint, high note of boredom creeping into his tone.
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This time, Eni tried to be more cunning, aiming for his torso, but the Doctor demonstrated a terrifying flexibility: he bent his spine backward exactly ninety degrees, letting the blade pass over him. Simultaneously, he hooked the hilt of Sin with the end of his cane and, with a sharp jerk, disarmed her. The sword flew far to the side, impaling itself into the trunk of an apple tree.
"Hey! That’s not fair!" Eni cried out and, without thinking, charged him with her bare hands.
The Doctor straightened up, tucked his hands behind his back while still clutching his cane, and began to methodically dodge her fists. He danced around her like a ghost. When he finally tired of the pantomime, he delivered a short, precise strike with his cane to the nerve cluster on her thigh. An electric shock instantly lanced through Eni’s leg; her muscles failed, and she collapsed to the ground, paralyzed.
"Your skills are meager," he repeated, heading toward the Obelisk. "But I admit, you have more resolve than common sense. However, you are not yet ready for the true art of war."
"Stop! Wait!" Eni struggled to rise, her voice trembling with frustration. "I haven't learned anything! It hasn't even been thirty minutes! You promised!"
The Doctor froze at the very edge of the stone, without turning. "You have learned the most important thing—the awareness of your limits. If you wish to continue, grow stronger."
He had already raised his hand to touch the teleportation sigil when a confident, heavy thud sounded behind him. The Doctor turned and went rigid. Eni was standing. The paralysis that should have held her for at least an hour had vanished.
"What?.." the Doctor whispered, his mask tilting slightly. "Incredible. Your capacity for cytokinetic division and cellular regeneration is comparable to the metrics of Mr. Nickincki. But he is living conceptual matter—magical ink. And you... you are weak, you belong to the baseline human race, and yet..."
"Ability... I don't know how, but... I can," Eni interrupted surly, feeling the echo of the strike still vibrating inside her.
The cane slipped from the Doctor’s hands, hitting the stones with a dry clatter. His voice dropped to a reverent whisper, a mix of shock and scientific ecstasy. "Cacchio... If... if I can study this trait, I could save millions... or create something perfect..."
He approached Eni slowly, closing the distance to a dangerous minimum, and spoke rapidly, drowning in terminology: "Your metabolic coefficient exceeds the norm by thousands! Do you realize that your telomeres do not shorten during division, but seem to self-repair through external magic absorption? Your DNA is not just a code; it’s a self-correcting matrix with hypertrophied expression of regeneration genes. In an ordinary human, the tissue repair cascade takes days—with you, it’s nanoseconds. You aren't just a human specimen, Eni. You are a biological anomaly violating the second law of thermodynamics! Your organism synthesizes proteins at a speed that should have incinerated you from the thermal output, yet you haven't even broken a sweat!"
He grabbed her by the shoulders, and Eni saw her own reflection in the lenses of his mask—frightened, but resolute.
"I need more of your blood, Eni. I need to understand how your human nature tames this bottomless regeneration. This... this is the key to human evolution!"
