The ground around them was an irregular mosaic of dry shrubs and patches of withered grass, yellowish, broken by the wind.

  The soil wasn’t sand, nor desert: a hard surface, cracked only in places, with clumps of low vegetation stubbornly clinging to life under the sun.

  Here and there, low bushes, thin dry branches that looked like vegetal bones.

  In the distance, Rahinua was a grayish blur.

  In front of its walls, the ivory-white army: a perfectly ordered mass of soldiers, a stark contrast against the barren landscape.

  Here, instead, there were only two people.

  Ten meters.

  A corridor of dead grass and dust.

  Micheal, standing in front of her.

  Hyped.

  With that loose-dog energy, the kind ready to bite just for fun.

  Katherina stared at him, motionless.

  The breeze barely moved her cloak, bending the grass beneath her boots.

  No fear on her face.

  No trace of hesitation.

  Inside, it was a different story.

  Seventeen? Maybe eighteen. A kid.

  And in less than a year he had taken cities, won wars, built a personal cult of soldiers loyal to the death.

  In Rebi?uy they already whispered that his faction would attempt a coup.

  A true warlord. You don’t become that if you’re weak.

  She couldn’t afford to underestimate him.

  But it was hard to believe an adolescent could actually surpass her.

  Neither of them moved.

  The wind pushed a cluster of dry shrubs between them, making them crackle like little dead fingers.

  Micheal was the first to break the silence, speaking in English:

  “You’ve been acting all high and mighty,” he said. “And now you’re waiting for my move like it’s strategy. Strong people don’t need strategy.”

  Katherina looked at him with a flicker of mockery.

  “So you admit you’re not strong?”

  The smile he gave was the kind worn by someone having way too much fun.

  “Traveling around these lands, you hear stories about you. Makes it sound like you can actually fight — and pretty damn well, too.

  It makes sense for me to wait.

  I know the odds aren’t in my favor, that this duel is a gamble… but I also know what I’m capable of. And honestly, it seems unlikely that anyone is stronger than me.

  So no: you don’t scare me.”

  He’s not stupid, Katherina thought. That makes him worse.

  She lifted her chin, icy and composed.

  “I’m not afraid of you, idiot.”

  Her voice was a blade.

  “I’m not waiting because I fear your attacks.

  I’m waiting because I have no intention of wasting more energy than necessary to break a worthless nobody like you.

  And yes: I’m certain I’ll defeat you easily.”

  Her words fell among the dry grass like stones.

  The wind stopped.

  The air grew heavier.

  The duel hadn’t begun.

  But the atmosphere had.

  Micheal was the one to make the first move.

  He took a step forward with his right foot.

  Theatrical.

  Slow.

  Katherina watched him with a tense kind of curiosity.

  Let’s see what you can do, lunatic, she thought.

  Then Micheal pressed his foot hard against the ground.

  The tremor followed at once: a sharp, concentrated earthquake.

  A violent, top-down anthropogenic subsidence, a brutal vertical collapse that crushed the soil beneath him with disproportionate force.

  From the impact point, an immense web of cracks burst outward, racing fast through dry shrubs and dead grass until it reached Katherina.

  But she remained impossible. Unmovable.

  As if the ground beneath her feet didn’t belong to the same world.

  Micheal then took the stance — or rather, a crude imitation of the stance — of a hundred-meter sprinter in the instant immediately after the starting gun.

  The forward leap was so lightning-fast it could have made a cheetah sprinting at ×2 speed look ridiculous.

  In an instant Micheal reached Katherina, intent on striking her with an overwhelmingly powerful punch.

  But just as the blow was about to land, he realized the body in front of him was only a residual afterimage.

  The real Katherina was already behind him.

  She placed a hand on his back, with no apparent force.

  And in that instant, something lodged itself inside him.

  As if an arcane energy had been forced into his body with millimetric violence and imploded suddenly.

  His viscera clenched all at once, as if someone had pressed a hidden switch and shut down his entire internal system in a single gesture.

  The shockwave of the implosion formed a flickering nimbus around his body: an ephemeral crown of energy, barely perceptible, that trembled and expanded in the span of a blink.

  A phenomenon only eyes like Katherina’s could detect — and perhaps even Micheal, if he’d possessed even the faintest autoscopic capability, if he could have seen himself from the outside rather than being overwhelmed by the shock.

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  She did not hesitate.

  Despite the unstable, mid-air posture forced upon him, she aligned herself perfectly and struck his back with a brutal kick.

  The blow was tremendous: his body was hurled incredibly far, as if his trajectory had suddenly been multiplied; meanwhile, particles of the exogenous hemoptysis streaked across his cheeks, and the rest was displaced by the inertia of his flight.

  And he truly would have flown far, if Katherina hadn’t used the energy just discharged as a vector of propulsion, surpassing his velocity in mid-air and appearing in front of him.

  She struck again.

  This time with a pink lightning bolt, which shot through his body like an overloaded electroshock, freezing him in mid-air.

  Then she let him fall.

  Micheal hit the ground with a dull thud.

  Katherina looked down at him, satisfied.

  A one-sided duel. Maybe I overestimated him a little, she thought.

  “Is that all you can do?” Katherina said.

  Micheal snarled—short, brutal—and vanished into the ground at once, like an animal slipping beneath the surface in an unnatural motion, quick and far too fluid to belong to a human body.

  Katherina placed her hand on the soil.

  The effect was immediate: the same implant she had used on her back, but expanded to a geological scale.

  Energy spread through the ground with a single internal beat, a dry impulse that traveled across the mass of earth like a jolt inside some colossal organism.

  A faint glow flickered.

  The earth hiccupped sharply, shaking off a small cloud of dust.

  Micheal burst out, scraping his way to the surface.

  The pulse had caught him mid-tunnel.

  The result was a primal, disordered emergence: arms clawing at the surface, fingers digging for grip in the dry soil, his body dragged out in fast, filthy motions—more like the startled escape of a disturbed animal than the maneuver of a trained fighter.

  His breath was broken, his face smeared with dust, and in his eyes something new had appeared: a tension that calculated and feared at the same time.

  Katherina seized the moment.

  She launched herself upward with brutal force, using her inner energy as a vector.

  The acceleration was so sudden that the air seemed to pull back to let her pass.

  As she ascended, she brought both hands in front of her.

  A tiny sphere formed between her palms.

  It pulsed.

  And began to grow.

  In seconds it had become enormous, nearly the size of her body: an unstable mass wrapped in electric filaments—geometric worms sliding across its surface like transient phenomena, fleeting, almost impossible to observe continuously.

  It looked like an impossible object, as if oscillating between two different ways of existing.

  Then it collapsed.

  The sphere shrank, quivered, shifted erratically in size, as though assembling and disassembling itself at high speed.

  Then it vanished.

  The explosion came a heartbeat later.

  Not an elegant flash, but a brutal detonation—an abrupt compression of air.

  Micheal was hit head-on, caught in the eye of the impact, his body folded in on itself like a rag doll hurled into a hurricane.

  From above, Katherina saw the struck point tremble beneath the settling dust.

  She located where Micheal had crashed down.

  She corrected her trajectory with another burst—an abrupt change of direction, almost like firing up a supersonic engine—and dove toward him like a projectile.

  She struck his back with both knees.

  Crack.

  The sound was sharp.

  Something gave way, or perhaps it had already been close to breaking.

  He hadn’t had time to harden his body.

  Or maybe he was conscious, but too dazed to muster the focus he needed.

  Katherina didn’t know, and in that moment, she didn’t care.

  She looked at him with compassion. She couldn’t help it: she didn’t like humiliating others, even if he deserved it. And he definitely deserved it.

  It’s over, she thought. Something broke inside him, but he’ll manage to regenerate on his own. He has enormous potential. He could even become stronger than me. Maybe I should eliminate him.

  That was when the story of that soldier came back to her mind—Tandey, or whatever his name was—the one who spared Hitler’s life. She wasn’t even sure it was historically accurate. Still, had he killed him, he probably would have saved millions of lives.

  The future she imagined for Micheal, projected onto his personality, made her think he was that kind of man from the very first moment he opened his mouth. And, in truth, she had had some doubts even before meeting him, considering what people said about him.

  But the fight wasn’t over.

  Micheal rose again, tearing the air apart with a battle cry straight out of an anime.

  He was furious.

  Fuck. I wasted time, Katherina thought.

  Micheal got back to his feet, breathless.

  At his feet, the ground began to boil, and dynamic pseudopods formed—incipient tentacles, as if too timid to extend themselves fully. But in no time, they grew and intertwined, shaping a perforated sphere of mud that seemed alive.

  Not a compact form.

  Not a symmetrical shell.

  It was a spherical tangle, a filthy, deformed knot — a sickly globe where the continents looked as if they’d been painted by a paraplegic god using a brush held in His mouth and primordial broth as pigment.

  Layers of earth folded over him in a chaotic, oscillating manner, like a defective cocoon built in a moment of panic.

  Katherina had spent a great deal of energy, which she had partially recovered during the introspective moment in which she’d lost the chance to finish her opponent. Not all misfortune comes to harm.

  She raised her arm, and her eyes lit up with golden light. Clumps of clouds in the sky swelled, crossed by golden electrical flashes.

  Then the lightning struck. Massive. Thick.

  In that instant, the sphere sealed itself, formed by rings of mud rotating in laminar layers, side by side, at tremendous speed.

  It still couldn’t withstand the impact of the lightning’s force and was vaporized, releasing an indescribable sound.

  But Micheal was no longer inside it.

  Katherina moved to reproduce the same geological-scale implosion technique to flush Micheal out again, but the ground swelled in an unreal, instantaneous way and erupted violently. A massive crater tore open beneath her feet, and a storm of debris was hurled into the sky like IDF rubber kneebreakers.

  Zero time to react.

  Katherina was forced to shield herself with her arms, pouring an excessive amount of psychophysical energy into reinforcing her body at a microscopic level. Some of the debris that hit her still managed to wound her — grazes, scrapes, bruises. Nothing serious, but enough to bite at her nerves.

  As the storm began to lose force, Micheal burst from the ground at an inhuman speed and landed a right hook to her stomach, driven in with the brutality needed to fold her diaphragm. She spat blood.

  Then he realigned himself in an instant — as if his tendons had already decided the sequence — and launched into a barrage of punches.

  For the first time since the duel had begun, Katherina felt clearly that the tide of the battle could truly shift.

  She had to find a fast move to avoid the power of those blows. But in that moment — disorganized, dazed, suspended mid-air like a helpless target — the only technique she could execute easily was the nested implosion. Micheal, however, was too far and too well positioned: his strikes would land first.

  She executed it anyway.

  This time in the open, in the space between them, knowing full well it would hit her too. But she sensed — with a brutal, immediate kind of logic — that he would take the backlash harder than she would. Up to that point he had taken far more damage, and there was no reason to believe he was more resilient.

  Or at least that’s the rational explanation one can give in hindsight. In truth, her brain had performed a hyper-complex calculation in a fraction of a second, distilling instinct and years of experience into a timespan in which a normal human would not even be remotely conscious.

  The terrifying shockwave generated by the implosion hurled them in two opposite directions.

  The storm of projectile-debris had finally waned.

  Katherina realized she still had enough energy to decelerate mid-air, using the same technique she had employed earlier to snap her trajectory in flight and dive down on a dazed Micheal.

  So she did.

  She used her remaining strength to prepare an energy sphere—certainly weaker than the first she had unleashed in this fight, but still stable enough to be thrown.

  She hurled it at Micheal, hoping she wouldn’t miss, given the distance that had opened between them and the condition she was in.

  She didn’t miss.

  The explosion was devastating. She understood it from the light striking the edges of her vision, because she hadn’t managed to keep her body arched forward as she fell past one of the apses of the jagged mouth of the crater Micheal had created.

  The impact with the ground was painful, but not dramatically so. She managed to get back on her feet, though she was exhausted, her muscles screaming for mercy and her joints on fire.

  On the other side, partially hidden behind the jagged fangs of the crater’s rim, she saw Micheal trying to stand — and failing.

  From her position, she formed another energy sphere with one hand.

  She hurled it at him; she couldn’t possibly miss, not at that distance, because she had all the time she needed.

  Or so she thought.

  And she was right.

  The blow knocked Micheal out.

  Katherina caught her breath, while he showed no sign of life.

  Could he be dead?

  No. Impossible.

  He’s unconscious, or unable to move from the pain.

  He had proven himself far too tough to die from such weak hits, Katherina thought.

  She gave herself a few more seconds to recover a minimal amount of breath and energy.

  Then she vaulted over the massive crater with a leap as rapid as it was elegant, landing on the other side — where Micheal was finally coming to, or had recovered a shred of strength.

  Katherina approached him.

  I hate to admit it, but I have to kill him, Katherina thought.

  Yes, this is the right choice, she told herself again.

  And yet her hand, stretched toward Micheal, hesitated to deliver the killing blow.

  Come on, she urged herself. This boy is irredeemable and extraordinarily powerful. You cannot allow him to survive. Imagine how many lives you would save, how much suffering you would prevent. And he’s not even the first human you’ve killed.

  Then Micheal weakly lifted his head and… his expression was something utterly unexpected.

  He was terrified.

  It’s normal to feel fear at the edge of death. Normal to beg for mercy, lie, make promises you’ll never keep just to stay alive.

  It is not normal to turn into another person entirely.

  And sometimes a single expression is enough to spark an unsolvable doubt in the eyes — and in the mind — of the one who witnesses it.

  That was the terror of prey.

  The look of someone who feels completely overwhelmed by a malignant creature.

  A look that would make you feel guilty… if you weren’t a malignant creature.

  Then he started crying and whimpering.

  A dreadful, broken moan, while his desperate will to run away flailed among his few remaining psychophysical energies.

  He managed only to drag himself a few centimeters away from her.

  He looked so tender to her.

  How is that possible?

  Maybe there are multiple personalities living in his mind.

  Or maybe it was just an act — the performance of a psychopath with excellent theatrical instinct, perfectly mimicking the reactions of cornered prey.

  He’s doing it to confuse me, of course.

  And what if his goal was precisely to make me believe that someone else lives inside his head?

  Would he go that far?

  Yes, obviously he would.

  But no matter how cunning he is, it’s hard to imagine his strategy stretching its tentacles far enough to consider acting as his last resort.

  He doesn’t even know who I am, nor the principles that form the foundations of my decisions.

  It seems unlikely.

  And if there really were another personality in his head, I wouldn’t just be killing that bastard…

  I’d be killing someone else too.

  Probably an innocent person — someone who, if helped, might even be able to overtake the amoral trickster who really should vanish from this world.

  But who could help him in a world as backward as this one?

  And how can I even verify that?

  How much sense does this intuition make?

  And what if I’m deceiving myself, because deep down I don’t want to kill?

  Because I don’t want to stain my hands with blood again.

  Micheal had curled up like a child and was peeking at her sideways with his left eye.

  Katherina adopted a gentle demeanor, trying to shed light on her dilemma.

  She approached him slowly.

  Micheal said,

  “Nooo…” in a trembling voice. “Stay away. Don’t hurt me. Please. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”

  “Relax. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Liar. You hurt me.”

  “You hurt me too.”

  “I… I…”

  “Yes, come on. You don’t need to be afraid of me. If you don’t want to hurt me, I won’t harm you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “May I ask your name?”

  “Micheal.”

  “And may I ask you a slightly intimate question, Micheal?”

  “Mmh…”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Is there another Micheal you share this body with, Micheal?”

  Micheal didn’t answer.

  Maybe I was too blunt, fuck, Katherina thought.

  I’m really not suited for situations like this. If only Dmitrij were here…

  She gave a faint, melancholic smile at the fact that he had come to mind in that exact moment.

  She missed him terribly.

  Do I really have to consider the possibility that two Micheals exist — one psychopathic and one shattered by trauma? It sounds absurd.

  “I understand, you don’t want to talk about it. Was it perhaps the other Micheal who…?”

  But it doesn’t make sense.

  It would be in his best interest to make me believe in dissociation. But he could also imagine that I’d interpret everything as a manipulation — precisely because revealing the ‘secret’ would be the optimal strategy for him. Doubt can create more hesitation than a believable but unreliable confession, because such confessions divide more.

  It would be the cleverest tactic against an opponent who projects her own ingenuity onto others. But that would be too clever for someone this young. And he would’ve had to plan all this before the duel even began.

  No… I’m overthinking.

  She sat down and hugged her knees with her arms.

  What do I do? she thought.

  It was Micheal who broke the silence.

  “Why do you want to kill me?”

  “I don’t want to kill you.”

  Maybe, she thought.

  “Yes, you do. Everyone wants to. This world exists to kill me.”

  “Why do you think that? Is that something you believe, or did someone tell you?”

  “You told me,” he said in a faint voice.

  Oh, fuck.

  “I’m sure I never said anything like that.”

  “You always do this. First you make me suffer, you attack me without mercy, and then you act nice. You want to drive me insane.”

  “We met for the first time today, Micheal. Why would I do that?”

  “Because this world was created to kill me.”

  He’ll drive me insane.

  If this is an act, he’s the most talented actor I’ve ever seen. And in my old life I had plenty of film buffs around me, so I’ve seen good movies. What the fuck is happening?

  “Did Micheal tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  But he didn’t answer.

  She tried asking more questions, but Micheal had curled back into silence like a shut clam.

  At a certain point, while her mind agonized in indecision and her compassion for that other Micheal — assuming he really existed — kept growing, she stood up.

  “I hope you find someone who can help you, Micheal. I’m leaving now.”

  Micheal remained silent.

  When she had walked a good distance away from that unsettling conversation, Micheal shouted:

  “Hey, bitch!”

  His voice booming.

  Katherina turned quickly, and saw again the same predator’s stare, the same inevitable sardonic smirk on his face twisted by pain and exhaustion.

  He’s back… or he’s pleased he won the mindgame?

  “You’ll regret leaving me alive! I’ll come after you! I’ll humiliate you, I’ll break you, but not before destroying everything you care about! Pathetic whore!”

  The idea of a death sentence brushed her mind once more.

  But she immediately realized she could never kill a body capable of producing the most genuine expression of terror she had ever witnessed.

  Before he was even done insulting and threatening her, she turned her back to him and walked calmly toward her men.

  Ready to go home.

  If the arc of the moral universe — however long — truly bends toward justice, as she believed, and if her hypothesis about the two Micheals was correct, then perhaps even in this scientifically backward world the traumatized Micheal could recover and take control of that body.

  This, at least, had always been the way Katherina rationalized hope.

  And it had never occurred to her to look at it from another angle.

  Never.

  This was the only time she wavered.