They moved at the same instant.

  What followed was a blur of back-and-forth.

  Magnolia’s tentacles lashed out in overlapping patterns, trying to cage him in: one swept low for his ankles, another whipped down from above, two more stabbed from the flanks. She grabbed a trash bin with a free tentacle and flung it at him. Kazane wove through all of it.

  His body never stopped moving, but never wasted movement either. He rode his own wind, feet barely kissing the ground. When the trash bin came in he stepped on it, let the momentum carry him, and used it as a rolling platform to vault over a tentacle spear.

  Magnolia hissed and whirled, tentacle snapping after him like an irritated snake.

  He landed on the hood of another car, the metal denting under his weight. Wind coiled around his legs and he launched off again before the tentacle could follow. It slammed into the spot he’d vacated. The hood crumpled inward like foil.

  A mailbox got sliced in half.

  A street sign spun end over end.

  Magnolia ducked under a horizontal slash that ripped three neat grooves into the wall behind her. She countered by slamming both palms down, her arms bulging, then bursting into a spray of fleshy tendrils that spread across the ground like blooming roots. They speared down and lurched up in unison, turning the road into a bristling forest of living spikes.

  Kazane kept moving.

  He skated along the surface of the wind, feet brushing the tips of the spikes without touching them. He leaned sideways, sword carving arcs of vacuum that lopped the tentacles clean as he passed, leaving stumps that sprayed blood.

  Magnolia clicked her tongue. Overextended. She yanked the mass back, tendrils collapsing into streams that slurped across the ground and up her arms until only the original four remained, held taut behind her.

  The wind around him contracted, and he blurred forward with a thunderclap of air pressure. His afterimage smeared across Magnolia’s retinas like someone had dragged a fingertip through a wet painting.

  She was already reacting.

  The nearest tentacle whipped up like a batter’s swing, slamming into where his side should have been. He corkscrewed mid-air, sword scraping along the tentacle’s surface. He planted a foot on the slick flesh and launched off it, flipping over her head and landing behind her.

  “Too slow,” he murmured.

  Another tentacle was already slamming down where he landed.

  He feinted left. She read it.

  But he’d counted on that. The feint was a distraction: while her eyes tracked his shoulders, his blade was already rising, carving an arc toward the nearest tentacle. The edge bit deep. Red tissue sprayed the ground, hissing where it landed.

  Magnolia sent the wounded tentacle straight at his face.

  Kazane leaned back, the appendage passing so close it left a wet streak across his cheek. By the time he straightened, she had closed the gap. Her remaining tentacles fanned out behind her, cutting off every angle of retreat.

  He had nowhere to go. So he went forward.

  His shoulder dropped. He came in low, under her guard, and for one instant they were chest to chest. She felt the heat of his breath. Saw the cold amusement in his eyes.

  Then his palm struck her sternum.

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  The wind cloak detonated outward. The blast caught her square and flung her back. She hit the side of a delivery truck hard enough to leave a dent, ears ringing, vision swimming.

  By the time she pushed herself upright, he was already ten feet away, blade resting on his shoulder.

  “Sloppy,” he said.

  He was on her again before she could answer.

  The blade fell in a silver arc aimed at her skull. Magnolia threw herself into a backbend so violent her spine screamed and her hair brushed the street. His sword split the air where her face had been. The edge passed a finger’s width above her nose. She felt the wind of its passing on her eyelids.

  From her upside-down vantage, she caught his expression. He looked, if anything, mildly impressed.

  “Cute,” he said.

  Her tentacle fired upward from the ground, driving for his chest while he was still mid-swing.

  He spun around his own blade as though it were an axis, twisting his body to let the tentacle scream past his ribs. Then his free hand shot out and caught it. Wind tightened around his forearm like a glove, and he pulled.

  The force ripped Magnolia off her feet. She turned the momentum into a roll, flipping back upright as another tentacle hooked a streetlamp. The pole bent under the strain, concrete around its base cracking apart.

  She swung herself up the pole like a gymnast, flipped onto the bent lamp, and perched there, elevated above street level.

  Cars lined the curb below, one with its alarm blaring from the impact. A trash can lay on its side, contents scattered. A mail scooter sat parked at a diagonal; Magnolia’s tentacle flicked it up as a shield the instant Kazane darted forward.

  Metal shrieked. Kazane carved through the scooter’s frame, but Magnolia was already gone.

  She dropped from the streetlamp, using a tentacle to yank down a laundry line. Shirts and bedsheets billowed into a blinding wall between them. Kazane’s vision filled with flapping fabric.

  Tentacles speared through the sheet like harpoons.

  He heard them before he saw them. Ducked the first. Parried the second. His blade carved quick, short strokes, turning aside each strike as it tore through the cloth. The sheets shredded around him. Cotton scraps drifted down like snow.

  Magnolia burst through the falling fabric, fist drawn back. She caught him on the forearm, hard enough to rattle her own bones. Before he could recover she was kicking, her leg lengthening mid-swing, flesh and bone rearranging themselves to add range.

  He leaned back. Her heel brushed his hair and found nothing else.

  “Like I said before,” Kazane said. “You’ve improved.”

  He sheathed his sword.

  The blade slid into its scabbard with a soft click. His hand settled on the hilt. His eyes closed.

  The wind that had been swirling around him since the fight began went still.

  Every nerve in Magnolia’s body fired at once. Something old and animal deep in her gut told her to move, to be anywhere else, to be far away from this man right now.

  She was too slow.

  Kazane breathed in.

  He drew.

  The sword left the scabbard and the world came apart.

  Lines of force erupted from where he stood, radiating outward in every direction—a lattice of killing edges that cut through everything they touched. Shimmering green beams. The ground split open. Steel shrieked and parted. Cars fell into pieces. Lampposts crumpled in on themselves. The buildings on either side of the street opened up in long diagonal wounds, spilling brick and glass and plaster into the road.

  Magnolia was already diving, already twisting, but the attack was everywhere and there was nowhere safe to be. A blade of wind laid her shoulder open. Another scored her back. A third passed so close to her face she felt it tug at her eyelashes.

  She hit the ground behind the bisected remains of the delivery truck and lay there gasping, palms flat against cold concrete.

  When she raised her head, the street had been transformed.

  Wreckage lay everywhere, sliced into clean pieces. Water fountained from severed pipes. Sparks rained from cables cut mid-span. The ground itself had been carved into a web of intersecting grooves, as though a hundred blades had been dragged across it at once.

  Kazane stood at the center of it all. He had not moved from where he started. His sword was still extended from the draw, held level with the ground, and he was smiling with the kind of grin that belonged on someone watching fireworks, not standing in the wreck of a city block.

  He tilted his head, surveying the flattened ruins around them.

  “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

  He laughed once and let the blade drop to his side.

  “Good thing I had Varn clear everyone out, huh?” He scratched the back of his neck with his free hand, sheepish, like he’d accidentally overcooked dinner. “That would’ve been—yeah. That would’ve been a whole thing.”

  He stepped forward. Glass crunched under his heel. His eyes found hers, that same wide grin still sitting on his face like it had been painted there.

  “So,” he said, pleasant as a host refilling her cup. “Shall we keep going?”