The villagers moved through the northern lane covered in smoke.
Reason heard them go.
Steps.
Twenty-eight and Mercy...
He exhaled once through his nose, a perfect success... now he only needs to keep two more promises tonight.
Before the villagers reached out, he stepped out of the smoke first into the bandit group's face.
"Fire!" The order came, and it was already raining.
Reason was calm still, one blocked, one dodged, he turned his head, and another flew by, then his toros just enough for the arrow to pass by.
At the end, he was still unharmed when the bandits closest charged forward... many of them died tonight, but there were still enough to overpower one man... but not this one.
One slash, a scream, one cut, a head rolled, Reason's sword caught in the leather, it was already dismissed.
The next attacking bandit's sword switched owners. His own blade opened his stomach.
The attacking bandits, he moved through them the way he had moved through everything else tonight — with the particular economy of a man who is not angry and not afraid and has simply decided what the next several seconds will look like.
The smoke was thinning at the edges as Reason jumped back. The two following him flew out already dead.
This was the moment the vice leader jumped in.
With his curved blade, slicing the smoke open as it met Reason's sword.
"YOU MONSTER!" The vice leader screamed, but even as the words left him, he knew this acting wouldn't work on this man. Nothing had worked. Not the men, not the leverage. He filed that away and came again faster.
Multiple exchanges, this was the first time Reason had to exchange more than twice tonight.
Suddenly, Reason had a thinking look, from the smoke behind him, something that wasn't the vice leader or another bandit.
He was still keeping count.
There shouldn't have been anyone, and yet.
Steps — wrong weight, wrong rhythm, too uneven, the way someone runs when they are not running toward something, but simply running, past the point of thinking, past the point where the body and the mind are still in agreement.
A young bandit, a boy who can't be called a man yet.
A bandit ordered to hide before Reason's calculations began, someone unnoticed, and unaccounted for.
Reason heard the boy rushing in a straight line, a sword pressed forward. He calculated and set them aside.
This wasn't something unbelievable, rather it was an opportunity. If this was the vice's plan, he would dodge the stab, then meet the vice's readied strike, and finally end this fight.
He turned his attention back to the vice leader. He blocked his attack and, with the same motion, cut off the head of another attacking bandit. This was the last straw for the stragglers.
No one moved forward. They had no plan to go toward that monster.
The only thought... 'Just die, one of you just die already!!' It didn't matter... if the monster or their vice leader died, either way, they would finally be able to run or get away from this situation alive.
*Boom*
Reason kicked the vice leader out of the thinning smoke.
The man rolled his neck once. His hand tightened on the grip worn smooth from years of daily use— the short, curved blade twisted.
They looked at each other.
"Just us," the vice leader said.
"Yes."
The vice came forward.
He was fast. Not the raw aggression of the bandits before him, but trained speed, economic, not much wasted movement in it. He closed the distance in two steps, and the first strike came low and angled — meant to force Reason back, not land.
Reason moved right.
The vice adjusted. 'Good. He anticipated that.'
Reason had the vice leader's rhythm. Two seconds of it. That was enough.
He stepped inside the third strike, caught the weapon arm at the wrist, turned the blade away from himself, and drove his sword upward into the man's chin.
The vice's head snapped back. Reason followed with his knee into the man's midsection, felt the man tighten against it, and shoved him back.
The vice stumbled two steps. His eyes refocused.
He smiled.
Not madness. Not cruelty.
Recognition.
The charging boy was finally close enough, Reason right where he wanted him to be.
"You're dead," he said.
He came again, even faster this time, an attack that couldn't be avoided yet was almost easy to block, forcing Reason to stay still.
It didn't matter.
It never had.
Reason was already ready, his own plan flawless.
But...
This was right around the time when Monster and Feral clashed, right when even Echo used his powers.
The body's brain went into overdrive.
Temorsth, the body staggered.
His vision split into fragments as voices collided inside his skull.
A sharp crack echoed through his head.
Warmth slid beneath his nose.
Dark blood splashed onto the floor.
Reason's silver and gold eyes flooded crimson as tiny vessels burst one after another. The veins at his temples bulged beneath his skin, pulsing so violently they looked ready to tear free.
Another voice screamed.
His fingers twitched.
His jaw locked.
He forced his control back, but by the time his body started listening to him, it was too late to dodge the boy's charging stab.
'I have to take it. Shift.' Reason was one of the best at controlling the body. He could even shift and move his insides and organs.
'Good.' He made a clear path for the sword that would cause almost no damage as the boy broke through the clearing smoke.
He met the vice attack and pushed him away, ready to take the sword and then split the vice's head from its shoulder.
But...
"Ah..." He heard it... and then felt it.
In the last second... luck, or rather bad luck.
The boy's foot slipped, his sword path changed, cutting, cleaving, and splitting Reason's cramped together organs, traversing everything.
Reason turned. Looking at the fallen boy sitting up, mistakenly trying to get up with the sword impaling him from the back.
Reason did not make a sound of pain. "Let go!" Rather, his eyes were cold on a level that could freeze someone to death.
The boy screamed, letting go of the sword and falling back, scrambling back on the cobblestones, staring up with an expression of complete fright.
The vice leader had seen all of this, and he was not wasting time.
He had also been moving — and the skill he had been building in his fingers since the boy broke from the smoke released, a compressed force that came fast and direct toward the center of Reason's chest.
Reason's hand came up.
He caught it on his palm.
The force bent his arm back, but mere pressure was not enough to split skin, not when Reason stepped in to absorb it, and then, before the move was finished, his sword came down, cutting off the vice leader's arm and cutting over his chest.
One move.
The vice leader's eyes went strange, and he went down as pain shot through him.
Sitting, he breathed slowly. His hand pressed flat to the stump of his arm, his eyes moved, unfocused, the way eyes move when the body has decided that horizontal is where it belongs now and is simply waiting for the mind to agree.
His chest and stomach, his cut of arm, he was bleeding too much.
He contemplated for a moment, deep and quiet, the way his head was hazy, he could tell, and the way his color was going, everyone could tell, he would not stay conscious for much longer.
In a swift moment, while everyone looked at the vice leader, Reason wiped the blood from his mouth and nose.
Then, as they looked back at Reason, the remaining bandits at the edges of the square did not move. They were uncertain... even though impaled, this monster seemed fine.
Reason stood completely unfazed.
His sword dropped to the ground... but a sword was still in him.
The hilt rested on his left near his lower back, the blade pointing upward, coming out right below his ribs on the right.
His hands were at his sides. His weight had shifted left in a way that could have looked like stillness if you weren't counting it.
His face was unchanged.
His breathing was controlled.
He looked at the bandits, and the bandits looked at him, and none of them moved because none of them had any remaining language for what they were looking at.
The vice leader turned his head, looking up.
"...You're still standing," he said.
"Yes."
The man exhaled. "How."
"I counted."
A sound from the vice leader. Short. Broken. Something between a laugh and an exhale that wasn't quite either.
"We had forty men," he said. His voice was even now, the kind of even that comes when everything that was holding tension has simply let go.
"I had a sure kill skill. We had the village. We had every—" He stopped. Breathed. "What are you?"
Reason looked down at him.
Then slowly — very slowly — he crouched.
He did it without letting his face change. Without letting his weight shift in any way that could be read. The movement cost him something that did not show on the outside.
The vice looked at him for a long moment. He was going to die, and he knew it, and there was something almost freeing in that. He was sure he would at least hear an answer.
"You will die anyway, so I shall tell you." Reason said, thinking the same. "Our reasons — I am Reason."
"I-I see..." A heavy sigh. He wasn't sure what this meant, but it at least felt honest.
The vice leader's eyes moved over him. Sharp still. Whatever was taking him had not taken that yet.
"You're hurt," he said.
"Yes." Their words were low, so no one else could hear them.
The sharp eyes looked at the sword. "That boy put a sword in you."
"Yes."
"It's still in you."
"Yes."
A silence.
"And you're crouching next to me, having a conversation."
"Yes."
The vice leader looked at him for a long time. "Why," he said. "Why are you still—why aren't you—"
"Because there are still men standing behind," Reason said, "and the moment they see something worth moving for, they will move either running or charging." He looked at the vice leader with the same expression he had worn all night.
"So I won't give it to them just yet."
The vice closed his eyes.
"I had forty men," he said again. Quieter. The words of a man returning to something he cannot make sense of.
"He was my friend. The leader. I knew that he was consumed by revenge. Knew it from the start." A slow breath. "I followed him anyway."
Reason said nothing.
"Does that make me a fool," the vice said.
It wasn't quite a question.
"No," Reason said. "It makes you someone who chose."
The vice leader opened his eyes, not expecting such words from this cold thing opposite him.
The fire at the edges of the square had burned low. The smokescreen had thinned to almost nothing. The sky above the buildings was no longer black from the night — somewhere past the trees, it was beginning to go the color of ash, pale and cold, with a dark red line pressing at the horizon.
"Your people," the vice said.
"Not mine."
"They thought they were." He exhaled slowly. "Tell them to run from you, too. Whatever you are. Tell them."
Reason looked at him.
"They won't listen, no one does," he said simply. Everyone thinks they can change him, fix him, kill him... but nothing has worked on Temrosth so far.
The vice leader made a sound.
His eyes closed.
His breathing continued — thin, slow, present — but his hand that had been pressing against the stump went flat and stopped.
Behind Reason, the bandits who were left looked at each other.
No order was passed between them. No word.
One man took a step back. Then another. Then they were all moving, quietly, away from the edges of the square, the way water leaves when the vessel tilts — not all at once, but everyone was about to run away.
Except one.
The youngest of them, a boy still sitting on the cobblestones staring at his own hands, had not run.
He looked at the vice leader and then at Reason — at the hilt of the sword, at the stillness, at the face that had not changed once through all of it — and his mouth opened.
"This..." he said.
His voice came out wrong. Too small. The voice of someone trying to find a word for a thing that the language hadn't made a word for yet.
"This man is—" He stopped.
Tried again.
"This is unreasonable!"
Reason turned around, looking at the boy as his face twitched once.
"uNrE-"
The boy shook, and so did everyone. This still and cold monster, his voice was strange, his face shifted.
The red line on the horizon pressed further up into the ash-colored sky.
"UNREASONABLE!!?"
A snowstorm howled into the morning light.