The twin blades fell.
From above, crossing — the angle designed to eliminate every dodging option simultaneously, the Frozen Fish Monster's dead-fish eyes calculating the geometry before the strike even began. It had positioned itself perfectly. The cold it radiated had already started stiffening Iaian's joints. The gap between the rooftop and escape was occupied entirely by frozen steel.
The sword in Iaian's hand slid home into its scabbard.
Eyes closed. The screaming cold above him, the whistling arc of the blades, the distant sounds of Okamaitachi and Bushidrill working through the lanes — he filtered all of it down to one thing: the shape of the attack's path through the air.
There.
A streak of light came from the left.
Not his light. Someone else's.
"Okamaitachi!!"
The blade crossed the distance between a distant rooftop and the Frozen Fish Monster's right shoulder in the time it took the monster to register that a third vector existed. The Flying Sword technique — a cutting arc projected ahead of the physical blade, sent spinning at range — was not a strike meant for heavily armored targets. But it was fast, and at this angle, against an unguarded joint—
The arm came off at the shoulder in a single clean separation.
Icy blue blood sprayed downward and hit the cobblestones already freezing — crystallizing on contact into formations that bloomed like the inside of a geode, hexagonal ice-flowers spreading from each droplet where it fell. The severed arm, still gripping the frozen mackerel sword with the locked determination of muscle memory, arced upward, turned twice in the air, and came down through the collapsed roof of a shop three seconds later with a muffled crash.
The Frozen Fish Monster staggered. One-armed, suddenly off-balance, its monstrous weight destabilizing in a way that something of its size wasn't built to recover from quickly.
Iaian's eyes opened.
Now.
He was already moving — closing the distance, sword coming out in a rising arc aimed at the neck. The monster's head: the obvious weak point, the anatomy they all shared regardless of what the rest of the body was. One clean strike—
The remaining arm swept up from the ground in a blur-speed kick.
It hadn't fallen. It had fallen, the way a sprung trap falls — intentionally, controlledly, with the impact distributed for maximum rebound velocity. The heel connected with Iaian's armored midsection, and the steel dented inward like sheet metal. His vision went white for a fraction of a second. The sword strike that would have ended the fight went wide.
He was flying backward through two pillars before he finished processing what had happened.
The landing was ugly — he caught it on one knee, both hands on the ground, the impact shuddering up through his arms — but he landed. His armor had taken the worst of it. His ribs were having opinions about what had just occurred.
He coughed. Looked up.
The Frozen Fish Monster stood in the ruins and laughed.
"Hahaha! What a pity! Just a little short!"
It walked through the wreckage of the stall toward the severed arm on the other side of the lane. Not rushing. The unhurried confidence of something that knew it had already won.
The arm lay where it had fallen, fingers still locked around the frozen mackerel hilt. As the monster approached, something under the cleanly cut surface shifted — wriggling tissue from the severed stump reaching toward the separated limb like two halves of a torn piece of cloth pulled back together by their own fibers. The reattachment was not graceful. It was faster than anything with tissue and blood had a right to be.
Five seconds. The arm was back. The shoulder joint moved: rotation, extension, fingers flexing one by one. The monster raised both weapons and laughed harder.
"Just like new!!"
Iaian stared at it from his knee.
He looked at his hands. The skin on his sword hand had gone faintly blue around the joints where he'd gripped the frozen blade energy's edge. He could feel the frostbite establishing itself — not badly yet, but the cold was patient and the fight was not close to over.
If we can't finish it in one hit, it regenerates. And if I can't hold the sword, it ends before we finish.
He drove his fist into the ground.
"Damn it!"
"Hm."
The voice came from above.
Iaian looked up. On the telephone pole at the market's edge — the only one still standing — a man in a red cloak stood with one hand resting on the hilt of his sword and a large toothpick between his teeth. Atomic Samurai was not looking at the monster. He was looking at his disciple.
"To be unable to handle a setback this small—" his voice dropped, almost too quiet to carry across the distance, but carrying anyway "—is unlike my disciple."
Three seconds.
That was how long the discouragement lasted before Iaian stood up.
He took off his helmet as he rose.
It hit the rubble beside him and stayed there. The blond hair underneath, short and sweat-damp, caught the afternoon light. His face, with the helmet gone, was younger than the armor suggested — and considerably more determined.
"It was just a missed opportunity."
He met the monster's advance without backing up. "If I could sever it once, I can sever it again."
"What a joke!" The twin frozen swords swung wide, establishing momentum. "As if I'd give you a second chance! Die, you stupid—!!"
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The weapons collided in rapid sequence — the frozen blades against a longsword that had no business keeping up with them at this weight differential, and yet keeping up anyway through angles and timing and the specific advantage that superior technique has over superior strength when the technical gap is large enough. Iaian wasn't winning the exchanges. He wasn't trying to. He was redirecting, shedding force, letting the monster's own momentum carry the strikes into empty space while he moved through the wake.
He used the backswing of a particularly wide slash to vault over the wall at the lane's edge.
He came down on the monster's back before it completed the rotation.
Everything he had left. One strike, no reservation. The blade opened a wound from the base of the fish skull to the middle of the monster's back — deep enough to show the pale interior of whatever passed for bone, icy blood erupting from the length of it in a continuous release that began freezing to the monster's sides almost immediately, sheeting the lower half of its body in deep blue crystalline ice that radiated cold like an open walk-in freezer.
The monster screamed. Not from pain, exactly — from rage. The same species of sound.
"How dare you hurt me, again and again and AGAIN—!!"
On the telephone pole, Atomic Samurai's mouth curved upward half a centimeter. "That's more like it."
Iaian looked at his sword hand.
The blue was spreading. He had minutes before the cold affected his grip enough to matter.
"Okamaitachi! Drill!" He called across the market without taking his eyes off the monster. "Are you finished over there?"
"Coming!" Okamaitachi's voice from the far lane, already in motion.
Bushidrill landed ten meters to the right — he'd been cleaved away at some point, but he'd landed cleanly — and took his position without commentary.
The Frozen Fish Monster's laughter faltered. Its dead-fish eyes swept the three-point formation taking shape around it.
"Despicable! You call for help in an honorable one-on-one duel?!"
"You're a monster." Iaian said it without inflection, the way you state something obvious. "The concept of an honorable duel does not apply to you."
He sheathed his sword.
The three of them settled into position — Okamaitachi wide left, Bushidrill flanking right, Iaian at the point — and the combined weight of three A-Class hero auras pressed inward on the monster like a change in atmospheric pressure. The Demon-level threat registered the shift. For the first time since it had broken through the cold storage wall, something in its posture acknowledged the possibility of danger.
Iaian felt every cell in his body arrive at a specific state of readiness — the moment before a strike where everything is aligned and the only thing left is the release.
Now. Together.
"We're going—"
He stopped.
His eyes found something in his peripheral vision that hadn't been there a moment ago.
Two lines of golden light swept across the market floor in a crossing arc — not the pale blue of cold, not the white of impact, but a deep, concentrated gold that carried heat visible in the air around them. The beams moved through the Frozen Fish Monster's position with the unhurried precision of something that knew exactly where it was aimed.
The monster froze.
Not from cold. From the interruption of every process that had been occurring inside it up to that moment.
Its two frozen swords fell first. Then the body — slowly, the way something falls when it's been divided more cleanly than physics usually allows — separated at the midline and toppled in opposite directions. The wound surfaces were carbonized at the edges, the tissue sealed by the heat before the blood could reach them, and then the cold of the monster's own biology rushed back in and took over, crystallizing the exposed interior into two halves of an ice sculpture that gleamed under the afternoon sun: deep blue, translucent, the Frozen Fish Monster's final expression preserved in arctic clarity on both faces of the split.
Silence.
Atomic Samurai stared at the two ice sculptures.
Iaian stood in his three-point formation with his sword still sheathed and his hand still on the hilt and no monster left to draw it for.
Okamaitachi had gone very still on the left flank.
Bushidrill on the right was looking at the two ice sculptures with the expression of a man reviewing footage of something he had been present for but had not fully processed yet.
...What just happened?
A figure was descending from directly above the market — unhurried, the drop controlled with the ease of someone who had done exactly this sort of thing too many times to find it interesting. He landed in the market's central lane, between the two halves of the ice sculpture, and the sound his feet made on the cobblestones was quieter than it should have been given the altitude.
Tall. Dark hair. The specific kind of built that came from something other than ordinary training. The golden light that had swept through the market had already faded, but the faint warmth it had left in the air hadn't dissipated yet.
Atomic Samurai's gaze locked on him with the particular focus of an S-Class swordsman who had just watched a Demon-level monster get bisected from range in a single pass before any of his three best disciples could land their combined strike.
Okamaitachi's gaze locked on him for entirely different reasons.
Oh my— the thought arrived in Okamaitachi's mind with the force of revelation. He's so—
Jordan glanced at the two crystalline halves of the Frozen Fish Monster, then at the three swordsmen arranged in a formation they'd never gotten to use, and had the decency to look mildly apologetic.
"Sorry," he said. "Was I interrupting something?"