He forced himself upright, dragging his hand away from his side. Blood slicked his fingers, dark and already thickening under the Hemovore's influence.
"Don't," his bones grumbled.
"Too late," Gin muttered.
He spread his fingers and pictured Vexa's axe.
Blood answered.
It surged from the wound in a controlled spill—not gushing, not wasting—coiling through the air like smoke. It darkened as it moved, shifting from red to iron-black, hardening into familiar shape. In two steady heartbeats, the weight of a dive-axe settled into his grip.
His arm trembled under it.
"Round three," he told the room.
Marren's gaze flicked to the axe, then back to Gin's face. "You are stubborn," he observed.
Another flick of the sword.
Gin anticipated the second blade, stepping into it instead of away. He brought the axe up in a tight parry.
The water hit the iron-blood head with a sound like a wave smashing into cliff rock. The impact jarred his shoulders. Most of the blade split around the axe, but a thinner, faster edge rode the curve, slapping into his bicep.
Hot pain lanced down his arm. Blood poured fresh.
Marren spoke, voice calm. "You stand there thinking you're rewriting some grand ledger with nobility and sacrifice. All you're doing is adding new negative entries, new messes for me to clean up."
Gin bared his teeth. "No, just helping people."
Marren's mouth quirked. It might almost have been amusement, if not for the deadness in his eyes.
"Help," he said, "is a resource. Like fuel. Like food. Like labor. I allocate it where it does the most good." He nodded toward Rell and Tamsin. "I gave your friend a chance to repay his debt in useful work instead of pointless charity. That is mercy."
"You chained him below the waterline," Gin snapped. "He gets sick when he can't see the sky. That's not mercy. That's a sentence. And for what? Some contract you forced on him?"
Marren's eyes flickered. "We don't all get to choose the view from our cell, Mr. Farcast."
He stepped in, sword cutting in a blur.
Three blades this time, layered: one low, one high, one almost invisible between them. Gin's bones screamed warning. He didn't have time to think, just move.
He dropped his weight, letting the high slice skim over his head. He twisted the axe to catch the middle one, metal ringing as it took the force. The low blade carved across his thigh, cheap fabric no match for cutting water.
He hissed, leg nearly buckling.
Marren drove another blade at Gin's chest.
Unable to dodge, Gin could only twist his body in the hope the blade would miss his vitals.
He felt the cut, hot and precise, scoring across muscle.
His bones howled.
"Trust me," Gin told them silently. "I know."
He snapped his arm back and hurled the axe.
It left his hand in a perfect, ugly spin, the iron-dark head catching the light as it sailed across the room.
Marren's eyes widened a fraction. He dodged, but not fast enough. The axe buried itself in his left shoulder with a wet thunk, cutting through uniform, into muscle, almost to bone.
The reef sword dipped.
Marren staggered, breath hissing between his teeth. He caught himself with ruthless control, fingers tightening on the sword hilt. His free hand scrabbled at the axe haft, fingers slicking with his own blood.
Gin blinked sweat and pain out of his eyes. "Huh," he panted. "That felt cathartic."
"Throwing your weapon," Marren said through clenched teeth, "is not a sound strategy."
He grabbed the haft and yanked.
The axe tore free with a spray of blood.
The polyps along the blade shivered, tiny mouths gaping wide. Marren turned his arm, letting the axe-head drip along the sword's living surface.
The reef weapon drank.
Its glow deepened. The mist thickened. The carved channels pulsed once like a heartbeat.
"You see, Farcast, you cannot win this battle," he said. "Every time you manage to injure me, I become stronger."
"No," Gin said. "Your sword does. You just keep losing blood."
"If anyone here should be concerned about blood loss, it should be you." Marren lifted the sword again.
Crescent slices carved the air. Gin dodged where he could, blocked where he had to, took cuts when there was no other option.
His arms became a map of burning lines. His thigh throbbed. His side ached like someone had tried to open him with a can-opener and lost patience halfway through.
His bones pulsed, furious and afraid.
"You're going to bleed out," they warned.
"Not yet," Gin told them. "Later. I promise. We can be dramatic about it then."
He needed to get close.
Every instinct screamed that closing distance on a man with a sword that made its own blades was idiotic.
But, he'd already learned something important, way down in the water with a shark's jaws around him:
Sometimes the only way past a weapon was through it.
He drew in a breath.
Not a normal one.
The Hemovore reef under his ribs flared, heat racing through his marrow. Oxygen flooded him, more than his physical lungs should have allowed. The world shifted.
The pain didn't go away. It sharpened. Each cut, each throb, slotted into a precise awareness of where his body ended and the air began. Marren's movements slowed—not actually, but in Gin's perception, every twitch of muscle, every tightening of grip a bright signal.
The blood dripping from his cuts stopped feeling like loss and started feeling like resource.
Alright, he thought. Let's be clever.
He deliberately raked his left hand across the cut at his ribs. Blood slicked his knuckles. He clenched his fist.
"Shape," he told it.
It obeyed.