Due's hands were shaking.
Alistair could see it from where he stood, the settling gestures interrupted by tremors that Due couldn't suppress anymore.
He'd been managing threads across the entire battlefield since before dawn, and the cost was showing in his fingers, in his posture, in the way his collar sat slightly crooked because he hadn't adjusted it in over an hour.
'He hasn't adjusted his collar once since the Ace fight.'
That was what told Alistair more than the tremors did. Due always adjusted his collar. When he stopped, it meant his hands were busy with something more important, or they couldn't manage it anymore.
Alistair walked toward him.
Due watched him approach without moving. His expression was calm. His hands were not.
"How bad is it?" asked Alistair.
"Bad enough," Due replied quietly.
"That's not an answer."
Due sighed, then looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. "I have enough for two more obligations. Maybe three if they're small. After that, I'm done for today, possibly longer."
Alistair frowned. The formation was regrouping at the far edge of the field, soldiers pulling back together after the fractures that Due had spent all morning creating.
Ace was gone, withdrawn somewhere into the retreating ranks.
Sargus was dead on the ground behind them. The fifth suppressed reading remained patiently on the scan.
"Then stop," said Alistair.
"I'm going to," said Due. "But not the way you're thinking."
Alistair's eyes narrowed.
Following that, Due did something Alistair didn't expect.
He raised both arms and pressed his palms together, the settling gestures stopping entirely. His eyes closed. The air around him changed, not visibly, but Alistair's scan caught it.
Obligation threads consolidating, pulling inward instead of reaching outward, the entire web of Due's Characteristic contracting into something deliberate.
Two obligations. Alistair felt them forming before he understood them.
"Due," said Alistair. "What are you doing?"
"Something useful," Due replied, his eyes still closed.
The first obligation was pointed at Due himself.
Alistair watched it form on the scan, a thread that connected Due to something distant, pulling him toward it with a compulsion that was already making Due's feet shift.
He had created a necessity and fulfilled it simultaneously, compelling his own body to respond.
'He's forcing his own exit.'
"You're leaving," said Alistair.
Due opened his eyes. "I'm not useful here anymore. I will be useful somewhere else… That's what the obligation requires."
The second obligation hit Alistair before he could respond.
It felt like warmth spreading through a cold room. The pain in his arms lessened and the heaviness behind his eyes lifted a bit.
His grip on the Rune Sword steadied, and the shaking in his wrist, which he hadn't even noticed, stopped completely.
He wasn't fully recovered, not even close, but he felt strong enough to keep standing.
Strong enough to keep fighting for what was left of this morning.
Alistair's eyes widened.
He could feel the imbalance of it immediately. Due had divided what little he had left and given most of it away.
The recovery that Alistair felt was larger than whatever Due had kept for himself.
"You spent more on me than on yourself," said Alistair.
Due adjusted his collar once, firmly, and it was the last settling gesture Alistair saw him make.
"Don't waste it," said Due.
He turned and started walking. His cloak caught the morning wind, his back straight despite whatever the second obligation had cost him.
His hands hung at his sides, no longer settling, no longer shaking.
"Due," Alistair said again.
However, Due didn't stop. He didn't turn around.
His boots carried him steadily away from the field, each step pulling him further with the compulsion of a Characteristic that wouldn't be argued with.
The distance between them grew, and Alistair watched Due's silhouette shrink against the grey horizon until eventually it disappeared entirely.
Then Alistair was alone.
'Again.'
He stood on the battlefield by himself for the first time since the dawn had broken. The field around him was thinned.
Hours of combat had left its marks everywhere, bodies scattered across the ground, weapons abandoned where soldiers had fallen or fled.
Smoke drifted at the sky's edges from where Due's earlier detonations had gone off.
The morning light was grey and flat, as it always was for him.
He ran his scan. Due's signature was already distant, moving south, alive and getting further away.
The connection between them showed that Due was alive. Due was leaving. This was all the information he had, and it had to be enough.
Alistair exhaled slowly.
'Two obligations. He spent more on me than on himself.'
He adjusted the Rune Sword in his grip and turned back to face the field.
The formation reassembled at the far edge.
It happened gradually, soldiers finding their ranks again with the organizational instinct of trained men despite the devastation of the morning.
Broken units merged with intact ones. Officers shouted orders that carried thinly across the open ground.
The entire mass of remaining Therasia soldiers condensed into something functional, and Alistair watched it happen from the center of the field.
The partial recovery Due had given him was settling into his muscles. The ache in his ribs remained.
The exhaustion behind his eyes remained. However, the sharp edge of it, the part that would have dropped him in another hour, was dulled enough that he could think clearly.
Then someone stepped out of the formation.
Alistair recognized the reading on his scan immediately.
The signature he had been tracking since before dawn, the one that had changed when Sargus fell.
Using Equalizer to understand his name, Alistair tightened his grip.
Valve stood at the formation's edge.
He was younger than Alistair expected. Black hair worn short on the sides and longer on top, not carefully maintained.
Sharp features with a gauntness that hadn't been there in Sargus's face, the look of someone who hasn't been eating properly.
He wore his Rune Weapon on his left hip, a shortsword with a grip worn smooth from years of left-hand draws.
Valve didn't look at the formation behind him. Didn't look at the soldiers who had followed his brother into this field.
He didn't give any orders.
He only said his brother's name once.
"Sargus." He lowly said.
The soldiers nearest to him went still. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. The wind carried the name across the field and let it die there.
Hearing this, Alistair's grip tightened on his Rune Sword.
Valve looked across the field. His eyes found Alistair through the smoke and the grey distance, and something in his expression settled.
Seeing this, Alistair understood something plainly.
This was not rage. This was grief doing what grief does when it has nowhere to go except forward.
Valve's hand moved to the shortsword at his left hip and drew it with the ease of long practice.
Then he started walking.
Each step was heavy, covering ground without hurry.
The Edgeform Aspect mastery, his Sword Skill was visible even in how he walked, every movement controlled, every line of his posture built for the discipline he had spent years perfecting.
Alistair raised his Rune Sword and walked to meet him.