He swung Sajibu, catching a falling glob of lava on the flat of the blade as it dropped from the fight raging above the rooftops, and flicked it toward Fredo across the road.
"Primitive," Fredo said, raising a hand to dispel it.
Atiya was not aiming for him.
He snapped a portal open directly in front of the fire and redirected it into the thatched roof of a stable sitting at the road's edge ten meters to Fredo's right.
The dry hay caught immediately and exploded upward into a massive column of thick black smoke and thermal energy, the heat bloom washing across the road and distorting the air around it, the sudden shift in temperature creating a blind spot in Fredo's sensory range as it struggled to adjust to the new signature.
Atiya moved through the smoke.
He placed the first portal at his own feet and the second directly above Fredo's position, the vertical axis aligned for a high velocity overhead strike, and stepped through.
He fell through the rift, Sajibu's blade leading downward, the smoke and orange light of the burning stable around him as he dropped.
Fredo's eyes tracked upward. He did not summon a barrier.
The air around him shifted instead, a pocket of manipulated pressure forming at the point of impact that did not stop the blow but redirected it, sliding the blade sideways and turning Atiya's own momentum against him, pulling his center of gravity past the point where he could correct it.
"You rely too much on the tool," Fredo said, his voice arriving from directly beside Atiya's ear.
His hand closed around the wooden shaft of Sajibu while Atiya was still off balance and unable to respond to it.
A high frequency pulse traveled through the wood from Fredo's grip, the vibration reaching Atiya's hands in an instant, numbing the nerves along his forearms and forcing his fingers to lock and then simply stop working.
A sharp kick to the chest sent him tumbling backward off the road and into the slush at the roadside, the impact driving the air out of him.
"Fuckkkkkk!"
Sajibu clattered onto the ice ten feet away and slid into the dark at the road's edge, coming to rest somewhere between the burning stable and the collapsed fence line beyond it.
Atiya pushed himself up, hands shaking, breath coming in ragged uneven pulls, the numbness still running up both forearms. Fredo stood in the road between him and the staff, the falling embers from the battle above casting long shadows across the ground around him, the burning stable throwing orange light across his face.
Yai began pooling around Fredo's hands, the geometry of a binding spell assembling itself in the air between them, complex and deliberate.
"You have run out of variables, human," Fredo said. "And now you have run out of weapon."
Meanwhile, some distance away across the burning village.
Kallar erupted from the debris of the collapsed residential row like a volcanic vent, his skin a lattice of cooling black basalt cracked through with weeping orange fire, the snow around him hissing into steam where it made contact with his body.
He roared, a sound that had nothing tactical in it, pure loathing given volume, and launched himself across the road toward her.
She was standing near the base of the demonness statue at the center of the square, the bronze figure still upright above her amid the surrounding destruction, the altar stone cracked and scorched at her feet.
He swung a fist the size of a dinner plate trailing a wake of liquid fire across the square.
Leishna caught his wrist.
Her touch was light, almost incidental, and she used the full momentum of his charge to spin him, stepping into a perfect tight pirouette on one toe, her silver hair whipping across his face like a thousand small needles as she turned.
"Oops."
Kallar went face first into the snow covered square with the weight of a falling mountain, the impact cratering the stone beneath the snow and sending a shockwave outward across the ground that cracked the base of the statue above them.
Leishna hopped onto his broad burning back and crouched there, chin resting in her palms, looking out across the burning village with the expression of someone enjoying a view.
"You are so grumpy," she said, poking the back of his glowing neck with one finger coated in a protective silver sheen. "Is it because I am winning? It is because I am winning, is it not?"
The heat coming off his body surged, the air above him distorting into a shimmering haze, the snow melting outward from the crater in a widening ring across the square's stone floor.
"GET OFF ME, YOU INSENTIENT WRETCH!"
He rolled violently, the full force of his body twisting against the ground.
Leishna was already gone.
She back flipped off him and landed in a handstand on the altar stone at the square's edge, legs splitting perfectly in the air above her, holding the position for exactly one heartbeat with the burning village on all sides and the demonness statue looming overhead.
Before dropping back to her feet in the same motion as Kallar's lava fist came down and vaporized the altar stone completely, the impact sending chunks of scorched rock scattering across the square toward the surrounding roads.
He lunged again, close quarters this time, a desperate flurry of strikes across the scorched square.
Leishna ducked a hook, the heat singeing the air an inch above her head, and slapped his reaching hand away with a flat thwack that had no business being as casual as it was. While he was still processing that she reached up and tweaked his nose.
He recoiled in pure shock and she drove her knee into his solar plexus with a giggle.
"Love is like a rollercoaster, it just gets so fucking high~"
She moved through his attacks like water finding gaps, hips swaying with a rhythmic ease that had nothing defensive about it, her body following a logic that was half dance and half complete chaos.
A stinging palm strike caught his jaw from an angle he had not tracked, the impact sending a tooth spinning out in a spray of molten saliva that hissed where it hit the snow at the square's edge.
Kallar stumbled back toward the center of the square, panting, his chest heaving, the cracks running through his basalt skin widening under the strain of his own internal temperature climbing past what even his body could comfortably sustain.
He looked up.
Leishna was standing ten feet away near the remains of the altar, checking her fingernails.
"You know, Kallar," she said, tilting her head so her silver hair fell across one eye. "You are very strong. Really, genuinely. If you were not such a boring angry little man I might have actually fallen for you and sucked your balls off."
Behind her, reality shimmered faintly. A single ornate silver hilt began to emerge from a ripple in the air above the ruined altar stone, the Gate of Ellejort groaning open by an inch, the sound of it low and resonant across the burning square.
"But you are starting to lose," she pouted, her eyes wide and entirely without sympathy. "And honestly? If that is all you have then just die."
"YOU DARE!!!"
His entire right side liquefied, the basalt and fire giving way to a massive surging wave of lava that rose above the rooftops of the surrounding roads, a Great Eruption building to drown the entire square, the heat of it reaching the outer roads and setting the remaining intact structures alight before it had even fully formed.
Leishna looked at it.
She blew him a kiss.
The air did not just heat up. It vanished.
Kallar's roar stopped being a sound a human throat could produce, becoming something geological, the sound of a tectonic plate finding its breaking point. His skin did not crack further.
It sloughed off in molten sheets, the basalt and fire falling away to reveal a core of pure blinding white hot plasma underneath, the light of it turning the entire square noon bright in the middle of the night.
"Melt into the dirt, you insignificant parasite!"
The pressure built in a recursive spiral and then released.
"The Core of Hate."
The radius of the blast converted the demonness statue, the surrounding pillars, the altar ruins, the road surfaces on all four sides of the square, into liquid stone in the space between one moment and the next.
The bronze figure that had stood at the center of Inumaki for a thousand years was simply gone, replaced by a cauldron of molten metal spreading outward across the square.
Leishna's laughter died in a choked wet gasp.
The shockwave caught her mid pirouette above the square's eastern edge. The silver aura of the Gate of Ellejort, which had held through everything the fight had thrown at it, shattered.
Not bent, not overloaded. Shattered, like something cheap, under the tenfold amplification of Kallar's heat.
She did not have time to move.
The wall of white hot magma slammed into her and carried her across the square and into the far stone wall of the northern road before the wall itself turned to slag around her, the impact leaving a depression in the liquefying stone where her body had been driven into it.
When the steam cleared the square was unrecognizable.
Leishna slumped against what remained of a blackened pillar at the northern road's edge, the silver of her hair scorched to dull ashen gray, the pristine silk robes gone.
The pressurized heat had cauterized as it destroyed. Her legs were gone from the mid thigh down, the wounds blackened stumps, the edges glowing faintly where the temperature had been high enough to seal them as it took them.
Her right arm was severed at the shoulder, the joint a jagged cauterization of charcoal and bone. Her left hand was a ruin of fused flesh, the fingers melted together into a single solid mass.
Kallar walked through the lake of fire that had been the central square, his form flickering, the plasma at his core beginning to dim as the output leveled off. He looked down at her against the pillar.
His misogynistic pride, the thing that had driven every decision he had made across a thousand years, settled into something satisfied at the sight of her.
"Where is the dancing now, little bird?" His voice came out low, a bubbling hiss of sulfur beneath it. He raised one foot, lava dripping from it onto the liquefied ground below, positioning it above her head. "Where is the grace?"
Leishna's head dropped forward.
Blood, dark and thick, fell from her lip and hit her own ruined lap and sizzled there.