The High Elders did not introduce themselves. They moved like laws: one snapped the flow of time, another spilled decay across the grass, the third crushed hills with a gesture, the fourth opened voids where light died.
Rei struck. Not with flair. Not with hope. Only with the one thing he had kept: the Blade of Resolve threaded with Enso. His afterimages flew. For a breath he landed a strike on a being that did not flinch often.
A crack of silence. An impossibility. The Elder's robe fluttered, and a smear of blood marred its sleeve. Someone gasped. Shira's hand tightened on her sword.
Then the world retaliated.
Time buckled. Every strike Rei had prepared unraveled. A tendril of decay slithered through his chest and stole his breath. The third Elder's fist punched a trench into the earth and sent Rei flying through a line of trees. The void curled around Shira's legs and tried to erase her step.
Rei hit the ground. He tasted iron and old smoke. He tried again. He forced Enso into his fist, a spear like before. The Elder raised a single finger and unmade the movement. The spear froze midair, then collapsed into dust.
"You cannot be a god on your first scream," the presence in his head intoned.
Rei's voice was raw. He lunged. He hit. He cut. But the Elder's robe healed. The wound sealed like a bad dream.
Shira moved to cover him. Her strikes chattered against the Elders like pebbles against a gate. But each impact cost her more. The Elders' powers were not brute. They were rule. They rewrote the fight.
And yet Rei saw it. A crack. Where his strike had landed, the Elder's will pulsed. It was tiny. A hairline fracture in the absolute.
If he could learn to thread Enso not as raw power but as an argument, a repeated sharpened assertion, maybe he could widen that crack.
He screamed, not in anger but in will. Enso answered. For a sliver of time his body moved like lightning, Tenrai Senbu compounding into a hundred slashes. He forced a wound. The Elder bled.
It was not victory. It was not close. But it was the first time anyone had bled under them in an age.