Urrich’s head and tens of forelimbs loomed out from the stone floor, poking out of shadow. He stabbed saber-legs into the exact point of space where her heart should have been, faster than she could have dodged. She dodged.

She was standing a little to the side now. Standing: she didn’t appear to have moved any limbs in the transition. Only her afterimages remained, for just a moment, in the place where Urrich had stabbed.

Without missing a beat, Urrich changed tack—if you can’t pin her, pin her shadow.

An eye on his head flickered open on her. It cast a meager yellow light that hit Ragnorre and shot a dim shadow out behind her. Even a hazy shadow could be pinned, so he reached around her and pinned.

He expected Ragnorre to try warping away as she had the first time, which had only carried her a few inches away. He’d planned a few moves in advance for just such a tactic. Instead, Ragnorre just—disappeared, utterly.

Afterimages showed the path she’d taken. She was now next to Nyx’s shadow on the wall, standing and, in the literal physical sense, placidly motionless.

Looking out from the shadow void, taking it all in, Nyx wondered...

Was Ragnorre a glitch?

The way she phased out of reality didn’t resemble magic or any demon tactics Nyx could think of. It looked more like an unseen computer operator was dragging-and-dropping Ragnorre around the place. Maybe instead of following demon logic, Ragnorre had come to this area using her own custom logic—which was to circumvent or break existing logic?

The real question was, how could Ragnorre expect to dodge him if she remained in this room...where Urrich’s shadows swirled along the ground and could easily rear up onto the walls and ceiling?

A blade-limb came out of the rock and soared toward Ragnorre—just past Nyx.

But Ragnorre glitched herself away. This time messily—she must have warped herself into the wall by accident, because it blasted apart around her now. She looked unfazed, determined.

...Couldn’t that have easily gone the other way around? Instead of a mess of pebbles, a mess of blood and limbs? Lucky girl.

“HA!” she belted out.

Urrich reacted fast and cleaved her head off.

Nyx watched as her neck was razed from her torso and her flesh-bag fell helplessly to the ground. Nyx watched this with not only zero emotion, but also zero sense of finality. Just minutes ago, they’d sliced Urrich’s head clean off to no avail. He’d just been playing dead. And whatever Ragnorre was—either demon or beyond—surely she could too.

Maybe Urrich had the same inkling, because he immediately got to work pulling more limbs out of the shadow to surround and thoroughly pick apart Ragnorre’s corpse and face.

As he started on his work, a jolt of electricity lit the room. A fist, freed from its constraining wrist, blasted against his limbs—blasting one clean off.

The leg flew against the wall with a loud krak.

Nyx stared.

They had only seen him lose a limb once, at the hand of an archlord. Regardless of how this match was going to pan out, this already felt like Ragnorre’s victory...though Nyx wasn’t sure whether they could call her an underdog.

Surely she was an underdog now, with her body parts laid out biology-class style and her blood just now starting to spurt out?

Uh—no.

As Nyx expected in the back of their mind, Ragnorre just glitch-stitched herself together again. Instantaneously she was back on her feet. So what if her hips were connected at a shockingly noticeable five-degree angle to her torso, causing noticeable blood leakage? Judging by her ever-confident face, she was more than ready to fight on!!

“Leave me or die now,” said Urrich. The first words he’d said all match. Clearly hoping they would be his only words. Nyx saw a trickle of miasma appear just above the floor—like dry ice, but, since it was from the underworld, more magical and deadly. He was casting some spell on Ragnorre, acknowledging at last that she was worth treating like an actual, respected threat.

He rose like a haunted cliff above Ragnorre, spreading his saber limbs—

Then he was gone. Glitched away in a cloud of pixels.

Ragnorre had held her gloved hand out to him, and that hand, for a moment, had been covered in pixels and blur too.

“Oh, I should probably do something about that,” she added, pointing to the miasma rising from the ground. It was glitched away too.

With deep breaths and a deeper longing for solid ground, Nyx emerged from their shadow at last. They looked at Ragnorre with a totally empty, totally conflicted expression.

Ragnorre looked back with a grin and a thumbs-up.