Pema hurtled himself away from the building just as another disembodied sword slash rocketed through the porch, bisecting the structure in a burst of shredded wood. Within moments his hand had grown back, a regeneration so quick that it made an audible pop as the rematerializing bones, muscles, sinew, and skin displaced the air around it.

  He had his sensory Qi field stretched to its limits, and it was only its instant detection of the ripple of air preceding another sword slash that bought him the fraction of a second he needed to change direction and dodge it.

  Pema swerved away, arcing up into the sky, behind cloud cover, and nearly collided with a huge, hand-shaped Qi Field that appeared directly in front of him, fingers grasping in his direction. He tumbled wildly around it, moving too quickly for any graceful maneuvering, and it was all he could do to cartwheel madly around two more approaching sword strikes. Another hand grasped at him, coming within inches of the Qi around his own ankle, and then the knight was in front of him, hands outstretched, and Pema was blown out of the sky by a blunt wave of superheated air.

  Fleeing was clearly not a viable option, Pema was quickly realizing. The knight was faster than him, hit harder, had more weapons at his disposal. Pema needed to find an edge, fast, or he was going to die. Decades and decades of rich life were going to end here, in this blackened ruin, at the whim of a crazed fossil with a magic sword.

  A direct fight was out of the question, but to wiggle his way out of it, Pema would need to get close enough to get a glancing peek at the knight's brain. He could only plan once he knew what he was actually dealing with.

  He braced himself. These next few moments, comprising whatever he'd have to do to close that gap and get away again without dying, would be the deciding factor.

  He turned, hoping to catch Fitz off guard with a sudden blitz his direction, and had the nose cleaved from his face for his efforts. Heart beating in his ears, a fear of death gripping his chest for the first time in countless years, Pema whirled in the air and reversed his direction, streaking back down to the city below like a falling star. He slammed through the roof of a half-collapsed shopping mall and hit the ground hard enough to crater it. He barely slowed as he set his Qi field to snatching material out from beneath him: tile, then soil, then solid rock, then water, then rock again. The instant it was moved from beneath him, he shunted it above, sealing his makeshift tunnel as he went, boring into the earth as fast as he could manage.

  Which, despite his best efforts, was painfully slow compared to the speeds he'd been reaching above ground. He reached out with his sensory Qi, cursed when the knight was nowhere to be found within it. He quieted the rest of his exertions, tried to lay absolutely still, to exert no Qi at all, to be undetectable.

  While the man himself wasn't within his Field, he had other ways of looking for his presence. He focused on the vibrations and micromovements of the tons of sediment and rock surrounding him, looking for signs of the knight's approach. He mentally sifted through millions of sources of stimuli: ant colonies, scores of earthworms, leaking plumbing, rotting wood. No sign of the knight.

  Either he had lost his pursuer, which was unlikely, or Fitz was hovering above, somewhere, searching or waiting or preparing the attack that would kill him any moment.

  Pema passed a few breathless moments, his heartbeat manually suspended, in tune with every microscopic shift and slide of the earth in all directions. And then, he picked up the ghost of an echo of a vibration, the residual effects of a sound carried through the air, then the soil, then the rocks that clipped the very outer edge of his sensory Field.

  A sound, from maybe two hundred meters above and thirty to Pema's right. A man's voice, a curse muttered to himself:

  "Ugh. Craven trick."

  It was enough: Pema knew where he was. He tunneled quickly over, bending his sensory Qi the knight's direction. The sudden movement would tip him off, he knew, but not before he got a good look at the man's mind.

  He made contact, dove in to Fitz's synapses, and in a space of time so brief that it can scarcely be measured, he had found what he was looking for. He sifted through the recesses of his brain, peeking into the corners usually reserved for a person's most guarded secrets and treasured memories. He instantly memorized thousands of details of the man's life, focusing most on the minutiae that were intimate, hidden, or forgotten enough to be useful at knocking his enemy off guard. Instantly he had a glossary of the man's failures, victories, loved ones, enemies, formative memories, bitter regrets. Then he glanced at the thoughts and information that comprised the knight's more immediate, surface-level self-awareness, and felt a wave of dread as he became aware of just exactly what he was up against:

  The knight, Henry Fitzhenry, was an immensely powerful Qi user, well over six hundred years of age. The depths of his hidden reserves were unknowable, both to Fitz as well as Pema, but the knight operated as if they were vast, far greater than Pema would have guessed.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He had a peculiarity to his Qi, a special talent. Pema was aware of the existence of these personal strengths, he was using his own right now, after all, but he'd never seen any like Fitz's. The knight's special talent allowed him to infuse the talents of other powerful Qi users into parts of his suit of armor, to be wielded at his discretion after he bested them in battle and absorbed their essences. The outfit he was wearing now was comprised of no fewer than six other Qi users' powers, stretched to the limits of their effectiveness by Fitz's boundless reserves of energy and centuries of experience wielding it:

  His sword, whose powers Pema had already deduced, allowed him to project impossibly dense, extremely fast waves of kinetic energy long distances, focused around a thin edge strong enough to cut through essentially anything the wave came into contact at a near-atomic level.

  His right gauntlet allowed him to project a huge, hand-shaped Field of Qi anywhere within his line of sight, so long as it wasn't directly intersecting another's pre-existing Qi Field. Once caught within its grip, it would take an immense expenditure of energy to escape from it.

  His shield, slung across his back, could be used as a near-perfect defense, losslessly absorbing up to three forms of energy at once, no matter their quantities, so long as he was wielding it and focusing on the act of defending himself or another.

  His left gauntlet allowed him to ambiently siphon from any sources of energy within a 20-meter range of his body, topping off his reserves constantly and without effort.

  His sabatons projected a surface just beneath them, which he could move without expending energy, to hover or fly in the air. The surface didn't move him as quickly as a controlled explosion of kinetic energy beneath his feet would, but it gave him perfect control of his orientation in local space, and something solid to bounce off of when a quick, precise change of direction was in order.

  And finally, the dirk hanging on his belt. It ignored nearly all Qi. It passed through Fields as if they weren't there, severing and cauterizing them in the process, mangling the Field forever. A cut from its blade could not be healed. No part of it, from its tip to its handle, could be damaged or moved except by conventional means. That weapon had been the first of his prizes, and it was responsible for winning him all of the rest.

  Pema allowed himself a heartbeat, and a breath of relief. If he hadn't gotten lucky, here, he very easily could have died. He smiled, as Fitz let loose with an earth-shaking wave of energy, pulverizing the meters and meters of earth separating the two into smoke and gravel.

  He would have died, before. But now he had what he needed to win.

  Pema rose to meet him, moving more gracefully than during his initial panicked flight. He circled around beneath Fitz, who hovered above the shattered earth, readying another sword blow. Pema made sure to keep him within his sensory Qi's range.

  For the next few seconds, the two engaged in an almost graceful sort of dance. Every time the knight would strike, or move, or feint, Pema would see the spark of that action's impetus in Fitz's brain, almost before the knight himself knew he was thinking of doing it. He would already be out of the way, or raising the ideal defense, slipping around or deflecting each attack in turn with an ease that read as almost oblivious.

  Pema felt the acid tang of frustration bloom in the knight's brain, tasted the flood of cortisol and adrenaline as Fitz's thoughts raced. The fight had changed its pace in an instant, a reversal that Fitz was clearly unaccustomed to.

  Pema rose to meet him, peeking in his brain as Fitz shifted his shield to his arm, and anticipated the forms of energy that the knight was priming his defense against. In quick succession, he hit him with the specific attacks that he expected least: a concentrated dose of radiation directly to the eyes to startle him, a follow-up beam of intensely focused ultrasound to disorient him, and then three quick blasts toward his elbow: electricity, then radiation again, then kinetics. It was just enough to sever the man's sword arm at the joint, sending both his sword and his long-distance gauntlet bouncing away in one move.

  To his credit, Fitz moved quickly, unperturbed by the reversal, and his next attack, a monstrous one-two punch of heat and then kinetics, rocketed out so quickly that Pema only barely managed to anticipate them, even with his head-start.

  Pema whirled beneath the man's remaining outstretched arm, now hovering close enough to see his muddy reflection in the man's dented breastplate. And then he employed a nasty trick: one he'd used before, and one he always felt a little twinge of shame at deploying.

  Pema spoke a rapid series of words, a sentence that was the product of the boiling down of thousands of the man's deepest and most personal memories, a phrase perfectly composed to shock his system with an overwhelming flood of confusion, fear, rage, and shame:

  "Matthieu - mud - chapel - thief - God dream - missing girl - shepherd - Paris - rope"

  Fitz blinked as the words collided with the language-processing sector of his brain, their emotional heft triggering an effect that Pema had first noticed over fifty years ago, in the mind of another powerful man who had been trying to kill him: the impact of the words wasn't even close enough to do physical, or even significant mental damage, but their overwhelming emotional heft created a microscopic opening, something like an impossibly brief reset in the man's brain.

  His Field flickered. It was gone for less than the time it would take to blink, a space that would be all but imperceptible to anyone other than Pema.

  But Pema perceived it. And, with an apology in his heart, he exploited it.

  With the knight's Field so briefly gone, he was free to spear his own Field into Fitz's brain, to manipulate the flesh and energy there as freely as if Fitz had never been gifted with any Qi to begin with.

  He flooded a key series of synapses with a burst of electricity, and Fitz's eyes rolled back into his head. Soon, he was dropping through the air, mouth flecked with foam, body completely limp.

  Pema swooped after him, catching and lowering him down to the base of the yawning crater they'd made at the heart of the ruined mall.

  He studied the seizing body of the man beneath him, and felt a twinge of temptation. It would be no real feat at all to kill him, now, to absorb the mountain of potential that the ancient knight clearly contained.

  But, just moments ago, compressed in the space of a moment, Pema had watched thousands of the man's most treasured memories. He had spectated soaring victories, grievous losses, deep fears, tender confessions. He had flipped through hundreds of moments shared with a person, Matthieu, a kind and patient man who he knew was waiting for his husband's return now, holed up in a mountain halfway across the world. He saw the man before him as a scared child, a discarded veteran, an exultant god, a smitten lover.

  Pema could no more kill this man than he could pluck his own eyes from his head, or crush his own heart. Henry Fitzhenry was part of him now: this was the bargain, the trade that came with the advantages his power gave him.

  Pema loved nothing more than beauty, and he had never explored a brain that hadn't been bursting with it, etched with it from cell to cell, animated by it as vitally as blood.

  Pema bent over the knight's thrashing body and plucked the dirk from his belt. Then, pausing to wipe some mist from his eyes, he shot back off into the sky, back toward the house, and the terrified people he'd left waiting within it.