Chapter 437: Breaking Point
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The underground market had already turned into a butcher house by the time Sekhmet arrived.
The lower tunnel opened into the battle chamber through a broken side arch, and the moment he stepped through it, the whole scene entered his eyes at once. Blood covered the stone floor in dark wet streaks. Bodies were everywhere. Some were already still. Some were still crawling, twitching, or trying to drag themselves toward walls that would not help them. Broken lantern light shook over crates, dead men, spilled knives, and the ugly movement of people who had passed the point where discipline remained pretty.
Raka was still alive.
That mattered first.
He was on one knee near a split pillar, blood all over one side of his body, one hand braced on the floor, the other shaping blood into jagged lines around his arm while two of his surviving men tried to keep Iron House guards off him. They were losing ground. Not because they had stopped fighting. Because too many of theirs were already dead.
Dickoff was farther back with his guards and hired men, not at the front where real danger was. Of course. He had enough courage to point and shout, but not enough to stand where teeth could actually reach him.
The dark-clothed man saw Sekhmet first.
That alone said enough about him. Even in the chaos, even with the underground market roaring like a wounded beast around him, his eyes found the new danger immediately.
The armored woman saw him in a heartbeat later.
So did Dickoff.
For one brief second, the battle changed without anyone even striking. The chamber felt it. The pressure shifted. The people still standing felt it too, even if they did not know why. A new weight had entered the room, and rooms like this always knew when the strongest thing inside them had changed.
Then the twins came in behind him.
Vera and Vela did not waste the entrance. They moved into the chamber like silver blades dropped from a god’s hand, skirts and coats cutting the dark, eyes already fixed on the enemy line. They saw the dark-clothed man, the armored woman, the Iron House guards, and the hired killers. Their judgment came as fast as Sekhmet’s had.
The man was theirs.
The woman was his.
The rest were meat and noise.
Sekhmet did not shout a speech. He did not need to.
He only said, "Kill."
The chamber exploded again.
The armored woman moved first. Good. That pleased him. It meant she was not stupid enough to wait and see what he could do. She came at him with full battle intent from the very first step, blade low, shoulders balanced, killing line hidden until the last possible moment. Her control was clean. Her speed was wrong for this lower place. Her eyes carried none of Dickoff’s panic and none of the dark-clothed man’s dry distance. She fought like a predator that preferred direct work.
Sekhmet met her head-on.
Their first clash hit hard enough to shake blood from a dead man’s sleeve nearby. Her blade came for his throat. He caught the angle on hardened blood formed over his forearm and shoved it aside while his other hand drove forward toward her ribs. She twisted back. Not fully. His claws tore cloth and scored the armor beneath. She answered with her knee rising fast toward his stomach. He turned with it, took less of the impact than she intended, and caught her wrist before the next strike could form.
Strong.
Very strong.
She was at least Fourth Rank and pressing the edge of Fifth. That explained why Raka’s line had bled so quickly under her.
Behind Sekhmet, the twins hit the dark-clothed man together.
He was good enough not to die from that.
That alone made him more dangerous than most of the underground fools around him. Vera came from the left, Vela from the right. One aimed for the neck. The other for the lower side. He stepped back exactly enough to avoid the first and turned just enough to block the second, but he did not gain space. The twins did not fight like random partners. They fought like two thoughts from one mind. When one failed to kill, the other was already making the next line of death before the first motion ended.
The dark-clothed man retreated three steps.
Then he stopped retreating and answered them.
That made the battle cleaner.
Raka saw the opening and understood it at once. With the woman gone toward Sekhmet and the man fully occupied by the twins, the pressure holding his side down cracked. Not vanished. Cracked. That was enough. He rose fully from the floor with blood still running down his shoulder and bared his teeth at Dickoff.
Now the bastard looked less pleased.
Raka spat to one side and growled, "Take them down."
His remaining men surged toward Dickoff and the Iron House guards around him. Lesser bloodline creatures, wounded enforcers, ugly fighters from the lower market, and whatever still lived from his side all crashed together with Dickoff’s hired killers and house guards in one wild knot of claws, steel, blood, and bad breathing.
Dickoff shouted at once.
Not from courage.
From fear.
"Protect me. Kill them. Kill..."
One of Raka’s men reached him before the sentence ended and got cut down by two guards, but that alone forced Dickoff back three steps. He had lost the shape of command already. Now he only had the sound of it.
Sekhmet did not waste attention on him.
The armored woman was the real danger in front of him.
She had changed her rhythm already. Good. Most fighters needed longer. She had felt his speed, his reaction, and the way his blood hardened around his hands, and now she stopped trying to win through quick testing strikes. The next attack came heavier. She drove in, blade first, then dropped her weight low and twisted the whole line of her body into the cut. Sekhmet met it directly. Blood formed over both his arms in jagged armor and caught the edge long enough for him to slam into her at close range.
The impact sent them both half a step sideways.
Then the underground market floor cracked under the pressure of their next exchange.
She struck three times in a row. High. Middle. Reverse line from the hip. He blocked the first, let the second glance off blood-hardened flesh, and caught the third on his wrist before driving his own blood control downward in a snapping red spike aimed at her leg. She avoided the deep wound, but the spike still tore across the outside of her thigh.
She hissed.
There it was.
Real damage.