I went on the offensive. Lord of Loss hopped to one side, more nimble and quick than he’d been when he’d first emerged as a spear-throw of a wolf from the husk of the bird. Throwing off my timing.

And my timing was thrown. I tried to adapt, pulling back hard, strength active, to shift the arc of the hook. He hopped again, easily avoiding it.

I didn’t let up this time. If anything I had to break his momentum, force him to adopt a new form and a new course of action. I flew in, kicking.

He pulled his head away from the kick, retreating. I shifted my course, pulling the slack in the line taut, and let the current momentum of the hook finish its rotation. It smashed him in the right shoulder and then carried on to hit the ground by his left forelimb. He hopped, three-legged, to get back, already regenerating by morphing his form.

Still not good enough.

“I got advice once, that I should pick some forms and stick to them,” he boomed. A man’s voice spoken from a body made of energy, at the heart of his form, magnified out by the shell he’d encased himself in. “Then new advice, from your uncle, I think he is? To experiment, diversify. Think outside the box.”

Marquis.

He chuckled. “I had a little help, to ease the learning curve.”

“Then you fucked up,” I told him. “There isn’t a single person I can think of who could do that for you, that wouldn’t be a huge mistake.”

“You don’t know enough people,” he boomed. Talking down to me.

Smug asshole.

“I like this. Experimenting and testing out my new approach. Thank you,” Lord of Loss uttered it with a chuckle. Fucking gracious and fucking magnanimous. “I’ll go easy on you in exchange.”

Well, if I’d wanted something to drive this sensation home, being condescended to would do it. I built up the hook’s momentum again, passing cable from hand to hand. Here and there, the little fuckups, that Precipice’s power drove home. A loss of momentum. A bad timing of the Wretch. Better to do two sharper half-circles with a pause between them—a long ellipsis rather than a circle. It let me switch the Wretch off and on.

I was sweating, my jaw hurt from clenching it. This was hard, demanding focus while he did everything effortlessly.

This sucked.

I was a second or two away from feeling like I had the momentum necessary to deliver a good hit when he leaped in the direction of Precipice’s group.

I flew after him, and saw him veer to one side. Claws latched onto the wall of a building. Going up, gripping—

I shifted course.

—and he bounded off of the side of the building, collapsing a part of the construction as he sailed upside-down toward me.