"Let’s try what this new kinky power of yours does!" Ayame’s voice rang as her fingers found her katana and the grin that split her face was pure excitement, the kind that burned through every layer of pretense the samurai usually wore, reaching her blue eyes first and changing the shape of her face entirely.

Her mark ignited through the silk at her belly, dark calligraphy above her womb blazing crimson, and the warmth that rolled off the script turned the skin beneath her navel into a beacon.

Quinlan felt it at the same instant. The Crimson Reservoir behind his sternum lurched as a current of blood-essence threaded outward through the bond toward the samurai ten meters away, leaving a warm hollow at the center of his chest that pulsed once and settled into the quiet pull, being spent.

Then Ayame drew the blade, and nothing happened.

Her mark blazed. The Reservoir drained. She could feel Quinlan’s blood-essence flooding the bond in a warm current that reached her womb and pooled there, formless and hot, refusing to take shape. She swung the katana through empty air and the steel cut nothing.

She tried again, harder, pulling on the bond with the same force she would use to wrench a stubborn technique into obedience, and the Reservoir pushed back.

The power was his, born from his blood-essence, and it did not obey simply because she demanded it. Her mark burned hotter and her grip shook on the hilt, and for one second the samurai looked like she was going to lose the blade.

"Stop brute forcing it," Quinlan’s voice sounded, and Ayame listened, knowing he was far more knowledgeable about these weird powers of his.

Her breathing slowed, her stance softened, and she let the bond carry what it wanted to carry instead of trying to shape it herself.

Inside Quinlan’s chest, a deeper current stirred.

The lattice of demonic script across his heart pulsed, and inside his core the water element flared on its own, rising from the other six without prompting and pressing toward the bond with an eagerness that had nothing to do with his will.

It wanted to reach her. He could feel it stretching toward Ayame’s mark through the lattice, ready to pour through without diminishing inside him by a single drop, waiting for his permission.

He gave it.

The energy shifted. It read her body, her rhythm, the way she held the katana, and when it finally answered, water erupted from the steel in a ribbon of liquid force that wrapped the blade in cool blue and held.

The courtyard drowned.

"What!" multiple shouts rang through the crowd, but Ayame was no longer paying attention.

The first slash she threw into the empty air trailed a crescent of water that arced three meters past the tip, held its edge, and carved a clean furrow through the courtyard stone where it struck, splitting rock with the ease of a blade through silk.

Her blue eyes went sharp with a concentration so absolute that the excitement vanished from her face in a single breath and left the swordswoman, her expression locked into a focus that belonged to a different woman entirely.

Her legs fired and she moved, and the wrongness began on the very first step.

The second slash came too fast, the transition between stances too seamless, her weight transferring through positions that should have required a hitch, a plant, a muscular correction, and none arrived.

The water fed her motion the way it fed her blade, filling the gaps between one cut and the next until the gaps ceased to exist, and by the third and fourth strokes the petite frame turning through the courtyard had stopped moving like a woman and started moving like the element itself given form and a katana.

Each arc of steel launched a pressurized crescent that held its shape for ten meters before dissolving, and where they struck stone they bit, leaving shallow scores across the courtyard floor in clean parallel lines.

Ribbons of water wound around her wrist and forearm, tracing the line of her waist as she pivoted on one heel.

Curtains of spray caught the first light of dawn and scattered it prismatic across the greenery, and the cuts kept landing from ranges her blade could never reach on its own while the samurai delivered them without slowing, without adjusting, without the smallest hitch between one killing stroke and the next.

Her body poured from position to position in a dance so beautiful it held every eye on the moss, a continuous flow so total it pushed past grace and into eerie, because human bodies did not move like that.

Human bodies carried micro-hesitations, corrections, the tiny frames between one stance and the next where muscle memory caught up with intent. Ayame’s body carried none.

She lifted off the ground and her next sequence played out five meters above the courtyard, her clothes trailing beneath her, and the speed was visibly beyond anything her aerial swordsmanship had produced before.

The water propelled her, filling the space beneath her feet and behind her shoulders with a medium she could push against, and the samurai carved through sequences that normally took twice the time with her katana leaving afterimages in the pale morning light.

The women on the moss could not look away. Some of them had sparred with Ayame a hundred times and knew her body, knew the rhythm of her footwork, knew where the pauses lived in her sequences.

Those pauses were gone. Every movement above them was a killing stroke dressed in a beauty so complete it held the courtyard breathless, and the woman delivering them had moved past mastery into a fluidity that did not belong to a human body.

The final slash left a curtain of spray that shimmered once and dissolved, and Ayame landed on the ground without a sound. The concentration shattered in the same heartbeat.

She looked at her katana. Water still dripped from the edge in fat lazy drops. Her blue eyes followed each one to the grass, then lifted to Quinlan, and her mouth opened, closed, opened again without producing a word.

Her katana hit the moss and she crossed ten meters in a blink. The impact of a samurai striking Quinlan’s chest at superhuman velocity assaulted him yet he didn’t budge at all, her arms cinching around his neck and her legs locking around his waist before the air had time to fill the space she’d left.

"Synchra, recede!"

The armor obeyed. Plates shifted and collapsed and flowed away from his face, and the moment bare skin appeared Ayame kissed him so hard the wet sound carried across the courtyard.

It was fierce and messy and so far from the Skysplitter’s composure that the gap between who she was right now and who the world believed her to be could have swallowed the courtyard whole.

Her mouth found his again before the first kiss ended, pulling back just far enough to breathe before pressing forward. Again, and again, rapid and full of need.

Quinlan accepted her emotions without complaint, for he knew...

The woman wrapped around his neck had spent months watching the distance between his world and her own stretch wider with every war.

His elite souls - of whom he had hundreds - now matched and sometimes outpaced her and the girls on an individual level. His elements bent battlefields to his will, destroying barriers and devastating whole army regiments in seconds.

Ayame, for all her talent, all her speed, all the experience that [Blessed Seed] poured into her, could not stand on the same floor as the enemies he fought.

That truth had lived behind her ribs for longer than she would ever admit, and every girl on the moss had carried the same quiet weight into this ritual, the knowledge that the man they loved was climbing toward a peak they could not follow him to, no matter how desperately they tried to keep up.

But now... The oriental beauty’s rapidly beating heart felt like screaming: ’my ceiling has been raised! And I don’t even know how high it is now!’

"Quin," she managed between kisses, cheeks pink, eyes sparkling. "Did you see that?! Did you feel it?! I had your water, it was in my blade, it moved with me...!"

"I-"

"Stop talking, dummy, and kiss me!" she squealed and rushed in for another serving of her lover’s lips. And another.

And one more.

Many more.