The girl, now that Benjamin looked closely at her expression and her posture, was glaring directly at him with undisguised hostility and resentment.

Before he could part his lips to form another gentle word aimed at the small, glaring girl, one of those black, whip-like strips of fabric that wrapped her body in their strange, winding embrace suddenly uncoiled with a speed that defied a normal eye’s ability to track.

It lashed forward like a serpent striking its prey, and in the same instant that Benjamin registered the motion, the tip of that dark length had already punched clean through his chest.

Through his heart.

He felt it pierce him from front to back, a cold and sharp intrusion that burst through his sternum, tore through the muscle of his left ventricle, and erupted from his spine in a fine, red spray that misted the evening air behind him.

The force of the strike carried him backward a half-step, his heels pressing into the soil, his breath catching in his throat not from pain alone but from sheer, disbelieving shock at the violence that had erupted from such a small and fragile-looking child.

"You... You will pay for what you did to my family!" The girl’s voice cracked and soared, high and trembling with a grief so raw that it seemed to bleed out of every syllable.

Her small frame shook as the other black lengths around her body began to writhe and rise, twisting in the fading sunlight like living tentacles hungry for more blood. "I will make you pay for everything, you monster! You destroyed everything I had! And I will not stop until you have felt even a fraction of the pain that you have caused me!"

[Pay? What in the world did I possibly do to this child to earn this kind of hatred? Yikes. I think I’m being assassinated right now by some twelve-year-old. I didn’t think Benjamin Assassination Arc would come so soon.]

The thought flashed through Benjamin’s mind with a strange, almost detached clarity as his heart—still pierced and skewered by that black whip—began to knit itself back together.

The muscle fibers rewove themselves with a wet, audible squelch that only he could hear inside his own chest.

The blood that had sprayed outward reversed its course and drew back into his body as if time itself had decided to rewind the wound.

Within two heartbeats, the hole in his chest had vanished as though it had never existed.

He dropped into a battle stance without thinking, his knees bending, his weight shifting to the balls of his feet, his blue eyes narrowing to slits as he fixed his gaze on his small attacker.

And a fight broke out.

She was dangerously fast. And those whips of hers moved with an intelligence that made the skin crawl.

The battle that followed was hot and explosive in every sense of the words.

Benjamin weaved, ducked and rolled as the black whips came at him from every angle, each one moving with a mind of its own, striking with the precision of a master duelist and the force of a battering ram.

He dodged left — a whip carved a trench in the earth where his ribs had been.

He threw himself flat onto all fours as three whips converged overhead, crossing each other in a deadly braid that would have bisected him at the waist.

The ground beneath him shuddered with every impact, the soil erupting in geysers of dirt and torn grass, the craters deepening with each failed strike.

He was faster than her, though. He saw the pattern in her attacks after the tenth swing — a slight hesitation before each downward strike, a telltale narrowing of her yellow eyes before she redirected a whip mid-flight.

She was angry. So angry that her rage was making her predictable.

So when the next whip came screaming toward his face, he did not dodge.

He caught it.

His bare hand closed around the black length, and the moment his palm made contact, he felt the whip writhe against his grip like a living eel, its surface cold, smooth, and very strong.

It somehow cut into his flesh, drawing thin lines of blood that dripped down his wrist, but he did not let go.

He pulled hard, then he yanked that whip-thing toward himself and used the momentum to swing the girl off her feet and slam her into the ground.

Her small body hit the dirt with a heavy, wet thud that knocked the wind from her lungs.

The impact shook the earth beneath her, and for a long, terrible moment, she did not move at all.

She lay there on the torn grass, her limbs splayed at odd angles, her chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven gasps. Her whips went limp around her, draping across her body like discarded ribbons.

"Eh? She didn’t die from that, did she?" Benjamin muttered aloud, his voice carrying a note of concern. "That would be terrible if I killed a child. Well, a very angry and armed child, but a child nonetheless. I really hope she’s just unconscious, because I do not think I have the emotional bandwidth to deal with the guilt of murdering a preteen."

He moved closer, his footsteps careful and deliberate, his blue eyes scanning her face for any sign of waking or flicker of those yellow irises, any twitch of her fingers that might indicate she was still in the fight.

And that was his mistake.

BLAST!

Her mouth opened—too wide—and from the back of her throat erupted a beam of pure yellow energy that struck Benjamin square in the chest before he could even react.

The force of the blast sent him rocketing backward through the air like a stone from a sling, his body tumbling end over end, his back dragging through the tall grasses and tearing furrows into the soil.

He bounced three times against the uneven ground before the momentum carried him into the treeline of the Verdant Spire, where he crashed through bushes and saplings with a cacophony of snapping wood and rustling leaves.

He came to a brutal stop against the broad trunk of an oak, his spine slamming into the bark hard enough to crack the wood and send splinters showering down around him like brown rain.

When he looked down at his chest, there was a hole there.

A large, gaping, smoking hole where his sternum used to be.

The edges of the wound were charred black, the flesh cauterized by the heat of that yellow beam, and through the opening he could see the raw pink of his regenerating organs knitting themselves together in a frantic, desperate dance.