wasn't meant to be melodramatic; that was merely a fringe benefit.
Aiming at the rough lumber that was the nearest wall, Widdershins kicked. And not only with her own strength.
The air around her all but crackled with Olgun's magics, slipping her through a narrow gap in the laws of physics. Many a time before, she had taken a step on nothing, her god's power catching and boosting her. Now that power coursed through her legs, propelling her from the building at impossible speed—but also at an impossible angle. Without the slightest concern for minor details such as inertia, Shins's kick transformed her leap up and back into a forward dive.
Caught completely by surprise, even the fae-ridden guardsman couldn't react. Widdershins plowed into him, a human ballista bolt, slamming him to the hard ground. A quick handspring from his chest, even as he fell, and she was on her feet behind him.
Her heel rose and fell like a headsman's axe, intended to put him good and out, but the unnatural creature wasn't so easily felled, not even by a blow that should have left him too battered to stand. As though his own heels were hinged to the earth, his entire body sprung upward and straightened; a narrow tendril of shadow trailed from his back, propelling him off the ground.
Archibeque spun, rapier whipping free of its scabbard, and Shins drew as well. No pause, no threats. Steel screamed against steel, a chorus of death thwarted and frustrated as each parried the other, only to have every riposte parried in turn.
Back and forth along the street, occasionally swapping places as one flipped or wall-kicked over the other. She thrust at the man's arm, trying to catch his strike on flesh rather than blade, hopefully rendering the limb useless. It should have worked; he'd need a second elbow to bend out of the path of her rapier, and he had yet to display any of the inhuman flexibility that Lisette had revealed days before.
The commandant's arm broke from within as muscles flexed where they shouldn't, bending at a near right angle between elbow and wrist. The second her blade had passed by and withdrawn, the limb snapped itself back together, the audible crunch of bone fitting back into bone somehow worse than the crack of the break itself.
“Ow!” Shins backed up a pace, initiating the first pause the duel had seen. “Doesn't that hurt?!”
Archibeque grinned so widely the corners of his mouth began to bleed. “Of course it does. But not me.”
Shadows lashed from his fingertips, dancing before her like drunken serpents, and abruptly the entire world went black.
For all of half a second, before Olgun's magic surged once more and cleared the unnatural veil from her sight.
The possessed guardsman had already committed—even overcommitted—to his lunge before he realized that his “victim” wasn't remotely as blind or helpless as she was supposed to be. Had Shins wanted him dead, she could easily have run him through as she sidestepped.
But killing Archibeque was never the plan.
Widdershins's fist, protected by Olgun to keep it from breaking, met the man's jaw at the apex of his lunge. Even that didn't put him out, but it wasn't a blow he—or the creature riding him—could just shrug off, either.
“See,” Shins told him, circling around his sprawled form to stand by his head, “I know that you guys are only kind of here, in Davillon. And I figured you were spending more than a bit of your concentration keeping this poor fellow compliant, yes?
“I bet your jaw hurts, so feel free not to answer. Oh, and sorry about that, Commandant. If you're in there.”
Carefully, watchfully, she knelt beside him, reached into a pouch at her belt, and shoved a handful of dried and powdered leaves in his face. Startled, he inhaled. His entire body spasmed, choking, thrashing, but only briefly. The drug worked fast, and he started to go limp almost immediately.
“I'm thinking you can't drive an unconscious body,” she said. “So either you get to leave—if you even can—and poof on out of here, because you're not even supposed to be in Davillon, and you won't have Archibeque as an anchor. Or you get to come along with me. I'm good either—”
“You! Stay right where…Commandant? Commandant Archibeque's down!”
Shins whimpered something unintelligible. The patrol—and it looked, silhouetted against the light at the end of the street, to be about six of them—must have been near enough to hear the gunshot. The thing behind Archibeque's face began to laugh before unconsciousness