“Travis, is that you?”

The revolutionary didn’t respond to Erik’s question, but he didn’t have to. He knew his brother’s voice. It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d heard words like that flung his way by that exact voice. He couldn’t even pretend there was any doubt in him. The second he placed the voice, Erik just knew. Everything about the way this revolutionary fought, everything he did just fit Erik’s younger brother too well. It was him.

Travis lunged forward again, attempting to catch Erik with his energy blade. Erik dodged, but he didn’t bother trying to retaliate. He wasn’t sure what to do. He’d been enjoying this fight for the most part. His opponent was intelligent and had access to a lot of power. They weren’t skilled, but the challenge had been there. It was fun.

Now, Erik wasn’t having any fun, not even a little bit.

He’d known for a while now that his brother had fallen in with the Revolution. After all, it had been confirmed that Travis was the one that blew up Caeden’s smithy back on their home continent. Caeden, who’d been a prime target for the Revolution, an isolated and unskilled shrouded. Erik had no idea how Travis came into contact with the Revolution, but it was obvious he’d been acting on their orders since he never returned home after the attack. Instead, he vanished.

Erik’s parents had been devastated. Not because of the attack, though they certainly weren’t happy or proud of their younger son’s actions. No, they were deeply hurt that their son would join an organization whose explicit goal would see his own brother dead.

For his part, Erik wasn’t surprised. Travis had never been subtle or quiet about his hatred for Erik. Their parents had more or less turned a blind eye and ear to the conflict. After all, it was difficult enough running a medical practice and the constant barrage of accidents and mishaps that surrounded Erik constantly.

So Erik knew his brother would fit right in among the Revolution. If he was honest, Erik could accept his brother’s hatred. He knew how hard it had been to live with him as a brother. He was surrounded by misery and misfortune, and it spilled onto those around him. Travis’s life was genuinely harder because he was there. It was no wonder he’d resented Erik.

Then you add in Erik’s shroud, which seemed tailor-made for their parent’s profession, and Erik was treated as the natural successor to the family business despite his bad luck and its negative effects. Meanwhile, Travis lacked the patience and mental fortitude to be a healer of any kind. As such, he was left out of a lot in their home. It wasn’t intentional, just a natural progression of events. That fact didn’t make Travis feel more loved, though.

And now Erik was confronted with his brother, wearing advanced Revolution tech and out for his life. Somehow, Erik’s luck had seemingly stepped up to another level of bad. Because he was completely stuck. Despite everything, Erik wasn’t going to kill his brother. He loved Travis. His brother had been handed a raw deal of a home life, and it was no surprise that those events had led him down a dark road.

But Erik wasn’t about to let Travis kill him. Even if you excluded the fact that Erik didn’t think he’d done anything bad enough to deserve death, he wasn’t sure his highly refined survival instinct would let him consciously choose death. His reflexes would kick in and stop it.

Erik hadn’t been lying or exaggerating when he’d said that Travis had no chance of winning at this point. His armor, no matter how advanced, wasn’t enough to beat out the flexibility of Erik’s shroud and splinter. So Travis wouldn’t be able to kill Erik against his will, and he couldn’t willingly subject himself to death.

That left the options that included Erik winning the fight. A minute ago, he would have said that that wasn’t even a challenge. After all, a minute ago killing his opponent had still been an option. Now, Erik wasn’t willing to make a move where Travis’s death was even a risk.

So, Erik, couldn’t die, either on purpose or through defeat, and Travis couldn’t die because Erik was completely unwilling to kill his brother. That left only one option as far as Erik could see. Travis would never surrender, which meant Erik had to somehow nonlethally subdue him.

Now that was easier said than done. Travis wasn’t going to win this fight, but the armor he was wearing was still a threat if Erik wasn’t careful. Taking the possibility of fatal damage or severe injury off the table had Erik hesitating, something he never did in battle. He never held back.

Before now, he’d never had a reason to.

The hesitation led to mistakes. Despite his defensive sense giving him ample warning, Erik still managed to get caught by and energy blade to the ribs. Moments later, a force blast clipped his arm, spinning him around and throwing off his balance. Each was healed with relative ease, but Erik never should have taken the hits in the first place.

His whole combat flow was off. Every time he saw an opening to attack, Erik had to restrain his instinctive, ingrained response. And Travis was leaving a lot of openings. After his outburst, any thought and strategy to his offense had vanished. He attacked with wild swings and random bursts of purple goo and force blasts. A smattering of other weapons were mixed in for good measure.

The only thing Erik could do was try to restrain his brother. It was just as difficult as he’d thought it would be. He tried several different grapple holds, but Stitch was only really good for granting Erik intense bursts of strength and speed. Its moment to moment benefit wasn’t enough to match the strength that Travis’s armor gave him. His mobility also wasn’t anything to scoff at.

Multiple times, Erik managed to capitalize on an opening he’d seen, grabbing arms and legs and attempting to throw off his brother’s balance. Every time the armor’s strength would outmatch his or Travis would engage the flight ether in the suit and slip free of the grip with the three-dimensional movement flight offered. Most grapples simply wouldn’t work on an opponent that could move in any direction at a moment’s notice.

Erik also tried using Stitch to restrain the armor’s movements. Every time, Travis simply used a small portion of the purple goo to burn the strands holding him. When Erik targeted the nozzles that sprayed the goo, Travis’s energy blade swept through the strands. If Erik spread his focus between the two arms, Travis would use raw strength to rip through the bonds before Erik could layer enough on to hold him.

Erik thought about using martial arts. He was certain that it would work, it had the first time, after all. But there was one problem with that. The gaping hole in the back of Travis’s armor. The white light didn’t seem to be able to fix that damage. Erik had ruined the integrity of his brother’s armor, and he was afraid that using martial arts would be enough to kill Travis now that his suit was broken. He was only an unshrouded after all, and he didn’t have the inherent defenses a shrouded had.

Erik let Travis shove an energy blade into his stomach so he could grab his brother’s armored arm with both hands. At the same time, he sent a deluge of Stitch crawling over his arms and up Travis’s. He got a thick dousing of goo for his troubles and was once again burning a moment later.

“Stop holding back!” Travis suddenly shouted, breaking the silence that had followed Erik’s question. “You’re not better than me! Stop belittling me and fight, damn it!”

“Trav, I’m not going to kill you.” Erik sighed once Healing fixed his burning face enough that he could speak.

“Well that’s too bad, because I’m definitely going to kill you!” Travis thrust out both palms, sending out a wide double blast of force that sandwiched Erik between them. They weren’t concentrated enough to pierce through him this time, but they did hold him in place for a moment.

That moment was enough for Travis to nail him with a spike of sunflower yellow crystal in his arm. He’d been aiming for Erik’s chest, but he’d managed to shift just enough to catch it in the arm instead. Erik, being familiar with this attack at this point, didn’t hesitate as strand of Stitch ripped his arm off and pulled it far away.

Moments after it left his body, the arm started writhing and boiling rippling before it expanded out from the stump in a mass of uncontrolled rapid growth. When the crystal’s power ran out, there was a mass of flesh several times larger than Erik sitting where his dismembered arm had landed.

“This isn’t going anywhere.” Erik huffed as Healing rapidly grew him another arm. “Can’t you just stop? I can’t let you kill me, and I’m not going to kill you. We’re just wasting time.”

“Just because you know you can’t win doesn’t mean I’m going to let you get away!” Travis screamed.

Erik rolled his eyes. His brother had officially checked out of reality at some point during their fight. Travis had always lived in his own little world that didn’t really match with what was actually going on. Erik didn’t doubt that the adrenaline of the intense and personal battle hadn’t helped that tendency. It was likely that he’d completely disassociated.

All of this didn’t make Erik’s life any easier. Travis wasn’t going to stop, not until Erik was dead or he was. Nothing Erik said at this point would change that. Nothing he tried to stop Travis had worked. Erik was sure that some clever application of his shrouds or the environment would let him pull it off, but he wasn’t Caeden. Clever and inventive plans didn’t just pop into his head.

“Sorry, Caeden.” Erik muttered. With a mental groan over how much shit he was going to catch for this, Erik released Laekna’s materialization. Without the Spirit of Confinement to hold it up, the dome protecting the arena vanished.

A moment later, Erik snapped his fingers as black chains wrapped around every one of his brother’s armored limbs, holding them in place. Erik knew that Travis was straining himself and his armor to their limit to escape, but no sign of his efforts showed from the outside. It was only through Binding that Erik knew his brother was trying to escape at all.

“Now you’ve gone at done it.” Erik kicked the ground in frustration. “I’m going to get in so much trouble for this. You have no idea how scary Lily is when she’s angry, and after she finds out that I dropped the barrier she’s going to be pissed. Fuck!”

Erik took off at a sprint. Binding, in the form of black bungee cords and massive purple rubber bands, appeared ahead of him, constantly pulling him forward faster than he could have ever run. Travis floated along behind him, still completely bound in dark chains. Their fighting had taken the pair of brothers far away from the arena.

Mentally cursing at himself and his brother, Erik prayed to any imaginary god that might listen to make sure no one in that arena died before he got back. Lily would be mad enough at him for dropping the barrier. He had no idea what she’d do to him if someone actually died under his care.

Coming around another hill of rubble, Erik finally laid eyes on the arena. He relaxed, seeing that it wasn’t a bombed out husk. Until a moment later when a figure resembling a bigger, bulkier Etherman flew out the top and up toward the enemy flagship.

“Ohshitohshitohshit.” Erik muttered, flinging himself across the terrain with an extra powerful set of rubber bands. He expected to arrive to a bunch of corpses when he burst into the arena at full speed. Instead, he found the same group he was expecting to find. Shell-shocked survivors and uppity, pissed off shrouded.

“Huh, looks like everything’s fine.” He swept his gaze over the whole arena, looking for the dead bodies. He was certain of what he’d seen leaving the arena. “Well, I guess it didn’t kill anyone. But why would it- Hey, were’s the portal?”

There was one thing out of place. The Entrance Blade Caeden had left in the arena was missing.

{}

“Huh,” Caeden’s gaze swept around toward the direction of their fallback point. He hadn’t thought much about it, too busy handling the effort to clear the skies. They’d made staggering progress, but the number of ships in the air was absurd.

“What is it?” Lily asked from where she was looking at reconnaissance data the Bladeborne’s sensor array had produced.

“Someone is messing with the Entrance Blade I left at the arena.”

“Let Erik handle it. I’m sure he’ll get them to cut it out.” She didn’t look up from the CV tablet.

“No, I mean metaphysically messing with it. Not someone poking it or hitting it with a hammer.” Caeden frowned, trying to understand what he was sensing. “I’d say it was a shrouded, considering the interference is on a conceptual level. But the Revolution has shown much more advanced tech here than they ever did before. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d managed to make tools that can interact on that level.”

At that, Lily did look up. “You think the Revolution breached the arena?”

Instead of answering, Caeden took a Physical Enhancement reinforced jump that took him high enough to see past all the rubble in the way. “Shit! Considering Erik’s barrier is down, I’d say that’s likely.”

As he landed, Caeden attempted to tap into the Entrance Blade at the arena and pull it back into the Blade Forge. When he did, a sharp force pierced through his connection, preventing the move. “Something just cut off my ability to control that Entrance Blade. I can still feel it, but I can’t do anything with it. My senses inside the arena are being blocked too”

Now Lily looked as alarmed as Caeden felt. “We need to get back there right now.”

They left Cat in charge and Lily took them over on Sky’s back. Caeden already knew his Entrance Blade had left the arena while they were handing everything over to Cat, so he wasn’t surprised when they didn’t find it there. What he was surprised to see was all the survivors they’d left in Erik’s care, alive. Along with Erik himself and a revolutionary in a suit of armor reminiscent of an Etherman.

“What happened here?”