Darth Kage VS werebeast

The red moon hung over the ruined temple colonnade like a wound that refused to close, and Darth Kage walked into its light with the unhurried certainty of a man who had already decided how the evening would end.

He could not see the werebeast yet. That was the first miscalculation.

The reports had described a green wolf-thing, massive, quadrupedal, all fang and claw and no mind worth the name. What Kage heard instead was breathing — slow, deliberate, and coming from two directions at once. His masked helm tilted. The crimson blade of his katana-style lightsaber hissed to life, throwing red reflections across toppled stone.

"Show yourself," he said, voice low and flat. "I dislike guessing games."

The answer came as a howl that shook dust from the arches, and then the werebeast was simply *there* — not charging from the front as the reports promised, but dropping from the broken cornice above, a mountain of green fur and dark mane and claws the length of daggers. It hit the flagstones where Kage had stood a heartbeat earlier. Kage was already elsewhere, boots skidding across grit, blade carving a shallow arc through empty air.

The beast was faster than anything that size had a right to be. It pivoted on one hind leg and came again, snapping, and Kage felt the wind of its jaws graze his shoulder plate. Twenty centimeters closer and the fight would have ended before it began. So the reports were wrong. Fine. He had always preferred wrong reports. They made the dance interesting.

The werebeast did not speak. It circled, snarling, hackles raised, and its glowing eyes tracked him with an instinct too precise to be mere animal hunger. There was something left in there — a remnant, a memory of a man — and Kage filed that away as a weapon.

"You fought someone before me," Kage observed, sidestepping a lunge that cracked a pillar. "You still carry his rhythm. Sloppy."

The beast roared and came in low, and Kage let it. He wanted to feel the shape of its timing, the pause between pounce and recovery, the half-second where all that muscle had to reset. He caught the first claw strike on his blade — a jarring impact that drove him back a full meter — and the second he simply wasn't present for, sliding under the beast's guard in a fluid roll that would have looked impossible on a man his size. His saber scored a line across the werebeast's flank. Green fur smoked. The beast howled, more fury than pain.

But it learned. That was the trouble. The next charge feinted left and struck right, and Kage took a claw across the forearm, armor shrieking. Blood beaded under the plate. He exhaled slowly, almost pleased.

"Better," he said.

The werebeast's answer was to seize a fallen column in both forelimbs — and hurl it.

Kage's perception warped. That was the trick he had built his whole life around, the psionic shimmer that made a man's eyes lie to him, and he used it now to blur his own outline into three overlapping afterimages. The column shattered through two of them and buried itself in the wall. The werebeast hesitated for a single confused breath.

*There.*

Kage was already moving, blade angled for the throat.

But the beast — the *thing* — rode the confusion like a wave. Its chaotic mutagenic body did not fight the distortion; it *used* it, snapping backward along the false timeline Kage had woven, then slingshotting forward with double the momentum, breaching the space Kage had opened for himself. Claws closed on his saber arm. The blade guttered, wrenched sideways.

Kage's masked face turned slowly toward the beast, red eyes glowing behind the horned visor.

"A clever trick," he said. "You adapted to me. That means you were *watching* me. Which means—"

He dropped the saber.

The beast's momentum, built for a resistance that had just vanished, carried it lurching past him. Kage's free hand found the secondary weapon handle at his waist. And the ground beneath them — already undermined by the fallen column, already cracked by the impacts of the fight — gave a long, grinding groan.

Architect of Ruin. He had not been dodging. He had been *engineering*.

The flagstones collapsed. The colonnade's western arch, robbed of its footing, folded inward with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat. Kage rode the falling stone, using the collapse as a ramp, using the shadows of the tumbling rock as cover, using the beast's own overcommitted charge as the axis around which the entire battlefield now turned. The werebeast scrabbled for purchase on stone that was no longer there. Its claws found air. Its howl turned to something almost like surprise.

Kage landed behind it on a slab that still held. He ignited the second blade — a shorter, brutal crimson shard — and drove it up beneath the beast's ribs as the rubble settled around them like a curtain falling.

The werebeast's legs buckled. It turned its great head, one glowing eye finding him, and for a moment the snarl softened into something that might have been recognition. The remnant of the man, perhaps, acknowledging the better dancer.

"Thank you," Kage said, in the werebeast's own remembered voice, flat and deliberate, and withdrew the blade.

The beast collapsed into the settling dust and did not rise.

Kage stood amid the ruin, breathing slowly, blood running down his forearm, the red moon watching through the broken roof. Reports were always wrong. The werebeast had been faster, stronger, and smarter than promised.

It had simply not been more patient.

He retrieved his katana-style saber from the rubble, extinguished both blades, and walked out of the temple without looking back.