Vash and Cerberus VS Enrico stregone di primo grado

The alley reeked of wet stone and ozone, and Vash was already grinning before the first blade cleared its sheath.

"Three heads, one brain between us," he said, thumbing the hammer of his revolver. "Statistically, that's still an advantage."

Cerberus answered with three low growls that harmonized like a broken chord. The beast's metal collars jingled as it fanned left, shadow bleeding into shadow, six eyes fixed on the narrow corridor's far end where Enrico stregone di primo grado stood perfectly still.

Enrico adjusted his glasses with one knuckle. Red veins pulsed beneath his skin, a slow tide of light that ran from wrist to collarbone and back. He did not draw yet. He measured.

"You move like a man who has never been cut," Enrico said, voice level as a plumb line. "A bullet is a dot. A blade is a line. Only one of them can teach you the shape of your own mistake."

"Poetry," Vash said. "I charge extra for poetry."

He fired.

The shot was a feint — three rounds stitched across the corridor at shoulder height while Cerberus lunged low, jaws snapping at the wizard's ankles. Enrico stepped. Not back, not sideways, but *through* — a diagonal inch that placed him between the bullets and the beast, and his first cursed blade came out of nowhere, a silver arc that caught only air and the tail of Vash's coat.

The coat split. Vash whistled.

"Okay. Rude."

Enrico's second cut was already in motion. Cerberus's middle head lunged; the blade met it not with steel but with a thin red line that bloomed across the beast's muzzle. The wound did not bleed so much as *glow*. Enrico exhaled, and the red veins along his forearm brightened as if he had just swallowed a sunrise.

That was the trick, Vash realized — cold, sudden, the way a man realizes he's standing on ice. Every cut fed him. Every wound was a deposit. The wizard wasn't trying to kill Cerberus. He was charging himself through the dog's pain.

"Cerberus, back off!" Vash shouted, and the beast obeyed instantly, three heads swinging away from the blades with a discipline that belied its monstrous shape.

Enrico tilted his head. "You noticed. Most don't, until the fourth cut."

"Most are dead by the fourth cut."

"Correct."

The corridor narrowed — broken crates, a fallen sign, a puddle of rainwater that caught the red light and threw it back. Enrico walked the space like a surveyor, placing each foot to close Vash's angles. Each step erased an exit. The blades never stopped moving; they simply *appeared*, short brutal strokes that carved geometry out of the air, and Vash's dodges grew tighter, his shots wilder, his grin thinner.

Cerberus circled. One head low, one high, one watching the wizard's off-hand — the hand Enrico kept hidden behind the small of his back. The beast had learned something the man hadn't: Enrico's rhythm broke every seventh step. A hitch. A breath.

Vash saw the dog's ears flatten. That was the signal.

He emptied the revolver — not at Enrico, but at the puddle at his feet. The water jumped, silver and red, and for half a heartbeat the wizard's lenses were spattered, his surgical sight blinded.

Enrico's blade came anyway, precise even blind, and it found Vash's forearm. The cut was shallow, elegant, and Enrico smiled as the energy flowed into him — a smile that faltered when he felt the wrongness.

The wound wasn't glowing red. It was glowing *white*.

Because Vash hadn't been retreating. He'd been leading. The "wild" shots, the panicked dodges, the shrinking angles — all of it had walked Enrico exactly into the narrowest part of the alley, where the walls pressed close and the puddle pooled deepest, and where Cerberus had been dragging a length of rusted chain through the water for the last thirty seconds.

Enrico looked down. His own red light, reflected and amplified through the wet chain, was climbing his legs.

"You misunderstand my dog," Vash said quietly, all the joking gone. "He doesn't hunt. He *herds*."

The chain snapped taut under three jaws and a single coordinated pull. Enrico, mid-cut and mid-charge, was yanked off his perfect diagonal. His blade whistled through empty space. His seventh-step hitch, the one Cerberus had counted, arrived — and this time there was no ground beneath it.

He hit the crate stack shoulder-first. The cursed blades scattered. The red veins guttered, drained, dimmed to a dull ember under his skin.

Vash holstered the empty revolver and drew a second one, resting it against his shoulder like a man settling a bill.

"You cut lines," he said. "He draws circles. Guess which one closes."

Cerberus padded forward, three heads lowering in unison, and Enrico stregone di primo grado raised one hand — not to fight, but to push his glasses back up his nose, an admission dressed as dignity.

"Precision," he murmured, "without a map, is just a very sharp mistake."

"Now who's doing poetry," Vash said, and fired once into the air, purely for punctuation.