Darth Kage VS awais

The red moon hung over the shattered colonnade like a wound that refused to close, and Darth Kage stood upon the highest tier of the broken temple, letting the wind drag at his tattered cloth. Below him, across a courtyard of cracked flagstones and toppled pillars, the young man in blue robes waited with the patience of stone.

"You could descend," awais called up, his voice mild, almost courteous. "Or I could come to you. The stairs are treacherous."

Kage did not answer. He tilted his horned mask, and the crimson eyes drank in the geometry of the place: the terraces stepping down like the ribs of some dead leviathan, the narrow channels between them, the one cracked pillar near the eastern stair that leaned but did not fall. He filed that pillar away without knowing why. Then he moved.

He came down not by the stairs but along the wall, boots finding purchase on stone lips too narrow for a man, cloak snapping behind him. At the third tier he launched, crimson blade igniting mid-air, and the first exchange was a single shriek of plasma against the blue-robed guardian's raised staff. Awais gave ground precisely—one step, no more—and turned the strike aside with a rotation of his wrists that spoke of decades he did not appear to possess.

"You fight like a storm," awais observed. "Storms pass."

Kage's reply was a low rumble from beneath the mask. "So do men."

He pressed. Juyo poured through him—unpredictable, broken rhythms, feints that became kills halfway through, strikes arriving from angles that had no business existing. Twice his sorcery flickered at the edges of awais's vision, and twice the young man blinked and reset his stance as though shaking off sleep. He was calm. Infuriatingly calm. Each time Kage overextended, the staff swept in, and only the Sith's unnatural fluidity saved him from a broken knee, then a shattered elbow.

They fought down the terraces, and the tide of the duel began to turn. Awais was not faster. He was *earlier*. He read the storm and stood where the lightning would not fall. When Kage lunged from the second tier, the guardian sidestepped and drove a palm into his shoulder, and the Sith crashed through a balustrade onto the flagstones below, dust blooming around him.

"Yield," awais said, descending the steps with unhurried grace. "There is no dishonor in it."

Kage rose slowly, and behind the mask, he smiled. That was the moment he understood. The boy won by standing on solid ground, by letting the terrain fight for him. So Kage would take the terrain away.

He hurled his perception into awais's mind—not a feint this time but a drowning, the courtyard folding into a red haze of impossible angles—and in the same breath he was *gone*, not retreating but climbing, leaping from pillar to leaning pillar up the eastern side, blade carving through the supports as he went. Awais staggered free of the illusion and looked up, and for the first time, his calm cracked.

"You would bring the temple down on both of us."

"I would bring it down on *you*."

The cracked pillar. The one he had filed away before the first blow was struck. Kage drove his crimson blade through its base, then through the two beside it, and the whole eastern colonnade groaned like a living thing. Stone cascaded. The terrace where awais stood split and tilted, and the guardian's perfect footing—his entire art—slid out from beneath him.

He did not panic. He leapt, robes streaming, toward the one remaining ledge. But Kage had already mapped that ledge, and he was already there, waiting at the top of the falling stair. The Sith came down upon him like the moon's own shadow, and the young man, robbed of ground and robbed of time, raised his staff to block.

The crimson blade met it and did not stop.

Awais landed hard on the broken flagstones, staff cloven, breath driven out of him. He tried to rise, and the point of the katana-saber rested against his throat, humming.

"Storm," Kage said quietly, "has passed."

The guardian looked up at the towering figure, at the red moon behind the horned mask, and let his hands fall open. The courtyard settled into rubble and silence. What awais had trusted—the high ground, the patient counter, the environment itself—had been turned into the instrument of his defeat, and he knew it, and he did not dishonor himself by pretending otherwise.

Kage withdrew the blade a hand's breadth and stood motionless, master of the ruin, as the dust of the fallen temple drifted down around them both like slow snow.