Down in the corridor, the air was thick with absolute tension. Ethan and Himari stood perfectly still, their eyes locked onto each other as the emergency sirens wailed in the distance.
"Liam, go ahead, I will be joining you soon," Ethan commanded coldly, never breaking eye contact with the white-haired ninja. "Go secure the other levels."
Liam gave a curt nod, shifting his weight to sprint down the adjacent hallway.
But before he could even take his first stride, Himari's arm blurred. Three custom-milled combat knives hissed through the air, burying themselves deeply into the concrete floor mere inches in front of Liam's boots, cutting off his path.
"Don't flatter yourselves," Himari smiled elegantly, her twin primary daggers glinting in the dim light. "The two of you can come at me together. It won't change the outcome."
In the literal next microsecond, a heavy shadow caved into her field of vision. Ethan had closed the distance invisibly, his right fist driving forward like a railgun strike straight at her face.
Himari's reflexes saved her; she vaulted dynamically backward, clearing the trajectory just as the wind from the punch whipped her white hair across her eyes. Ethan didn't give her room to breathe—he pursued her instantly, driving a heavy follow-up left hook. Himari twisted her torso mid-air, dodging the strike before rolling flawlessly across the concrete floor to create separation.
As she slid to her feet, her wrist flicked, releasing a rapid-fire volley of four jagged shuriken directly at Ethan's core.
Ethan tracked the metal smoothly, tilting his upper body in a series of precise, tight movements to let the blades whistle harmlessly past his coat. He burst forward again, aiming a devastating straight right to her throat.
Himari threw up both her forearms to form a cross-block, but the sheer, superhuman kinetic force of Ethan's strike completely overpowered her guard, launching her backward until her spine hit the reinforced wall.
Despite the impact, a sharp smile remained on Himari's lips.
Suddenly, Ethan's tactical senses screamed. He felt a sharp shift in the localized airflow behind his neck. Without looking, he violently ducked his head, rolling hard to the side.
ZRIP!
A clean, silver line of blood caved into Ethan's left cheek as one of the jagged shuriken scraped past his skin. He touched his face, looking back in genuine surprise. The four shuriken he had skipped past earlier had somehow reversed their trajectories mid-air, whistling back toward Himari's exact coordinate like homing boomerangs.
Incredible... Liam analyzed, his eyes narrowing as Himari effortlessly caught the returning steel between her fingers. She threw them with a hyper-specific, curved axial rotation so they would execute a orbital path back to her hand.
Himari didn't grant him a single frame to recover. She translated her momentum into a blinding rush, her twin knives carving a lethal, multi-angled web of slashes across his guard. Ethan utilized his evasion matrix, dodging the majority of the steel, but the sheer velocity of her ninja arts caught him twice, leaving two clean slashes across his left shoulder.
Isolating a minor frame gap in her stance, Ethan fired a heavy counter-punch straight at her jaw. Himari anticipated the hit, dropping her center of gravity into a full crouch beneath the strike. With a vicious smirk, she drove her right knife upward, aiming to completely impale Ethan's right thigh to the floorboards.
Predicting the execution, Ethan weaponized his pinned leg—he drove his boot downward with immense force, precisely hitting her fingers before the metal could pierce his leather.
Damn it, this guy's combat IQ is insane... Himari thought, her knuckles bruising under the immense pressure.
Ethan vaulted into the air, utilizing his leverage to execute a catastrophic, vertical hammer-kick directly down toward Himari's skull. Sensing the lethal velocity, she rolled frantically to the side a millisecond before impact. Ethan's heel caved into the floor, creating a massive, deep crater in the concrete and sending a shockwave of spider-web fractures ripping through the hallway.
Himari scrambled back to her feet, a drop of cold sweat rolling down her temple as she stared at the ruined floor. "If that kick had made clean contact... my skull would have been completely vaporized."
Ethan didn't offer a verbal reply; he simply reset his guard, his eyes completely hollow.
Himari slowly sheared her knives back into her tactical belt, her posture relaxing into something ghostly and fluid. "I am a shadow of the old world," she whispered, her form beginning to blur under the flickering corridor lights. "And a ninja's true specialty... is absolute stealth."
In the blink of an eye, she vanished entirely from Ethan's sight.
The next microsecond, Ethan's instincts flared. He didn't look—he violently caved his spine forward, executing a hard tactical roll across the floor. He snapped his head back toward the spot he had just occupied; Himari had materialized out of thin air, her heavy dagger driving downward into the exact coordinate where his neck had been a frame prior.
"So fast," Liam muttered from the sidelines, his hand gripping his sidearm. "This ninja girl completely lives up to her lineage."
Himari pulled her blade from the concrete, her eyes locking onto Ethan with a strange, analytical curiosity. "I must admit... I truly believed you would possess a threshold closer to that guy's level," she murmured.
As she spoke, a vivid, memory flashed through her mind's eye—the image of masked boy, who is always with Jake, appeared.
Himari's silhouette blurred once more. "Let's see how long you can track my shadow."
She vanished again.