Steel met steel over the keystone of the gorge bridge with a flat, bell-clear crack that knocked a shower of frost crystals from the hanging icicles below the arch. On the first exchange, Ilyra called upon the exact Early Bronze focus she had forged during the reed-marsh ambush in that milestone entry: the Branching White Wake.
Her marsh-iron spearhead drove toward Arel Fen’s throat along the centerline. Then, her Bronze breath divided six inches behind the socket into two backup white arcs. One curving left to hook his forward wrist, the other dipping low toward the inside of his lead knee to force him half a step toward the southern rim. Against standard Bronze bandits or even Reth Mal’s outer shrine guards, that three-way division forced the defender to choose which threat to block. Meanwhile, the other two branches pried open a lane.
Arel Fen didn’t chase a single branch. His mature Bronze focus—known in White Heron Hall’s inner manuals as the Inviolable Point—tightly packed every ounce of his five years of Bronze buildup into a twelve-inch sphere centered directly on the tip of his silver-tasseled spear.
Rather than swinging his shaft wide to meet Ilyra’s backup wakes, Arel kept his spear tip anchored over the exact center of the bridge and rotated his rear elbow by less than two inches. The dense, iron-heavy sphere at his point intercepted the main stem of Ilyra’s thrust before the left and low branches could separate cleanly.
