The leader brandished the sword. He was obviously not an expert at it, but he was not as clumsy as some David had seen. He moved forward, swinging the sword at David, and as he moved he grabbed at David's mind. David slipped free as easily as ever, but in order to do so he had to pause in place for just an instant. So his blocking sword was only barely there in time to deflect the blow. The leader grabbed at him again, apparently able to effortlessly attack him mentally while still moving physically. Once again David had to pause for a moment, and this time he didn't get his sword up quite in time. The tip still deflected the attacker's blade slightly, but it gouged a deep cut into his arm. He fell back a step, and the leader advanced on him.

They circled around the hilltop that way for some time. The leader couldn't manage to deliver any crippling blows, but for once it was David who was having to pause to deal with a mental battle, and the pauses were long, in terms of the snake-strike movements of vampire combat. David retreated again and again, but though he was cut and bleeding in dozens of places, he was serene as he fought. The trance state seemed to linger with him, though he dropped out of it to see and block every time he used it to escape. He was calm, in a way he'd never been calm before. He might die, he might live, and it didn't matter, all that mattered was the fight.

And then something shifted.

One of the leader's blows came at him, with the same mental hold, and David once again had to pause to slip free of it, but this time he did not block the blow. He took it, the deep gash across his shoulder a light price to pay for the change in pace, for instead of blocking, he attacked.

The pace of the fight was the same, but now it was David who drove it, and the half-second pauses were barely enough to give the leader time to block or dodge his strikes. Again and again David's sword sliced in at him, and again and again he only just managed to escape injury. As David fought he was more and more calm, more and more detached from all the usual baggage of life. He did not need to survive, he did not need to win, he only needed to fight. This was his purpose. Thousands of hours of practice, of forms and drills and sparring. Dozens and dozens of battles with other vampires. All his skills, all his training, all his work, everything that he had ever done or been was leading up to this moment. He felt it, the sense of destiny rising up around him in a flood, stronger than it had ever been. And as it rose around him he was no longer David, he was only the Hunter. He stepped up the pace of his attacks, moving now on muscle-memory, driven by millions of repetitions of the motions of combat. There was no thought, only action.

And the leader, trying to reach out and force him to pause once more, found nothing there to grab. He stumbled backwards, suddenly afraid, wanting to run, but he didn't get the chance, for the Hunter's sword swung around at neck height, in the motion he'd performed so many times before... and rebounded with a clang and a shower of sparks from the ridged cables that ran up the sides of the leader's neck.