Jolthar recognized Caelum before his enhanced vision fully resolved the details.
His uncle.
Caelum Kaezhlar walked toward the ten-tailed entity, and his aura preceded him.
It was not explosive, not a display. It expanded outward steadily like dawn expanding across a landscape, comprehensive and patient and deeply, thoroughly dominant.
He was a man of aura and the person who reached tier 10.
The corrupted ground around Caelum's footsteps stabilized where it contacted his aura's edge, the malice in the soil temporarily suppressed by proximity to something that simply outweighed it.
The ten-tailed entity noticed.
For the first time since emerging from the spire, it turned away from the Naemarys group and oriented toward the new arrival. The intelligence — if that word applied — behind its ten-tailed form recognized that the threat calculus had changed.
Caelum's first strike landed before Jolthar fully processed that he had moved.
