Karen ran, her boots pounding against cracked asphalt.
The world was a blur of ruined buildings and swirling dust.
Her left side was a universe of wrong weight—the pulse rifle augment, a brutal slab of machinery never meant for her frame, dragged at her shoulder with every stride.
The servos whined in protest, fighting her own desperate momentum.
Her breath came in ragged, sawing gasps.
Balance was a memory.
Each footfall was a small, private battle against the pull of the gun.
"Just how far did he blow him?!" she shouted, the words ripped raw from her lungs.
Her eyes scanned the gloom ahead, searching for a telltale glow of orange or the flash of blue glyphs.
Cale kept pace beside her, his movements more natural but his face tight with focus.
He glanced at her struggling form. "You said to blow him into Sector 20," he reminded her, his voice flat. "Lucent took it literally. That's… several blocks. At velocity."
Karen didn't answer.
She was too busy wrestling with the aftermath of her own opening move.
The memory of the shot was a hot brand in her mind: the cool twinkle of the charging sequence, the violent river of light, the concussion that had vibrated in her teeth.
And then the dust clearing… to show Blaze standing there.
Smiling.
Behind a barrier that hadn't even flickered.
Her shoulder ached with a deep, metallic throb.
The augment's heat sinks were still venting a faint, shimmering haze into the cold air.
Firing it had been like catching a speeding truck in her arms.
The cooldown cycle was agonizingly slow—a full minute, the display in her arm warned, before she could risk another shot without melting the core.
She'd pulled the trigger on their only plan to separate the Scorchers.
And all it had done was announce their presence to a monster who found it amusing.
Gritting her teeth, she forced her legs to move faster, the heavy arm swinging like a pendulum of pure frustration.
The sound of their frantic footfalls was joined by another—a sharp, electric hum. Kai had drawn his conduit, the newly stabilized core glowing with a fierce, ready light.
"Want me to use the Leap glyph?" Kai called from behind them, his voice edged with the strain of keeping up while channeling. "We could cover the distance in half the time!"
"Yes. Please," Cale answered instantly, his words clipped between breaths. He was already calculating the vector, the reduced exposure time in the open streets.
But Karen's head snapped sideways, a sharp, negative jerk.
"No." The word was absolute.
She didn't slow, but her good arm came up slightly, as if physically warding off the idea.
"I can't. The landing shock…" She glanced down at the massive, alien weight of the pulse rifle arm, its servos whining in time with her gait.
"This thing wasn't built for my frame. I don't know what a hard landing will do to the shoulder mount—or to me. Could rip it clean off. Or snap the housing."
The risk was too great.
The augment was a borrowed cannon, not a part of her.
Its weight distribution, its balance, its connection points—all were foreign.
A Leap spell's sudden acceleration and abrupt stop could turn the machinery into a wrecking ball inside its own housing.
Ahead, an intersection of collapsed facades offered a choice.
Without breaking stride, Jack peeled away from the group, his movements a study in heavy, deliberate efficiency.
"Taking the high lane!" he grunted, his voice like gravel.
He didn't wait for acknowledgment.
The sniper's instinct was in him—find the angle, own the sightline.
Cradling his metal case of specialized rounds, he veered towards a skeletal fire escape clinging to a half-standing wall, beginning a swift, sure climb.
They ran for another twenty seconds—a lifetime measured in gasping breaths and the discordant rhythm of Karen's clumsy, heavy-footed strides.
Then the world ahead of them erupted.
It wasn't a single blast, but a rapid, overlapping quintet of thunderclaps that seemed to tear the sky.
Five distinct, concussive roils of sound and force, so close together they felt like a single, shuddering heartbeat from the earth itself.
The air in the street vibrated. Dust sifted down from broken windows above.
Karen skidded to a halt, the sudden stop making the pulse rifle arm swing wildly.
She stared toward the source, her face pale in the gloom.
"They've started already," she breathed, the words not a shout but a cold statement of fact. The last syllable was swallowed by the fading echo.
Five explosions.
There was a pattern.
A salvo.
***
The glyphs ignited in the air before him, and for a split second, Lucent's mind went perfectly still.
I know this glyph.
The intricate lattice of lines, the specific convergence of angles—it was burned into his memory.
It was the Inferno Lance.
The very spell-form he had painstakingly deciphered from the Ghost Key's corrupted data-streams, the one he'd channeled against the shifting horror in the Myriad Lab.
But something was off.
The lances that blazed to life were not the searing, white-hot spears of contained starfire he had wielded.
These were a deeper, angrier orange, like molten rock.
The edges of the glyphs weren't as crisply defined; they shimmered, bleeding light at the seams as if drawn by a hand that knew the idea of the spell, not its exact, harmonic blueprint.
It was a brilliant, deadly interpretation, not a perfect copy.
A cold knot tightened in his gut.
Blaze hadn't just seen the feed from the lab.
He'd analyzed it.
He'd reverse-engineered a ghost of Lucent's own stolen power.
The air screamed, warping from the heat.
There was no time for awe, only survival.
Lucent's will snapped to the Leap glyph held ready in his mind.
He didn't so much cast it as fling himself sideways with it.
The kinetic shove slammed into his body, hurling him into a desperate, flat arc just as five lances of painted fire tore through the space where he'd stood.
The heat seared the side of his jacket, and the afterimage of orange burned in his vision.
A desperate calculation ran behind Lucent's eyes as he landed, the three conduits humming in their orbit around him.
Every caster knew the two laws of spellcraft: speed depended on your hardware, and complexity dragged everything down.
A Rank 1 barrier flickered to life in a thought.
A Rank 3 siege-breaker could take seconds to formulate—seconds you didn't have.
But what if the burden was shared?
The thought was a spark in the gloom.
He had three conduits.
Not one.
If a glyph was a sequence of commands—gather aether, shape intent, stabilize form, release—what if you split that sequence?
Let one conduit handle the foundation, another the structure, the third the ignition.
Run the processes in parallel.
It wasn't linking the devices.
That was clunky, a tech solution for a problem of pure will.
The link had to be in the glyph itself.
You'd have to dissect the spell-form, not into pieces, but into simultaneous, interlocking layers.
A tripartite architecture.
One conduit holds the shape, the second weaves the power, the third binds the intent.
In theory… you could brute-force a higher-rank spell.
You could make lower-spec hardware punch above its weight class by sheer, coordinated effort.
It wouldn't be elegant.
It would be a messy, overwhelming surge, like forcing three small engines to scream in unison to move a boulder a single crane could lift.
It was a street-fighter's logic.
Not finesse, but applied, desperate force.
And right now, facing a man who could replicate his spells from memory, "desperate force" was the only theory he had time for.
The theory was a fragile, dangerous thing in Lucent's mind.
It had one glaring, critical flaw: control.
To split a glyph was to perform delicate brain-surgery on a bolt of lightning.
You needed absolute, intimate knowledge of the spell-form.
Every contour, every harmonic resonance, every point where intent met aether.
A single misaligned process, one conduit feeding power out of sync… and the aether wouldn't weave.
It would bleed.
Spill out as chaotic, volatile energy.
Or worse, feedback into the conduits, overloading their cores in a cascade of catastrophic failure.
It wasn't just risky.
It was a good way to turn your own weapons into bombs in your hands.
His gaze locked on Blaze, who stood watching him with that infuriating, analytical curiosity.
The man's orange barrier hadn't even been scratched by Karen's pulse rifle.
A Rank 1 kinetic bolt would be a fly against a bank vault door.
A Rank 2 force-lance might make the barrier shimmer.
It would be noise.
A distraction, not damage.
To hurt him—to even make him flinch—Lucent would need to break into the territory of Rank 3 spells.
The kind of glyphs used to breach bulkheads or level fortified positions.
Spells with names, not just functions.
But Rank 3 was a different world.
The aether cost wasn't linear, it was exponential.
His conduits, even upgraded, were junkyard relics next to corporate-grade hardware.
Casting more than a Rank 3 through a single one would drain it to a dead husk in two to three shots, assuming it didn't melt the battery first.
That was the brutal equation: use safe, weak spells and achieve nothing.
Or gamble everything on an untested, suicidal method to wield a power he wasn't meant to hold, all while fighting a man who treated high-level glyphs like casual conversation.
The air still smelled of aether and Blaze's copied fire.
There were no good choices left.
Only necessary ones.
Lucent's mind, already holding the tripartite theory, seized on a single glyph.
A foundational siege spell. Rank 3—Tectonic Lash.
It was a brute-force spell.
Not subtle.
Not complex in its intent—only in the sheer mass of earth and force it commanded.
The three conduits orbiting him shifted, their hum climbing in pitch.
He didn't try to link them.
Instead, he partitioned the glyph in his mind:
The first conduit grasped the targeting lattice, defining the area around Blaze's feet.
The second channeled the raw kinetic energy, the "lashing" force.
The third handled the material transmutation, the command to the stone itself.
He didn't cast one spell.
He performed three interlocking functions at once.
The street answered.
The concrete and packed earth in a ten-meter radius around Blaze didn't just crack—it erupted.
Dozens of jagged, stalagmite-like spikes the size of tree trunks shot upward in a deafening roar of shattering stone.
They rammed inward, a crushing, stony fist closing around the spot where Blaze stood, aiming to impale and pulverize.
Dust and debris filled the air.
The sound was colossal.
And when it cleared, Blaze stood exactly as he had, untouched at the center of a jagged stone crown.
The orange hexagonal barrier had flickered visibly under the assault, absorbing the immense kinetic energy, but it held without a crack.
Not a single chip of rock had reached him.
Blaze didn't look at the spikes surrounding him.
He looked straight at Lucent, his head tilted.
A slow, disappointed smile touched his lips.
"C'mon," he said, his voice almost conversational over the settling rumble. "I know you can do better than that. I saw what you can do."
The message was clear: a standard Rank 3, even cast through a desperate new method, was just more noise to him.
He was waiting for the real show.
The one from the lab.
Lucent gritted his teeth, the taste of dust is sharp on his tongue.
Blaze's casual dismissal was a needle pushed straight into a locked door in his mind.
A door behind which lay the memory of fire in his veins.
He had used higher-rank glyphs in the lab.
He had bent reality, faced down an Abomination.
But he hadn't cast them through a conduit.
Not really.
He had rawcasted.
The memory wasn't one of power, but of violence—against himself.
The cold pinch of the Q-Serin in his system, the chemical ice flooding his system before it turned to liquid lightning.
His nerves screaming as they became live wires.
His blood thickening with raw, unshaped aether, burning its way through capillaries never meant to hold such power.
The agony of his own body turning against him, becoming both the source and the sacrifice.
Another vial was still in his pocket.
A cold, heavy promise against his ribs.
A last resort with a price written in pain and permanent damage.
He didn't want to touch it.
He didn't want to feel his skin split again, to hear his own voice warp with harmonics that weren't human, to trade pieces of his future for a few seconds of catastrophic, unstable now.
The memory of that salvation was its own kind of chill, separate from the cold street.
He had lived through the rawcasting not by strength, but by intervention.
A hand, colder than the void, laid on his chest as his body was tearing itself apart from the inside.
Zero.
Zero hadn't healed him.
Not that he believed he offers someone salvation.
He siphoned the corrosive, overloaded aether out of Lucent's burning bloodstream like drawing poison from a wound.
It should have been impossible.
Aether corruption was a death sentence—your own cells turning against you, crystallizing from the inside out.
Zero had done it with a touch.
An act that felt less like mercy and more like… preservation.
"Someone of interest," he'd called him.
A specimen kept intact.
Lucent's survival wasn't a triumph.
It was a transaction with a ghost, and he still didn't know what was owed.
To use Q-Serin now, to rawcast again… it wouldn't be a gamble.
It would be an assumption—a hope that he could walk up to that same cliff edge, and that the same mysterious wind would blow him back to safety a second time.
He couldn't count on that.
Zero was gone.
The debt, if there was one, remained.
Blaze wanted a show?
He wanted the performance from the lab feeds?
That show had nearly killed him.
And Lucent had no intention of taking a final bow today.
Not if he could help it.
Lucent's grim calculation shattered—not by thought, but by light.
A second star ignited in the skyline, a cold blue-white pinprick against the bruised dusk.
It lanced downward, a precise and silent promise that became a roaring river of annihilation in the space between heartbeats.
The second concrete-melting beam struck Blaze from the opposite flank, a perfect, punishing follow-up to Karen's opening shot.
The impact was a localized sun, swallowing Blaze whole in a sphere of blinding energy and concussive thunder.
The shockwave hit Lucent physically, a wall of heated air and dust that shoved him back a step.
In the sudden, stark clarity of the blast, a simple, vital truth slammed into the forefront of his mind, washing away the solitary dread.
He was not alone.
He had been so focused on the mirror held up to his own power, on the ghost of Zero and the price of Q-Serin, that he had compartmentalized the rest of the world.
Karen, Cale, Kai, Jack—they weren't just a distraction or a rescue team.
They were the other blades of the scissors.
He was the one holding Blaze's attention, his glyphs, his terrible curiosity.
But he didn't have to be the one to cut.
As the light died and the steam rose in a geyser, Lucent's gaze snapped from the crater to the surrounding ruins.
His strategy reconfigured in an instant.
He wasn't doing a solo act dueling a god.
He was the anchor.
The lure.
The one who kept Blaze's eyes on the magic, while the others lined up the kill-shot.
And he finally remembered how to play it with a team.
***
Deep in the sub-levels, beneath the weight of the Red Dogs' crumbling fortress, a different kind of silence had fallen.
It was the quiet after a structural tremor, thick with dust and the fading echo of violence.
Ash pushed himself up from the shattered pipe, a sharp, grating pain flowering in his chest with every breath.
The Scorcher tattoo on his forearms pulsed with a low, healing warmth, stitching the worst of the damage into a bearable, throbbing ache.
His eyes, however, were cold and clear, fixed on the anomaly standing across the rubble.
The girl. Jessa.
But she wasn't the urchin he'd tied up anymore.
She was a puppet.
A weapon.
The pristine white conduit in her grip was a brand, a claim staked by someone else.
A slow, seeping anger began to pool in Ash's gut, hot and unfamiliar.
It wasn't the clean, theatrical fury he wielded like a prop.
This was darker.
More personal.
That girl had been his.
A trivial piece, yes.
Bait for Lucent.
A bit of gutter-trash to be picked up or discarded at his leisure.
He'd planned to play with her later, to see what made a kid like that tick before the end.
A private, cruel curiosity to be satisfied after the mission's real work was done.
Now, someone had reached into his pocket and taken his toy.
They had rewired it.
Pointed it back at him.
And they had done it with a conduit that spoke of a reach and a cleanliness that offended his sense of order.
This wasn't just an intrusion.
It wastheft.
A violation of the unspoken rules of his game.
The anger didn't boil.
It congealed.
Turning his sharp, playful malice into something focused, quiet, and utterly, dangerously intent.
Whoever was pulling her strings wasn't just an enemy.
They were a rival who needed to be burned.
But the need to burn the puppeteer was a luxury for later.
First, he had to survive the weapon in front of him.
The analogy was perfect, and infuriatingly literal: someone had handed a live grenade to a toddler and pointed the toddler at him.
The girl's hollow-eyed stare, the clumsy yet devastating gravity spells—it was raw, unstable power guided by a child's unrefined fury.
The most dangerous kind.
Unpredictable.
No finesse, just catastrophic consequence.
Ash wasn't out of cards.
He had plenty left.
But playing them depended on the audience.
His eyes flickered, not to Jessa, but to the dust-choked shadows of the collapsed hallway, the gaps in the broken ceiling.
Is the puppeteer watching?
The thought was a cold wire in his mind.
This kind of manipulation—possession, high-end tech, psychological override—it reeked of a controller who loved data.
A showman, like him, but of a different, sicker breed.
If I were in those shoes, Ash reasoned, the logic settling like a shard of ice, I wouldn't just set the weapon loose. I'd want to see it perform. To gauge its efficiency. To savor the chaos.
He was no longer just fighting a possessed child.
He was performing in a rival's theater.
Every move was being judged.
Every reaction, data.
A slow, bloody smile touched his lips.
It wasn't pleasant.
It was the bare stretching of skin over teeth.
Fine.
If they wanted a show, he'd give them one.
But he'd rewrite the ending.
He stopped thinking about winning a fight.
He started planning a demonstration.
One that would send a very clear message to the one behind this.