Damian's palm pressed against the curve of light.
The reaction was immediate.
Adrian convulsed.
Not a soldier's controlled flinch. Not pain swallowed and hidden. His whole body jerked violently, shoulders locking, fingers clawing against the torn edge of the rupture as if something inside him had suddenly bitten down.
A strange, muffled sound tore out of his throat.
"Don't—!"
The word came out raw, thin with panic.
The white radiance around him surged outward in a distorted pulse, then snapped back, thickening around his body like something alive and badly contained.
The rupture shuddered.
Where the light touched the living wall, flesh didn't burn.
It failed.
Black tissue shriveled where the glow brushed it. Wet muscle turned pale, then gray, then broke apart soundlessly into drifting dust. Veins collapsed. Membranes dried and curled inward. The organic corruption that had filled the tunnel seconds ago simply ceased to exist.
Adrian wasn't holding the passage open by brute force alone.
Something far stranger was happening.
His silver hair hung across his face, half-hiding his eyes, but Damian saw enough—the strain in his jaw, the tremor running through his arm, the tight, helpless panic of someone barely staying ahead of disaster.
"Go," Adrian forced out. "Go!"
Caleb moved first.
Frost cracked across the dying walls in jagged blue-white veins, locking the collapsing edges long enough to buy them seconds. Ethan shoved Marcus forward. Neol was slung over Marcus's back, limp and gray-faced, one arm dangling as Marcus stumbled through the breach with a curse.
"Move!" Ethan barked.
Marcus ducked under Adrian's raised arm and made it through. Caleb followed, ice breaking under his boots as the tunnel writhed and split around him.
"Damian!" Caleb shouted from the other side. "Now!"
But Damian didn't move.
Adrian's arm was shaking too hard now.
The light around him had stopped looking like power and started looking like overload—swelling, contracting, bulging unevenly around his torso and shoulders as if his body could no longer decide where it ended and the radiance began.
He was about to lose it.
Damian stepped forward.
Adrian saw him coming and his head jerked up sharply.
"No—!"
Too late.
Damian grabbed his wrist.
The world changed.
For one terrible heartbeat, he thought Adrian had tried to throw him off.
Then the pressure hit.
Something poured through their joined hands.
It rushed up Damian's arm in a clean, violent current, so cold it felt hot. The blood drying across his knuckles vanished. The grime under his nails dissolved. The sting of half-closed cuts disappeared before his mind could even catch up to the fact that they had been there.
The metallic smell in the air thinned.
The rot coating the tunnel walls near them collapsed into nothing.
The light did not burn.
It stripped.
Anything tainted. Anything corrupted. Anything impure.