The first blade of light screamed into being at eye level.
It cut air with a sound like glass being struck.
It hung there, thin and perfect, inches from Kael's face.
People recoiled.
A ripple of bodies moved away like a margin folding back.
No one wanted to be close to the light when it hungered.
Leo's head slumped.
Silver smoke unspooled from his mouth and climbed, obedient, into the column above them.
The boy's fingers twitched once and went slack.
Two Celestial Knights closed from the flank.
Blades of compressed radiance bloomed in their hands like drawn suns.
Their armor ate the square's light and returned it sharper.
The crowd parted automatically.
Fear is a choreography they practice.
Kael saw Leo fall.
Something inside him snapped the way a brittle spoon snaps.
The second heart — the thing welded into his ribs that had been a slow drum since the shard — exploded.
It wasn't a quiet awakening.
It was a detonation.
The tattoo on his right forearm flared amber, fast and messy.
Lines moved beneath skin, rethreading like a seamstress working a trembling hem.
Heat washed his hand.
Cloth no longer contained it.
An ethereal glove of gold formed over his knuckles in a single, ugly instant.
It wasn't graceful.
It looked made by someone who knew hunger and had learned to punch with it.
He hit.
The glove met the first Knight's blade at his cheekbone level.
There was no cut.
There was a crack — a sound that cleaved the chant into two.
The radiant blade fractured into glittering shards and collapsed like a blown bubble.
Every head turned.
The square froze.
Even the angels' chant stuttered.
The shattered light rained like a brief, harmless meteor shower.
The first Knight staggered as if his pride had been wounded.
A corporal thing: armor bent, a glint gone wrong.
The second Knight's jaw tightened.
Protocol is a muscle that tenses.
Kael tasted copper and something colder — the shard's murmur like a mouthrush of static.
His glove hummed.
The amber was not light but will, and will weighs.
He didn't think.
He only watched the second Knight move.
That movement was faster than ceremony allowed.
The second Knight lunged, blade bright and clean.
Kael felt a command push through him — the shard's insistence.
He dodged with a speed he had never had.
It wasn't technique.
It was a body that had been rearranged by hunger.
He slipped under the Knight's arm, rotation a hair too precise.
His eyes found the gaps in the white plate.
Seams at the shoulder.
A joint where a servomotor might breathe.
A faint lattice behind the breastplate that pulsed with the knight's internal light.
Under the armor there were faults.
The light wasn't a god; it was engineered.
The Knights were sewn with circuits and ritual.
Kael's eye caught the pulsing nodes like target dots.
He didn't know why he could see them.
Seeing felt like a theft.
The square screamed again.
Mothers pulled children back.
Someone's prayer stopped halfway and strangled to silence.
Kael's glove answered with a motion that was more reflex than plan.
He didn't aim for flesh.
He aimed at seam.
The glove struck metal, but the blow rode the weakness.
There was a ringing that vibrated in his teeth.
The Knight's arm spasmed.
The blade went clattering into cobbles.
A fraction of a second widened.
For that sliver, Kael was not prey.
He was a knife turned in the other hand.
The second Knight recovered with professional brutality.
He countered a step, a measured blow meant to end novelty.
His gauntlet found Kael's shoulder.
Pain exploded — honest and immediate.
The crowd heard the impact.
Someone sobbed.
People who had been watching the ceremony because it made the world ordered now had their order cracked open.
A man in the front row vomited.
A teenage girl screamed.
The ritual she had believed in was being shown as a messy negotiation.
Kael's senses narrowed to hot iron and Leo's thin breath.
Adrenaline tasted like ledger paper.
He reached blindly for the smallness of being human.
The instinct to protect.
The ugly need to hold a life before it is taken.
He shoved his palm on Leo's back.
The glove flared.
The filament of gold around his hand sang.
The air between them chilled as if a window had been closed.
The life smoke around Leo tightened its line.
It halted a fraction sooner than it should have.
Leo's fingers twitched.
He coughed and spat blood that tasted like rust and promises.
That micro-delay was a revelation that burned him alive.
The gold could push back on the Ordo's instruments.
It could slap at the edges of their machinery.
It was not a healing hand.
It was a disruptive one.
The podium's angels lifted their heads.
One of them moved like a gear, slow and precise.
His hood caught the light and turned it into a face none of the crowd could look at.
The angels' chant harmonized with a mechanic's click.
Protocol was not just in the Knights now.
It flowed up to the podium.
On the periphery, drones shifted.
A surveillance lens hunted for a signature the algorithms had learned to fear.
Someone on the platform tapped a console.
A light winked from green to angry red.
Kael could run.
He had a path.
He had two good legs and a ruin-rich backstreet a block away.
He could vanish into the city's folds and bury what had happened.
He didn't run.
He dragged Leo with hands that shook.
It was not noble.
It was a selfish, small thing.
He wanted to buy Leo one hour more than the Ordo planned to sell him.
Kael made it two steps.
A Knight slammed a boot into his ribs.
Pain flared and he tasted teeth.
The glove reacted, slicing a clean arc that didn't pierce armor but sang metal.
It made music of impact.
The Knight backstepped, stunned, not by death but by the insult of defeat.
A drone dipped and a scanner pinged.
The net tightened.
The angels' fingers found their runes and drew them like a surgeon drawing a line.
Kael was no longer an incident.
He was an anomaly.
Protocol escalated to category.
The lead angel on the podium lifted his hand.
The square went quiet because silence is also control.
His voice came out not quite human — layered, amplified, choir and command.
"Heresy detected," it said.
The words were a blade in tongues.
The monitors on the Knights' plates blinked.
A chain of numbers scrolled for a microsecond on the air.
A tone chimed.
The Ordo did not ask permission.
It broadcast assessment.
A scanner targeted Kael.
Light mapped him like a hand tracing a pattern.
For the first time since the shard fed into him, Kael felt the world respond in the language the shard had always used.
Contracts and clauses.
This was an order.
The world was rewriting what it would enforce.
Someone in the crowd began to shout — not in prayer but in fear.
People moved like prey, pushing and tripping.
A child's shoe went flying.
Kael forced himself to stand over Leo.
He had not been brave on purpose.
He had been clumsy and panicked.
The glove tightened.
With it came cold comprehension.
His body was changing the rules.
The second heart pressed against the ribs as if testing a new cavity.
A Knight drew a rod from his belt.
An extraction tool, official and obscene.
The device hummed white authority.
It wasn't meant to kill.
It was meant to bind and drag.
Kael's reaction was not thought-out.
It was animal and ugly.
He swung at the Knight.
The impact sent a shockwave through the square.
Dust lifted.
A vendor's stand collapsed like a throat being cut.
The crowd's faith delivered a consequence.
Someone screamed that the Ordo had been betrayed.
The Knights bristled.
The angels' hoods turned like watchful moons.
An officer barked into a device.
Orders scrolled across airborne displays.
Drones converged.
The second Knight advanced again, slower, cautious now.
He had learned that the light could be broken.
He wanted to break what had broken it.
Kael smelled defeat and it tasted like rain.
He also smelled the shard's satisfaction.
As if the thing within him were savouring new teeth.
The glove felt heavier, more hungry.
A voice boomed from the podium.
It was not a prayer.
It was a verdict given in institutional steel.
"Anomalous heresy confirmed," it declared.
"Threat level: Beta."
Every radio in the Knights' belts clicked.
"And by decree of the Ordo," the voice continued, colder and now intimate in its authority.
"Authorization granted: on-site annihilation."
The words landed like a gavel.
The square folded into silence that had teeth.
Kael's glove tightened on empty air.
He looked at Leo, at the Knights, at the podium.
He felt watched in a way that had no mercy.
The world had reacted.
He had crossed a line.
Annihilation was a precise verb.
It offered no mercy.
It was a decision made for him and against him all at once.
The lead angel's hand lowered, slow and final.
The Knights closed like vultures that had learned the taste of steel.