Adept Fenara saw the line was lost, and she stopped trying to hold it.

In the last moments of the lives of these people, I found it remarkable that they were able to face it in their own way.

Maybe they did not have time to think much about the situation due to the urgency of everything, but their responses to this moment taught me lessons about life and the strength of character that stuck with me in a way I could not describe.

She gathered everything she had, and she put it into one cast. Her staff shattered as it released a blizzard that was focused into a lance of absolute zero.

This lance punched clean through the chest of the Khaazim that had taken Varis and out the other side.

The demon opened its mouth in a silent scream before it froze in place. The lance continued on and pierced through hundreds of demons and disappeared in the distance, leaving a long row of frozen sculptures.

It left her empty, but she was smiling. In that smile, I saw nothing but satisfaction at a spell that was properly cast.

I saw that smile, a moment before a Khaazim reached her, and her body was buried under the immensity of its form, and its tail struck down rapidly, multiple times in a second.

Adept Torvin roared her name, and gold light blazed from all over his body, not just his staff, and three Khaazim next to him, plus hundreds of Khaaz turned to golden statues, and for a moment, one more cruel moment, the line reformed around the old Adept like iron filings around a lodestone.

He was the best of them. He had believed me when believing me cost him everything, and he stood in the ruin of his expedition and held it together with nothing but discipline and gold light and the refusal to break.

By the lights of heaven, he was magnificent, and I was privileged to see them fight with their entire might rather than die in sorrow when their powers were robbed from them.

"Voss!" he shouted, over the screaming. He did not look at me; he could not spare the attention.

"You need to hold on, fight for as long as you can. The Council is coming; they need whatever information you have. Don’t die, boy."

"I can’t... I can’t carry you all," I said, and I do not know if he heard it, and it was the truest and most cowardly thing I have ever said.

"Nobody’s asking you to," said Torvin, and turned a fourth Khaazim to metal, and was still casting when the fifth one’s tail took him through the back, and the gold light went out like a candle in the wind.

∞

I had retreated to the side of my friends, after I had failed to protect the Adepts, the Khaazim were too strong and too fast, and handling them on my own was far different than fighting them with a group.

The best way to fight a Khaazim was either to be overwhelmingly powerful or be faster than them; these were hard criteria to match, and I was barely doing that, but I was nowhere near the capability of protecting people from them.

Protect my friends? Ah, who was I kidding?

And then it was Bari.

Of course, it was Bari. He had been trying to reach me the whole time, my loud, loyal idiot friend, shoving through the chaos with his clumsy Surge, and he got to me just as the line died, just as the last of the order dissolved into people running and demons feeding.

"Elric!" Blood on his face, none of it his yet. "Elric, we have to... Dara’s still back there, the researchers, we have to..."

"I know." I was already counting. Dara was forty metres, two Khaazim between her and us. The cluster of researchers, sixty metres, lost. Bari, here, alive, looking at me with absolute trust that I, somehow, would fix this, because I always knew things, because I’d known about the stakes, because to him I was still just clever Elric Voss who’d warned them, and I was displaying abilities beyond that of an Acolyte.

Bari trusted me when he had every reason not to, and I had to force myself not to tell him that I could not save him, I could not save anyone, but I heard myself saying,

"Get behind me," I said. "Both hands on my belt. Do not let go."

He grinned, sigh, with the world ending, Bari was having fun at my expense, "Like when we were in the Academy," he said, "you always did pull me out of the fights," and he reached for my belt.

At that moment, I knew that Bari understood that I could not save him, but that did not matter, as long as he was fighting beside me. I grinned back at him in the madness.

The Khaazim took him from the side. Burst-speed, ten metres in a blink, the one tell I always watch for and did not watch for because I was looking at his face. One moment, Bari Sohn was reaching for my belt with a joke on his lips, and the next, there was a sound I will not describe to you, folks, because you have been good to me and you do not deserve to carry it, and there was no more Bari.

His blood splashed across my face; it was hotter than it should have been, and that was the only sensation my mind could wrap around. An afterimage of his face remained in front of my retinas, one moment he was smiling, and the next, he was gone.

I heard someone screaming. I thought it sounded like me, but I could not be sure.

The Khaazim came for me, and there was no smile left on my face. I did not know if there was any left in my heart.

I killed that Khaazim. I killed it slowly, with my bare hands and the lightning in them, and I did not enjoy it, even though I wanted to enjoy it, but all their death could not bring him back, and no matter how much pain I inflicted upon this demon, the only thing left of Bari was his blood cooling on my face.

"I told you not to let go."