Lucas had both hands on Kruel’s wrist.

Kruel had both hands on Lucas’s throat.

Neither of them moved. Just standing there in the alien ruins, bloodied past the point where blood meant anything useful, breathing hard, locked against each other, neither giving ground.

Lucas looked into Kruel’s eyes.

Kruel looked back.

The void hole in his chest was smaller than it had been. The grey tissue creeping inward from the edges, plastering over the absence. His new horn was more pronounced now, the grey pushing out from between the second and third, the shape of it clear.

Lucas’s hands tightened on the wrist.

Kruel’s grip tightened on his throat.

"You’re still here," Kruel said.

"And you’ll be done before I leave," Lucas said.

Kruel’s tail came around.

It hit Lucas in the midsection from the side and the tip drove through him and came out the other side and Lucas felt it go through him and felt it come out and the sound that left him had nothing of language in it.

"Arhhhh!"

Kruel grabbed his shoulder with the free hand. Both hands now, one on the shoulder, one on the opposite hip, and he pulled in opposite directions.

Lucas screamed. Kruel was trying to slowly, sadistically rip him apart.

Then from nowhere, a bunch of red tentacles hit Kruel.

They came from everywhere at once. Red, thick as forearms, barbed along their length with hooks that faced backward so pulling out did more damage than going in, and they came from the air above and the ground beside and the ruined walls to the left and they hit Kruel from sixteen directions simultaneously.

Some broke on contact. The grey hide took them and the barbs snapped at the surface and the broken ends fell away dark with Kruel’s blood and their own material.

Others went through.

Three punched into Kruel’s back between his shoulder blades and the barbs opened inside him and held. Two more went into his left thigh, deep, the hooks finding purchase in the muscle beneath the hide and locking there. One caught him across the jaw and wrapped around his neck once before the tension yanked it taut.

Kruel released Lucas.

Lucas hit the ground and lay there with the tail wound in his midsection and breathed and did not stop breathing because stopping was not something he was willing to do.

Forty meters back Angel stood with both arms extended and her feet planted wide and her blood running yellow.

Not the dark red it always was. This was because she was getting an assist.

The blood was yellow and hot. The enhancement coming from a task force member twenty meters behind her with both hands raised toward her, his ability feeding into hers, amplifying the output past what her biology alone produced, and the blood constructs running at that temperature burned where they touched, getting into tissue and kept working after the initial contact.

She yanked.

The tentacles pulled in opposite directions on Kruel’s body and the ones that had gone through held and the ones wrapped around his neck tightened and Kruel dug his feet into the alien stone and the stone lost, long cracks running from his heels outward as he was dragged six inches toward Angel’s position.

Six inches. Against everything she had.

"MORE," she screamed at the task force member behind her.

He pushed harder. His nose went immediately, blood running over his lips, the effort of amplifying an S rank output past its threshold tearing through him from the inside.

The yellow in Angel’s blood deepened. Almost orange.

The tentacles pulled and three of the ones in Kruel’s back tore free taking chunks of grey hide with them, the barbs doing their job on the way out, and Kruel groaned, low and deep, something below pain that lived right next to it.

He grabbed the tentacle around his neck with both hands and pulled it apart.

The material separated with a sound like a cable snapping under load and the recoil hit Angel across both forearms and the skin there split from wrist to elbow and she didn’t stop.

Eclipse members came in behind him.

Not S ranks. Not heavy hitters. Just people who had been fighting for two hours and were still standing and had made a decision about what standing meant. They came at Kruel from behind while Angel held his attention forward, hitting him with everything their bodies could produce, VPT strikes finding the joints and the damaged areas, the places where Jayden and Lucas and Diana had been opening wounds all day.

A woman named Petra drove a VPT strike into the back of Kruel’s left knee and the joint buckled two inches before Kruel’s weight caught it.

Kruel’s elbow came back and hit her in the chest and her sternum cracked audibly and she went down and did not get back up.

The man beside her hit the same spot before Kruel had finished the elbow. Then again. The joint buckled further.

Kruel turned and hit him with an open hand and the man’s head snapped sideways at an angle heads were not built for and he was dead before he hit the alien ground.

Three Ares soldiers came in from the left. Two of Aurelius’s wives who had returned from seeing the king to the ship, still running fire, hitting Kruel’s damaged chest from the side while the soldiers drove VPT into his ankles.

One of the wives got too close.

Kruel grabbed her by the wing of her armor and swung her into the second wife and both of them hit the alien ground together in a tangle of red plating and neither of them moved immediately.

The three Ares soldiers kept hitting the ankles.

One of them took a tail strike that removed his arm at the shoulder. He looked at the stump. Then he hit the ankle again with the hand he still had.

Jayden came back in.

He had been circling, watching, the Descending Dragon cycling continuously, and he came in from Kruel’s right while Angel held his left and drove the hot staff into the plastered void hole on Kruel’s chest.

The staff hit and the plasma state at this temperature did something to the plastered tissue that the tissue had no answer for. The patch cracked. A fracture running across the grey from the impact point.

Jayden hit it again.

The crack widened.

Kruel grabbed his arm.

Lucas hit Kruel across the back of the skull with Valor from behind and the grip loosened and Jayden pulled free and hit the patch a third time and the grey gave and the void hole opened again, wider than it had been, the absence inside it going deeper than a chest had any right to go.

Kruel groaned again.

"HIT HIM," Lucas screamed.

They hit him.

Angel’s tentacles pulled. Jayden’s staffs drove into the chest. Lucas hit him from behind in combinations that his broken collarbone screamed about and he screamed back at it and kept swinging. Eclipse members poured in from every angle, dying as they came, each one buying a second or a fraction of a second, the math of it brutal and simple, spend enough of them and Kruel couldn’t answer every direction at once.

A task force member took a tail strike meant for Jayden. The tail went through him completely and Kruel pulled it free and the man fell and the two people beside him stepped into the gap he left.

An Ares soldier got Kruel’s fist in the face and his skull did not survive it and the two soldiers beside him grabbed the fist before it pulled back and held it and died holding it.

Kruel was bleeding from forty points. The void hole was open. His remaining wing was torn in three places. His left knee was compromised. The regeneration was running at capacity and losing ground.

Then Kelvin came back.

He came from the north end of the ruins at a dead run, all four arms occupied, two steadying the object he was carrying, two managing the suit’s systems.

The cannon in his hand was not standard issue anything. It was not in any EDF catalogue or any Eclipse inventory manifest. Kelvin had built it in the hours since the fleet made orbit, using components from two disabled Ares weapons platforms and the KROME suit’s own power core running at a throughput it was not rated for.

He was still fifty meters out when stones lifted off the alien ground in a radius around him and held there, vibrating. The air between him and Kruel went dense and charged, building, the field expanding as the charge climbed.

Everyone felt it in their back teeth.

"CLEAR," Kelvin screamed.

Angel pulled her tentacles back. Jayden stepped sideways. Lucas grabbed two Eclipse members by their collars and physically moved them out of the line.

Kelvin fired.

The beam was wide. A column of compressed energy three meters across that hit Kruel center mass and pushed and kept pushing, driving him backward through the alien ruins, through a wall, through the open ground behind it, through the cliff face at the ruin’s edge, and into the alien shore beyond.

When it stopped Kruel was on one knee.

One knee. In the alien sand. His chest open. His remaining wing shredded. Blood running from more points than anyone had been keeping count of.

One knee.

"STOP," Kelvin said. He was breathing hard, all four arms shaking, the cannon smoking in his grip. "Everyone stop. Look at him."

They looked.

Kruel on one knee. Bleeding. The horn still growing from his skull.

"We are not killing him," Kelvin said. "We have been hitting him for two hours. We have thrown everything at him. And that horn keeps growing." He looked at the survivors around him, the bloodied people still on their feet. "Hitting him harder is not the answer. It has never been the answer. We are feeding him."

"Then what," Lucas said. His voice came out wrong, too much air behind it, the tail wound doing things to his breathing that he was managing through will alone. "We stop? We just stand here and watch him finish?"

"I’m saying killing him isn’t working."

"Then we hurt him harder," Lucas said.

Kruel laughed.

The sound came up from the alien sand where he knelt, low and certain, and he looked at them with the grey of his face healing in patches and the void hole in his chest still open and the horn still pushing through his skull.

"Yes," he said. "Hurt me harder."

Jayden looked at the void hole. At the horn. At Kruel’s body working toward something none of them could stop by conventional means.

He looked at Lucas.

"Buy me time," he said.

Lucas looked at him. At his face. At whatever was sitting behind his eyes.

"How much," Lucas said.

"Enough," Jayden said.

Lucas turned back to Kruel and raised Valor and went forward and the others went with him, everyone still standing throwing themselves at Kruel to buy Jayden the seconds he needed.

They weren’t worried about being jumped by other Harbingers while at it anymore because of two things. Well not thing, more like angry dragons in the name of Ares and Nyx who were becoming more than a handful for the remaining Harbingers left. Three horns or not, the Red deaths did not discriminate.

As for Shade, he’d coiled around Diana hours ago and hadn’t let anyone come near her. That was where kelvin had come from to check on her.

Jayden stood back and held the Descending Dragon at his sides and closed his eyes.

The chain stopped moving.

Then it started again. Both staffs running simultaneously at their maximum outputs, cold and heat at the same extreme at the same moment, the thermal differential between them so violent that the air around Jayden stopped behaving like air.

His left eye went blue.

His right eye went red.

The soul form came through him like something that had been waiting behind a door he had never opened, heat and cold running through his veins simultaneously, his skin luminous at the surface as the two extremes fought for his body and found a temporary agreement. Steam rose from him. Frost formed on his shoulders and melted immediately. The alien ground around his feet cracked from the temperature radiating outward.

He was burning himself.

He knew it. He could feel it, the cost of holding both extremes simultaneously in a body built to channel one at a time, running upward through his chest and into his throat.

He held it and built it higher.

Around him people died buying the seconds he needed. An Eclipse member took a hit meant for Lucas and his ribs came through his back. An Ares soldier grabbed Kruel’s arm with both hands and Kruel broke both of hers and she grabbed it again with the stumps and held on. A task force member put herself between Kruel’s tail and Kelvin’s position and the tail went through her midsection and she went down and did not come back up.

Jayden kept building.

The Descending Dragon past the point the ability descriptions had language for, the chain between the staffs molten and frozen simultaneously, the staffs themselves running at temperatures no instrument on the battlefield could measure.

His hands were burning. The skin at his palms going wrong where the staffs made contact, the tissue losing the argument with what it was being asked to channel.

He held it.

"Jayden."

He heard it from somewhere behind him. He didn’t turn.

"Jayden stop."

He turned.

Sophie was standing ten meters away. On her feet. Both hands at her sides, the King’s Gaze in her right hand, the eye open and running deep blue. Her eyes matched it. She was looking at him with something in her face that had no word for it.

"Stop," she said. "Don’t."

"Sophie—"

"It won’t work," she said. "What you’re building right now. What it does." Her voice cracked slightly. "It won’t work Jayden. Please."

He looked at the void hole in Kruel’s chest. At the horn still growing. At Lucas barely standing, one arm wrong, blood running freely, Valor in his grip and nothing left behind his eyes except refusal.

"It has to work," Jayden said.

"Jayden—"

"Sophie." He looked at her. One blue eye. One red. "Get clear."

He turned back to Kruel.

"No," Sophie said. "Jayden halt!"

And just like that, Jayden’s entire body froze up.

Kruel broke free.

His elbow came back into Angel’s face and her head snapped sideways and she went down into the alien ground and there was ship scrap where she landed and it went into her back below the shoulder blade and her eyes went wide and she stayed down.

His hand found Lucas and swatted him sideways and Lucas hit the ruin wall and the wall cracked around the impression of him and he stayed in it.

He turned to Kelvin.

Kelvin raised the cannon.

Kruel grabbed it with both hands and crushed it and the energy cell inside detonated against Kelvin’s chest and Kelvin went backward and Kruel grabbed his arm, the real one, the one that was still his own, and pulled.

The sound it made filled the entire battlefield.

Kelvin’s eyes went green. Just for a second, the Universal Interface firing as his consciousness reached outward for something to hold onto.

Then he stayed down.

Kruel walked toward Jayden.

Jayden was frozen. Both staffs still running at full output, both eyes still burning, the energy built to its peak and held there and his feet not moving. His arms not moving. The command going somewhere and not arriving where it should as he tried to move his body.

He tried.

He tried again.

His legs shook with the effort and did not move.

Kruel stopped in front of him. Looked at the blue eye and the red eye and the energy running through the weapon and the boy burning himself from the inside out to hold it.

"Besides the blue one, you were the most interesting one today," Kruel said. "After him." He looked briefly toward where Noah’s cocoon sat thirty meters away. "Finish it. Whatever you’re building. Do it."

Jayden’s jaw was tight. His hands shaking. The energy at its peak and going nowhere and his body burning to hold it and his feet still not moving.

"Do it," Kruel said again.

Jayden couldn’t.

Kruel looked at him for a long moment. Then he flattened his hand. The edge of it raised.

He swung.

Jayden’s head left his body and hit the alien ground and rolled and stopped against the base of a ruin wall and the one blue eye and the one red eye looked at nothing.

His body stood for two seconds. The Descending Dragon still running in his hands. Then it went down.

Lila had been coming to her feet twenty meters away, still finding herself after Kruel had put her down, her head ringing, her vision returning in pieces. She saw Sophie first. Then traced Sophie’s line of sight to what was on the ground. And it didn’t take her long to piece it together.

She looked at Sophie.

"It’s the only way. It’s the only way...." Sophie kept chanting like a mantra.

"What have you done," Lila said, seeing Sophie’s entire body convulse with tears running down her eyes.

Meanwhile beyond them, Seraleth who no longer had to stand guard thanks to Nyx and Ares protecting Noah stood guard anyways, watching the tentacles that were now slowly returning to the cocoon and no longer going out in search of entropy.

"What’s happening now?" She said watching attentively.

And the entire time, inside the cocoon, Noah’s eyes just snapped open and a pair of slits appeared in them.