Orion lowered his hand one centimeter at the unmistakable tone in his brother’s voice.

Magnus spoke from the other side of the barrier at the same moment, the voice of someone looking at something they don’t fully understand, which was precisely what was frightening about it.

"The barrier isn’t responding."

Orion turned.

The orange-and-blue surface that had been rotating with the consistency of something well-constructed had a different texture at two specific points.

Not holes.

Not visible fractures...

A fluctuation, a tremor in the synchronization between the two elemental systems that the twins had been holding stable for the last several minutes, responding now to something that wasn’t any of the attacks that had been hitting it from outside.

As though someone had found the correct frequency from the wrong direction.

"What is happening?" Orion said, in the voice he had when something was outside his calculations.

Dorian and Magnus didn’t answer immediately because they were too occupied trying to understand the same question.

The barrier fluctuated again. Strongly.

Then it broke.

It was visible to everyone watching, that fraction of a second where the orange-and-blue surface shuddered and came apart, releasing its stored energy outward in every direction at once, in a dispersal rather than an explosion because that was the nature of a system that had been unraveled rather than punctured.

Min’s instruction had reached every fire-and-water tamer still capable of using mana, distributed through Hikari and everyone who could pass the message along, in what was probably the strangest directive most of them had ever received in the middle of a battle: move your mana in the same direction as the barrier, not against it, and then shift it up and down after three seconds, at the fastest rhythm you could sustain.

There were more allied tamers than before, which helped.

Or perhaps complicated the situation, depending on the angle, more healers had arrived from the school as enough time had passed since the initial attack for some of them to recover enough to move.

But among them, Ren’s parents, who despite Finch’s efforts, since Ren had specifically asked him to keep them occupied and out of the danger, had found their way here anyway, which was the kind of outcome that was probably inevitable in retrospect. And a group led by Klein, Trent, and Roran with the gold and high-silver ranked classmates who had recovered enough to support.

The way they had destroyed the barrier made no sense to anyone thinking in terms of mana used for attack or defense.

It made complete sense to anyone thinking in terms of resonance and equilibrium though.

Min had carried the largest share of the water side, because the healers who would normally have contributed had been treating wounded for hours and their reserves were nearly symbolic. He was the exception, held in the concealment group with the VIPs long enough to have something real to give when the moment arrived.

He had controlled the final mana movements that were the ones requiring the least mana but counting the most, the most complex and numerous and small chaotic changes, the kind that only someone who had studied the interaction patterns between opposing elements at close range so intimately could execute with the necessary precision.

The twins felt what was happening before they understood it.

Dorian tried to compensate and his compensation had fed the pattern rather than interrupting it, the adjustment applied force along the same axis that was already being exploited.

Magnus did the same on his side with the same result for the same reason.

The barrier they had built on the synergy of their two elements was being used against itself, its own energy converted into the instrument of its dissolution, working from inside the structure outward, and there was no way to defend against something that used your own technique as the vector.

The more precisely they tried to correct it, the more precisely they were helping it fail.

It broke.

The attacks came coordinated from every viable angle simultaneously, because everyone still capable of moving had moved the moment the barrier gave. For a second it looked like an eruption, the accumulated force of everything flying at once from every direction.

Orion didn’t blink.

The pulse he released this time was larger than any of the previous ones. Undirected again, not calculated to reach specific targets but expansive, completely expansive, the release of all available energy at that moment in one direction that was all directions at the same time.

Selphira and Victor were airborne before the impact finished processing.

Orion had no barrier now...

So he called his tiger.

Not ceremonially, dramatically or slowly. The way someone called something when they had decided that the procedures were finished and what followed didn’t require any form of formality.

The Gold-tier tiger emerged with the solidity of a beast that had not been used at any point today and whose reserves were almost entirely intact, a resource Orion had kept held back through the whole session, waiting for exactly the moment when the barrier was gone and something that could absorb physical attacks needed to be in front of him.

The twins called their beasts at the same moment. Dorian’s Real Undine, Magnus’s Fire Phoenix, the three of them forming a living barrier around their tamers while simultaneously taking up a combined attack position for the first time in the entire battle.

And not just the beasts...

The crystals in all three brothers’ hands continued their work without pause, filling the hall with beams of fire, water, and darkness from a single point toward every other point simultaneously.

Zhao moved forward.

He had blade feathers in both hands and three simultaneous beams coming at him, and what he had calculated was that he could evade two if he redirected the third with his body, and attack with everything remaining before his fusion ran out, and that this was the best equation available with what he had.

He had made that calculation and accepted its terms.

Taro and Liu followed.