Outside, Orion’s army, which had arrived with such confidence a few hours earlier, was being pressed from two angles simultaneously by forces that didn’t outnumber it but exceeded it in something harder to calculate and harder to compensate for: they knew what they were fighting for.

That kind of consistency didn’t replicate the way money and crystals replicated power. It had a different texture entirely, and it showed in the way positions held that shouldn’t have held and in the way people moved when they were told to move.

There was new hope.

but now that the dust had settled...

Orion was standing.

Inside a barrier.

Not the same barrier.

The one Ren had broken with everything he had was white, and it belonged to the crystal that was now in Luna’s hands as she sat beside him trying to repair his body as much as she could with her water mana, slowly, with what remained.

This barrier was different in color and in texture, red-orange and blue interlaced, the surface turning slowly on itself, a combination that anyone who had spent time near the twins in recent weeks would have recognized immediately.

Fire and Water.

Dorian and Magnus had moved from their position beneath their brother’s feet when the impacts arrived, crystals already in hand, the coordination of people who had practiced this exact contingency. Not because they had anticipated Zhao’s attack specifically, but because they had anticipated that at some point the backup barrier would be needed, and they had made certain the resources to deploy it were ready.

Zhao looked at it for a second before despair, one second was the time it took him to understand what he was looking at.

"Removing one crystal didn’t do you much good," said Orion from inside, with the tone of someone who had received the desperate counterattack he had been expecting, and who had been expecting it precisely because he had calculated it as a possibility.

The attack from Ren... that one he hadn’t anticipated.

The split lip Ren had given him was still there but had become a detail, something filed under cost of doing business.

It didn’t matter in the end.

"And what you brought in from outside doesn’t change much either." He looked across the hall with the serenity of someone who had not lost count of the available resources even as the hall changed shape around him.

"We are close to even, yes... Perhaps we’re not quite as far ahead in numbers right now, I’ll accept that. But being even in armies with me inside a barrier is not the same as being even without it."

Nobody answered immediately, because nobody had an immediate answer that was also an encouraging one.

Julius was on the floor alongside Arturo, they had paid the price for trying to block the eight-crystal beam without sufficient time to build real shields.

Larissa was studying the new barrier with the eyes she had when she was calculating something whose result she already didn’t like. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Zhao, who had arrived with enough information from outside to understand the general state of the situation, had the expression of someone who had added up the numbers and not arrived at the conclusion they wanted.

The problem had returned to its original shape.

The fire-and-water barrier was not the white barrier. But it wasn’t anything less important either.

Without the four most powerful tamers in the kingdom available and in condition to fire their best attacks simultaneously, or without someone like Ren who could absorb the energy of Orion’s own crystals and return it with enough concentration for the surface to crack the way the first barrier had cracked... then the new barrier remained the kind of problem that didn’t yield to volume of attacks.

It yielded only to the right kind of attack. Those were two entirely different requirements.

Ren was on the floor with Luna beside him, still trying to heal him.

Selphira and Victor were likely still hidden in the gallery, still crystallized, still without functional bonds.

Julius and Arturo were down.

Orion knew it.

Everyone knew it.

The difference between a moment of relief and a permanent turn was exactly that: a moment.

The allies had arrived. The pressure had dropped a degree. The balance had looked, briefly, like something that could be tipped.

More even than before, yes, more allies in the hall, the external pressure reduced to something manageable, the weight of numbers no longer as lopsided. But "more even" and "resolved" were two entirely different things when a slowly rotating orange-and-blue barrier was the specific obstacle separating them.

The situation hadn’t changed in the way that mattered.

Those few centimeters of combined elemental energy were the exact distance between one and the other.

And right now they were as far away as infinity.

♢♢♢♢

Orion had watched all of it from inside the barrier with patience, knowing that what was required of him was not to waste energy worrying about them.

Then he started firing again.

Not urgently. With the methodical rhythm of someone working through a list, each target chosen and addressed before moving to the next, no reason to rush because the outcome was already understood.

Liu and Taro were powerful, both double tamers with fusion capacity, the best quality of what had come through the ceiling with Zhao, the kind of fighters whose arrival had shifted the atmosphere of the hall in both directions simultaneously when they entered.

Yet neither of them had an answer for the combined barrier of the twins.

Their attacks arrived, the orange-and-blue surface absorbed or deflected them, and the effort of generating those attacks cost the people producing them more than it cost the barrier receiving them.

That was the mathematics that mattered. Not the absolute strength of what was being thrown but the exchange rate, and the exchange rate was entirely in Orion’s favor.

Orion moved slowly but surely to the place on the floor where Julius and Arturo were. It was time to secure his future.