Orion walked.

Not running. Walked... the steady movement that communicated exactly what it was meant to communicate: that there was no hurry because the result had been calculated and the calculation didn’t depend on the speed at which one approached it.

Each step measured. Each step saying the same thing the barrier said, the same thing the scattered bodies across the hall said, that the space between where he was and where Julius and Arturo lay on the floor was his space, and he was crossing it at whatever pace suited him.

His brothers moved with him beneath the barrier’s coverage, keeping pace without needing to be told, focused on the maintenance work that kept the fire-and-water surface rotating steadily rather than on anything that would have required them to run. And maybe it was Orion’s consideration with them too.

Many tried to stop the advance...

Yang fell first. A beam that arrived while he was covering three soldiers who were shielding the way too and would have gone down earlier without that coverage.

Lin caught him before the floor received him completely, using the arm that wasn’t already compromised from the fighting outside. She lowered him carefully, assessed him and returned her attention to the room without changing her expression in any way that would have been useful to Orion.

Wei held longer. He had been managing damage since before the ceremony started, awareness that came from decades of knowing exactly what his body could sustain and for how long. The beam that finally reached him did so with enough energy that the question wasn’t whether he went down but only when he would get back up.

Orion moved with the deliberateness of someone who had the barrier and therefore had no reason to hurry. Each step chosen, each target evaluated.

The tamers at the margins who could still move tried to intercept him. Two doubles found positions where their techniques would have had the right angle and under other conditions would have represented a real threat. The beams reached them before their attacks could complete. Before the barrier surface so much as flexed.

Ignatius tried with the Fire of his fusion.

It was a genuinely powerful offensive attack, the kind that justified the rank he held and the years of development behind it. The fire-and-water barrier received it and neutralized the damage when the twins’ fire recognized fire from another source and absorbed it before it could become a problem.

Ignatius set his jaw and tried again from a different angle.

The result was the same.

Zhao and his beast still carrying Taro and Liu also rained attacks to no avail.

Orion reached the place on the floor where Julius and Arturo were.

He stopped in front of the two brothers.

The crystals rotated slowly in his right hand, not charging, not threatening, just present, like a tool was present almost as a toy when the person holding it had already decided how it would be used but was enjoying the moment.

"I’m sorry," he said, with the same cordiality that had the same origin as all the cordiality he had shown today. "But some things need to be made clear for what comes after to function properly."

The beam left his hand.

Selphira came out of nothing before it reached them.

Not literally from nothing... From the new position in the hall where the mana-suppressing artifacts had been slowly, imperceptibly relocated over the course of the battle, the same hidden space that had concealed Ren long enough for him to "jump" at the center of ceremony in time, the same space where Victor still lay without the ability to move.

They had been trying to drag that position close enough to cover Julius and Arturo before Orion reached them.

They had almost made it.

Selphira had been managing exactly where and how they moved for the last several hours, looking for any angle from which the concealed group could affect the battle without exposing themselves before the moment was correct. The answer to that question had changed the instant Orion aimed at Julius.

She stepped in front of the beam and took it on the lateral of her most crystallized arm.

The crystallization she had been carrying since the ruins responded to the impact in a way that wasn’t simply damage. It was as though the mana already integrated into her structure recognized the incoming energy and made a decision, not to resist it, not to deflect it, but to incorporate it, extending the crystal network already present in her system outward rather than absorbing the blow as raw force.

The existing formation accepted the new energy and grew from it.

A curse and a blessing at the same time.

Selphira went to one knee.

The process continued for a moment after the first beam ended, the crystallization climbing from the arm toward the shoulder with the slow deliberateness of something settling in with the intention of staying.

Her fusion wasn’t active.

Her defenses didn’t have the platinum-tier coherence that would have let her system fully resist a beam of that density.

But the same principle that had applied to Victor in the ruins was applying here: once a system began crystallizing, direct energy impact against the existing crystal didn’t produce damage so much as it produced more crystal, the solid energy metabolizing the force into continuation of its own structure.

Orion would have preferred to inflict ordinary damage. The spiral beam that had done the work in the ruins wasn’t what he was using now. But the result was what it was.

Meanwhile Min, Hikari, and Kira had moved the moment Selphira did.

Not toward Orion, not toward Selphira. In the opposite direction entirely, toward Julius and Arturo, with the coordination of people who have agreed precisely what to do when the moment they’ve been waiting for arrives.

Exactly what Selphira had asked of them, planned in the quiet of the concealed position across all the hours the battle had run.

Hikari took Julius from one side. Kira took Arturo from the other. Min pulled the artifacts around them and extended his somewhat recovered invisibility over the retreat, the cover that worked as long as a mana-vision user wasn’t actively looking for you in a location they already knew to search.

Under normal circumstances Orion would have found them in seconds. But the open space of the hall, and Selphira kneeling directly in front of him, occupied the attention that would have gone to the search.

Umi slipped away in a different direction at Min’s instruction.

Orion still looked at Selphira, kneeling, arm crystallized past the shoulder, the process still visibly advancing through her system, with the expression of someone assessing whether an obstacle had been sufficiently neutralized.

"Insufferable," he said. Without raising his voice particularly, the word didn’t need volume to be derogatory. "Always an insufferable old woman." The crystals in his hand rotated. "Your part is over. Don’t involve yourself any more in what has no solution."

Selphira raised her eyes from where she knelt.

The crystallized arm had reached the shoulder and the advancing edge was already moving further, unhurried, with the patience of something that had found a viable path and had no reason to hurry along it. But her eyes had the same quality they’d had in the ruins when she told Victor that she would not sacrifice him, that same specific steadiness of someone who has already passed the point where physical circumstances are the primary consideration.

"If you achieve things this way," she said, her voice carrying the slight compression of a throat being worked around systems that were no longer fully cooperating, "you’re going to spend many years trying to stabilize what will be left of a fractured government."

Orion opened his mouth.

"I wanted to negotiate," he said, and the cordiality was gone completely now, what was underneath it was more direct, less constructed, the actual register of someone who had been managing his presentation for hours and had stopped needing to.

"I came with reasonable proposals. Terms that anyone with any sense would have evaluated rather than throwing themselves into combat like animals. I extended a hand and you were the ones who decided you preferred this."

His gaze moved across the hall, the bodies, the debris, the ancient stone fractured and scattered across what had been a ceremonial floor. "Now you’re harvesting what you planted."

"Or," said Selphira, "you spent months planning exactly this and still couldn’t convince the people you needed to convince that you’d leave them room to function afterward, so they had no choice because you cornered them too badly."

Orion looked at her for a moment.

Then he shrugged, with the naturalness of someone who genuinely didn’t care which version the other side believed.

"You’re too old for this," he said. "You’ve always been too old for the modern era I’m going to bring. You should have retired decades ago with everything you accumulated." The crystals pulsed once. "But if you want to be the first one I send into the void, you’re in a good position to go first."

The beam this time pressed harder.

Selphira received it with what remained of her body as a shield to give time to the younger generation.

Ren saw it with his now barely opened eyes.