The crystallization in Selphira. The way her system responded to Orion’s beam. The difference between that and what Ren saw when he looked at the crystals already formed.

Something in the comparison was giving him the outline of something that might work.

But the knee that had been holding Selphira gave, and then the second knee followed, her body responding to the accumulated weight of everything it had received, the hours in the ruins, the climb up the stairwell, the tunnel, the ceremony hall, all of it presenting the final invoice simultaneously and refusing to continue negotiating with her will about the terms. The crystal network spread through her as it would through stone that had found its natural fault lines.

The strange internal way of working of it, the way the crystal metabolized the energy was the only thing that let her keep receiving it at all.

Ren’s eyes had been opening, incrementally, across the last several seconds.

Not fully but enough. Enough that what he was registering wasn’t the blurred peripheral awareness of someone still mostly under.

Luna felt the change beside her without looking. She had been directing her water mana into the slow work of what could be repaired, and she felt it shift slightly inside Ren, something engaged again that hadn’t been, some layer below the surface answering.

♢♢♢♢

Min was looking at the barrier.

He had been looking at it since the moment Dorian and Magnus generated it, with the focused, slightly separate attention of someone who has found something that doesn’t close properly and is going to keep looking at it until they understand what isn’t closing.

The twins’ fire and water control wasn’t uniform. It had zones of higher density and zones of lower density, the points where their two individual systems had fully integrated and the points where integration was still incomplete, the seams where the barrier had been assembled in haste rather than constructed from a stable foundation.

Not an obvious weakness. A combat tamer examining the barrier would look for points of lower resistance and attack them directly, which was exactly the response the barrier had been built to handle, yet not the answer. That straightforward approach was the wrong approach.

But if someone with sufficient understanding of how fire and water interacted when they coexisted in a single system could work with the barrier’s own pattern rather than against it... they could pull at the incomplete seams between the two elements that weren’t just zones of lower density. They were natural fault lines.

Points that would respond to fire and water applied in the right configuration, at the right angle, from the right direction, using the same logic that he had studied to make his cultivation work.

Min had turned to Umi.

"Director Ignatius and any high-level fire-and-water tamers you can reach," she said. "I need them there."

Umi was already moving before Min finished the sentence just after he signaled.

Min kept watching the barrier as she moved through his own thinking. What he was building in his head was technically impossible for anyone who hadn’t spent the last several years studying elemental interaction patterns.

But what he had discovered out of a curiosity that had started developing real direction could be the key to turn the tide. The twins had synchronized their systems sufficiently for the barrier to function but the synchronization wasn’t perfect.

♢♢♢♢

Ren’s eyes were no longer the eyes of someone half-awake.

They were the eyes of someone who had recovered enough but not enough to leap back into the fight without cost. The threshold between those two things was exactly where he was sitting, and he knew it.

Still, it didn’t particularly matter because Selphira was still kneeling across the hall and the process in her system was still advancing.

He couldn’t let that continue.

Luna didn’t stop working through his damage still moving through the physical injuries with the quiet methodology of someone who had learned to heal without drawing attention to the healing.

Ren’s body had responded. His lungs were functioning with less objection. The ribs that had developed strong independent opinions about several of the impacts they had received in the last hour were still of those opinions but expressing them with less intensity.

He was better now but his mana system was a different problem. The real one...

The damage there was deeper than just water and will could heal, the kind that required time and the kind of rest that didn’t exist in this ceremony hall with Orion firing from behind a new barrier at anything that moved.

Not an hour of rest.

Not even a night... Much longer, with nothing else being demanded of the system in the meantime.

His mana was drier than a desert. But the corruption was still there, always waiting near his nucleus.

Not active nor growing. Simply present the way it was always present since the crack in the nucleus had never fully closed, patient, without the urgency of something that worried time is running out, because corruption didn’t experience time the way living things did.

Waiting cost it nothing.

So Ren pushed himself up on the arm that protested less.

"Thank you," he said to Luna, very quietly.

Luna was looking at him with the expression someone had when evaluating something and hadn’t reached the conclusion they wanted to reach.

She already knew what he was going to say.

"I have to go back in..."

"No."

"Selphira can’t hold much longer, someone has to..."

"Not you. Please, not anymore."

Ren began accumulating energy despite the refusal. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

The corruption answered the call with the speed of something that had been waiting precisely for that, flowing toward where he was directing it with a readiness that would have been alarming and something to take into account if it weren’t the only available option.

He at least could direct it considerably better now and it didn’t take over his mental state nearly as much as before.

The learning had been not for nothing. But there was still a cost, and he felt it immediately at the edges of the system, that specific deterioration that tainted and distorted his mana system, the kind of damage that accumulated in layers, each layer making the next one harder to repair.

But there was still no other choice.

"Luna." The slight strain in his voice was the voice of someone who was hurting but didn’t have time for excuses or a long conversation. "You need to get Liora and Larissa and retreat with whatever mana you have left in your beasts. Don’t give Orion the crystal back under any circumstances and..."

"You’re asking me to leave and leave you here!?"

"Yes."

"No. I’m not doing that... If saving the vips, if that’s the argument then I’ll go fight and you retreat instead!"

Ren looked toward where Selphira was still kneeling, the crystallization visible from where he was, climbing steadily, and Orion pressing her with the patience of someone who had a new barrier and the principal threats lying on the floor around him and no particular reason to hurry.

"Luna, you don’t have enough energy for an attack that breaks that barrier. Not without your fusion, not without a stronger light-and-shadow synergy so..."

"Neither do you!"

"Not anymore in pure mana, but if I pull the corruption again..."

"The corruption has already destroyed your system too many times today!" She said it with the certainty of someone who had run the damage calculation when healing and was not willing to have it ignored.

"If you take on more damage here when all the healers are down there won’t be anyone left who can repair it and you will die. If that’s still the argument, then I’ll take the same risk, I have more usable mana than you right now, even if it’s not much I can pull Orion’s attention, and that is exactly what I’m going to do if you’re not going to leave with me!"

Ren opened his mouth.

"And Liora and Larissa," Luna continued before he could speak, "would agree with me too!"

It wasn’t an argument about the battle. It was the kind of argument that landed differently because it wasn’t about the battle, and both of them knew it, and neither of them had time to keep stretching it.

Ren exhaled.

"Listen," he said, faster now because the margin was measured in the state of Selphira’s posture and that state was still moving in the wrong direction. "Even if you use everything you have left in a final fusion, the only thing you’d accomplish is depleting what remains and leaving Orion able to recover the crystal you love so much, because you won’t be able to hold it in that condition. It’s better to protect what we already won."

He held her gaze while the purple energy he was rotating continued to build faster than it should. "The crystal is with you. That shouldn’t get undone."

The pain was sharp and immediate in his damaged system, but he didn’t stop.

"Get Liora and Larissa, pull back with that and protect it, because losing any of you would be too much for me. Let me handle what’s left because more of my friends are still out there and I can’t let any of you..."

"Ren!"

Min’s voice came from the side at the exact moment Ren was about to complete the energy charge, envelop himself in lightning and launch forward.

He turned at the urgency in it. Min was standing with his eyes still returning to the orange-and-blue barrier.