Min had arrived just on time...

"Stop!"

Ren was about to refuse and jump anyway but...

"Selphira’s sacrifice has to be worth what she asked of us at least." Min said it quickly, and there was pain in his voice and the weight of someone who understood exactly what they were asking for. "That’s what she asked of me. That whatever we did would be worth it, and we still have time since Hikari is already there."

His voice found its footing.

"I have an idea for dealing with the barrier. But I need your help executing it."

Ren looked at Min.

Then he noticed that Hikari had been mentioned and looked quickly in the direction where he could feel the faint, artifact-muffled signature of her mana, the Royal Giant Firefly, barely perceptible through the concealment, but findable if you knew the texture of it.

He found what he was looking for. The position, the angle and the distance.

He didn’t say it out loud because it would have taken longer to explain than to understand.

"No detours," said Ren. "Fast."

Min was already talking.

♢♢♢♢

Selphira had stopped trying to get up.

Not because she had given in. Because the honest assessment of what her body could do right now excluded getting up from the list of available options, and Selphira had spent enough years being honest with herself in difficult situations to know better than to spend energy contradicting a correct evaluation. Staying down to hold on for one more second was the more efficient use of what remained. That was the calculation, and it was the right one.

The crystallization had reached her cheek.

It didn’t hurt. Which was almost worse, because it meant the body had stopped protesting in the way it protested when something was going wrong.

She thought about the young people of this generation.

Ren, who had been awake now enough for her to feel his mana again, a strong system that had been down and had come back, a bit different from before but present. Julius and Arturo, who were probably in a safe position by now thanks to Kira as agreed upon. Leonel, who had reached the same end she was approaching now, much earlier.

From the essences she could still sense and their locations, they were close to finishing whatever they had planned.

Fortunately, they all seemed too occupied to ruin it by doing something dumb like trying to save her.

She smiled... It was harder on the left side, with the crystallization that had climbed from her neck settling into the muscles of her cheek, but possible. A small asymmetric smile, which was fine. Symmetry was overrated.

And it was worth it.

She had lived long enough. More than long enough... More than anyone she had record of, and asking for more after everything she had been given was the kind of greed that was easy to recognize in others and difficult to see in oneself. It was enough.

It had been more than enough for a very long time, and she had simply been reacting to things too fast to stop and acknowledge it.

The process was about to pass the point of no return, she could feel it without feeling it somehow.

Selphira closed her eyes.

Then someone she hadn’t been able to feel jumped in front of her.

’What a waste of...!’

Victor Dravenholm rose with the crystallized arm extended forward as a shield between Selphira and Orion, despite everything today, despite everything in the days before today, despite being in a state that by any honest measure should not have allowed him to be standing.

He was standing anyway.

His mana signature was so faint she hadn’t detected it. The bond reserves she would have expected to feel from him simply weren’t there to feel.

"One more moment," he said, with the voice he had when he had made a decision all the way through and the decision was done. "Just resist one more moment!"

Selphira opened her eyes.

She looked at Victor.

Victor didn’t look at her. He was looking at Orion with the attention of someone who has decided that this is the situation and the rest of the details can be processed afterward, if there is an afterward to process them in.

Selphira found herself wondering, not for the first time today, why these young people refused to let her rest.

"I don’t want to see another statue of someone I care about very much!" Victor said, to the air more than to anyone specific.

Selphira understood in that moment exactly what Victor meant by that. Dragarion... his father, crystallized by his own choice because it was the only way the city survived. Victor who had seen that image as his definition of what it meant to hold power and responsibility simultaneously, what the endpoint of that combination looked like when it was fully expressed.

And who had also carried that image not only as inspiration but as something heavier, something that had shaped how he thought about what he was willing to lose and what he wasn’t willing to lose anymore.

Who had suffered it... Grieved it.

And now losing her?

Family, she had told him. What had become clear in the ruins, when she had told him he was one of hers.

Selphira let the smile be complete this time, the crystal seemed to accommodate it as though the structure had decided to allow her this much at least.

"Idiot," she said, with all the affection the word could hold when it came from someone who had spent enough decades in this to know exactly when an insult was being received as precisely the opposite.

Orion had been maintaining the energy flow and the crystal rotation with enough concentration that the dramatic moment in front of him hadn’t registered.

But he didn’t particularly like the image in front of him now.

Victor standing with the crystallized arm extended forward. Selphira kneeling behind him with that smile that bothered him more than it should have bothered him, given that she was no longer an operational threat in any meaningful sense.

He exhaled.

"Fine," he said. "Better this way. I had these two as unfinished business and the asymmetry of half-completed objectives was irritating me."

He raised his hand.

But behind him, inside the barrier, Dorian said something.

In the kind of voice someone used when they didn’t want to cause alarm but when the urgency of the thing and the weakness of their own nerves overcame the preference for not alarming.

"Brother, the barrier!"