For a heartbeat, time turned to syrup.
Kael saw the glowing chains erupt from the moss like luminous snakes. He saw the volley of sickly green slime balls and crackling energy nets arc down from the balconies. He heard Corvin's laughter, sharp and ugly above it all.
His body reacted before his mind could. He wasn't a leader. He wasn't a strategist. He was a boy who'd spent a life dodging blows in Concord alleyways. He dove.
Not away. Forward, towards Ellora and the two younger commoners who were frozen in panic. He slammed into them, knocking all three into a stumbling heap behind the scant cover of a decorative (and hopefully sturdy) stone planter.
"THWIP"
"SPLAT!"
"CRACKLE!"
A net of sizzling energy snapped over the space they'd just occupied, grounding itself into the moss with a nasty hiss. A glob of slime hit the planter's side and began eating through the stone with a hungry, gurgling sound.
"Don't touch the moss!" Dominic's voice, stripped of all dry humor, barked across the plaza. He wasn't where he'd been. While Kael had moved forward, Dominic had moved back and up. He'd used a short, sharp burst of earth magic not to attack, but to launch himself onto the low wall of the pavilion itself, putting himself above the snapping chains. He stood there, silhouetted against the sanctuary's gentle light, hands empty and clenched. "The chains are rooted! Stay off the ground!"
Easier said than done. Justin was already in motion. He didn't try to dodge the incoming sonic pulse. He planted his feet, faced it, and cut.
His sword, sheathed in that liquid mercury Silver light, moved in a blinding vertical arc. He didn't block the sound; he split the wave of mana carrying it. The disorienting pulse shattered into two harmless rushes of air that whipped past his ears, ruffling his hair. The effort made him grunt, his boots skidding back an inch in the moss.
"They're aiming to disable, not kill!" Justin shouted, his tactical mind clicking into gear even as he defended. "Break the formations! Ellora, spirits to the balconies, distract the casters! Kael, can you do that… un-making thing to the trap runes?"
Before Kael could even process the question, a shadow passed over him. Daniel.
He moved like smoke against the wind. He didn't run; he flowed from one patch of deeper shadow to another, the glowing chains lashing uselessly through the air where he'd just been. He was heading not for cover, but for the nearest cluster of trap runes etched into the cobblestones at the plaza's edge. As a slime ball hurtled towards him from above, he didn't slow. He simply twisted his body in a way that seemed to defy physics, the projectile passing so close it stained the shoulder of his dark tunic before he melted into the gloom beneath a balcony.
A second later, there was a soft puff of extinguished light, and a whole section of the glowing chain network near that balcony went dark.
"Okay," Kael breathed, scrambling to his knees behind the planter. Ellora was next to him, her face pale but set with determination. Her hands were already moving, weaving a summoning pattern in the air.
"Little spark, mischievous breeze, sturdy pebble," she whispered, her voice a rapid chant. "Cause a fuss, please!"
Her three spirits materialized in flashes of light. The flame-fox shot like a fiery arrow towards the balcony where Corvin stood, yipping and weaving, forcing a lackey to abort a spell to swat at it. The air spirit, a whispering, translucent figure, zipped to another balcony and began whipping up a localized gust of wind, ruining aim and blowing robes into faces. The moss-turtle plopped onto a third balcony railing and just… stared, intently and slowly, at a caster, who stared back in confused irritation.
It wasn't much, but it was a few seconds of chaos. It was enough.
"The runes," Kael muttered to himself, peering over the planter. He could see them now complex patterns glowing beneath the moss. They didn't feel like the Golem's bindings. They were simpler. Angrier. More like shouts of magic, not songs.
"Shouts can be silenced," Vaelthryx mused in his head.
Kael didn't have precision. He had concept. He focused on the shout, on the intent to bind and hold. He pointed a finger, not at a specific rune, but at the idea of the trap itself in a patch of chains near Justin.
'What if you just… forgot how to grip?'
A wash of gold and black energy, faint and shimmering like a heat haze, washed over the patch of moss.
The result was less dramatic than with the Golem, but just as unnerving. The glowing chains didn't break. They… fuzzed. Their light dimmed to a murky brown, their forms growing indistinct, like a memory fading. They lost all solidity and collapsed into puddles of inert, dark mana that soaked into the moss, which promptly withered and died in a small, perfect circle.
Justin, seeing his exit open, didn't hesitate. "Dominic, with me! We take the fight to them!" He charged for the stairs leading to the nearest occupied balcony, his sword a streak of silver.
Dominic dropped from the pavilion wall. He didn't follow Justin up the stairs. He looked at the stone wall beneath the balcony, then at his own fists. A grim smile touched his lips. "Fine. Let's be direct."
He cocked back a fist, and for the first time, Kael saw the true, untapped potential of Silver veins in a commoner's body. Dominic's arm didn't just tense; it seemed to dense, the air around it warping slightly with concentrated reinforcement magic. He drove his fist into the wall.
"CRUMP"
"BOOM!"
It wasn't an explosion. It was a deep, localized earthquake. A spiderweb of fractures exploded across the stone face of the building. The entire balcony above shuddered violently. Two of Corvin's lackeys shrieked, losing their footing and tumbling over the railing (only to be caught by safety barriers a few feet down, flashing out of the trial). The balcony itself groaned, threatening to detach.
Corvin, from his higher perch, watched his ambush unravel. His face, twisted in triumph, collapsed into rage. "You rubble-scum! You think raw force matters? Net them! Now!"
His remaining, more disciplined lackeys switched tactics. They ignored the skirmishes and focused their fire. Four of them cast in unison, weaving a much larger, stronger net of crackling energy, this one aimed not at a person, but at the entire central plaza, to drop over Kael, Ellora, and her friends, pinning them all.
Kael saw it forming, a massive, descending grid of light. He couldn't unravel something that big, not that fast. He froze.
A shadow fell across him. Not a metaphor. The very light in the plaza dimmed for a split second.
Daniel stood on the low wall of a dry fountain, directly between them and the descending net. His hands were outstretched, not weaving a spell, but pulling. Pulling at the shadows cast by the balconies, by the planter, by their own bodies. He drew them in, weaving them into a thick, swirling pool of absolute darkness above his head, a shield of void.
The brilliant energy net hit the patch of condensed shadow.
And was silenced.
It didn't explode, struggle, or fizzle. It was simply swallowed, its light and sound devoured by the darkness. The void shield shuddered under the impact, and Daniel's knees bent slightly, a single drop of sweat tracing a line down his temple from his stark white hair. But he held.
In the stunned silence that followed, two things happened.
First, Justin reached the first balcony, disarmed a lackey with a precise strike to the wrist, and had his sword at the boy's throat before he could blink. "Yield."
Second, with a final grinding CRACK, the balcony Dominic had undermined tore free from the wall and collapsed in a cloud of dust and shimmering safety-barriers.
The fight was over.
Corvin stood alone on his high perch, surrounded by the chiming lights of his disqualified or yielding allies. His chest heaved. He looked down at the ruined plaza, at his thwarted ambush, at the odd, battered group standing together below: the noble defending commoners, the dirt scraper with shattered stone in his wake, the anomaly, the spirit caller, and the shadow in human shape.
His eyes, burning with pure, venomous hatred, locked on Kael. "This isn't over, freak," he spat, the words barely audible but carrying all the venom in the world. "You don't belong here. Any of you. This is just the beginning."
Then he turned and, with a last glare, activated his own emergency recall token. He vanished in a flash of light, choosing disqualification over surrender.
The sudden quiet was deafening. The trap runes were dead. The balconies were empty. Only the gentle hum of the true sanctuary's restorative runes remained.
Kael slowly stood up, his legs wobbly. Ellora let out a shuddering breath, her spirits returning to her in flashes of light, nuzzling her hands comfortingly. Her two commoner friends were hugging, laughing with nervous relief.
Justin descended the stairs, wiping his brow. Dominic brushed dust and rock fragments from his arms, his knuckles raw and bleeding slightly. Daniel let the void shield dissipate, the light rushing back into the plaza. He was breathing a little faster, his crimson eyes scanning the perimeter once more before he deemed it safe.
No one spoke. They just looked at each other, across the scarred battlefield of the plaza.
They were a mess. They were exhausted. They were strangers thrown together by circumstance.
But they had won.
Justin broke the silence, sheathing his sword with a solid click. He looked around at all of them, his hazel eyes shining with something fiercer than his usual kindness. It was respect.
"Well," he said, a genuine, weary smile breaking through. "That was a lousy welcoming committee."
A snort of laughter escaped Kael before he could stop it. It was half-hysterical, half-relieved.
Dominic spat a bit of stone dust to the side. "His tactics were garbage. All flash, no foundation. Predictable."
"His aim was okay," Ellora said softly, then flinched as everyone looked at her. "I mean… the slime was very accurate."
This time, even Daniel's lips twitched, almost imperceptibly.
Justin laughed, a warm, full sound that seemed to finally break the last of the tension. "Come on. Let's actually use that sanctuary before someone else gets creative."
As they trudged towards the glowing, welcoming pavilion this time checking every inch of the ground Kael felt it. It wasn't friendship, not yet. It was something harder, rarer, and more vital for survival in a place like this: Trust. Forged in fire.
The Midway Sanctuary awaited. But as Kael glanced back at the ruined plaza, at the fading scars of magic and shadow, he knew Corvin was right about one thing.
This was just the beginning.