He would not kneel.
He saw Leo on the floor with light sucking at his ribs and the word "trash" like a sound in his throat.
That image was a blade.
The tattoo along his right arm flared as if struck by a match.
Gold spilled from his veins.
This time it did not obey hesitation.
It burst outward like tidewater hammered through a break in a dam.
A shell resolved around him: a cuirass of translucent amber, greaves, bracers—armor sketched in the language of will, not fabric.
It fit like a truth and hummed with a low, clean pitch.
A blade of compressed light coalesced in his right hand—long, pale, an intent wound into form.
His eyes went molten gold.
Two dogs died before the Inquisitors could finish saying the word "purify."
Kael moved like a row of frames in an animation—pose, extend, cut.
The first hound lunged, jaws of lattice and light.
His blade's arc was silence turned to sound.
It sliced the hound's flank where energy nodes pulsed; the construct shattered in electric embroidery.
Sparks flared and rained.
A second dog tried to take his flank.
He threw a curved elbow of armor and its skull gave out in a ringing bloom.
The chamber tasted like spent fireworks.
The Inquisitors froze for a breath.
Their semicircle wavered.
A leader's helmet crest flashed scarlet in the amber gleam.
They were specialists—Blade Inquisitors, not cowards—trained to open a skull clean and worship their duty with a clinical hand.
They'd not seen a Contractor in the same room with their instruments and expect their craft to hold.
"You will surrender," the leader said, his voice an office of commands.
The words had a liturgy.
His hand moved. Blade-light coalesced along his forearm into a serrated edge.
Then the chant unfurled.
A Dogma of Suppression—high, crystalline, designed to unweave forbidden patternings.
It came from the blades and from the men behind them, raised in harmonics to blow through a thing like a broom through dust.
The sound struck Kael like a physical thing.
It entered his skull.
Pain punched a star behind his eyes.
His blade flickered.
The amber armor trembled.
The gauntlet shivered.
For a moment the room hollowed into a single instrument—his mind the string being tuned.
He realized, cold, that the Ordo's songs were made to unmake certain spells.
They had made their world tidy with a thousand such rituals.
They believed they had a broom that could sweep away rebellion.
Kael's power was not the tidy thing they pictured.
It was older.
It had roots that predated the liturgy.
But liturgies hurt.
They cut through the edges and cost him.
Pain forced breath out of him like wind.
His knees wanted to buckle.
Gold ran hot and brittle across his skin.
He tasted metal in his mouth and the memory of the stone's first bite.
Lyra's voice broke through the ringing.
"Hold it!" she ordered. "Contain!"
She and Silas were in the shadows, their faces carved with concentration.
Lyra's jaw was set like someone who had already written the price of each option.
Kael did not think.
He felt.
He set his will like a hand across the chord that the Dogma had plucked and tried to hold the music steady.
The Dogma bruised him but did not erase him.
The painful chant unstitched easy things—small charms, simple spells—but his Contract was a different grammar.
The suppression hurt because the Ordo's instruments reached for a channel he had once been taught through the stone; the chant rattled the edges, made the armor strobe; but it could not fully dissolve what had been welded into his bones.
He steadied, and, with a movement like a machine remembering a human, he turned the pain into focus.
He saw their weak places with Pact Eyes.
The dogs had collars—narrow bands of lattice that pulsed in time with their movement.
The collars had nodes.
The Inquisitors wore devices at their hips that fed the collars.
A line stepped through the optics in his head: cut the node, disrupt the feed.
The thought was simple and animal.
Kael moved.
He danced through the little arcs that mattered.
He didn't try to kill the men; he was not a fool.
He carved interruption.
He aimed his blade at the node on the lead hound's collar.
The cut was a promise.
The collar flared and shorted.
The dog convulsed and collapsed, light scattering like a lamp broken on stone.
The second dog went down to a strike he placed at the joint of its hind segment.
The third dog should have followed—except he struck with his elbow and the armored guard took the impact, and the dog's skull cracked against the amber like a bellstone.
The Inquisitors hissed and reformed.
They had not intended to be dealt with like animals.
For a breathing, a calculation, Kael had taken the tempo.
But the net had more than songs.
One of the Inquisitors showed a tiny device—no larger than a fist—flung from his other hand.
It hummed, a precise geometry of wires and light.
He tossed it and it caught the corner of Kael's armor, a latch that clipped to the surface and sprayed a fine lattice onto the skin.
The latch burned cold.
A clamp of chilled light bit into his forearm.
The amber screamed.
That one device was a manufacture of the Ordo's tactical edge: Null-clamps—field anchors that bit into Primordial signatures and began to siphon the resonance.
They did not "nullify" in the old sense.
They bled—slow and bureaucratic—and they were painful, designed to make the substrate of a power collapse under legal procedure.
The clamp hissed and the blade in Kael's hand quivered.
Pain knitted from his shoulder down.
He hadn't expected a net that could bite.
The leader barked orders: "Clamp positions securitized. Net field, sweep."
The semicircle tightened.
The Blades trained their serrated edges like surgeons.
Their devices rewired the air with gray efficiency.
Lyra was already moving, voice frayed and fast.
"Silas—draw left!" she yelled.
Silas breathed shadow like breath and flung it.
Darkness coiled and became a false archway.
It lured the Inquisitors' sight for the smallest moment.
Kael felt that moment and used it.
He struck again; a blade-tip found machine in the collar.
Sparks flew.
But the clamp had teeth.
He could feel his anchor seizing not merely his armor but the lines under his skin.
There was a tug in the air where his will had been anchored to the blade and the roar in his chest.
He could try to dislodge the clamp with force.
He could hammer it with enough violence that it might pop free.
That would unleash the full power but also blow his reserve and likely cook Leo's thin ration of life.
He could run—abandon Lyra and Silas to scrape out of the trap while he took the hit.
He could stay and take the bureaucratic bleed while Silas and Lyra tried to cancel the field.
He chose the door.
He would not let the dogs be a meal.
He set his feet and moved center, not to flee but to become an engine the clamp would feed on while his hand sought a vector that mattered—the leader.
A surge of amber ran up his forearm.
He thrust his blade outward not to slice but to cut line.
The hit found the leader's knee joint through the blade's arc—an ugly, animal trick—and the man stumbled.
The leader cursed and re-centered.
The clamp siphoned at a steady, legal pace—small notes of hurt that ate at his backbone.
Kael spat pain into resolve.
Something changed in him then.
The second heart was no longer only throttle; it became a reckoning.
He felt the tattoo on his arm spread a fraction—fine lines widening like a map redrawing itself to include a new river.
His body remembered being more.
The amber armor soaked and rerouted the clamp's bite in a way it hadn't before.
The armor took the drain and redistributed the hurt.
But the net evolved.
The leader tapped his gauntlet and a new field unfolded: sonic surfacing—hollows of high pitch meant to undo structure.
The Blade's chant was clinical, a hymn designed to render shape into nothing.
The sound went inside Kael's skull again.
It made his blade flicker.
Pain made him taste old wounds.
Rage answered.
He lashed his blade outward and hit a dog collar.
The lattice scattered in sparks.
Silas took a run in the shadows and struck a net module with a slab of rust; the module stuttered.
Lyra moved like a spear in the light, but a thin white flare licked at her side.
A shard of energy nicked her throat and she grunted.
Blood was a language here.
It translated to urgency.
The leader's visor flashed a new readout: PREDICTIVE INDICATION — CONTRACTOR FORM — ADAPTIVE RESPONSE REQUIRED.
They were learning.
That realization was a cold, simple weight.
Kael had become not merely a threat but a lesson for the Ordo.
They would change their choreography now that they had a data point.
He thought of Leo again and the square and the way the priests had smiled when they called people to the Plaza.
He thought of being called a parasite.
He thought of Lyra and Silas risking themselves.
He made a choice that was as ugly as it was clean.
Bearer's Steps.
He would use his small space-slip.
He would put himself between the leader's throat and his blade.
But Bearer's Steps were not without cost.
Ten meters and exhaustion like being run through ten thousand times.
A limit counted in breaths.
He had already used the shard.
He had clamped pain along his arm.
There was a bill waiting.
He sucked air, shoved the will forward and folded.
The world folded like a page, and the chamber reassembled around him in the place he'd chosen—a position behind the leader, where his shoulder cleared the gauntlet's reach and the maintenance hatch's lip could be used for leverage.
He landed in a crouch.
The movement had been clean, surgical.
For a sliver of an instant, victory tasted like copper.
He swung.
His blade arced for the leader's spine.
The leader's hand came up—not to parry but to palm the air.
From his palm sprang a small spool.
Another device.
Not a clamp.
Not a net.
A grapnel of thin, mirrored filaments.
It shot like a star and wrapped around Kael's forearm.
It bit.
It bit into the skin.
The ampersand of the Ordo's craft found him.
The mirrored filaments were scrape-hungry.
They laced along the tattoo lines and began to radiate a cold that was bureaucratic in its cruelty.
The amber screamed in his ears.
The armor stuttered and then went dark like a light cut at the fuse.
The mirrored filaments twined, a legal, shiny lattice, and the light-armor collapsed like a tide folding back.
The chamber hummed with the Ordo's instruments learning, cataloging, and the leader's voice cut through the fallout like a bell.
"Contain and terminate," he said. "No mercy for heresy."
Kael felt the second heart going flat as the filaments drew the amber out of him, like a siphon pulling a candle down to its stub.
He could not see past the pain.
He could only hear the sound of the city cataloging his name.