Roberto did not rush this time. The blood on his body was still fresh, the wound across his torso still open enough to matter, but the next change in him had nothing to do with pain. The irritation remained, yet it had settled into something colder now, more focused. He stopped chasing shapes in the dark like a man swinging at ghosts and began treating the space itself as the problem that needed to be cut apart.
"Flashbind." The burst of light spread wider than before, not as a careless flare but as a deliberate sweep that forced a section of the darkness to open all at once. For the blink of that white exposure, the ground became visible again, pale and dim beneath the eclipse, Roberto's figure stood clear in the center, and farther off, only for the smallest instant, Noel's silhouette appeared near the edge of that forced vision.
