The answer to the phoenix's scream was not louder sound but cleaner motion. Andy kicked into the air, scales along his shoulders catching firelight, and the twin dragon-forged blades—Ember-Edge in his right, Tide-Singer in his left—sang two different notes as they left their sheaths. Heat folded around him and refused to bite; the Tier 2 scales took it in and gave him back strength.
"On your line," Nia called, already moving. The engagement band on her finger flashed—his answered—and the bond widened like a canal being opened.
[Soulbind Channel: OPEN]
[Dual Synchronization: Mana Resonance — ACTIVE]
[Conduit: Eternity Bands (Soulbound)]
[Resonance Efficiency: +28%]
She raised her staff and the bracelet at her wrist (Astra-Veil) flared, feeding the lattice that flowed from her fingers. "Mana Resonance Amplification." The words were almost unnecessary; the ward took the instruction the way skin takes a scar. Light braided into his flames, not whitening them but sharpening their intention.
Ashens lifted, chest plates shifting with a clatter of light, and drove a rake of radiant feathers down like a guillotine. Andy rolled into them instead of away—Aegis in one palm, Ember-Edge in the other—and cut the falling radiance on the bias so each feather's force glanced past him and died harmless against the night.
"Twin Surge," he breathed, and fire and water braided off his blades, a helix that spun into the phoenix's left wing root. Steam exploded, and when it thinned, a long pale crack showed in the hinge light, trying to knit and failing.
Nia threw her palm toward that crack. "Luminous Judgment—Grid." Her beam didn't lance this time; it tessellated, a lattice that snapped down across the wound and held it open like careful hands keeping a patient still on the table. Ashens wrenched, but the mesh held long enough for Andy to drive Tide-Singer through the bright seam.
The impact rang the whole sky.
[Target: Wing Root (Left)]
[Lattice Weakening (Local): +9%]
[Enemy Output Spike — Counter Inbound]
The counter came as a claw that swallowed the stars. He braced the Aegis, but not to block—the disc tilted just so, and when claw met shield the force poured along the curve and left him standing where it expected him to fall. He used the borrowed momentum, pivoted hard, and cut the inside edge of the claw with Ember-Edge. The cut didn't wound—gods don't acknowledge the nicking of their nails—but it mattered where lattices meet load.
A shockwave sounded like silence sharpened. It knocked his breath backward; it knocked his thoughts sideways. Nia caught his mind before his body. "Center," she said, and his focus slid back into its groove like a blade into a whet slot. Her staff tip drew a prism in the air—edges he'd used once before—and the next sheet of heat split around it, some climbing, some diving, none erasing rooftops.
Below, Solaris moved like a single organism with many hands. Chains scraped sparks off slate. A potter used a broom like a halberd against fire. A healer knelt by a man whose hearing had gone wandering and put two fingers on his neck and counted him back. The noble with the bucket stopped noticing he was a noble with a bucket and became someone who could carry weight.
Andy found the rhythm that made the impossible navigable: cut on her exhale, guard on her inhale, roll when the Feather pressed, push when it softened. The engagement ring thrummed at his finger with every clean exchange, and the System—blessedly, infuriatingly calm—kept score.
[Combo Chain:
Twin Surge → Dragonlight Slash → Resonance Burst
(Amplified by Mana Resonance)]
[Throughput: +33%]
[Bond Level: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆☆ | 95% → 96%]
He climbed. The air thinned the way leather wears at stress points. He rode a seam of rising heat, banked left, and came in low under the breast—dangerous, close to the whiplash arc of the beak. "Dragonlight Slash—arc three!" The right blade cut a shallow, confident crescent; the left slid into the wake, deepening it—two strokes that taught the same lesson to different layers.
Nia's sigils spun off her fingers and sank into the seam a heartbeat later. "Ward Stitch—Hold." The rip tried to heal and discovered patience had been applied to it. Her breathing hitched, and blood drew a clean, bright line down her philtrum. She never took her eyes from the work.
Ashens snapped its head, trying to erase the gnats biting its ribs. Andy didn't give it a single target; he gave it four, each an echo of the last, feints cut out of heat, Aegis flickers that promised mass and delivered angle. He cut at the throat seam that had refused to close since Scene 3, not to sever it—he lacked that arrogance—but to make it remember it had been touched.
The phoenix answered with breath—and not the full column; a fork, short and mean, meant to punish proximity. He had no time to bring the disc fully up. He let the blast hit the scales along his left shoulder and felt the Tier 2 pattern drink it. Pain made a case; he postponed judgment. Nia tore a sigil wide and peeled the last third of the breath away from his face before it could change him into ash and intention.
"Thank you," he said, and she said, "Later," and the vow baked itself onto the bond.
A drumbeat of feathers hammered his back; he flattened the Aegis into a door and let the beat write its rhythm there instead of on his spine. Captain Elra's voice rose out of the melee below like a spine grows out of a back. "Lanes! Keep the lanes! Sand—pull!"
The phoenix's right wing surged. He met it with Tide-Singer, water-bright, and skated along the edge, letting force and curve remake each other until he stood at the armpit of a god and the god discovered armpits can be taught humility.
"Resonance Burst," he said, and the left blade hummed as if it remembered being ore in dragonfire. He drove it into a node of light that should have stayed theoretical and made it practical.
The world brightened at the point like a nail catching sun.
[Resonance Burst: Direct Hit]
[Lattice Weakening: +22% (Cumulative)]
[Core Exposure: 15%]
[Enemy Stability: 40% → 38%]
The glimpse was obscene and holy—the Core, naked for a heartbeat, a sun trying to be a heart and not quite managing either. His face tightened, some primitive part of him bowing even as the human part raised his arms to kill it.
Ashens lost all pretense of dignity. It blurred in three directions at once, and then the three disagreed and collapsed into a single vector—the beak lunging for the open seam. He couldn't stop it square. He sidestepped the way a dancer lies to a floor, and slammed the Aegis up under the jaw. The clash tore sparks into syllables. Nia flung a sigil into the shadow of his shield and it detonated after the beak passed, stealing heat without taking credit.
Feathers fell in a hissing rain toward the north ward. The citizen lines had learned. Hooks took the worst down before roofs did. Sand curtains draped off cart sides and made new banks where heat came to sulk. A sergeant laughed once, short and obscene, at the fact of still being alive.
Andy's vision tunneled then widened provocatively, the way the body warns and invites. He should drop; he didn't. He rolled shoulders, wrists, hips—feeding motion back into muscles that threatened to stiffen—and let the bond carry what breath could not.
[HP: -11%]
[Heat Trauma: Localized — Contained by Scales (T2)]
[Bond Level: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆☆ | 96% → 97%]
[Blazing Aegis: Capacity 41% — Recharge Inhibited]
"Take it," Nia said—no adornment—and poured her mana into him like water into a throat that had forgotten how to drink. The bracelet on her wrist flared once; the ward mesh brightened; then she steadied the burn. He felt none of it get lost between them.
"Together," he said. He didn't shout. He chose.
They moved as if someone had scribbled lines across the sky just for them and left them to trace. He ducked a claw by millimeters, the disc scraping sparks off the underside; she threaded a supporting ward through his wake that turned those sparks into light instead of embers. He cut a diagonal through the breast's plates; she hit the edges of that cut with a pair of tiny sigils that turned a straight line into an opening that refused to close.
"Elemental Flow—Twin Surge," he said again, because you use the tool that works until the job changes. Fire-water helix drilled in where feather and flesh weren't sure which they were. "Dragonlight Slash," he added through his teeth, because sometimes a thing needs naming to know it's dying.
"Luminous Judgment—Grid. Anchor." Nia's voice thinned but didn't break. The gridded beam landed, locked, and Andy felt—not saw—the way it pinned the local pattern so his next blow would matter.
He took it.
"Resonance Burst!"
The night rang like a struck bowl. The seam blew wider. Something inside the core faltered and nearly fell. The phoenix stopped being beautiful for two heartbeats and became merely huge and furious, which is always an improvement from a tactical standpoint.
[Core Exposure: 15% → 18%]
[Enemy Output: Flare]
[Public Sentiment: Awe → Defiance +10%]
[Bond Level: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆☆ | 97% → 98%]
Below, the boy on the roof laughed—one sharp, unbelieving bark—then bit it back because superstition has its own lattice. His mother didn't scold him. She lifted her chin and let the laugh live in the air. The nobleman with the bucket switched hands without thinking; the skin at his palm had blistered and he decided he would hate that later.
Ashens whipped its head and raked one claw straight down the wall's line. Andy saw it a breath earlier than vision should allow—felt it through the Feather like a change in weather—and flared the Aegis to a full door one last time. The claw scraped the disc; stone sang; Nia slammed a "Hold" sigil under his boots so he would not skate. The claw passed. The wall remained. He did not fall.
Everything in him wanted to overreach. Instead, he exhaled and took one more exact cut, nowhere dramatic: a little nick at the seam between two plates near the left breast. He felt Nia catch the impulse and reinforce it rather than magnify. The nick mattered more than heroics.
The phoenix rose—not retreat exactly, but a gathering for something worse. Light thickened. The note in the air found a new frequency that made even lantern flames think about their employment.
Andy hovered, chest heaving, Aegis dim as a coin in mud. He looked down and found the square still shaped like a city that intends to exist tomorrow. He looked sideways and found Nia's eyes steady despite the blood. He looked up and found the enemy bigger than his ribs could easily fit fear for.
[Lattice Weakening: +22% (Cumulative)]
[Core Exposure: 15%]
[Enemy Stability: 38%]
[Blazing Aegis: Capacity 37%]
[Wards: 72%]
[Bond Level: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆☆ | 98%]
Ashens reared, its body splitting with radiance until the whole sky was a wound of light. Its scream became vibration, forcing tiles to jump from rooftops, mortar to sift loose, and every ear in Solaris to bleed silence.
Then the world moved. The phoenix beat its wings once and the Inferno Cyclone was born, sucking flames, debris, even horses screaming from their tethers into its spiraling maw. Sparks fell like meteors, whole carts tumbled into the air and vanished.
[Enemy Skill Detected: Inferno Cyclone + Shockwave Cry]
[Environmental Hazard: Collapse Risk ↑↑↑]
Andy planted his boots on the trembling parapet and braced the Aegis. The shield howled, glowing orange-red, its rim crumbling like melting steel. His shoulders convulsed under the pressure.
[Blazing Aegis Integrity: 37% → 19% — CRITICAL]
[HP -21%]
"Stay with me!" he bellowed into the storm, though he wasn't sure if the words were for Solaris or for himself.
Nia was already half-kneeling, one hand smeared with blood as she scrawled sigils directly into the stone. Her Astra-Veil bracelet blazed, forcing light to answer her will. "Ward Reversal—Channel!"
Her wards inverted, snaring part of the cyclone's fury and flinging it skyward. A third of the maelstrom dissolved into steam.
[Luminous Ward Reversal: ACTIVE]
[Force Reflected: 23%]
[Ward Strain: 72% → 98%]
The reprieve lasted only heartbeats. Ashens descended with claws spread wider than any plaza. The air itself bent under the strike. Andy felt the Feather in his chest scream, and he screamed back, his body seizing into full Tier 2 form. Scales cracked but held, golden fire pouring out of the seams.
"Twin Surge!"
Fire and water twisted off his blades into a helix that slammed against the claws. A geyser of steam burst over Solaris, blanketing towers in a burning fog.
[Elemental Flow – Twin Surge: Direct Clash]
[Impact Neutralized: 63%]
[Bond Resonance Amplification: +22%]
The remaining claws scythed downward. Nia raised both hands, staff overhead, and drew a prism of light. The talons ripped into it, deflected off at unnatural angles, and crashed into the river. Water erupted skyward, a wall of steam that rolled over the southern gate. Soldiers ducked but didn't run.
Ashens shrieked again. Hundreds of feathers tore loose and launched like flaming spears. They rained toward the wall and city in waves.
Andy spun, his blades blurring arcs of steel, cutting feathers before they struck him. Each one exploded, sparks scorching his scales and burning shallow cuts into his arms. Nia's wards lashed outward, severing volleys mid-flight. Still, some rained past—
—until the people themselves caught them.
Chains and hooks dragged the feathers into water troughs. Buckets of river water splashed over burning roofs. A mother threw her shawl over a child and then stamped out an ember with bare feet. A soldier raised a battered kite-shield, catching a feather that seared through the wood but not his will. Even the nobles, robes torn and faces black with soot, shouted orders and joined the lines, shoving beams and debris into the firebreaks.
The city itself was fighting.
Andy caught a glimpse and felt something tighten in his chest. "They're with us," he rasped.
Nia smiled through blood. "Then we don't fall."
Their foreheads brushed, sweat and blood mixing, and the bond flared like another sun.
[Bond Synchronization Surge]
[Bond Level: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆☆ | 97% → 99%]
[Warning: Resonance Critical State]
The Aegis blazed bright white, reforged in defiance. Nia's wards restitched themselves with raw will, even as her body shook. Solaris roared as one—soldiers, civilians, children, nobles. Every voice became a chorus that rose against the divine beast.
Ashens' chest glowed hotter, ribs of fire snapping wide. The Core pulsed, no longer hidden—an exposed star behind translucent bone.
[System Alert: Core Exposure Approaching 20%]
[Bond Surge Detected: Synchronization Unstable — Threshold Imminent]
The battlefield was smoke, steam, and flame, but at its center Andy and Nia still stood, blades and staff ready. Their bond burned steady, louder than the phoenix's wrath.