Dragged back by Kaelan almost like a prisoner's escort, Elara was thrust into the storm's center.
The forward camp was nothing more than a ring of riveted steel plates and steam-shield generators hammered into the shale. Small patrols had already returned, bleeding, bone-weary, and silent. The air smelled of copper and scorched oil. And waiting among them, gleaming and unblemished, stood Cecilia Whiteshard. Her polished armor mocked the rips in Elara's robe. When she saw Elara hauled back at Kaelan's side, her ice-blue eyes flared with unmasked satisfaction.
"Kaelan!" Cecilia hurried forward, her tone dripping with concern for him—then feigned surprise as her gaze slid to Elara. "Sorn? Where's your partner, Blake? Don't tell me the rumors were true—that he's… gone?" Each word steered attention like a knife, slicing Elara open for the crowd.
Kaelan ignored her, his face an iron mask. He reported directly to the presiding instructor, a fourth-tier knight. His words were clipped, precise, and merciless: Elara's squad had strayed from route, failed to signal for aid, and in the ensuing clash with anomalous threats, Vigil cadet Blake Ironanvil had fallen into an uncharted rift and perished. Leon's burst of spirit, Kaelan explained, was no true awakening but a stress-induced anomaly, unstable and in need of monitoring.
The report spread like spores in damp air.
"How did she survive when he didn't?"
"Did she panic? Run?"
"And that servant boy… awakening? Impossible."
The whispers coiled around her. Elara kept her head bowed, lips pressed tight. Pale not only from fatigue but from the act of appearing fragile. She repeated her account of ambush, collapse, and accident. Nothing more.
Kaelan, though, was not calmed. He watched her with eyes that burned—not only with anger, but with the shaken terror of a man nearly losing something he had already claimed.
"Elara," he said, low and crushing. "I told you—all things through me. Why do you never listen? Do you understand you nearly—" He broke off, fists clenched, holy light rippling around him like a storm barely caged.
And then the alarms screamed.
A keening wail split the camp as tremor-sensors flared.
"Mass convergence! Eastern flank! All hands to defense!" the knight bellowed.
Every private feud evaporated. Survival devoured pride. Vigil cadets raced to the barricades, saws revving, gauntlets crackling. Weavers fell back, threads interlacing into bastions and signal beacons.
Elara joined a node, her focus a razor. She summoned a soft white radiance that soothed frenzy, dulled fear, steadied blood-rage into clarity. The effect was potent—more so than any cadet of her tier should have managed. A witch's understanding of emotion, cloaked in the robes of an empath.
And then Kaelan stepped forward.
In a heartbeat, the anxious, furious young man vanished. In his place stood something colder than a star, holier than steel.
He needed no weapon. He raised his hands, and a rune bloomed on his chest—vast, radiant, absolute.
The Saint's Domain: Halo of Reckoning.
It expanded with a hum, a circle of white fire etched with golden law-lines. It covered half the camp. Inside it, the Vigils' rage sharpened, their bodies surging with tempered fury. The Weavers' threads drew taut, flowing like rivers of crystal. And the swarm… slowed. Their bodies hissed as the blight boiled away, armor cracking under unseen judgment.
One man, rewriting the rules of the battlefield.
Kaelan's gaze fixed on the swarm's command-beast: a Hammer-Devourer, massive, armored, pulsing with abyssal energy. His eyes flashed cold. He flicked a finger.
The shock was invisible, but every awakened soul felt it like a shudder through the marrow—Saint's Shockwave.
The beast froze mid-charge, howling, its will shattered. Around it, lesser spawn convulsed, staggering, some collapsing outright as their corruption unraveled.
The battle became slaughter. Vigils carved clean lines through the dazed horde, Weavers struck with surgical precision.
And Elara, haloed in pale calm, felt the truth press on her chest like an avalanche.
This was Kaelan unmasked. Protector, yes—but a protector whose hand was a mountain chain.
When the tide ebbed, the valley floor was littered with steaming husks.
The exercise was over.
Blake's death was ruled a tragic mishap. Elara bore the punishment of "failure in judgment"—a black mark on her record—but her stabilizing performance in the defense prevented harsher censure. Leon, after isolation, was released. His "latent surge" filed away, his name flagged for review.
Back in Silver Star, Elara locked herself in the broom closet. Outside, the gears turned, cold and endless. In her palm lay the spoils: shards of abyssal crystal, and moss still pulsing with resistant energy.
Blake's death was an ice-bath. A lesson in how small she still was beneath the true forces of this world. But the materials in her hand whispered another truth: that growth meant risk, and survival meant daring.
She would take every chance. Seize every shadow and flame. Not only to live—but to one day look her "brother" in the eye, saint or not, and meet him without chains.