The demon lord moved first.
Not because he wanted to. Because staying still in the presence of what was currently standing across the rubble from him was not a sustainable option and he had enough intelligence to know it.
He came with everything.
The dark mana working that had leveled Singrael's wall in a night, that had coordinated two portals and the fall of three kingdoms, released at full output toward me in a concentrated beam that turned the air between us black.
I put my hand up.
The beam stopped.
Not deflected. Not absorbed. Stopped. The way a wall stopped water, the dark mana hitting the field in front of my hand and backing up against itself, the pressure of the demon lord's full output pressing against something it couldn't move.
He pushed harder.
I closed my hand.
The beam compressed and inverted, the dark mana turning back on itself, and the demon lord took his own attack at the source.
He went backward through the air and hit the far edge of the palace ruins.
I was already moving.
Not to him. Down.
I dropped through the rubble to the lower level where the five artifacts were still burning at maximum output, their light visible from above, the barrier function holding the space intact within the collapse around it.
They were there.
All five. Torra with both arms around Jenna, Maya pressed against Sia, Nico standing in front of all of them with his arms out in the instinctive gesture of someone who had decided they were protecting the others regardless of what that meant practically.
They saw me.
Torra made a sound.
I didn't stop moving. I crossed the space in two steps and gathered them in a sweep that was not elegant but was fast and complete, the barrier function dissolving as I cancelled it, five children absorbed into the area around me that my own aura was now covering.
"Captain." I said.
He was at the edge of the rubble above, looking down. He had come through the collapse on his own, navigating the fallen stone with the efficiency of someone who had spent his career in difficult terrain.
I handed them up.
One at a time. Torra first, passed up to the captain's waiting hands, then Maya, then Jenna, then Sia, then Nico.
"Go." I said.
"Leigh—"
"The northeastern road is open." I said. "Run it. The gate will recognize you."
He looked at the children around him.
At me.
"Go." I said again.
He went.
I felt the tracking function in the necklaces register their movement, five signals beginning to travel north and east toward Medalline's border, the captain moving them fast, his body remembering what running with people who needed protecting felt like.
The demon lord landed behind me in the lower level.
He had recovered faster than I had given him time for. The intelligence again, the adaptation. He had used the seconds of my descent to build something new, a different working than anything he had used in the throne room, the shape of it unfamiliar in a way that said he had been holding this one back.
He released it.
I turned and hit it with an open-handed compression that met it at its peak and crushed it before it opened.
He looked at his hand.
At the space where the working had been.
"You cancelled it." He said. "At peak."
"Yes." I said.
"That's not possible." He said. "Cancelling a working at peak requires more mana than the working contains. By definition."
"Yes." I said.
He understood what I was telling him.
He attacked again.
A different working, faster to build, the construction optimized for speed rather than power, designed to be deployed before a cancellation could be prepared.
I let it develop for one second and then cancelled it.
He built another. Different shape. Different frequency. The approach of someone who was cycling through options looking for one that worked.
I cancelled it.
Another.
Cancelled.
Another.
Cancelled.
He stopped.
The ruins of the lower palace were quiet around us. The afternoon light coming in from above through the absent ceiling, the dust from the collapse still moving in the air.
He looked at me.
"How much." He said. "How much mana do you have."
"More than you." I said.
"More than this." He said. Gesturing at the space between us, at the workings I had cancelled, at the exchange in the throne room, at the absorbed life force of the palace's population sitting in him and not making a difference.
"Yes." I said.
He was quiet.
I moved.
The mana sword came back and I was across the lower level in a step and hit him with it before he had finished the response calculation. He got the dark mana barrier up in time to block the contact but contact with the mana sword while his own mana was running a barrier transferred through the barrier's construction and the disruption found the pathways underneath it.
He felt it.
I held the contact and pushed more output through the blade.
He broke the barrier and moved back and I followed him through the movement and hit him again before he had reestablished position, the mana sword finding the gap the movement created.
Again.
And again.
Not fast in the way the throne room exchange had been fast, the mutual calibration of two fighters reading each other. Fast in the way that hitting something that couldn't match the speed was fast. Consistent. Steady. The pace I set because it was the pace that suited what I was doing, which was not fighting.
The demon lord was fighting.
I was doing something else.