The avenue smelled of ozone and crushed stone.
In the center of the wreckage, sparks ran like cold fire across the air, and one man stood as if the chaos had been arranged for his amusement.
Klaus tipped his chin, blue lightning threading the air around his knuckles. His coat was scorched at one sleeve, but he looked absurdly comfortable — a cigarette-smile in a storm.
Opposite him, three banners whipped on broken poles: the Leo sigil, the Venom sigil, the Chloris wreath. Their heirs moved like practiced instruments.
James Leo brought the world up with him. Stone obeyed his foot; a low, volcanic wall rose and leaned, hungry to swallow Klaus whole.
Seraphine Virel drifted like perfume — graceful, precise. A violet mist uncoiled from her fingertips, a living poison that smelled faintly of iron and lilies.
Silvana Rose let the street breathe under her command. Roots ripped cobblestones free, green chords winding toward Klaus like fingers.
Klaus didn't bother to dodge James's first strike. He watched the rock with lazy attention, as if cataloguing flaws in the way the earth moved.
When James slammed his fist down, stone shot up in a wall so thick it hid half the street. Lightning didn't need to be loud to be lethal; it moved like a surgeon's hand. Klaus's blue bolt lanced through the rock, and the wall exploded in a shower of dust.
"Brute force," Klaus said, voice flat, amused. "Still juvenile, James."
James charged anyway. The ground under him split with a groan. He swung a fist meant to mend continents; Klaus stepped inside the trajectory and left a seam of blue along James's ribs — a streak that seared muscle and left crimson where skin used to be. The prince staggered, blood painting his armor in quick, hot strokes. The cut was ugly, a wide, white scar that would never be mistaken for honor.
Seraphine moved with all the quiet of a blade you notice too late. Her mist slipped between the explosions, invisible where it mattered, and found a seam at Klaus's sleeve. He breathed it in like a bad joke. For a second there was a flash of irritation — and then he smiled.
"How quaint," he said. He flexed, sent a sting of current through his fingertips. Blue light crawled along his veins, singeing the nearest filaments of toxin. The mist dissolved, hissing off his skin like steam.
Seraphine's eyes narrowed. She lunged for his legs with a whip of poisoned wire — a trap made to cripple, not to kill outright. Klaus answered with a motion so small it might have been a shrug, and the wire answered with air. He had her by the calf in one breath; the lightning that wrapped around her leg looked like jewelry and murder both.
He didn't cleave the limb clean away — that would have been vulgar. He unravelled it: flesh, tendon, the fine weaving of nerves. Seraphine hit the ground with a choked sound. Her leg dangled, bone glimpsing through ragged skin. She tried to push herself up, to twist away, but the joint was ruined; the leg would not bear weight, maybe never again. She hissed, crawling like a wounded animal, hands clawing at the street.
Silvana's vines leapt next, bright and furious; she screamed an old hymn and vision went white — then black.
Klaus's left palm flattened against her face as the green rope came to brush his throat. Where his skin met vine, something sharp and deliberate happened: the world sharpened into a single, terrible clarity. Blood wet his knuckles, and Silvana's hands flew to her face. Her fingers came away slick and empty. Her eyes, once proud and amber, were gone — ripped free with a motion that felt like the closing of a trap.
Silvana keeled back with a sound that was half-cry, half-curse. Wherever she stumbled, roots recoiled as if afraid to touch her. Silence hung in the air like a blade.
Klaus laughed — low, close, a sound that made the dust tremble. He was not laughing to be cruel. He was laughing because this was the sort of problem he liked: tidy, honest, solved with the right amount of force.
Then two more figures stepped into the ring, arriving like punctuation.
Hazel Drake folded the shadows over himself and watched; his presence was a quiet pressure. Agnes Blake arrived in a clean arc of gold, a conductor's precision in every move.
They were efficient — and by the time Hazel sank a hand into the street to pull darkness up, Agnes had a spear of sunlight ready to pin Klaus in a moment of distraction.
Klaus took their shots like a man taking polite slaps. He returned one to Agnes with a gust of blue that singed her sleeve; Hazel answered with a curtain of black that curled and hissed but did not hold. They both left the fight bruised, winded, mostly intact — the small dogs of the evening.
The casualties lay around them like testimony.
James coughed and spat dust and blood, the new white of a terrible scar slicing across his flank. Seraphine dragged herself toward the nearest gutter, one leg a useless ruin. Silvana sat against a column, hands pressed to the empty sockets of her face, spit and plant sap soaking her mouth.
Klaus unbuttoned his coat with the slow grace of a man folding a letter. He had not been trying hard; he had not needed to. He'd managed three cripples before two others had even caught their breath.
There was a sting like a whisper, then: a microscopic tear at his wrist where a poisoned filament had nicked him. He felt it then — not a burn but a blind, curious pressure, a tiny coldness crawling under his skin. The electricity under his skin hiccuped like a misfiring engine.
He frowned once, like a man who notices a smudge on a window and paints it with annoyance, not alarm. He touched the cut, thumb to cloth, and for a breath thought the toxin laughable. He'd handled worse. He'd helped make worse.
A memory slid up — late nights in the Saint Guild's lab, the warm, careful hands of Daniel Malvin as he adjusted syringes, as he said, soft and absurd, "It will neutralize lightning's purge if matched." He'd laughed it off then, proud of the cleverness. Daniel had been proud of the cleverness.
Klaus laughed now, but it was a smaller sound. "So," he grated, and the street waited for the punchline, "this is who decides to act."
There were faces in the shattered glass windows around them, people gaping. Somewhere a child began to cry.
Klaus straightened. He didn't stagger; he moved with that same surgical economy as he leaned away from the wreckage and toward open street. He could have finished them. He could have turned and walked on until the world died of boredom. Instead, he let himself be the lesson.
The blue on his skin flickered, a heartbeat slower. He tried to push a current through the cut, to burn the toxin out. The electricity ran like a river down the wrong channel — warm, obedient, and blind to the foreign thing embedded in it. For the first time in a long while, his hand trembled.
"Daniel," Klaus said, tasting the name like ash.
Memory and pain braided together. Around him, the heirs gathered their dignity and their wounds. The Hunter Association's emblem — a neat, polite symbol of order — watched from a banner that fluttered uselessly in the ruined wind. Hunter Association had made a call, had brought their nobles to tidy a problem.
Marcello Oris stood watch in the crowd, hands folded, face unreadable. Marcello Oris had a smile that was all teeth and no warmth. He had wanted a statement, and the statement had been made.
Klaus took one step. His lungs burned, not from the fight but from something crawling like frost at the base of his throat. He blinked, and for a second the world doubled — blue lightning, then a blur, then blue again.
He fell on his knees as though someone had cut the ropes at his waist.
Someone screamed.
Klaus looked up and saw, very clearly, the ruined faces of the heirs — some in pain, some in rage, some stunned into silence — and beyond them the one face he had not expected to see as an executioner: Daniel, hands clenched, eyes leaking regret or guilt or something like it. Daniel had stayed out of sight, but his presence was a blade.
Klaus's laugh came out like a cough. "You gave me tools," he said, voice ragged. "You taught me how to cut."
He tried to stand. The world swam like someone had shaken a lantern. The blue around him stuttered and dimmed, not extinguished but growing thin, like a wick at the end of its life.
He pushed words out because he always pushed words out when the room tilted: "You did this so you could—" he didn't finish. The thought ruined him, and a sick clarity moved through his stomach like ice.
Daniel's lips moved, apology or explanation or something worse. The last thing Klaus registered was the softness of Daniel's face, that boyish softness that had once been trust.
Klaus smiled anyway, a feral, small thing. "So that's it," he breathed.
Blue lightning crawled and then spluttered. The world narrowed to a line of light. He tasted copper and Daniel's name and the dust of the avenue.
When his eyes closed, they saw one image burn into the dark: the single, small human hand of a healer, gloved and stained, pulling the trigger on an idea.
The street kept humming as casualties and onlookers and banners and dust all held their breath.
Then everything went black.
He came up coughing, lungs burning like he'd drowned on air — then blinked, sat, and realized: he hadn't died.
Klaus shoved himself out of the straw mattress, eyes stinging, and a mirror leaned against the wall caught him.
He stared for two slow heartbeats, then barked, half-laugh, half-curse, "What the hell — who the hell is this?"