Kael had been waiting for the perfect excuse to release this ability.
Watching him from behind Felicity's barrier, I realized that might have been the most concerning part of everything happening below us. The battlefield around him was already disappearing beneath an expanding radius of heat. Golems that had survived our combined attacks were losing their shape before they could reach him, while the basalt beneath his feet had gone from solid stone to a glowing, viscous mass that rolled away from his position in sluggish currents. None of that seemed to concern him. If anything, the growing destruction had loosened something in his posture.
He looked comfortable.
The miniature star hovering above his palm intensified.
Its light had already been difficult to look at, but there had still been a recognizable object at the center of it, a sphere small enough to fit in Kael's hand despite the absurd amount of energy compressed inside. That distinction disappeared as he continued feeding it. Light flooded outward until his fingers became little more than black silhouettes against the brilliance, and then even those vanished.
I turned my head and threw an arm across my face.
It didn't help.
There was nothing protecting my eyes. My suit stopped at the neck, leaving my head completely exposed to an environment that had already become hostile enough to make every breath uncomfortable. Even with my eyes squeezed shut and my forearm pressed across them, Kael's light burned through my eyelids as a violent red glare. Tears gathered instinctively, only for the moisture to evaporate almost as soon as it reached the corners of my eyes. Thin wisps of vapor curled from my lashes, carrying away what little protection my body could produce while the skin across my face tightened beneath the relentless heat.
I buried my face farther into the crook of my arm and immediately regretted breathing. The air itself had become hot enough to hurt, each inhale carrying dry heat across my throat and deeper into my chest.
Then Felicity's voice cut through the barrier.
"Brace for impact. I'm reinforcing the barrier, but it won't hold long against Kael's heat."
Impact?
The word lodged itself in my thoughts.
I understood the heat. My exposed face was currently providing an extremely thorough demonstration of that particular problem. What I didn't understand was why she had used that word. Heat wasn't something I expected to hit us. Burn us, cook us, reduce us to several extremely regrettable piles of carbon, sure.
But impact?
Felicity apparently wasn't interested in explaining.
Her hands spread apart, and the barrier surrounding us changed. The translucent sphere thickened until the battlefield beyond it became distorted, Kael's silhouette bending strangely through layers of compressed force. More reinforcement rippled across its surface before sinking into the existing structure, each adjustment making the air around us hum harder.
Elias lowered his center of gravity.
Dorian planted one foot behind the other.
Neither asked what was coming.
That bothered me more than Felicity's warning.
I looked back toward Kael.
His fingers were closing.
The star resisted.
I could actually see it happening. That impossible sphere compressed between his fingers, light spilling through the narrowing spaces in brilliant streams while Kael forced his hand shut around something that should never have existed there in the first place. His arm trembled beneath the strain. The vents across his suit erupted with red flame, and the glow beneath the armor intensified until the seams themselves appeared ready to melt.
Then his fist closed.
For the smallest fraction of a second, nothing happened. The battlefield seemed to hang there with him, every warped shape caught in the same impossible instant.
Then the star collapsed.
The world turned white.
There was no expanding wall of flame for my eyes to follow, no gradual transition between detonation and destruction. One moment Kael occupied the center of the battlefield, and the next a perfect sphere around him ceased to contain anything recognizable as terrain.
Basalt did not fracture.
It did not melt.
It changed state so violently that those distinctions became meaningless. Stone flashed into incandescent vapor as the first detonation expanded, stripping the crater outward in every direction with terrifying symmetry. Golems disappeared inside it before their bodies could react, their mass converted into glowing clouds that joined the expanding front.
Then everything Kael had just created ignited.
The second detonation hit us.
Now I understood why Felicity had said impact.
Her barrier buckled inward.
The entire sphere compressed around us with a sound deeper than thunder, its translucent surface bending so violently that I thought it had broken. Felicity's boots slid backward across the basalt while both arms snapped forward, fingers spreading as she fought to hold the structure together. Ripples raced across the barrier from the point of impact, each one carrying enough force to distort the world beyond it.
The temperature inside surged.
Until that moment, I had thought I understood heat.
I had been wrong.
Kael's earlier output had been dangerous. This belonged to another category entirely. Heat punched through Felicity's defenses faster than they could disperse it, and unlike everyone around me, I had nothing between that environment and my head.
My face burned.
Moisture vanished from my skin almost immediately, leaving it dry and painfully tight. My scalp prickled beneath the thermal assault. Every breath scraped across my throat, and when I instinctively tried shielding my face with both arms, even the material covering them had become painfully hot.
My suit reacted beneath my neck.
Warnings appeared across the interface projected into my vision.
CRITICAL HEAT DETECTED
THERMAL TOLERANCE EXCEEDED
EMERGENCY COOLING ENGAGED
A fourth warning appeared beneath them.
KINETIC ENERGY RESERVE: MAXIMUM CAPACITY
OVERRIDE PROTOCOL ACTIVATED
Every vent the suit possessed opened at once.
Heat poured from seams across my back, shoulders, chest, and thighs as its internal systems desperately tried to protect the body enclosed within it. Stored energy was redirected wherever the suit could use it, cooling systems driven far beyond their intended limits as the armor attempted to solve a problem it had never been designed to face.
That was the problem.
My suit was designed to survive collisions.
It distributed force across reinforced sections, protected joints against sudden changes in momentum, and absorbed part of the punishment that came with using my ability at increasingly unreasonable speeds.
It had not been designed to survive next to a man-made star.
And it couldn't do anything for my head.
My knees struck the basalt.
I tried to breathe.
My chest expanded, but the breath felt empty. Instinct made me try again, harder this time, my diaphragm contracting desperately as my lungs searched for something the surrounding atmosphere could no longer provide.
There was no emergency oxygen reserve hidden somewhere in my suit.
No sealed helmet.
No private atmosphere.
Just me.
Kael had destroyed the air.
The realization barely had time to register before the remains of the atmosphere began moving.
Dust went first. Fine particles lifted from the basalt and streamed toward the crater in thin ribbons, followed by fragments large enough to scrape audibly across the ground. Loose debris around my hands trembled, shifted, and suddenly accelerated toward Kael.
Then my body jerked forward.
The violent displacement left behind by the detonations was dragging the surrounding atmosphere back toward the devastated center, and everything caught in that flow wanted to follow.
Including us.
Felicity's barrier lurched several feet.
Dorian raised one hand.
The pull stopped.
Not weakened.
Stopped.
An invisible weight slammed across the space occupied by our group, anchoring us against the basalt with enough force that my palms struck the ground. My knees ground painfully against stone. Every limb suddenly felt heavier, and when I tried pushing myself upright, my arms barely responded.
Normally, I might have appreciated the absurdity of Dorian solving one problem by introducing me to another.
I was too busy suffocating.