The ash moved wrong around him, rippling outward in unsteady rings, driven by Current he hadn't bothered to suppress. Disgust sat locked behind silver irises. Beneath reinforced plate, his heart hammered hard enough to hurt.
Composed. Composed. Composed.
The word repeated endlessly behind his helm. His lips twitched once. Gregor burned in his grip.
"Have you no honour?" The words rolled across the wasteland like sheer pressure. "No dignity?"
Sixty paces away, a faint smile answered him.
Chion set a hand against the burning flag, tore it free from the ground, and levelled its speared tip toward Viren. Arrogance bled from the gesture. "Those are virtues for dead men, Senior. Why would I risk letting you turn its authority against me?"
"You believe I need a relic to finish you?"
For the first time in a very long time, Chion's smile showed teeth. "You might."
The earth shuddered.
Ash blasted backward as Viren launched forward.
The first stride. Crimson bled across silver armour. Odessa — his first Reinforcement Spell.
The second stride split the ground beneath him. The malleable metallic seams of his armour strained outward as muscle expanded and compressed to accommodate the gathering force. The Ogre — his second Reinforcement Spell.
The third —
He vanished completely.
Hermes. The third Reinforcement Spell.
One instant, a blur closing sixty paces. The next — behind him. Behind the boy.
This time, the boy would die.
Gregor descended. A sideways swing. The world felt it first. Floating debris shattered into powder. Pillars imploded and ground into one another. Ash and shattered rock detonated outward with force enough to shake the entire isolation field.
Nothing.
The boy dissolved into mist the instant before impact. Every trace of him gone in less than a microsecond. Viren saw it happen.
A spell. Unknown. Irrelevant.
His head turned on instinct. His own flag came screaming toward him — silver fire spiralling around its shaft in impossible torrents, its speed monstrous.
He could have dodged. Of course he could have. He didn't.
The spear struck squarely against the golden Scarab etched into his chestplate. Crimson devoured it tip to hilt. Completely melted.
The Odessa Spell. Or, as the Clan named it: The Heresy of the Pin-Point Anchor.
No more projectiles. Only combat. If he dared.
_____
He would —
The greatest asset of any Highblood is Origin Blood.
Current is no mortal substance. It is a poison — lethal to the body that tries to carry it. Time, mastery, even fortune cannot fully prevent contamination when Current is drawn from the Wells. Nor was it ever meant to.
Blood — True Origin Blood — breaks it down on contact. The poison is converted into Blood Current. That is the line that keeps pure-Highbloods in a different world from everyone else. It forces every cell to adapt instantly — to Current, to death itself. Bones harden. Muscle hardens. Flesh mends. The body becomes a fortress built to house ungodly force.
The cost: cognitive power. The same mental resource required to sustain the Gates' outputs and monitor the Blood Current Threshold. Two hundred and fifty-four measured. Past that, adaptation becomes mutation — mutation becomes madness, or, if one is fortunate, a quick death. An inevitable gamble every Highblood must make.
Except Chion Nyxvalis.
______
In the next heartbeat, before the Iron Veil could fully close the distance, Chion's thumbs slid across nine fingers. Flesh split instantly. Blood welled from the slits in violent beads, each one saturated with enough Current to make his hands tremble from the vibration alone.
He inhaled once. Pain seized his chest — the stitches — and he exhaled it immediately.
Gregor landed a moment later. The impact erased the ground beneath it. Earth folded inward. Ash and shattered debris detonated skyward in a widening storm.
Chion dissolved into mist before the hammer struck, re-emerging several paces south, his form rebuilding above the rolling ash clouds.
Veins bulged. Eyes dilated. Blood Current tripled. Then tripled again. Obsidian droplets flooded outward from his fingers like fractures bursting through a dam.
His second spell. The Seraphim of Hollow Joy.
His hands slammed together. The scattering blood coagulated instantly into a vibrating spear of hardened blood and Current — jagged obsidian, its surface trembling hard enough to distort the air around it, fracture-lines spreading across each edge. A wave of unchannelled Current launched it straight toward Viren's head.
Would it land? Not likely. Would it wound him even if it did? Not on its own.
The spear arrowed forward. Viren's head tilted slightly. It would miss.
It exploded.
Super-saturated blood ignited with the Flames of Hera. Everything went white. The battlefield vanished beneath the detonation. Fire and pressure consumed the wasteland in a single catastrophic pulse.
The Iron Veil remained standing. Unscathed — but more importantly, blinded. Disoriented long enough for it to matter.
Chion's feet found earth directly behind him. Viren's senses found him instantly. Gregor shifted backward for a crushing counter-swing, Viren's spine arching hard enough for the motion alone to blow ash outward.
Fast. Not fast enough.
Chion's blood-covered fingers had already smeared across the centre of Viren's backplate.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Silver fire erupted across the armour. Momentum collapsed. Metal buckled inward. And the heretic dissolved into mist once more.
_______
Viren took a breath. Only one. That spell — it still burned.
The winds had turned violent. Current fluctuations rolled across the wasteland in uneven surges, distorting the ash into spiralling walls that swallowed distance whole. Visibility collapsed with every passing second. Every filtered breath through his helm forced fine specks of ash down his throat — he could barely breathe, let alone concern himself with the more dire consequences of inhaling matter contaminated with maelstrom.
His grip tightened around Gregor. Not even a speck of blood to its glorious name.
He needed to change his strategy. Now.
His stance shifted. Very few spectators even noticed. His senses spread outward through the storm.
South. The Heretic.
Another signature. West. A Lykin Spell.
Another. East.
How does he have more than one?
Memory surfaced — the intel the Council was forcing onto him, rejected, but inference enough to fill the gaps. Was that why his elder had been so insistent he at least take that?
The three signals were closing in, widening into a tactical encirclement.
How unwise.
From his Gates, more Current bled into his vessels, running across his spine into another spell — feeding into its Seven Hymns, welcoming the assault head-on.