The air in Fluxton was no longer just atmosphere; it was a pressurized tomb of ozone, iron, and the sounds of a slaughter reaching its crescendo. In the center of the square, the deadlock between Darion and Armal held, their blades locked in a screeching grind of crimson sparks, while Jay continued his playful mutilation of Pyrax.
Raphael stood amidst the cooling corpses of the defectors, his gaze turning toward Ezekiel. The boy was trembling, his small frame looking entirely out of place in a theater of such absolute violence.
"Do it, Ezekiel," Raphael commanded, his voice a silk-wrapped blade. "Land the finishing blow on the spear-man. Do it before the light leaves his eyes."
Ezekiel stiffened. The fear was a cold weight in his stomach, but the weight of Raphael's expectation was heavier. He knew that in this hierarchy, a refusal was a suicide note. With faltering, frightened steps, he approached the mangled heap that was once Quel.
From the corner of his eye, he tracked the other battles. He saw Darion's effortless dominance and felt a sharp, narrowing focus in his chest. But now was not the time for his own grudges. Standing over Quel's half-dead body, Ezekiel raised his hand. His fingertips began to pulse with a sickly, vibrant yellow light—the same concentrated energy he had used to cull the dregs during the tribute collections.
He condensed the light into a needle-thin crimson beam.
Across the square, Armal parried a heavy strike from Darion, his eyes snapping toward the glowing yellow light. A jolt of recognition and pure, unadulterated shock hit him.
"The miracle boy!" Armal screamed, his voice cracking with desperation. "Gunther was right! That's the one, Pyrax! We have to get out of here alive—we have to take that boy!"
But Pyrax couldn't respond with anything more than a gurgling shriek. Jay was relentless. The Night brother was a blur of armored claws and deranged smiles, giving Pyrax no room to think, let alone strategize. Jay's hand flashed out, his claws digging deep into Pyrax's chest.
With a sickening grunt, Jay clenched his fist and ripped a massive chunk of flesh directly out of the general's torso.
Jay admired the steaming meat in his hand for a second before tossing it aside, his face splattered with gore. He rushed in again. Pyrax's vision was failing; his blood magic was a dry well, unable to even begin the work of closing the gaping hole in his chest. In a final, agonizing surge of spite, Pyrax channeled his last scraps of energy into his knuckles, swinging a blind, desperate blow.
Jay chuckled. He swerved the strike and, with two lightning-fast swipes, sheared through the tendons in both of Pyrax's arms.
Simultaneously, Ezekiel unleashed his beam. It hissed through the air and punched straight through Quel's caved-in skull, obliterating the brain.
Ezekiel gasped as a rush of energy surged into his core. It was potent—far more refined than the dregs he had killed before. He clenched his fist, feeling the heat of it, but the Voice in his head interrupted his brief triumph.
You only harvest what remains, the Voice hissed. Because you did not break him, you only receive the dregs of his final moments. To take the full power, you must be the one to eclipse it.
Ezekiel's jaw tightened. It was a fair, if bitter, trade. He was too weak to fight these titans head-on; he was a scavenger at a king's table.
"Ezekiel Graves!" Jay's voice roared over the sound of clashing steel.
The boy's heart thundered. Jay stood over the kneeling, broken form of Pyrax, beckoning. "Finish this one, too! Use everything you have!"
Ezekiel saw the opportunity. Pyrax was still radiating a flickering, powerful aura—stronger than Quel's. If he killed him now, while the general's life was still burning, the power surge would be immense. He rushed forward, gathering a gargantuan amount of energy at his fingertips.
Pyrax, blind and broken, began to convulse. "Patrick..." he wheezed into the dirt, "you ruined me... my life would have been better... if you had never..."
Ezekiel didn't listen. He thought of Darion. He thought of his mother. He thought of vengeance. His eyes flared a brilliant, blinding yellow. As he pushed his limits, several more inches of his hair bleached into a stark, ghostly white. His fangs extended, aching in his gums as he forced his biology to sustain the output.
He fired.
The vibrant yellow line streaked through the air. Pyrax, sensing the end, forced a final, instinctive surge of magic into his forehead. The beam struck, sizzling against the reinforced bone but failing to punch through.
"Dig deeper!" Jay barked, his eyes wide with curiosity. "I'm not helping you, boy! Earn it!"
Ezekiel's chest felt like it was being crushed by a vice. Veins bulged across his face and neck. He poured every remaining morsal of his reserves into the attack.
Pyrax screamed, trying to lunge forward to kill the boy, but his right knee—shattered by Jay's earlier strikes—finally snapped. He collapsed backward, his head hitting the stones with a heavy thud. Ezekiel's beam, losing its target, whirred past and struck one of the last Druids in the distance, vaporizing the beast in a spray of red mist.
Ezekiel stood over the fallen general, his breath coming in frantic, ragged sobs. He was at the edge of his soul. The Voice urged him to trade more years, to buy the power to finish it, but Ezekiel refused. He had already given ten. He wouldn't give more.
He bent down, aiming one last time at the faint, stuttering heartbeat in Pyrax's chest. But the strain was too much. The energy backfired through his nervous system.
Ezekiel let out an ear-piercing scream of agony as the veins across his body vibrated violently. He collapsed to his knees, then to his face, coughing up a large, dark pool of blood as his vision finally went black.
Jay stood over the unconscious Ezekiel, his armored claws slowly dissolving into red mist. As he looked down at the boy sprawled in a pool of his own blood, two conflicting emotions warred in his chest. On one hand, he was genuinely annoyed; the "miracle boy" was still a fragile thing, a glass cannon that shattered before it could even finish off a blind, legless general.
On the other hand, a cold, sharp spike of fear pierced his gut. He had pushed the boy too hard. He had wanted to see the limits of that strange yellow light, but in doing so, he had overplayed his hand. He remembered the last Rumbling—the way Raphael had looked at Darion after his brother had slaughtered a hundred vampires in a mindless blood-frenzy. The punishment that followed had been slow, quiet, and utterly agonizing.
Jay slowly turned his head to face his brother.
Raphael was standing perfectly still, his rings glowing with a dim, ominous light. He wasn't screaming. He wasn't even moving. He was simply glaring at Jay with a gaze so frigid it felt like a physical weight on his lungs. Sweat began to pool at Jay's hairline and slide down his face. Raphael didn't need to speak; the verdict was already written in the silence. Jay would pay for his curiosity.
Off to the side, the duel between Darion and Armal was reaching its inevitable, ugly conclusion.
Armal was no longer a general; he was a walking collection of lacerations and deep, weeping wounds. He stood in a thick, dark pool of his own making, his skin the color of damp parchment. Every time Darion's great sword swung, Armal had been forced to burn more *malum* to knit his flesh back together, and now, the well was dry.
Darion, by contrast, looked as though he had just stepped out for a stroll. There wasn't a single scratch on his armor. To him, this wasn't a war; it was a play-fight, a tedious exercise in dominance. But as he scanned the square and saw that the other battles had ceased, he decided it was time to drop the curtain.
Armal tried to summon one last shield, but his fingers only sparked with a pathetic, dying light. He tried to lift his own sword to block the incoming overhead strike, but his muscles simply refused to obey. With a hollow, rattling breath, his crimson blade flickered once, twice, and then dissolved into nothingness.
Darion's great sword descended. It sliced into the side of Armal's neck, the heavy edge grinding against the vertebrae with a sickening, metallic screech. Armal shrieked—a raw, inhuman sound of pure agony—as the bone that connected his head to his shoulders began to fracture under the sheer pressure.
Darion paused for a heartbeat, turning his head to look for the boy. He had expected Ezekiel to be there, ready to harvest the power as he had done with Quel. Instead, he saw Ezekiel facedown in the dirt, his hair matted with blood.
Darion's eyes snapped to Jay, a furious snarl curling his lip. Jay simply looked away, whistling an obnoxious, tuneless melody and pretending the moon was suddenly very interesting.
"Raphael," Darion hissed, his voice thick with irritation as he kept his blade buried halfway through Armal's neck. "The brat is broken. What now?"
Raphael didn't take his eyes off Jay. The air around him seemed to darken. He gave a single, final order, his voice a low vibration that made the stones tremble.
"Kill the intruder. We're done playing."
A cruel, genuine smile spread across Darion's face. He turned back to Armal, whose eyes were rolling back in his head. Darion shifted his grip on the hilt, pouring a massive surge of malum into the edge.
With a violent heave, the neckbone cracked and then shattered completely.
The great sword sheared through the remaining muscle and skin in a single, brutal burst. Armal's head was sent spinning into the darkness, and the last general of the Devil's Flames collapsed, his headless torso hitting the pavement with a heavy, final thud.
The war for Fluxton was over, leaving only the silence of the dead and the heavy price of the Night brothers' victory.