The silence that followed Jacob’s death lasted exactly long enough to register.

Then the two elders at the back of the formation moved.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

They didn’t wait for an order.

The moment the head left the body both of them were already pushing through the crowd, cutting forward through the guard formation with the particular urgency of people who had just watched something happen that could not be allowed to stand without a response.

"That!!!"

One went straight for Ember.

A hand reached out with the full weight of a great mage behind it, aimed at her head, the intent clear and simple and completely without hesitation.

Crush.

"Fool!!"

Ember didn’t step back.

She met the reach with both palms already igniting, sparks catching into full flames in the space between one breath and the next, scorching through the elder’s robes before he could close the distance properly and forcing him to pull the hand back or lose it.

She pushed into the space his retreat created.

It wasn’t her first time facing a great mage. Not even close. And every time she had, something in her had calibrated to the experience, logged the weight of it, the particular pressure of that level of output, and adjusted accordingly. The gap was still real. She wasn’t pretending otherwise.

But she knew the shape of it now. And knowing the shape of something was the beginning of being able to work inside it.

She didn’t give him time to reset.

"Flame of Gog."

The words came out quiet and deliberate and the moment they landed the air changed.

A sense of decay moved through the surrounding space. Not heat exactly, something older than heat, something that carried the feeling of things ending at their edges. Her body lit up, the flame coming from inside rather than from her hands, burning bright enough that the street around her took on a different color.

She materialized fireballs in rapid succession and began pushing them forward, not holding for perfect aim, just sending them, creating pressure, keeping the elder back and occupied and unable to control the pace of the exchange.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Beside her, Arian had already engaged the other elder.

The exchange was fast and close, the two of them trading inside a distance that didn’t leave room for anything wide or prepared. The elder moved with the technical precision of someone who had fought many times and trained even more, his outputs controlled and layered.

But Arian was outputting at great mage level.

The elder registered it mid-exchange and the rhythm of his fighting shifted slightly, the adjustment visible if you knew what you were looking for.

’Is that kid insane?’

The thought arrived before he could stop it.

’He thought he was bringing them into a situation with no great mages on the other side. And these two are what he’s been trying to bring home to his low born family?’

The absurdity of the situation hit him between one block and the next.

That idiot Jacob had dragged two great mages into this without knowing what they were, gotten himself killed for the trouble, and now left his elders in the middle of a street fight against opponents they had been completely unprepared for.

He cursed Jacob thoroughly in the privacy of his own mind.

He didn’t stop fighting.

Stopping meant ending up like Jacob and he was not prepared to end this afternoon as a headless corpse in the city of dogs over a dead apprentice’s romantic delusions.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The city guards at the perimeter watched the exchange without moving.

Four great mages trading outputs in the middle of a street was not a situation the standard guard formation had a clean answer to. They held their positions and waited to see which direction the dust settled before committing to anything.

In front of the courtyard gate the two corpse puppets stood without expression, one of them holding a basket painted with gold. Cold. Still. Radiating level three energy outward with the particular blankness of things that didn’t experience uncertainty.

They made no move toward the fight.

They simply stood there and watched.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

At the back of the guard formation, slightly apart from the rest, a woman in her thirties stood with her arms at her sides and watched Ember fight.

She had the stillness of someone who had arrived at a situation and was taking her time forming a complete picture of it before deciding what to do with what she was seeing.

Her eyes were on Ember’s flame.

’That girl is resonating with my Firestone.’

The thought arrived with a slight wrongness to it, the feeling of something that didn’t fit the categories she had available.

The Firestone was an ancient relic. Fourth epoch. Not the most powerful thing she carried but rare in a way that made its existence notable, the kind of artifact that showed up in records but not in people’s hands. There was no reason a random person standing in front of a courtyard in the city of dogs should be producing any resonance with it.

And yet.

Her gaze moved from Ember to the basket the corpse puppet was holding, where a dark crawling energy moved against the inside of the weave in slow, patient waves.

She looked at the two women again.

Both great mages.

A beast at grade four that had been sitting inside that basket.

A courtyard in the middle of the slums that cost more to rent than most operations in this district generated in a month.

’Where are these talents from.’

She said it to herself quietly, the question genuine.

Then she looked at the city guards standing ready behind her, waiting for a signal.

She stood up.

"Well." The smile that settled onto her face was calm and slightly cold. "I might as well trade an eye for an eye. Jacob was an apprentice of the Firestone manor after all."

She released her energy.

Transcendent.

The full weight of it moved outward from her in a single pulse that flattened the ambient pressure of every other fighter in the street immediately, the great mages on both sides registering the change in the air before it fully arrived, the guards taking an involuntary step back without being told to.

Her first move was the basket.

She crossed the distance to the corpse puppet holding it and crushed the puppet in one motion, its structure collapsing under the force without resistance, and then she threw both the puppet’s remains and the basket upward and outward in a single sweep, sending them arcing through the air away from the fight.

Levi went with it, still inside.

Then she turned to Ember.

She came down fast and direct, no setup, no announcement, striking with the full gap between transcendent and great mage behind the blow.

Ember hit the ground head first.

Blood.

The woman reached down and grabbed her by the collar, pulling her up, already deciding what came next.

Something coiled around her arm.

Tightened.

Levi had come back.

Teeth sank into the transcendent being’s skin before she had fully registered the serpent’s return, the grade four beast doing what it did, refusing to stay out of something that involved the people it had decided were its.

"You stupid little—"

She grabbed Levi by the tail with her free hand and ripped him free in one motion, the strength differential between a great beast and a transcendent being absolute and immediate, and sent him flying a second time without looking to see where he landed.

Ember was getting up.

Slowly. Blood on her face. The ground around her hands scorched from the contact.

A cyan flame flickered in her eyes.

There and gone. There and gone. Like a bonfire trying to catch in wind, something cycling rapidly in and out of existence in the space behind her irises.

The transcendent being looked down at her.

And felt it.

Not a threat assessment. Not a tactical read.

Terror.

Clean, instinctive, the kind that arrives before the mind has time to build a rational explanation for it, grabbing the heart directly.

She raised her hand without thinking, the motion driven by instinct rather than decision, clawing downward hard.

Everywhere froze.

Something hit her in the lower abdomen.

Not fast. Not telegraphed. Just suddenly there, an unstoppable force that moved through her guard like it wasn’t present and connected with a weight that sent her off her feet and through the air in an instant, the ground where she had been standing left empty behind her.

Leon stood where she had been.

His breathing was even.

A strange confluration of energy moved in his eyes, not quite any single element, something that sat at the intersection of everything he carried, mana and soul and life and dark, all of it present at once in the particular way of someone who had just finished building the structure that let them hold all of it simultaneously.

He watched the transcendent being land.

"Despicable wretch."

He said it quietly, with the specific pride of someone who had arrived exactly when he intended to, not a second before.

Leon had broken through.

The transcendent stage.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​