Taro was beside Zhao with five spinning energy spheres already in motion, targeting the tiger, the yellow-orange accumulation at their peak.

Liu with the most powerful sound strike he could generate aimed directly at Orion.

They gave everything that remained.

The full residue of fusion pushed into one final exchange.

The tiger didn’t fall.

Dorian’s Undine moved forward on Orion’s order, positioning itself as the most effective absorber of Liu’s sound attack, the water element receiving the compression and dispersing it rather than taking the structural damage. The impact that arrived was reduced from what it should have been. But Taro’s attack took the Undine out, and the bulk of Zhao’s reach found all three brothers, the blade feathers and the accumulated energy making contact that drew blood from all of them.

Zhao hit the ground depleted of mana. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Taro followed two seconds later.

Liu held one second more, and then he too went down.

All three landed with their eyes closed and without the capacity to rise.

One point for the side that was losing but three great fighters less.

The surviving twin’s beast and Orion’s would have to hold alone now.

Lin came in from the side at high speed, with a fire-and-wind technique that Orion hadn’t been able to anticipate, because Lin was that fast and she never repeated her approach angles, two qualities that in combination made her among the most difficult fighters in the hall to read.

His tiger barely managed to interpose itself but received the full force of her kick against its side, the impact translating through the bond to Orion in the way a tamer always somewhat felt what their beast absorbed.

Director Ignatius arrived from the opposite side in full fusion, the mark patterns of his fire beasts visible across his arms, the temperature of the air around him carrying a bigger quality than the one his fire always carried, something hotter than ordinary combustion, the kind that the Phoenix of Magnus, a powerful beast in its own right, could not simply match by being similar.

The gap between their fire was not a gap that could be closed by element affinity alone.

Only the red crystal used alongside the beast’s control managed to counter it, and only partially, the combined effort barely enough to keep the full force from landing without mitigation.

But those two weren’t the only ones helping.

Klein had came with the recovered student tamers of gold and high-silver rank who had escaped the school’s protected perimeter with the determination of people who have seen enough to know that staying behind was not an option they could hold to with a clear conscience.

Trent and Roran also had brought the strongest of the student group too, those who hadn’t found sufficient resistance from the small number of instructors left there to stop them from breaking toward the hall before the line of soldiers that had been trying to protect them.

In their defense, they weren’t children anymore, not technically, not after crossing into the sixth year of academy... they simply hadn’t finished their military training, which was a distinction that mattered less with every hour the battles continued.

Given how close the hall and the castle were to the academy compared to the available soldiers from the walls, their arrival at this specific moment wasn’t purely negative.

Even Reed and Fern Patinder who had came with the healers, both with some mana remaining, had their water energy adding to Min’s group as people who had developed their secondary black water turtles enough to understand where to fit themselves into an attack pattern without needing to ask.

♢♢♢♢

Lin, Min’s group, and the new arrivals went down in nearly the same breath, the exchange costing what it cost on both sides, the balance of damage running in the expected direction.

When the dust of that exchange settled, of the three brothers’ beasts only Orion’s tiger remained, and it was carrying damage.

So Luna didn’t wait.

Her fusion came from the determination of someone squeezing everything remaining into a few seconds of use, not a considered deployment but a decision made and executed before the calculating part of her mind could present objections.

Her beasts answered with that strange chaotic fusion that revolved most closely around her wolf, that felt different from other fusions in a way she had no reference point to identify...

Not her fault because she had never been able to feel what other fusions felt like and compare them.

But there was something new.

The moment Luna finished establishing the fused bond, a strange synergy arrived from the white crystal.

Not something she had called for. Something that responded, as though the essence of Lykea within the crystal had been waiting for exactly this kind of contact, with beasts of this specific synergy and energies this intense...

Maybe something to do with the patterns controlled by an ancient fusion technique unlocked by Ren’s strange light beast and refined by high-quality cultivation over years. Maybe that strange wolf... Something in the energy recognized something in the fusion, and the recognition moved toward connection.

But Luna blocked it.

Not with cruelty. Just the firmness of someone who has made a decision and holds it even when holding it is harder.

This energy would not be spent.

Not now. Not ever.

That was decided and it was not going to be undecided by a moment of convenience.

She would do it by herself.

Her chaos beast, the result of the black wolf and the white tiger, responded to that clarity of will in the only way it knew how to respond.

Fast and direct.

It emerged from the shadow energy of Orion’s tiger.

Not from the front, not from the angle the tiger could have anticipated, but from inside the darkness that surrounded the black beast itself.

Ren’s lightning palm reached Orion’s chest simultaneously.

With the precision of someone who knows exactly where the strike needs to land and concentrates what little remains on making it land there.

It didn’t knock him down still... But it hit him at the exact moment he had started preparing the expansive attack that would have eliminated Luna’s beast before the chaos cut could complete, the interruption buying the fraction of a second that it required.

The cut arrived before Orion could reorient.

Orion’s tiger fell.