The chaos energy found the line it needed and the tiger separated into two halves that came apart clean.

Orion’s tiger had fallen.

Luna fell too... her knees giving before she could stop them, her reserves empty the moment her beast finished its work and dissolved.

Everything was spent.

Orion also went to his knees, bond broken.

But from the floor he drove his teeth together until they bled and screamed something into the space in front of him, and through the sheer force of whatever was in that scream he expelled the black pulse again anyway.

The white crystal in Luna’s hands pulsed alone.

That warm light, not combat energy, not power assembled for damage, but something intense that came from a passion older than any of those things. Defending Luna from the pulse Orion had released toward her and Ren.

A barrier more intense and more solid than anything Orion had managed to extract even using seven corrupted crystals in synergy at his best moment.

"No!" Luna shouted.

At the crystal. At her mother inside it.

"Don’t spend any more... Please!"

The light went out as if in reluctant agreement.

Luna felt the weight of what had just happened in the hands holding the crystal, not the emptying of her own mana but of something that had been present, that warmth she had been missing her entire life, now one degree less there than it had been a moment ago.

A truly sad occurrence.

A warmth that had spent itself for her the way it had always spent itself for protecting anyone when it could, much more strongly if it was for her, and that sadly was now slightly further away.

She knelt there with tears coming before she could decide about hiding them, and then registered what had actually happened... That there was someone important who hadn’t been protected!

Ren was on the floor several meters away, hurt but pushing himself up again with the stubborn methodology he had for doing things his body should not have been able to do. The same mechanics he had been using all day, the ones that had no clean explanation except that he simply refused to accept the inventory his body was presenting.

She looked at him.

He looked back at her for the one second he allowed himself to look.

Then Orion got up.

He wasn’t the same Orion who had entered the hall with the white-light barrier and the certainty of someone whose calculations had been correct.

Now the mana patterns of the purple crystals were visible on his hands, something that shouldn’t have been visible on someone who was simply using them as tools, the marks too pronounced, too settled deep into the skin, the kind of depth that came from contact that had moved past instrument into something else.

The energy around him had a texture that he couldn’t have described accurately himself, because accurately describing it would have required seeing himself from outside, and he wasn’t doing that.

So he didn’t know yet.

The corruption had found a crack somewhere in the course of the exchanges and had settled in with the discretion it used when it didn’t want to be detected yet. Patient and quiet. Installing itself through the gaps that prolonged stress and heavy crystal use had opened without anyone noticing they were opening.

What he did know was that of the two brothers who had been maintaining the barrier from beneath his feet through that small part of the battle, neither had a beast still active, and neither had the remaining mental capacity to generate the barrier again.

Useless.

He looked at them with eyes that were bloodshot and beginning to carry a purple tint that was working inward from the edges, the color of that something that had arrived and was making itself at home.

Dorian opened his mouth.

Then he saw the look in his brother’s eyes and felt the strange energy radiating from him and closed it again.

Orion turned toward Ren with every available crystal concentrated into the most destructive pattern all his research and practice had taught him to construct.

Luckily the control he had always exercised over them was different now, easier in certain ways, more brutal in others, the corruption he didn’t know he was carrying, smoothing away the friction that precision work normally required, filing down the edges that had always made the most powerful configurations cost something to maintain.

But the restrictions that kept a technique from eating its own user existed for reasons. Yet the corruption didn’t care about those reasons.

The scale of what he was preparing was not the scale of the earlier exchanges.

It was the scale of someone who had stopped calculating the future cost.

Someone whose wounds ran deep now and whose hatred for this particular boy ran depper... It had stopped being a political consideration and had become something more immediate and less manageable.

The careful, layered Orion who had walked into the ceremony with prepared arguments and calibrated provocations was somewhere underneath this, still there, probably, but not the thing driving the hands right now.

Ren wouldn’t manage to stand in time to escape.

It was the end.

It would have been, if a large number of attacks hadn’t already been accumulating around Orion from every direction.

He had tried to plant enough doubt in the room to turn the people in it against the boy. But despite everything he had seeded, the insinuations, the precedent of the coliseum, the carefully structured uncertainty...

They had watched Ren control corruption without being consumed by it.

They had watched him fight without being careless and hurting them like a certain tyrant, absorb damage that should have finished him, get back up. Had watched him throw his rewards into the air for a girl he cared about without a moment’s hesitation.

They knew the wild rumors about him and they started to make sense. Maybe he was that good.

The story Orion had been trying to write had been contradicted in real time by the person the story was about, and people who had been uncertain were no longer uncertain, and people who had believed they were on the right side were no longer sure of that either.