Orion looked at the energy around Ren with those eyes that had spent years learning to read the kinds of patterns corruption could have, and he didn’t find what he had expected to find.

The corruption was still there, present, dense, real... But it wasn’t doing what it should have been doing.

It wasn’t driving Ren toward the loss of control he had calculated so many times with the meticulousness of someone who had run the experiment before in other contexts. It wasn’t responding to the anger the way every Yino subject had responded to comparable emotional states, nor was the flow working the way the mutants responded when the crystal flow was adjusted, the way every piece of his model predicted it should.

It was doing something else.

Orion’s expression changed.

He drew out the remaining purple crystals.

Seven. Eight counting the black one. The white one couldn’t be added, it would slow the beam and compromise the barrier, and the barrier was the reason he was still standing in this hall without a ceiling on his available moves.

Without it, the math could change completely.

With it, he had many more options that Ren’s body, exhausted and already past what it should have been able to sustain, should not be able to handle.

The beam that formed from those eight crystals had no precedent in anything he had fired in this hall. The brothers beneath him tightened their grips against the surge of force as it built. The energy visible before it even left his hand deformed the air in the hall and made several people instinctively close their eyes, which weirdly accomplished almost nothing, because what they were reacting to wasn’t really light, and closing your eyes against it was the body doing what it knew when it didn’t know what else to do. But even in darkness, you could still sense and "see" it.

Yet Ren didn’t dodge.

He only extended both hands.

Despite the scream from Liora, despite Larissa’s worried voice, he let it make contact.

The first second was what the first second had been before: the energy finding its channels, circulating, distributed through the routes the nucleus had learned to use.

But the volume was in a different category...

He felt the channels saturating, felt the pressure accumulating in places that had already given everything they had, felt his body registering objections from every direction at once, the awful sensation of a system being asked to hold something it wasn’t built to hold.

Yet he didn’t let go.

He held it.

One more second. Two. The black veins covered his face completely. His eyes lit with an intense purple that wasn’t technique and wasn’t intention, just the light that came when that much energy ran through something with not enough room for it.

The energy churned around him and tore at him from the inside.

Five seconds.

Then...

Then he sent it all back.

The beam that left his hands was larger than the one that had entered, because he had added what he was already carrying, not much, but a difference, the difference between returning what had come in and returning something with a small yet significant weight behind it. Because...

When it reached Orion’s barrier the crystalline surface bowed inward, a slow curve under pressure that wasn’t an impact so much as an accumulated force looking for somewhere to go entering the energy system too fast.

And the barrier held.

Almost entirely.

Almost...

At the point of maximum pressure, in the fraction of a second when the surface had absorbed more than it could distribute simultaneously, a round gap opened.

Small, roughly a meter across.

Less than a second before the system compensated and closed it.

It wasn’t a problem yet but a warning...

Since less than a second was not enough for a real threat to pass through.

Everything was still under control... Except that what looked like the residual glow of the overall beam concentrated itself in the final instant of the beam’s life, not spreading to disappear, but gathering, pulling into a single point the way lightning pulls before it finds its path.

Like lightning?

Finally, what seemed like the residue of the general lightning intensified its brilliance in the last instant, a concentrated light.

And in the end, it thundered not as part of an ’explosion’ but as a powerful ’spark’, as if it were one of those lightning bolts that fall as punishment from the sky.

The lightning entered through the crack before it closed.

Orion had no time to react.

The impact hit him directly in the face.

It wasn’t devastating, it was not the kind of blow that finished a Gold-rank double tamer in decent fighting condition. But Orion had been maintaining the barrier for hours, managing the crystals, absorbing the cumulative cost of a session that had demanded more sustained output than most battles required.

His reflexes had been giving him fractions instead of whole responses for longer than he would have admitted, and this time the fraction wasn’t enough. The impact took him off his feet despite his brothers holding him from below, sent him backward with enough electrical discharge that his nervous system stopped cooperating with his muscles for the duration of the fall.

The crystals scattered. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Ren had already identified his target before Orion hit the ground.

Not Orion since he couldn’t finish him with what little energy he had left. Not more positioning advantage than he already had, not anything but... One crystal.

The one pulsing differently from all the others, not because it had more energy, it was actually somewhat warmer than the others. Somewhat personal.

The one that had been used as a lever against Luna for so much time and that was now spinning through the air.

He reached it before it fell.

The white crystal settled into his hand.

It pulsed once.

Soft shine like acknowledging something... Maybe not acknowledgment of him exactly, acknowledgment of something.

Maybe it was something that has been held by the wrong person for a long time and has just been picked up by someone moving in the right direction.