The expression on Orion’s face was not the composed one, not the man who had been running twelve-move calculations since months before any of this started.

What was there now was something more direct, more stripped down, nothing he had shown in the entire session.

As though the hit to his face had burned away the layer of political cordiality he had been wearing all day like a costume that had finally served its purpose and could be discarded.

The next beam went toward where Ren should have landed.

But there was nothing there.

Liora had come from above, she had tried to get to Ren before, to help hit Orion, but he had moved too fast and too far for a single jump to reach.

Yet she had luckily got positioned close to Ren after he got hit.

She made a fast, cheap and short jump and this time when getting to him she didn’t try to block with a shield to help him.

She instead used another spirit jump but dragged him with her, which only worked because Ren had absorbed her spiritual energy and just because of that it worked and the two of them vanished at the last possible moment, the beam passing through empty air.

Larissa arrived from the side immediately after, adding a second jump to the short one Liora had managed. It wasn’t the first time she had jumped while carrying Ren so her light step knew the weight and the synergy with Ren light energy and it took them further, putting real distance and time between them and Orion’s follow-up shots.

Luna arrived a beat later, she had her crystal thrown by Ren himself to catch first, but didn’t take more than a second before appearing from the other side with her shadow extending and swallowing all three of them to carry them further still, to the far most corner of the hall where the accumulation of everyone’s jumps had finally placed them beyond the immediate range of what Orion could reach without moving.

But Orion did not leave them alone even though they were in the far corner of the room.

He moved closer.

Jumping while carrying people was extremely expensive, and all three of them had already spent most of what they had.

Three shields went up to receive the next beam because Ren couldn’t get up anymore, none of them perfect, none of them alone sufficient, but together enough to distribute the force across all three instead of delivering it whole to any one person.

Larissa was the first to move out from behind those shields.

"Now," she called to the allies positioned throughout the hall who had been waiting for an opening that kept not arriving. "Now or never. He doesn’t have the barrier!"

The hall responded.

Not in order. Not with the coordination of an army executing a prepared plan, and they were under too much enemy pressure for that, but still moved with the urgent simultaneous movement of people who understood at the same moment that the window they had been waiting for existed right now and would not exist again.

Orion had a response prepared for exactly this.

He gave the signal.

The soldiers outside entered through the hall’s doors, not all at once, because the streets near the castle were narrow and complex and the hall’s own dimensions limited how quickly numbers could meaningfully multiply inside, but enough of them to begin shifting the balance of what was happening there.

The allies already within the hall responded to the same signal simultaneously and the ceremony hall, which had been a space of protocol with chairs in specific positions and an agenda on a lectern, became something that had nothing to do with any of those things.

Larissa could direct the allied fighters in Julius and Arturo’s absence. She had the judgment for it and everyone in the room with any experience knew it. But she couldn’t win alone, and she knew that too.

Liora put a hand on Luna’s shoulder.

"Stay with him."

She didn’t wait for an answer. A jump took her to where Larissa was already working, blinding Orion’s sight lines with concentrated light while reading the field with the eyes she had when she had stopped being a ’cute student’ and become the version of herself that made decisions in the time it took others to identify that a decision was needed.

"I’ll need to use what’s left of my fusion," Larissa said when she felt Liora arrive.

Liora nodded. "I can’t fuse but I can load your attacks with spirit fire while my mana holds." Not a question, just an inventory of what remained. "I can’t do more than that. My bond with the Bashe is still broken."

"It’s enough."

Larissa’s fusion was different from most aesthetically, distinctive in the way that everything she did was distinctive, with the brightness and purity of something that bordered on the genuinely divine.

The wings of light that emerged from her shoulder blades when the process completed were not decorative. Neither was the branching antlers of light that spread from her head when the fusion settled fully into place. Every part of it carried the density of concentrated crystal mana, built to move, built to strike, built for both simultaneously depending on what the moment required. The wings had edges.

The allied fighters felt the change before they saw it.

And seeing it was the kind of thing that put something back in people who believed they had run out, a second wind found somewhere in the space where people were certain there was nothing left.

Larissa drove toward Orion.

Orion fired.

Larissa was no longer where the beam arrived.

The cold came from the lateral before Orion finished processing the miss, layers of ice assembled in the time it took to blink, positioned not just to block but to amplify the blinding light attacks and restrict the movement of whatever they reached.

The light strike came from the opposite angle with Liora’s spirit fire loaded on top of it, which was the difference between an attack that Orion’s gold-rank physical defenses could absorb and one that found them from a plane where conventional physics wasn’t the relevant criterion.

Orion countered some of it.

But countering took attention, and attention that couldn’t be directed at finishing Ren was exactly what Larissa was trying to take from him.

Not a strategy of victory, she was honest with herself about that. She didn’t have the offensive power to win outright in the time her fusion could last, with what remained after everything the day had already cost her.

This was a strategy of depletion and disruption: keep Orion occupied in defense, keep his attention divided, prevent him from directing his soldiers with the precision that would turn the numerical advantage entering through the doors into something conclusive.

It worked for several moments.

The allies used the openings Larissa forced with her fast jumps, ice and shoots to close in toward the center, tightening the ring around Orion degree by degree, the situation shifting from "contained" toward something that looked like it might actually end.

Then Orion stopped being careful.

The pulse he released wasn’t targeted. It was circular, expansive, the kind that didn’t ask who was standing where or which faction they belonged to... It simply pushed everything within its radius outward from the point where Orion stood. His own allies caught the edges of it. Several of them went down.

He didn’t adjust his approach.

He didn’t care anymore.

The eight stones in his hands generated a concentrated force after spinning together for a moment that was brief and terrible.

Larissa received the blow. The huge wings absorbed part of it, which was what they were built for, but partially wasn’t completely and the remainder carried enough force to send her in the wrong direction, fast.

Liora received her portion of the pulse without the barrier she would have needed and landed with that hard terrible sound of something that had taken damage and didn’t yet have time to assess how much.

Orion stood in the center of the space he had cleared. Only his brothers remained, a bit damaged but still anchored to his feet. His breathing was heavier than at the start of the session, not steady, not easy, the honest cost of maintaining this level of output across hours, but his eyes had recovered the cold calm of someone who had re-established control that everyone else had briefly believed was gone.

"Enough," he said. "That’s enough!"

Three simultaneous beams to specific positions at the margins, each one aimed at some double with sufficient rank to change the arithmetic of the battle if they remained active. Not all of them went down but all of them had to occupy themselves with survival rather than advancement.

"It’s over," Orion said to the hall. The word landed like what it was: a close. "The only people who could have stopped me today are out of the equation and everyone here knows it’s true. What remains now is deciding whether you want more damage, or whether you prefer this to conclude the only way it can conclude given the state you’re all in."

Nobody answered. But the silence was the kind that acknowledged he was right.

One or two finishing blows to those already down and Orion would have no remaining resistance.

The crystal that had been taken from him could be recovered. The moment to stop him existed right now, at this precise instant, and it had arrived too late, when no one had the energy left to use it, the sequence of events having depleted everyone in the wrong order.

It was over... But no one was willing to say so. Not after coming this far, not like this.

"Then you’re in a hurry to die!?"

The ceiling of the hall answered for everyone.

When it exploded.