Kris.
Every part of what that name carried came back at once the moment the elephant's rider came into view: the voice that had recited his brother's death without a trace of feeling in it. Ant hadn't seen him since. He'd hoped never to see him again at all.
"You," Ant said. It wasn't much of a greeting, but it was all that made it out.
"Me." Kris slid down off the elephant's shoulder, taking his time about it, the massive animal settling behind him without needing to be told. He looked exactly as Ant remembered him, which was somehow worse than if he'd changed. Same plain, unremarkable face. Same quiet, deliberate way of standing. "You look surprised. I did tell you the schedule had changed, not the promise."
Around them, the battle hadn't stopped, but a space had opened regardless, fighters on both sides giving the two of them a wide berth without seeming to decide to. Nobody wanted to be close to whatever this turned into.
Mahkir's growl started low and didn't stop, a sound Ant felt through the bond as much as heard with his own ears. Ant drew Soul Render, the blade answering with its familiar warmth against his palm, and triggered Flame Fist on instinct, a burst of fire aimed dead center at the man who'd tortured him in a cell and threatened everyone he loved on the way out the door.
Kris raised one open palm, and frost spread visibly across it in the instant before the fire arrived, a thin sheet of ice forming over his skin fast enough that Ant actually watched it happen. The flame died against it immediately, no smoke, no mark left behind once the ice had melted back into nothing a moment later.
"You should try harder than that," Kris said. "It's what I'd want, in your position."
Ant didn't answer. He came in with the blade instead, a straight thrust aimed at Kris's exposed side, and the same frost wrapped fast around Kris's forearm, ice thickening in the half-second it took to meet the strike, thick enough to stop steel outright. The sword's edge found nothing to bite into at all. Mahkir went for the opening a half-second later, jaws snapping shut on empty air where Kris had been standing a moment before.
Ant stared at the ice already melting off Kris's arm, leaving no mark behind. "That's not possible."
"Do you think you were special?" Kris said, no relish in it at all, just something he'd clearly been waiting a long time to say out loud.
"Your brother," Ant said, circling, buying himself a second to think. "Could he do that too?"
Kris actually laughed at that, short and genuine. "I don't have a brother. I never did. Calvin served a purpose, to bring you into the battlefield so I could kill you. Everyone accepts grief as a motive. You never questioned it once. I would have killed you there and then, except you used magic, and that surprised me. I needed time to think, so I made my escape."
"Then why." The question came out before Ant had finished deciding to ask it. "Why any of this?"
"Because you're the last Byrren left standing, and that's a problem I've been paid to solve for a very long time."
"What's being a Byrren got to do with anything?"
Kris's expression didn't change. "You really don't know. That's almost funny." He tilted his head slightly, considering. "Do you think your father's death was an accident? A routine patrol, nothing more? There was nothing routine about it. I made sure of that myself."
Ant's grip on Soul Render went white-knuckled. Everything he'd believed about a routine patrol, and none of it had been true.
He triggered Appraisal on Kris without thinking, some instinct demanding information his eyes weren't giving him fast enough.
[Error.]
Normally if something was too high level, his system would inform him of it, but Error? That was a new one. He tried again just in case, frustration now boiling as his emotions rolled within him, threatening to completely take over.
Mahkir felt the rage before Ant fully registered it as his own. The berserk state took him without ceremony, amber eyes going dark red, fur standing along his spine as every attribute he had spiked twenty percent past its normal ceiling. Group Buff went up first, a wide pulse across the battlefield he barely felt leave him, meant for every other Kithren still fighting somewhere behind him rather than for this fight specifically. Then Attribute Sharing, their combined attributes merging into one shared pool, three minutes counting down where Ant could see it clearly on his own display.
"Say it again," Ant said, and his voice didn't sound entirely like his own anymore.
"I killed him," Kris said. "Slowly, if it matters to you. It should."
For a second neither of them moved. Ant's whole body ran on borrowed strength and raw fury sitting uneasily together under his own skin, and somewhere underneath both of those was the sixteen-year-old boy who'd stood at a graveside being told his father died doing nothing more dangerous than walking a routine stretch of road. That boy had grieved a man he'd never got to be angry at, because there was nobody standing in front of him to be angry at. Now there was.
They went at him together before splitting apart almost immediately, Mahkir peeling off toward the elephant while Ant kept Kris's attention on himself alone.
It didn't go the way it should have. Buffed, angrier than he'd ever fought, and Kris matched every single exchange without visibly working for it. Ant threw Flame Fist after Flame Fist, each one costing thirty mana he no longer had room to spare, and Kris turned aside every one of them with ice forming and shattering around his forearm in the same motion, a fresh sheet of it every time, no strain showing on him at all.
Ant pressed forward anyway, driving Soul Render in a low arc meant to open Kris's guard rather than end anything outright, and Kris met it with a blade of his own ice, conjured and shaped in less time than it took Ant to finish the swing. Steel rang against ice and the ice didn't break. Ant's arm jarred hard enough to numb it to the elbow, and he had to plant his back foot to keep from being thrown off balance entirely.
He drove in again a moment later, a low feint that turned into a real strike at the last instant, and it actually landed, Soul Render cutting across Kris's ribs.
It didn't cut properly. It should have cut. Ant felt the blade skid off something that gave less than skin should, more resistance than armour he couldn't see, and Kris rode the impact rather than falling to it, already spinning into a counter that clipped Ant's shoulder hard enough to spin him half around.
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Ant's mana kept dropping. Sixty. Fifty-five. Every spell spent chasing an opening that wasn't there.
Off to the side, Mahkir was having better luck. He's slower than he looks, Mahkir sent through the bond, teeth bared, none of the fear Ant felt anywhere in it. Just hold Kris off a bit longer. Once I finish this one, I can actually help.
Mahkir triggered Lightning Speed without waiting for agreement, and Ant felt the drain of it hit his own pool through the shared link even from a dozen feet away, agility spiking on Mahkir's end while Ant's mana dropped further and faster than his own fight alone accounted for. It bought something real. Mahkir tore into the elephant faster than the animal could track, three strikes landing in the time it had taken to land one before, claws opening long gashes along its side that made it scream and stagger.
Kris's counter caught Ant across the ribs before he saw it coming, an open-handed strike that shouldn't have carried the force it did, and it drove the air out of him hard enough that he stumbled a full step back before his legs remembered how to hold him. His HP dropped, not badly, nowhere near critical, but enough that he felt it settle behind his sternum where the hit had landed. He forced himself upright and back into range before Kris could press the opening any further.
Forty-eight.
It wasn't the usual monotone notification scrolling past at the edge of his vision. The voice cut across his thoughts instead, unprompted, something it had never done mid-fight before. This is not a fight you can currently win. He is beyond you. You need to pull back.
"Mahkir, stop." Ant said it out loud this time, no room left for anything subtler than that. "We can't win this. Pull back. You have no idea how strong he actually is, and neither do I, and that's exactly the problem."
Forget it. Mahkir didn't slow down. I've got this one. Just hold on.
He hit the elephant with a full-strength Flame Breath, enhanced by whatever Lightning Speed had left him with, and the animal staggered back a full body-length under it, scorched along one flank, a sound coming out of it that hadn't come out of anything Ant had heard fight tonight. It went down onto its front knees and didn't immediately get back up.
Attribute Sharing's countdown read twenty seconds and falling on his display, and Mahkir showed no sign the timer meant anything to him at all. Ant felt his own legs going heavy under him, every last reserve Attribute Sharing had lent him drawing down toward nothing, and he threw one more Flame Fist anyway. Stopping wasn't something he could afford yet.
Ten seconds. Kris caught the last Flame Fist on a wall of ice that didn't even crack this time.
Then it ended.
The bond snapped back to its normal width all at once, and every ounce of strength Attribute Sharing had been lending Ant's body left with it. His knees buckled. He went down hard on the scorched ground, chest heaving, HP intact but every reserve past that spent down to nothing.
"Mahkir." He couldn't get more than the name out.
Mahkir didn't stop. The elephant was down, or close enough to it, and with Attribute Sharing gone there was nothing stopping him from turning to help Ant instead.
That was the mistake. The elephant surged back up from its front knees, wounded and furious, coming from exactly the direction Mahkir had just stopped watching. Its stride shook the ground under it, closing the distance faster than something its size had any right to move. In the same breath Kris raised one hand and something cold and pale wrapped around Mahkir's legs, spreading fast, ice climbing past his knees before he'd finished registering the animal bearing down on him. He threw his weight against it once, twice, and it held both times, thick enough now that his claws only scraped white lines across the surface instead of breaking through.
Nowhere to run. Nothing to dodge with. The elephant's weight alone would be enough to end this, and Mahkir couldn't move his own legs to get clear of it.
Maren got there first. Axel got there half a step behind her, both of them throwing themselves into the elephant's path with nothing but their own bodies between it and Mahkir. Axel raised both forearms into the charge, absorbing the first shock of it, and it wasn't enough, was never going to be enough against something that size at that speed. The impact sent both of them flying, Maren's sword spinning off somewhere out of reach, Axel skidding a dozen feet before he stopped moving at all. The elephant itself staggered from the collision, thrown off its line just enough that it missed Mahkir's frozen legs by less than a stride, close enough that Mahkir felt the wind of it pass.
NO.
The word came through the bond loud enough to hurt, followed immediately by a roar that had nothing controlled left in it. Fire erupted along Mahkir's coat, the ice shattering off him in a single burst of steam, and he didn't turn back to the fight in front of him at all. He was already moving toward Maren and Axel before the last of the ice had finished falling.
Ant reached them at nearly the same moment, dragging himself upright on legs that barely answered, and tried to trigger Restore on reflex alone. Nothing happened. His mana sat at zero, every skill on his User tab greyed out except the one that cost nothing to use in the first place. He dropped to his knees beside Axel anyway, hands hovering uselessly over a wound he had no way to close, no bandage, no water, nothing at all except the sound of his own breathing and theirs.
"Come on," he said, to no one, to both of them, to whatever was left to reach. "Come on, stay with me."
Rowan arrived at a dead run a moment later, dropping to his knees beside them both, hands moving fast and practiced over Axel first, then Maren, checking pulse and breath and the worst of the damage in a handful of seconds that felt like they took far longer than that. His hands didn't stop moving even after the checking was done, some instinct in him refusing to accept what the rest of him had already worked out. He didn't say anything through any of it. He didn't need to. The look on his face when he finally sat back said everything Ant didn't want to hear, and he shook his head once, small and final.
Somewhere behind them, Natalia and Garrick had both broken free of their own fights, Cindermaw and Ashclaw standing over the two Epics they'd each finally managed to kill with Group Buff's edge behind them. Sunclaw was still out there somewhere against Andy and Hexa, that fight far from finished, but these two were free now. They came at Kris together, weapons and fire and everything they had left, Cindermaw's flame washing across him from one side while Ashclaw's claws raked in from the other. It slowed him. For the first time all fight, Kris actually gave ground, retreating a full three steps to keep both angles from closing on him at once.
This time it was harder. He caught Ashclaw's next swing on a blade of ice grown straight out of his own forearm, and the ice cracked clean through under the impact, the first time all night anything he'd conjured had actually failed. He turned the deflection into a strike that opened a line across Ashclaw's flank anyway, breathing harder now, and had to throw himself sideways a half-second later to keep Cindermaw's next blast from catching him square on. He was still winning. It just wasn't free anymore.
Mahkir knelt over Axel's body, over Maren beside him, and the arrogance that had carried him through this entire fight was gone. He'd been told to pull back. He hadn't listened. This was the first Kithren he'd ever fought beside, the first one he'd ever really called a friend, and he was looking down at what his own refusal to stop had cost.
He roared again.
This time the entire battlefield stopped.
Every fight still going on paused mid-motion, fighters and Kithren on both sides turning toward the sound without meaning to, some old instinct overriding whatever they'd been doing a half-second before. Even Kris paused, Natalia and Garrick's weapons frozen an arm's length from him, his attention drawn toward the source of a sound that seemed to demand it whether he wanted to give it or not. For the first time all night, he took a step back rather than forward.
Light began gathering around Mahkir where he knelt, faint at first, barely more than a shimmer at the edge of his fur, then brighter, spreading outward until it swallowed the ground beneath him entirely. It was bright and white and growing, rising up out of him rather than falling onto him from anywhere else, climbing along his spine and down each leg until his whole shape blurred inside it, edges gone soft and impossible to place precisely. The scorched ground around him hissed where the light touched it. The air itself seemed to pull toward him, a low pressure Ant felt against his own skin from a dozen feet away, the kind of pull that came before something enormous, not after it.
Ant stared at it from where he knelt in the dirt, no mana left to do anything about any of it, no idea what he was watching. He'd seen Mahkir angry. He'd seen him wounded, exhausted, pushed past every limit either of them had ever mapped. He had never once seen anything that looked like this.
"What on earth is going on?!"