Thomas scanned for his next target, the revolver sweeping in a controlled arc, his breathing steady, his mana core thrumming with the deep, resonant hum of a Tier 5 operating at peak saturation. The masked figure was engaging on the right flank—he caught a flash of white linen and the crack of their revolver as they fired twice in rapid succession. Two cultists scrambled for cover. One didn't make it.

  For a brief, electric moment, Thomas felt invincible.

  Then his heart stopped.

  In the corner of his eye—half-obscured by smoke, half-hidden behind a mound of collapsed plaster—he spotted something plum.

  No.

  Florence was not behind the bar counter. She was not hiding. She was kneeling in the open, thirty feet from the nearest cover, her dress filthy with dust and blood, her hands buried in the ruined pant leg of a groaning civilian. The man's thigh was shredded—shrapnel, from the look of it—and Florence had torn a strip from the hem of her own dress and was tying it above the wound with quick, practiced knots. A tourniquet. Her face was pale, her jaw set, and her fingers were working with the steady, deliberate precision of someone who had read every medical text she could get her hands on and was now, for the first time, putting theory into practice on a man who was bleeding to death.

  Damn it, Florence.

  The scream stayed internal, trapped behind clenched teeth, but it tore through Thomas's chest with a force that made the explosion feel gentle.

  "Behind you," the wounded civilian gasped.

  His eyes were glassy with shock, unfocused, but they had locked onto something over Florence's shoulder. His hand rose—trembling, weak, the fingers slick with his own blood—and pointed.

  Florence turned.

  Looming over her was the axe-wielder.

  He was enormous. Not tall so much as wide—a slab of a man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with forearms like dock pilings and hands that swallowed the fire axe's handle whole. The burlap sack over his head was stained dark with sweat, the white globe-and-line symbol distorted by the wet fabric clinging to his skull. He had crossed the debris field in silence, his approach masked by the gunfire and screaming, and now he stood directly behind Florence with the axe raised above his head in a two-handed grip, the blade poised at the apex of its arc.

  He was already swinging down.

  Thomas reacted.

  His body was moving at full sprint, his momentum carrying him on a trajectory perpendicular to Florence—thirty feet away, wrong angle, wrong direction. He tried to pivot. His left foot slammed into the rubble, his mana flooding the joint as he tried to torque his entire body around for the shot. The physics demanded more than his ankle could give. He finally felt it go—not a clean snap but a wrench, the lateral ligament tearing under the rotational force, the joint folding inward at an angle that sent a white-hot lance of agony up his entire leg.

  His balance evaporated. His arm jerked as the pain hit his shoulder, the revolver kicking upward at the critical instant.

  He pulled the trigger anyway.

  The shot went wide. He saw the muzzle flash, saw the round spark off the rubble two feet to the left of the axe-wielder's hip, saw the cultist not even flinch.

  "Florence!"

  Her name ripped from his throat as he went down—a raw, desperate sound that didn't belong to an Inspector or a Tier 5 prodigy or a Senior anything. It belonged to a brother.

  The cultists saw him fall.

  They did not hesitate. Magical lattices formed instantly—four of them, blooming in the air with the synchronized precision of casters who recognized a wounded animal. Fire. Earth. Earth again. Something that tasted like ozone—lightning, maybe, or a concussive wave.

  Thomas gritted his teeth and ripped them apart.

  The nullification wave pulsed outward, shredding all four spells simultaneously. The effort cost him—he felt the drain in his core like a hand squeezing his lungs—but the lattices dissolved into nothing. He crashed into the debris, shoulder-first, and rolled through broken glass and splintered wood, his ankle screaming with every rotation.

  He didn't check the injury. He didn't look down. He scrambled upright on one knee, his left foot dangling uselessly, and swept the revolver toward where Florence had been, his eyes wild, his chest heaving.

  Please no. Please no. Please—

  He expected a scream. He expected silence. He expected to see his sister on the ground with an axe buried in her and the last good thing in his life extinguished in this miserable ruin.

  Instead, he blinked.

  Florence was standing upright.

  She was shaking—trembling from head to toe, her face white as chalk, her eyes enormous. Dust coated her plum dress and her hair was half-collapsed from its pins, hanging in dark tangles around her face. She looked terrified.

  But she was alive.

  In her hands, she was gripping the handle of the fire axe.

  The cultist's fire axe.

  The axe-wielder was sprawled at her feet, face-down in the rubble, his arms splayed at odd angles. He was not moving. His burlap hood had been knocked sideways by the impact, exposing a thick, red neck and the pale curve of an ear. One of his hands was still twitching—the involuntary spasm of a body whose owner had been rendered abruptly and violently unconscious.

  Thomas stared.

  The axe was in Florence's hands. The cultist—the enormous, slab-shouldered cultist who outweighed Florence by at least a hundred pounds—was on the ground. The logical chain of events connecting those two facts refused to assemble in Thomas's brain. Had she dodged? Had the civilian tripped him? Had she disarmed him?

  Florence? His Florence? The girl who cried when she burned a batch of scones?

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The questions dissolved in a flood of relief so powerful it nearly took him under. He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding—a long, shuddering exhale that emptied his lungs completely and left him lightheaded.

  He collapsed.

  His ankle was finished. The joint had swollen to twice its normal size in the seconds since the ligament tore, the flesh around the boot turning a mottled purple-black that spoke of internal hemorrhaging. He couldn't put weight on it. He couldn't stand. He couldn't run.

  He was a sitting duck in the middle of a kill zone.

  Thomas dragged himself. Elbows and one good knee, his revolver clenched in his teeth, the taste of gun oil and blood filling his mouth. He hauled his body across six feet of broken glass and shattered porcelain until he reached the overturned oak table that had been nearest to his fall. He pulled himself behind it, pressed his back against the wood, and took stock.

  "Crap," he breathed. "What do I do."

  Mana. Building again.

  He felt it—the familiar, nauseating prickle across his skin. More lattices forming, more spells taking shape. He snapped them away with a pulse of nullification, feeling the drain bite deeper this time. His core was not infinite. Every nullification cost energy, and the cultist mages were not stupid.

  More mana. Immediately. Almost before the first wave had fully dissipated, a second round of lattices began crystallizing in the air—probing, testing, forcing him to respond.

  They were trying to drain him.

  Thomas's jaw tightened as the realization settled with cold clarity. They had more mages than he had mana. This was not a sustained assault—it was attrition. Cast. Force the Nullifier to respond. Cast again. And again. And again, until his core guttered out like a candle in a draft, and then they would kill him at their leisure.

  He sensed four distinct mana sources. Four casters, working in rotation, each one building a spell the moment Thomas collapsed the previous one. A relay. The mana equivalent of soldiers taking turns firing while the others reloaded.

  He nullified the current wave. Felt it cost him. Calculated.

  The math was not kind. At this rate—four casters rotating, each requiring a nullification pulse—his core would be dry in under two minutes. Less, if they escalated to simultaneous casting. And he was pinned behind a table with a destroyed ankle and no sign of backup from his colleagues to speak of. Where on Earth was backup!?

  The odds of coming out of this alive were not good.

  "Thomas! Thomas!"

  A voice cut through the ringing in his ears—high, scared, and achingly familiar.

  "Are you all right!?"

  Thomas whipped his head around.

  Florence was crawling toward him. On her hands and knees, her plum dress dragging through the debris, the fabric torn at the hem where she'd ripped the tourniquet strip. Her hands were stained dark—someone else's blood, smeared from wrist to fingertip. She was moving fast, keeping low, her eyes locked on him with an expression of raw, undisguised terror that had nothing to do with the cultists and everything to do with the fact that she had just watched her brother fall.

  "Florence!?" Thomas's voice cracked between fury and relief. "I told you to—aghhh." He hissed through his teeth as a fresh wave of pain rolled up from his ankle. "Never mind. Never mind! Where's the axe? Where's your weapon?"

  Florence reached him, pressing herself against the table beside him, breathing hard. "I gave it to the man I was helping," she said. "The one with the leg wound. Just in case that... that person wakes up."

  Thomas stared at her.

  She had disarmed a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound cultist wielding a fire axe—somehow—and then given the axe away to a wounded stranger. Because he might need it. Just in case.

  Of course she had.

  Of course she had.

  He closed his eyes for one second. Opened them.

  "All right," he said, his voice dropping into the clipped, controlled register of a man reorganizing his priorities under fire. "All right. Fine. But please, Florence. Just hide. I'm going to—"

  He stopped.

  Florence was not listening.

  She had looked down at his ankle—the swollen, discolored mass of ruined joint visible where his trouser leg had ridden up—and her expression had changed. The fear was still there, but something else had risen alongside it. Something focused. Something that looked, if Thomas had been in any state to notice, remarkably like competence.

  She reached out and placed both hands directly onto his ankle.

  "What are you—" Thomas began.

  "This looks like hemarthrosis," Florence said. Her voice had shifted. It was still shaking, still thin with adrenaline, but beneath the tremor was a steadiness that hadn't been there before. The voice of a student reciting from a text she had memorized. "Bleeding into the joint capsule. The ligament tear opened the blood vessels around the lateral malleolus and the blood is pooling inside the synovial cavity. That's why it's swelling so fast—the pressure is building internally, compressing the joint. If it continues, you'll lose all range of motion within minutes."

  Thomas blinked. "Hem—what now?"

  "Hemarthrosis. It's developing so fast. Blood in the joint." Florence took a deep breath. Her fingers tightened around his ankle—gently, carefully, with the precise pressure of someone who understood what they were touching. "Bear with me here, Thomas. This is going to be my first time doing this."

  Thomas felt it immediately.

  Mana.

  It gathered in his ankle—a warm, tingling sensation that seeped into the swollen tissue like sunlight into cold water. It was subtle, delicate, and unmistakable. Every hair on Thomas's arms stood on end. His nullification instinct fired—a reflexive, almost autonomic response honed by years of training, the Pavlovian urge to crush foreign mana that manifested anywhere near his body.

  He almost snapped it out.

  His core surged, the nullification field expanding for a fraction of a second before he caught it—seized it—and held it back with the mental equivalent of slamming a door.

  Because the mana was not hostile.

  It was not coming from the cultists. It was not an attack. It was not a trap or an enchantment or a compulsion. The signature was unfamiliar—warm, organic, carrying the faintly metallic taste that Thomas associated with—

  Blood magic.

  It was coming from Florence.

  The mana threaded through the damaged tissue with a finesse that belied Florence's claim of inexperience. It was instinctive rather than precise—she was not repairing the ligament, not knitting torn fibers back together, because she didn't know how. What she was doing was simpler and, in its own way, more impressive: she was telling the blood to stop. The hemorrhaging vessels around the joint constricted. The pooling blood within the capsule began to disperse, drawn back into the surrounding tissue by a gentle, insistent pressure that Florence exerted with her palms and her will. The swelling retreated—not fully, not completely, but enough. The angry purple faded to a dull, manageable red.

  The pain dropped from blinding to bearable.

  Thomas stared at his ankle. Then he stared at Florence.

  She was kneeling beside him, her bloodstained hands still resting on his boot, her face flushed with exertion and something that looked suspiciously like pride. Her breathing was heavy. A thin sheen of sweat had broken across her forehead.

  "Florence," Thomas said slowly. His voice was very quiet, very controlled, and vibrating with an emotion he could not immediately name. "You're a mage."

  It was not a question.

  Florence looked at him. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

  "...You never asked?"

  Thomas stared at her for a long, unblinking moment. His expression cycled through approximately seven distinct emotional states in the span of two seconds—shock, disbelief, anger, bewilderment, a flicker of hurt, something that might have been awe, and finally a hard, pragmatic resignation that settled over his features like a visor being lowered.

  "We are going to talk about this later," he said. The words were measured, precise, and carried the weight of an oath. "At length. In detail. With visual aids if necessary."

  He grabbed her by the shoulder. Looked her dead in the eyes.

  "Stay."