Mezzo reached the west hall at a dead sprint.
He heard the fight before he saw it.
Electricity shrieked against stone. Everstill struck the floor with a deep, warped crack that made the air bend around it. Skye’s summoned guardian roared, Lumina’s shield flared rose-gold, and Maven Eldritch laughed like she had found religion in the middle of a knife fight.
Then Mezzo came around the corner.
Hughes was bleeding.
Skye looked half-terrified and half-determined.
Lumina was holding her shield up with both hands, face tight with pain.
And Maven stood in the centre of it all, electric scythe humming at her side, dark eyes bright with delighted madness.
Mezzo did not slow down.
“Oh, you absolute psycho nun-cat.”
Maven turned.
Mezzo hit her.
Not with grace.
Not with strategy.
With the full force of a very angry Dalmatian Hybrid who had just carried Celeste half-dead across a cathedral and had reached the end of his patience with organised religion.
His fist cracked across Maven’s jaw.
Her head snapped sideways.
For half a second, the hall went still.
Then Maven slowly turned her face back.
A thin line of blood marked the corner of her mouth.
Her smile widened.
“Oh,” she said. “There you are.”
Mezzo shook out his hand.
“Yeah. And I’ve had a really bad day.”
Maven touched the blood at her lip, examining it with genuine interest.
“How charming. You brought feelings.”
“I brought fists.”
Hughes stepped in beside him, Everstill raised.
“Aye. And I brought sense, though apparently not enough of it.”
Mezzo glanced at him.
“You look like shite.”
“You smell like panic.”
“Celeste is in the Gwennan.”
Hughes’s expression changed for a fraction.
Relief.
Then focus.
“Good.”
Maven’s eyes glittered.
“How touching. The wounded heroine deposited safely in a vehicle while the loyal animals return to die in the corridor.”
Mezzo bared his teeth.
“You really do talk too much.”
“So I’ve been told. By people with far less blood on them.”
Hughes grunted.
“Give it a minute.”
They moved together.
Hughes struck low with Everstill. Mezzo blurred around Maven’s side, fists snapping toward her ribs, jaw, wrist. Maven caught the crook with the scythe shaft and twisted away from Mezzo’s first punch, but the second clipped her shoulder.
She spun with it.
The scythe carved down.
Mezzo ducked under the blade so close the static lifted his hair.
“Missed me.”
Maven’s elbow slammed into his sternum.
“Not really.”
He wheezed, staggered, then snapped back in with another furious burst of speed.
Hughes hooked Everstill behind Maven’s ankle.
“Now.”
Mezzo drove a punch toward her exposed side.
Maven’s nullifier bracer flashed.
Grey anti-mana burst outward in a flat pulse.
Lumina’s shield flickered.
Skye’s guardian snarled as part of its armour dissolved into sparks.
Everstill’s chronal shimmer guttered.
Mezzo felt the mana in the air collapse like someone had sucked the breath out of the room.
“Ah,” Maven said sweetly. “No.”
The nullifier field rolled across them.
Skye stumbled, Aurex Arcana sputtering around his wrist.
Lumina gasped as her shield thinned.
Hughes swore.
Maven’s scythe came around in a low, vicious sweep.
Hughes caught it on Everstill, but the force of the blow drove him back half a step. Sparks spat across his coat. His injured shoulder screamed.
Mezzo appeared on Maven’s flank, fast enough to blur.
She turned before he landed the punch.
Of course she did.
Her scythe shaft cracked toward his ribs.
Mezzo twisted away, teeth bared.
“Oh, you smug electric scarecrow.”
Maven’s smile brightened.
“Scarecrow? How rustic. I’m touched you reached for imagery within your reading level.”
Mezzo’s eyes narrowed.
Then his guitar flashed into his hands.
Hughes glanced at him.
“Is this really the time?”
“It is always the time.”
Mezzo threw the guitar under his feet and jumped onto it like a board.
The strings ignited.
Flame roared beneath him.
“Scorchslide!”
He shot across the hall in a streak of fire, riding the guitar like a flaming skateboard. A burning trail carved behind him, curling across the stone in a bright orange line.
Maven stepped back as the flame snapped at the hem of her robes.
For once, she had to move where Mezzo wanted her to.
“Ha!” Mezzo shouted. “Dance, you creepy cathedral stapler!”
Skye blinked.
“Cathedral stapler?”
“I panicked!”
The flame trail shimmered with gryphon mana, hot and quick. Hughes stepped through it and felt the speed buff hit his legs like a second pulse of adrenaline.
“Oh, that’s useful.”
Mezzo skidded around Maven in a wide arc, sparks kicking from beneath the guitar.
“Course it is. I’m a treasure.”
“You’re loud.”
“Also that.”
Lumina saw Maven’s guard shift toward Mezzo and moved before fear could stop her.
Roselight Blade flared in her hands.
She darted in low.
“Petal Dance Slash!”
One strike cut upward, releasing a swirl of pink-white petals.
The second came across Maven’s side, petals bursting outward in a radiant splash.
The third strike aimed for Maven’s wrist, fast and clean, the blossom-light spinning around Lumina like a tiny storm.
For one hopeful second, it worked.
Maven’s smile flickered as the radiant petals snapped against her sleeve and cheek.
Then the scythe shaft slammed down.
She caught Lumina’s third strike and forced it aside.
“Pretty,” Maven said. “Insufficient.”
Lumina’s eyes widened.
Maven’s boot struck her shield before the blade could reach her body, throwing Lumina backward across the flaming trail.
The Scorchslide fire caught beneath Lumina’s boots, not burning her, but pushing her faster.
She slid back into guard instead of falling.
Hughes saw it.
Mezzo saw it too.
“See?” Mezzo snapped. “Treasure.”
“Focus,” Hughes growled.
Maven attacked again.
This time she came for Skye.
The scythe swept toward him in a bright electric crescent. Skye stumbled back, Aurex Arcana flaring uselessly as he tried to summon another card.
Hughes planted Everstill into the floor.
His chest expanded.
Mana rolled up through him, old and stubborn and deep as mountain roots.
Then Hughes bellowed.
Not shouted.
Bellowed.
A full goat’s roar ripped out of him, amplified by Everstill until it became a shockwave of sound and time. The hall fractured around it. The air split into ripples. Dust froze mid-fall. Maven’s scythe slowed half an inch from Skye’s throat.
Chrono-Bellow.
The wave slammed through the corridor.
The weaker paladins still staggering in the distance froze mid-motion, trapped in brief, trembling stillness. Maven herself did not freeze, but she staggered, one hand flying to the side of her head as the time-fracture rattled through her implants.
Skye ducked under the scythe and scrambled back.
“Thank you!”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Hughes rasped.
The bellow had bought seconds.
Only seconds.
But seconds were his trade.
Mezzo shot in again along the last strip of Scorchslide flame, speed boosted, fists blazing.
Lumina raised her shield and sent a pulse of rose-light into Skye’s armoured guardian, strengthening the cracks in its plated form.
Hughes moved with them, Everstill sweeping for Maven’s knee.
For a moment, they had her.
Maven blocked Mezzo’s first punch.
Lumina’s petals burst against her shoulder.
Skye’s guardian slammed into her from the other side.
Hughes hooked Everstill behind her ankle.
Maven’s smile vanished.
Then her nullifier bracer opened.
Grey light pulsed outward.
The flaming trail guttered.
Lumina’s petals dissolved.
Skye’s guardian staggered as half its armour peeled away into sparks.
The speed buff died under Hughes’s feet.
Maven straightened slowly, eyes shining.
“Well,” she said, almost breathless with delight. “That was nearly a plan.”
Mezzo did not wait.
Mana or not, his legs still worked.
He launched himself at Maven in a blur.
Fast.
Faster than most people could follow.
His feet hammered the stone. He darted left, snapped right, struck from her blind side, then vanished low and came up with a hook aimed beneath her guard.
Maven blocked it.
Cleanly.
Mezzo blinked.
He struck again.
She caught his wrist.
Again.
He twisted free, came in with a knee, then a backfist, then a rapid one-two that should have battered through any ordinary defence.
Maven stepped around every blow.
Not rushed.
Not surprised.
Not even strained.
She moved as if Mezzo had warned her before each strike.
Her scythe shaft cracked against his ribs.
He stumbled.
She hit him again across the shoulder.
Then she caught him by the front of his coat and drove him back into the wall hard enough to knock the breath from him.
Mezzo tried to move.
The scythe blade snapped up under his chin.
Electricity purred against his throat.
He froze.
Maven leaned close.
“You can move fast,” she said softly. “Unfortunately, you can’t think fast.”
Mezzo’s eyes burned with fury.
Maven’s smile became almost pitying.
“You need to think before you move, not during. Such a shame. I thought you might be a challenge.”
“Bite me.”
“I have standards.”
Hughes’s grip tightened around Everstill.
His jaw clenched.
The last attempt to accelerate time had nearly torn something in his chest. His shoulder screamed. Blood ran hot down his sleeve.
He did it anyway.
Mana gathered around him slowly, painfully, dragged through the broken pressure of the nullifier field by sheer stubbornness.
“Hughes,” Skye warned.
“I know.”
The air around Everstill began to ripple.
Not backward this time.
Forward.
Hughes drove the crook into the stone.
The effect snapped out from him in a tight pulse, wrapping around his own body first, then Skye, then Lumina.
Time sped.
Not the world.
Them.
The corridor stretched.
Sound deepened.
Maven’s scythe-light slowed from a shriek to a bright, crawling ribbon.
Mezzo’s breath misted in the charged air.
And Maven’s eyes moved.
Hughes saw it then.
Properly.
Tiny adjustments. Silver light beneath the iris. Microscopic flickers tracking muscle tension, angle, weight, intention. Her pupils narrowed and widened in patterns too precise to be natural.
Augmented.
Her eyes were not just seeing.
They were calculating.
Maven smiled slowly.
Because now she could see him too.
Hughes was moving at her speed.
His breathing slowed.
Then his mouth pulled into a grin.
Maven noticed.
“Aye.”
Maven’s smile sharpened.
“Clever goat.”
“Slow cat.”
Her expression twitched.
His breathing slowed.
Then his mouth pulled into a grin.
Blood on his teeth.
Maven noticed.
“Oh,” she said. “That expression usually means someone has had a terrible idea.”
“Aye,” Hughes said.
He lifted Everstill.
“And this one’s a beauty.”
Skye lifted Aurex Arcana with shaking hands.
“Barrier Guardian!”
A heavy card slammed into the floor beside Maven and unfolded into a ring of plated light. The armoured guardian reformed around her, not attacking this time, but locking its massive arms into the stone like a living cage.
Maven’s scythe flashed.
The guardian held.
Just.
Mezzo dropped from the wall as soon as the blade left his throat, coughing hard and clutching his neck.
Lumina saw the opening.
Her hand went to the stun grenade Marvin had given her.
For one second, fear crossed her face.
Then she threw it.
The grenade spun end over end through the slowed air, its little black-and-silver circuits blinking awake.
It struck Maven just beneath the collarbone.
And stuck.
Maven looked down.
“Oh.”
The grenade detonated.
Electricity exploded across her body.
Not a blast.
A cage.
Blue-white current crawled over her throat, spine, wrists, and skull. The implants under her skin lit up in sharp silver lines. Her back arched. The electric scythe shrieked and dropped from her hand, clattering across the stone.
Maven screamed.
Then laughed.
The sound was awful.
Joyful.
Broken open.
“How clever!”
Her knees hit the floor.
The guardian vanished.
Maven collapsed forward, one hand clawing into the tiles as electricity snapped through her body in violent pulses.
Her manic smile stayed fixed in place.
“Oh, you are clever,” she gasped, fingers scraping against the stone as she tried to drag herself upright. “All of you. Horrible little miracles.”
Skye backed up.
Lumina’s shield flickered.
Hughes stepped between them and Maven.
“Move.”
Maven’s claws scored the floor.
“I will enjoy catching you.”
She dragged one knee under herself.
Still smiling.
Still trying to rise.
“I will take you apart so gently.”
Hughes looked at Lumina and Skye.
“To the van. Now.”
Lumina grabbed Skye’s sleeve.
“But—”
“Now.”
They ran.
Hughes turned to Mezzo.
“Find the others.”
Mezzo was still coughing, eyes watering from where the scythe had kissed his throat.
“What?”
“Run. Don’t stop till you do.”
Mezzo looked once at Maven.
She was crawling toward them, shaking violently, smile bright as a cracked altar candle.
“Oh, that’s cursed.”
“Mezzo.”
“Aye. Going.”
He bolted down the opposite corridor, faster than sense, fear, or dignity.
Hughes backed away, keeping Everstill raised.
Maven’s fingers dragged over the tiles.
One inch.
Then another.
Her eyes lifted to him, still fever-bright beneath the failing shimmer of her implants.
“This isn’t over,” she whispered.
Hughes gave her a grim smile.
“No.”
He turned and ran after Lumina and Skye.
Behind him, Maven laughed against the stone.
Not loudly.
Not sanely.
But happily.
The sound followed them all the way to the courtyard.
