Orion was very tired…
He had been pretending otherwise.
The honest reason was that recognizing it ant acknowledging that the old woman was exacting him more than he had planned for. Which was not, strictly speaking, his fault. The plan had accounted for Victor as a hostage and nothing more. A tar with a half-crystallized arm and days of captivity behind him had no business functioning as a aningful shield. By any reasonable calculation, he shouldn't have any fight left in him or strength enough to matter.
But Victor's partially crystallized body had turned out to be 'denser' than Orion's estimate accounted for. It had absorbed impacts for far longer than it had any right to before Selphira finally pulled him back. That miscalculation had cost him... Not critically, but he could feel the cost in the ringing, in the slight delay between decision and response that hadn't been there at the start.
He could have switched to the barrier and let himself recharge. That option had always been available. But he'd set it aside because giving Selphira even a brief respite ant giving her the choice to fully beat his soldiers and move deeper into the ruins and hunting her down afterward would have opened a window for other problems he preferred to keep closed.
He didn't have days to spend on one old woman.
So he held the beam here.
And if she could keep pushing, he'd have to endure it with his ears ringing, more easily.
The distance between them had dropped to nearly ten ters. Clearly, the old woman was incredibly stubborn, more than was reasonable. But there was a limit, and she was obviously approaching it. Every ter she gained now was costing her more than the one before, and at a certain point she would simply run out regardless of what she was willing to accept.
They couldn't be far from done now.
Orion included another rotation to the spiral and held his concentration steady.
♢♢♢♢
Nine ters.
Selphira's skills started failing, and Victor recognized it before she said anything… Because there was nothing to say. He knew that kind of failure from the inside. It was the sa silent unraveling he'd experienced the first ti Orion's beam had pressed him alone, the body still trying to channel mana that couldn't move freely through the crystal blockages anymore, still sending the signal, still insisting, and what ca out the other side was a fraction of what it should have been. Irregular and unreliable.
He had taken his potion back then, had fought with everything he had and still hadn't made it out.
Selphira had no potion now either. Victor looked at the crystals that now covered areas on almost her entire body. He knew exactly what it felt like when the body started to lock, to stiffen. He'd been living that knowledge in his own body for hours.
He knew they weren't going to reach the exit.
But Selphira kept pushing.
Not with the strength she'd had at the start, and not even with what she'd had five minutes ago. With what remained, which was considerably less than enough, yet she was spending it anyway. No complaints... Not one word asking him to take her place, not one mont where she turned to him and acknowledged that her math had stopped working. She just kept the broken shield up and kept moving, ter by ter, as though the numbers were a problem she'd deal with once she was done or dead.
Victor had spent most of his life testing the edges of her patience. She had spent just as many years of her life refusing to let him give up on things that still had breath in them, even when he couldn't see it himself.
He understood, watching her now, that he was never going to convince her to let him sacrifice himself, neither in life nor in death. She wasn't going to step aside and let him absorb the beam. She wasn't going to let him be the one to stay behind. Maybe they were more alike than he'd been willing to admit... At least on the subject of stubbornness.
He put his good hand on what remained of her shield, beside hers.
"I understand," he said, low enough since it didn't need to carry far.
Not surrender. Sothing closer to recognition, of the kind that only cos when a person finally stops arguing with a truth they've been circling for a while.
Selphira didn't respond, she just kept pushing.
Victor silently pushed with her.
♢♢♢♢
Upstairs, Orion's ears were still ringing.
It had crossed the threshold from temporary discomfort into the kind of thing that settles underneath everything else, layering a dull fatigue over thought and movent that he refused to na correctly. The body's way of presenting a bill he hadn't agreed to sign. He noted it and set it aside, because acknowledging it ant acknowledging what had caused it, and what had caused it was a woman in her final reserves who still hadn't stopped.
But it was almost over… He could see that now.
The last shield had fractured in a way that told him everything he needed to know. There was a specific quality to the resistance when a tar was running on will instead of mana, a rigidity that ca not from the skill but from the person holding it, a stubbornness that had its own texture and that could not, in the end, substitute for what it was trying to replace. He'd seen that quality in her shield for the last minutes. The ice wasn't responding the way it should. It was responding the way it could.
Not much longer.
Orion held his concentration with the inflexibility of a man who has decided he is not going to release first no matter what.
Watching the distance close.
Almost…
Almost there! The energy burst hit his senses from behind with almost no warning at all.
A whistle, and the sharp, flying feathers pierced him.
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