Orion's army…
The more 'reliable' half had entrenched itself close to the castle using the reinforced stone wall formations, they had losses that Orion had already estimated from what he could observe and that fell within the margins he'd calculated for this phase. Acceptable numbers, given what they'd accomplished.
The other half… The portion that had chosen the least convenient possible mont to develop independent opinions, had broken formation and was now fighting alongside an army that should not have arrived yet. Their techniques were directed against a section of the flow of mutants that was moving with more autonomy than Orion had been actively directing.
He observed that last part just now.
He pulled his attention to the crystals that were currently serving as the anchors for his barrier and examined the control of the corrupted beasts out of habit.
The flow was present. The connection was there, responsive, functioning.
He made a small adjustnt to the mutants' direction, a slight correction to test the response.
They moved accordingly. No problem.
He held the observation for a mont, then settled it. He'd been underground managing the tunnel for a sustained period, occupied with a level of technical focus that didn't leave room for active managent of the flow, just the previous ordered direction. But they had changed the target direction slightly not long ago.
The mutants had continued attacking on their own montum, which was what they did when no active direction was applied. That was their nature, not a malfunction. The connection had been intact the whole ti.
He told himself this with the certainty of a man who has reached a conclusion and sees no reason to revisit it.
He redirected the flow in full.
The mutants that the new defender group and the defectors had been contending with shifted direction, pressing with their full numbers toward the new army and the traitors alike, pushing them back from the castle's periter, away from the ground Orion still controlled. It wasn't an optimal outco, the pressure on the city castle and the academy would ease with the mutants partially reoriented, and that respite was a cost he'd have preferred not to pay. But it recovered the territorial position the remaining half of his army could regroup well first and breathe.
He contemplated the full accounting of what today had produced.
Selphira and Victor had made it out. That was the entry on the balance sheet that carried the most weight, and he wasn't going to pretend otherwise or dress it up as sothing more favorable than it was. They had escaped. That was the fact. But Selphira had co out of the tunnel as a woman who had burned through everything she had, her body compromised from crystals as Victor had been first, sothing she had no way to recover from. Victor wasn't in any fighting condition either. Whatever threat either of them represented in their current state was negligible compared to what they would have been at full capacity. They were no longer useful as fighters. They were no longer a factor he needed to plan around.
They were just hostages.
The second step of the plan had never depended on them to begin with... It depended on joining the groups waiting on the other side of the city, the ones who had stayed out of today's engagent by deliberate order, the ones who had watched from a distance while the first moves were made, the ones who would now march alongside what remained of his army with the weight of the crystals behind them. It depended on clearly making the situation obvious for the people and demanding what's theirs.
With that force and with the mutants under control, the castle would have no workable choice but to yield the remaining ruins and the access they represented to start his full connection with the crystals.
And then the final step.
But he knew there was a small extra problem he had to address fast first... Orion thought briefly about the strange boy and allowed himself to feel sothing that wasn't quite satisfactory. With ti the kid could find a way to reverse crystalisation…
So he needed to finish him now.
There would be no ti to find a cure. No ti to recover what had already been neutralized,nor ti or room to grow into sothing capable of closing the distance between them with so magical training arc.
It was now or never.
For both of them.
♢♢♢♢
Earth was the most boring elent to explain and the hardest to stop.
Julius had known that since he was old enough to argue about elents with anyone willing to listen, and he had confird it enough tis in actual combat that the theory no longer needed demonstration. Fire was spectacular and powerful. Wood was impressive, its growth input arriving almost instantly when you needed it. Wind was silent and sharp. Water was versatile, beloved for how it healed. Each of them had a mont, a peak, a reason people talked about them.
And Earth was the one less talked but still pushing when everyone else had finished doing impressive things.
The twins had understood that too late.
Orion had tested their capability beforehand, trusted them with the mutant flow, but his brothers hadn't inherited his obsession,his strong will or his patience. They had many mistakes after a while.
When Julius's group found the seam in their control and pushed toward it, the twins lost the thread. The mutants drifted. Not for long, just long enough, but Julius had spent his entire career building a life on those kinds of monts and he wasn't going to waste this one. His group moved hard toward the exit while the twins scrambled to reestablish the flow and bla each other for losing it.
By the ti they coordinated again, it was too late to stop the retreat entirely by only redirecting mutants.
So they had done what panicked people with firepower tend to do: they escalated. The combined beam arrived to cut off Julius's group, fire and water twisted together in a combination that was technically chaotic but technically coherent, the kind of technique that took real cooperation to produce and real discipline to maintain under pressure. Julius absorbed the first impact with a reinforced mineral shield and noticed sothing the twins probably didn't know he would notice.
The beam fluctuated.
It was a genuine achievent, synchronizing two separate tars well enough to make a technique that heavy and complex viable at all. One person would have struggled to execute it at all. Two people executing it together were capable of sothing neither could produce alone.
But two people controlling a single technique always had that problem. That millisecond of difference between one person's impulse and the other's, invisible under normal conditions, indistinguishable from noise unless you were looking for it specifically. In most fights it didn't matter. Against most opponents it would never surface.
But Julius was the kind of person who looked for the crack in people. He had been doing it since long before he had any business doing it, and he was very good at it.
His group also had an advantage the twins hadn't fully accounted for. Earth was the elent with the best internal synergy of all of them, his tars' mana was compatible not just with his own but with each other's, the flow passing between them and returning reinforced in a way that resembled a battery that recharged itself from the effort of being used. Not infinite efficiency... Just extended efficiency, which in a long fight was exactly the sa thing as the only efficiency that mattered.
They ford the feedback pattern Julius had been preparing since he first identified the fluctuation. The mineral shield reshaped itself into sothing narrower and more reactive to the spin, a drill that matched the spiral's own rotation and drove against it along the axis of least resistance. It was patient work... It required everyone to trust the pattern and not flinch from the pressure, and his tars trusted it because they'd seen it work before and because Julius had a way of communicating absolute confidence in a plan without saying anything about it directly.
The twins had no sophistication available to them at that point. They had panic, and they had supposedly unmatched firepower, so when they saw Julius advancing anyway they had more panic.
By the ti a few ters separated Julius from the exit, the twins had already switched to their barrier and ran. Which was, if Julius was being honest with himself, a relief… Maintaining the fusion much longer would have started costing him in ways he would have felt later, and not having to fight through a last desperate push let him conserve the reserves he'd need above ground.
They ca out with more left in them than he'd expected to have…
In summary Julius had won after a long battle against the mutants, which then transford into a battle against the chaotic spiral beam of fire and water. The beam battle had been a bit long, but considerably shorter than the one Selphira survived.
♢♢♢♢
Just minutes before leaving, Julius was certain he could escape and had decided on his next move.
"Zhao."
He didn't need to say anything else.
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