It didn't matter that Ren recognized the feeling. Recognition and resistance were not the sa thing.
He extended for Liora.
The mory of her fire, that sensation that burned in the painful but correct way, that pushed back against the wrong kind of feeling and replaced it with the right kind.
But this ti the quantity was different.
A fierce pain arrived before he had ti to prepare for it.
Not the pain of Liora's spiritual fire, which was clean even when it was intense. This was the pain of an absurd quantity of corruption being resisted without a channel wide enough to expel it, accumulating in the sa nodes he had been disrupting so calmly just minutes ago, backing up against the resistance his body was trying to maintain, finding nowhere to go and pressing harder in every direction.
Ren scread.
The sound filled the interior space with a volu he had never let go outside, where his physical body was still held inside the veil of darkness in the artifact's grip, about to be struck by a powerful combined triple beam.
The energy kept coming.
Outside, what Julius and the girls saw was the convergence: every mutant that had been scattered across the academy grounds now running in circles around him and funneling their energy toward the center of the eight-artifact structure, a dense black power accumulating in the core of the construct. A power dense enough that the temperature of the surrounding air dropped, not for any conventional thermal reason, but because of what that much concentrated energy did to the senses of the tar around it.
Inside, Ren felt that volu as pressure from every angle at once.
He kept resisting. Not because he had a strategy but because it was the only thing he could do, and letting himself be a toy of corruption was not a thing he was willing to consider while his lungs still had air in them.
Yet the pain was insane, maybe he was already don…
Then sothing happened outside that pulled his attention out of the pain for an instant.
Selthia's command arrived through the network, slow, like information traveling through a dium that was thicker than it should be. Ren felt it too, the instruction forming and moving outward, past the network, toward the artifact, toward the girls who were still trying to find an opening in the transformation process.
Attack them.
Ren disagreed mightily strongly. Fighting the command together with the corruption hurt too much to describe.
But he kept resisting…
Every second of resistance was a second the command took longer to execute in the external body, delayed past the timing Selthia had wanted it to be.
So the girls got their attack off in ti.
But it wasn't enough to stop the transformation. The beam struck the convergence point and seed to be absorbed, so Selthia registered it as a victory… the energy spent, she assud, would simply feed the process further.
Then it entered the vortex.
That weird beam.
Not a single elent or a common combination. Sothing that carried the essence of Liora's fire, the density of Luna's shadow, and the clarity of Larissa's light, except that it wasn't any of those three things separately. It was a new thing, the thing the three of them shaped when they arrived at the sa point at the sa mont without a prior plan for what it would beco.
The energy spun in the vortex of corruption for a mont.
Then it entered the center where Ren was.
What happened next had no category in the mana theory Ren or Selthia knew. The energies that had been pulling everything toward chaos found a structure to organize around. Corrupted in the way corruption always was, perating, seeping into every gap, but also purifying now, embracing, spiritual: all of them turning in the sa cycle, each one finding its position in a pattern that none of them could have ford alone.
The extraordinary nature of it pulled Ren's attention away from his resistance. Just for a mont. Just long enough.
So outside, Selthia's command was finally executed.
The shadow of the external entity Ren had beco raised its hand and struck toward the girls with what should have been concentrated corruption.
Yet what reached them was sothing else.
It didn't encroach them as contamination. It recognized them. The impact connected them to the interior space instead of consuming them, the bond traced by sothing that carried their signatures already mixed with Ren's in proportions that the corrupted mana network hadn't calculated, couldn't have calculated, because those proportions had never existed in a spiritual form, a form it couldn't have anticipated.
Lin was the exception.
The explosion sent her backward with the clean force of an impact that ford no connection, because Lin had not combined her energy with Ren's, but Julius caught her before she reached the ground, he had been running to help from the mont the situation started coming apart, calculating trajectories, keeping track of everyone at once.
Inside, the familiar energies entered the vortex. Their minds ca with them.
Ren recognized them.
They were warm in a known human way, the warmth of things you know so well they no longer feel external, because they aren't. They had always been at the periter of what he was, forming the edge of sothing that had no precise na but that existed regardless of whether anyone nad it. He felt the shape of each one clearly: Liora's urgency, Luna's steadiness, Larissa's directness. All of them present.
The pain of holding that much energy was still there.
But it was a benign pain now.
He embraced it.
Liora's energy scorched with its full intensity. He accepted it. Luna's shadow cut with a coldness that wasn't hostile, just honest about what it was. He accepted that too. Larissa's light didn't ask permission before it started cleaning what it found. He accepted it the sa way.
The interior space ca back to him.
Not gradually… All at once, the way sothing returns when it was never entirely gone and was only waiting for soone to take hold of it again.
Ren's jade-gold network expanded and took the energy Selthia's had been built from, so she got fragnted, collapsing back into her human shape, semi-translucent now, her form diminished and unsteady on the floor of the space.
The empty library transford into a chamber surrounded by golden roots.
Ren stood at the center, bare as he had been at the start, though at least now covered in his diamond armor. Selthia was on the floor just in front of him, wearing the sa expression she'd had the first ti the mushroom launched her into the wall, except that this ti sothing that could be called exhaustion had settled into her too-perfect features.
She was already fading at the edges. She would disappear from his interior soon.
Ren exhaled and finally relaxed.
But then he observed sothing else.
The interior space, which had been exclusively his for as long as he had any mory of it, now held three additional presences.
Three very specific presences.
And all three of them were looking at him.
In a very particular situation.
"How could you abuse like that…" Selthia seed about to cry.
Anyway, as always...
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