The rain didn't fall so much as hang.
Velith's sky was a lid of smoke and static, pressing the light down into a wet gray smear.
Ruins breathed heat — the kind that came from machines dying, not fire. The air smelled of iron and ozone.
Mael stood on a crooked stretch of tramline, hands in his coat pockets, watching the rain scatter off the broken metal at his feet.
For a while, it almost looked peaceful — if you ignored the faint shimmer of Mirra distortion crawling over the horizon like a slow, approaching storm.
He tilted his head.
"They sent two," he murmured, to no one in particular.
"Cute."
---
The Guild's Shadow
They came walking, not rushing.
Liora first — silver braid, eyes like polished quartz, the disciplined stride of someone who'd long ago forgotten hesitation. The faint halo around her hands pulsed with hardlight; it bent the rain into thin sheets of gold as she moved.
Behind her, Drayk trudged forward like the memory of a landslide — taller, broader, his coat sleeved with glowing sigils where Mirra veins ran hot under his skin. The ground stiffened under each step; pebbles turned to glass where his boots touched.
They stopped twenty meters away.
Three shadows, one street, and a silence thick enough to press against the chest.
---
The Warning
"Mael of the Lost Nine," Liora's voice cut clean through the noise.
It was cold, trained, but not cruel. "By order of the Guild, you're under detainment for the Velith incident. Come quietly."
Mael looked up at her like a man being woken from a nap.
"Under detainment." He repeated the words as if tasting something old.
Then smiled — thin, lazy, a grin that shouldn't have belonged in a corpse city.
"You people still think words work on me?"
Drayk shifted slightly, the faint hum of transmutation crawling up his forearm.
"We don't think," he said. "We know."
"That," Mael said, "is your first mistake."
---
The First Step
A piece of the broken tram gave a metallic groan — the kind that comes before something moves but hasn't yet decided if it should.
Mael glanced down. Rain rippled on the steel surface, each droplet vibrating faster than the last.
Liora's eyes narrowed. "He's charging something."
Drayk didn't wait for confirmation. He slammed his foot into the ground.
Metal around him rippled and hardened into a barrier wall that rose like teeth from the earth, surrounding Mael in a half-circle.
The sound it made was awful — the scream of earth trying to become armor.
But when the steam cleared, Mael wasn't there.
---
The Breath Between Strikes
He reappeared on a section of broken scaffolding above them, watching.
"Efficient," he said, voice echoing down through the metal. "But you build cages too easily. Maybe that's why you're always looking for monsters to justify them."
Liora raised her hand. Blades of light flared to life, cutting through the rain like shards of sunlight through fog.
She spun them once, the gesture almost elegant.
"You talk too much," she said.
"And you listen too little."
"Because I already know how you end."
---
The Spark
The first spark of their clash wasn't sound.
It was absence — a sharp moment where every droplet of rain near Mael froze midair, hung in hesitation.
Then the world caught up.
Liora's blades carved across the scaffolding, slicing it apart. Drayk flung rebar like javelins, each one whistling with condensed Mirra.
Steel shrieked. Sparks painted the air orange.
Mael dropped down between them, boots cracking stone.
For the first time, his smile disappeared. His eyes — once unreadable — sharpened.
"You should've brought more than two."
The next second was pure blur —
metal bending, light breaking, and Mael's hand flicking forward, sending something invisible that split the rain like glass.
Liora ducked just in time; the force shaved off the corner of a building behind her.
Drayk cursed. "He's already—"
"Don't say it," Liora snapped, reforming her blades. "He's still human."
Mael chuckled under his breath.
"Human enough to disappoint you, maybe."
---
The End of Calm
The ground cracked beneath his feet.
Every droplet of rain for ten meters exploded upward — not vaporized, but repelled, forced away by some unseen rhythm.
Liora's eyes widened.
"Mirra displacement?"
Mael tilted his head. "That's one way to name it."
He raised a hand — slow, deliberate.
"I prefer to call it… quiet."
Then the sound vanished.
Not the rain, not the thunder — everything.
No air, no echo, no heartbeat. Just a thin, deafening silence where even thought seemed muted.
Liora felt the pressure crawl into her skull. Drayk staggered a step, ears bleeding slightly from the sudden absence of sound.
And through that unnatural stillness, Mael spoke.
"Let's begin properly."
---
The silence broke like glass.
Light erupted — golden blades clashing with invisible force.
Steel screamed again.
Somewhere far above, a drone caught a flicker of three figures moving faster than its frame rate could follow.
Then static swallowed the feed.
---
End of Chapter 43.
---