Audree's shoulders trembled as she finished speaking. Solace stared at her, anger rising like heat in her chest, yet something else broke through first. Softness. Recognition. A steady, unexpected gratitude.
Solace stepped closer.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "For keeping me alive. For doing it even when you were afraid."
Audree blinked, startled by the gentleness. Her breath wavered.
"I will keep healing you," she whispered. "For as long as I can."
Solace nodded. "Stay out of sight. You are not safe."
Audree swallowed and nodded quickly. She slipped behind the pillar again, vanishing into shadow.
Solace turned. Then she ran back into the storm.
Back in the courtyard, Wonek was already charging when Solace re-entered. Their fists collided again, a violent rhythm echoing across the cracked stone.
He struck her across the jaw. She healed.
She kicked him in the ribs. He shook it off.
He slammed her into the ground. She rose in an instant.
She drove her elbow into his chest. He staggered and reset his stance.
It was the same brutal stalemate. Power against power, will against will, neither able to break the other.
The courtyard trembled under their next clash, dust rising in bursts. Solace braced for another hit.
A sharp whistle cut the air.
Everything stopped.
Wonek froze mid-strike. Solace halted. Arlenna and Thiago turned toward the sound.
King Salt dropped from the upper wall, landing in a crouch that cracked the stone beneath him. His eyes swept the courtyard, reading every bruise, every twisted detail. Then his gaze locked on Wonek.
"Wonek," he said quietly. "We need to speak."
Wonek's breath wavered. "Now is not the time, Salt."
"It cannot wait," Salt replied. His voice stayed calm, but something beneath it carried urgency. "You knew something was wrong here. You felt it long before I arrived."
Wonek flinched, as if the truth struck harder than any blow. "Do not start. I trusted him."
Salt's gaze hardened. "You trusted the wrong man."
Wonek's breath wavered. "And what would you have done? Accuse a king with no proof?"
"I would have listened to my instincts. Yours were screaming."
Wonek hesitated. His eyes flicked briefly toward Nick, then back to Salt. "Salt, this is not the time."
Salt met his gaze. "If not now, then when."
The tension cracked. Both men squared their shoulders, neither willing to yield.
Salt exhaled slowly. "It is the only time. If you keep running from this—"
The Perceptive King burst from the rubble, sprinting low and silent, aiming straight for Salt's throat.
Salt did not turn.
Then he moved once. A single shift of weight. A clean cut of his hand through the air.
The Perceptive King's momentum stopped cold. His throat opened before he understood he had been countered. His body hit the stone without a sound.
Arlenna stared, wide-eyed. Thiago let out a sharp, stunned breath.
Nick's mask finally fractured. His smile fell. His calm broke. The careful warmth he had crafted collapsed like shattered glass.
Nick looked across the courtyard, mind moving with measured calculation. The Perceptive King's lifeless body marked a turning point, and the moment the man's chest stopped rising the battlefield shifted in a way Nick felt rather than saw.
The Bond ruptured.
For Nick, it was not a sound or a flash of light. It was a silence, a sudden and jarring emptiness where unity had existed only a moment before.
Reverent Bond had always been subtle, almost invisible unless you knew its texture. It was not mind reading, not sensing, not command. It was rhythm, shared timing, shared certainty, a quiet alignment of instinct and intention among those he respected.
Through it, he felt Wonek's weight shift before a strike and the Perceptive King's silent warnings in the angle of his stance. He felt the Fearsome King's pressure rising or falling like breath. They were not thoughts and not images, only coordination.
But when the Perceptive King stopped breathing, the structure the Bond created collapsed in on itself. One of the threads anchoring their formation went dark, and without it the rest of the web sagged, warped and tore.
Nick felt it like a musician losing half a symphony mid-note.
The battlefield's rhythm jolted out of sync. The shared instinct vanished. The quiet confidence that flowed between them flickered and died.
His commands no longer moved through the formation with their usual precision, and the Fearsome King hesitated under Salt's presence. When the Perceptive King fell, the steady stream of battlefield cues Nick relied on vanished. The natural awareness the man provided went silent at once, leaving Nick with only his own senses to track the courtyard.
For the first time since the fight began, he saw everything with unfiltered attention.
And that was when he truly registered what Solace's body was doing.
He watched her jaw knit back together in seconds. He watched bruises fade before her feet touched the ground. He watched stamina surge where exhaustion should have pinned her.
Solace had no healing ability. He knew that with absolute certainty.
So if she was rising after every crippling blow, someone was keeping her alive. Someone close. Someone hiding. Someone who should not have been able to come this near the fight without being noticed.
Nick swept his attention across the courtyard, not in search of movement but of stillness. He looked for the one corner where sound failed to echo, where dust never settled, where the air bent around a presence that refused to claim space.
A place only a mendor would hide.
Nick's expression hardened as the last trace of his practiced calm slipped away. His eyes narrowed with a quiet, lethal fury.
He had found the mistake.
Behind the pillar, Audree clutched her chest, panting so hard her breaths broke into tiny shivers. Sweat streaked down her cheekbone. Her hands trembled uncontrollably, her magic flickering weakly between her fingers like a dying spark.
She had pushed herself too far. Too many deep heals. Too fast. Too much.
Her vision blurred, but she smiled through it, just barely.
Solace was still standing. Still fighting. Still alive.
That was enough.
Audree leaned her forehead against the stone and let her body sag as her knees gave out. She slid down the pillar until she sat slumped at its base, chest rising and falling in desperate, uneven pulls. Her fingertips glowed one last time before the light faded completely.
But for the first time in her life, she wasn't afraid.
A soft, trembling breath escaped her, almost a laugh.
"It's okay," she whispered. "Solace is going to stop him... and maybe... maybe we all get to go home."
She closed her eyes for a heartbeat, letting herself imagine it a world without fear, without chains digging into her bones, without hands dragging children away while she stood powerless to stop it. She imagined standing in sunlight. She imagined being free.
A shadow fell over her.
Audree's eyes fluttered open.
Nick stood only a few steps away. His face was carved from stillness, the kind that never meant peace. The moment he heard the word home, something behind his eyes went dark.
"You."
Audree's breath caught. She didn't try to stand. She didn't beg. She only looked up at him with that small, fragile hope still softening her expression, a hope she hadn't felt since she was a child.
Nick lunged.
His hand closed around her throat. Her fingers lifted weakly, brushing at his wrist in a trembling, instinctive plea. The force of the impact slammed her back into the pillar. The weakened stone split with a sharp, echoing crack. A chunk of it broke away and fell aside just enough for Wonek to see her.
"Nick, no!" Wonek shouted.
Nick didn't hear him. Or didn't care.
With a single, brutal twist, he snapped her neck.
Her body sagged instantly and slipped behind the half-collapsed pillar as Nick turned away, already stepping back toward the fight, unaware of what he had revealed.
A moment later, the loosened slab of stone slid fully free and toppled outward, exposing Audree's small, folded form on the ground, her face tilted upward, eyes half-open toward a sky she would never see again.
Silence rolled across the courtyard.
Solace's vision washed white.
Wonek stared at the exposed body, breath leaving him in a broken, trembling collapse.
And Nick never looked back.
He had ended her hope as effortlessly as crushing a flame beneath his heel.
Wonek stared at him, horror creeping across his face. "Nick... what have you done?"
Nick realized they had seen, then simply decided it didn't matter. His face hardened with quiet certainty that Wonek would remain loyal.
"She betrayed her King," he said. "She was a liability. Let us end this and speak plainly."
Wonek did not move. He did not breathe. He only stared at the man he once believed in.
"No," he whispered, glancing at Salt, then at Solace, shaken and devastated. "There is nothing left to say."
Solace stepped forward, anger and grief tightening in her chest until it hurt to breathe. Her voice trembled, not from fear but from the fury she could no longer swallow.
"You killed a girl who only ever helped people," she said. "If you think I'm letting you hurt anyone else, you're out of your mind."
Nick's eyes slid to her with cold disinterest, already dismissing her.
Solace's voice steadied.
"She didn't deserve to die for doing the right thing. And I'm done letting you decide who gets to live in this kingdom."
She took another step, but Wonek's hand rose sharply in front of her, stopping her mid-stride.
"Not this time," he said quietly.
He moved past her, his gaze locked on Nick with a terrible, steady resolve she had never seen from him.
"I should have stopped him long before today."
Nick let out a soft breath, almost a laugh. "You had your chance. Years of them. And you did nothing."
Wonek did not flinch.
Solace met his eyes, and for a heartbeat she saw the man he wanted to be. She stepped aside, not backward but beside him.
"You're right," she said, her voice low and fierce. "But you're not doing this alone. Not anymore."
She turned her gaze to Nick.
"And I'll make sure no one like Audree ever dies under you again."