The lieutenant kept walking.
He did not rush.
He did not posture.
He did not call orders like a man desperate to sound powerful.
He simply advanced while the battle bent around him.
Floodlights cast harsh white over the refinery yard. Steel beams, rusted tanks, and broken concrete made the place feel like the skeleton of some dead machine, and inside that hollow carcass the militia moved with terrifying discipline.
Devonte shifted his footing, blade low, shoulders relaxed.
Prince stood just off his right, one glove darkened with blood near the knuckles, expression sharpened into something colder than confidence.
In Destiny's ear-feed, she could hear both of them breathing.
Steady.
Controlled.
But tighter than before.
"Don't focus on the lieutenant yet," she said. "The formation is built to bleed you out before he even engages."
Prince's voice came clipped between movements. "That would've been useful thirty seconds ago."
"It was true thirty seconds ago too."
The first militia fighter reached Devonte again.
He came in with a heavy right hand—direct, efficient, no theatrics. Devonte angled past it and cut clean across the attacker's throat. The blade bit deep.
The man staggered.
Did not fall.
Devonte's eyes hardened.
A second fighter crashed in from the side, using the first man's body as a moving shield. Devonte caught the shift too late to fully evade and took a forearm across the ribs hard enough to launch him sideways into a concrete barrier.
The wall cracked on impact.
Prince moved instantly.
"Law of Direction."
A baton strike meant for Devonte veered off-course in mid-swing and slammed into the knee of another militia soldier with a wet, brutal crunch. Before the fighter could recover, Prince stepped in and drove a palm into his sternum.
"Law of Force."
The impact folded the man backward and hurled him through a sheet-metal partition.
But another was already in Prince's face.
Fast.
Too fast for men built like this.
Prince's Sovereign Eye flared, reality reducing itself into lines, trajectories, pressure, and decision. He saw the shoulder turn before the elbow came. Saw the next hit before the fist existed.
He slipped the first punch by an inch.
The second kissed his jaw anyway.
His head snapped sideways.
Blood flashed from the corner of his mouth.
The militia man followed with ruthless economy—short elbow, body shot, rising hook.
Prince blocked two, redirected one, and still got driven back three full steps.
"Destiny," he said through clenched teeth, "I am officially revising my opinion of these people."
"They're reading your timing," she said, eyes darting between drone feeds. "Not perfectly, but enough. Devonte, two o'clock. Prince, low flank."
Devonte ducked under a rushing tackle and buried his sword through a man's side as he passed. He ripped it free, pivoted, and drove the hilt into another attacker's throat. The man gagged, but the response was immediate—two more militia boxed Devonte in at angles designed to deny him room to swing.
That was when Destiny understood.
"They've trained for ability users," she said.
Prince twisted, caught a wrist, and altered its motion just enough to make the fighter break his partner's nose with his own strike.
"I gathered that."
"No, I mean specifically." Her voice tightened. "Their spacing isn't random. They're forcing compact engagements to reduce technique variance."
Devonte slashed low, opened one man's thigh, then kicked another back into a rusted support beam. "So what?"
"So they've done this before."
For the first time, that thought landed on all of them at once.
Not improvised.
Not mercenary muscle.
Not just enhanced bodies following orders.
This was infrastructure.
A system built to kill people like them.
The lieutenant watched in silence from the center yard.
His coat shifted lightly in the dead wind. One hand rested behind his back. The other hung loose at his side.
He still had not entered the fight.
Which somehow made everything worse.
Prince ducked beneath another swing and touched two fingers toward the attacker's chest.
"Law of Motion—"
The man slowed.
Not enough.
Prince's expression sharpened. The technique had landed, but the effect was resisted—not canceled, not broken, but fought through by raw physical absurdity.
The militia fighter roared and forced his body forward anyway, like a machine straining against overloaded gears.
Prince barely got clear of the next punch. It tore through a concrete pillar behind him.
"Oh," Prince muttered, "that's disgusting."
Devonte saw an opening and took it.
He moved like a cut in the dark—silent, sudden, absolute. One slash to the back of a knee. One thrust into a lung. One turn of the blade to widen the wound. The militia fighter dropped at last.
Then Devonte was already on the next.
No wasted motion.
No anger.
Only execution.
For a brief, violent stretch of seconds, the duo looked like themselves again.
Prince froze one fighter long enough for Devonte to cut him down.
Devonte drove another into Prince's line and Prince shattered his balance with redirected force.
One body dropped.
Then another.
The kind of efficiency they were used to.
The kind of rhythm that had made them monsters in every other room they entered.
Destiny saw it too and almost believed they had stabilized.
Then the militia changed.
The remaining fighters widened their spacing and stopped pressing emotionally. No frustration. No panic over casualties. They simply reoriented around a new command logic.
More measured.
More patient.
More exact.
The lieutenant never raised his voice.
He just lifted two fingers.
And the pressure shifted.