Author's note: Under the advice of my editors, and after some comments I have received on past chapters of a similar nature, I am adding a reader advisory for graphic, violent content. For those of you who have followed the story so far, that much may have seemed inevitable, but still, it may be worth keeping in mind that this chapter does contain scenes of violence, gore and general nastiness.

On that note, I must once again express my deepest admiration and thanks to my editors who have helped make this story what it is. Their grasp of the English language, and their ability to spot my numerous... NUMEROUS... typos has made more of a difference than most people know.

With that said... on with the story

********

"Okay, let's go," I almost growled as I burst out of Emma's office, the woman herself and Rhodri close behind me. Emma, knowing we needed to head for the armory, immediately hung a right, leading us on the correct path toward our destination. I had no idea where the armory was, let alone where it was in relation to where we were, but that was information that Emma could provide as we moved. The idea - at least in my head - was to - hopefully - link up with Bob, Isabelle, and their guards and get the fuck out of Dodge before the Praetorian attack gained any sort of momentum.

Of course, we all know what they say about the best-laid plans, not to mention my personal history with them.

You know, just once, it would be nice if the day tried to romance me a little before it tried to fuck me. I wasn't a fussy or needy guy; some flowers, a pleasant stroll in the warm morning air, some birdsong, something! But no! The entire day seemed to have maintained the utter disdain that was usually reserved for a morning's treatment of me. First, the Conclave, then the bullshit argument with Emma, then Marco, and now this. It wasn't even two in the afternoon yet, and the day seemed to have jammed at least a week's worth of fuckery into itself. I was starting to take it personally!

And it wasn't done yet.

All around us, the sounds of battle echoed. Sounds of automatic gunfire hit my ears from every direction, but this was an old, stone-built castle, and not even the stones in the wall were smooth or flush. Sounds - from gunshots to the stamping of our feet along the hallway - bounced off them at random and unpredictable angles, meaning that no matter how sensitive or intelligent my ears were or how much I had upgraded my senses with my powers, I could only tell the direction at which the sounds hit them. Where they had come from before that, how many corners they had bounced around, and how far they had traveled was as much a guess for me as it was for anyone else. I was powerful, but I still wasn't god.

All I could tell was that they were close, much closer than they had been a few minutes ago. No person on earth could travel that quickly, which could mean only one thing. "How many guards did the castle have?" I called out to Emma as we ran.

"I... I don't know," She panted back, her whole body jerking away from the nearest wall every time a rattle of gunfire bounced off it. Her eyes were darting furiously around in every direction as some small measure of understanding about her predicament started to sink in.

"Take an educated guess!" I yelled back, in no mood to coddle her when saving her life was so much more important.

"I... I don't know. Thirty? Maybe forty? I never thought to count."

"Shit!" I spat with another growl, my mind stretching out to the surrounding building and the landscape beyond it.

"What is it, Pete?" Rhodri asked cautiously. He was keeping pace with Emma while I led our little group, but he wasn't anywhere near as breathless - or apparently afraid - as she was.

"There are at least three hundred voids out there."

"Holy shit!"

"Voids?" Emma asked as Rhodri's face paled.

"Minds that I can't read," I answered hurriedly. "Even if there are twice as many guards as you think, there are still more than two hundred bad guys for us to get past. And that's not including any Evos who are blocking."

"You can't read Evos?"

"Not if they are actively blocking me, not unless I have a pretty decent idea of where they should be, no."

"Jesus, they could be anywhere," Rhodri groaned. "Pete, if you're right, there are too many of them."

"Wha... What are we going to do?" Emma's eyes flashed fearfully wide.

"We stick to the plan," I answered as calmly as I was able, but even Evos were prone to that trembling voice when the adrenaline was working overtime.

"Please don't kill anyone," Emma started her predictable complaining again, but a withering, incredulous glance from me seemed to hit her like a physical blow. "Not unless you don't have any other choice." She finished. Well, as far as I was concerned, that had almost always been the case anyway, and protecting Emma kind of precluded any urge to go on a Praetorian-hunting spree, so it was a condition I could live with. I just gave her a nod in response. "Thank y..."

The entire castle shook again as another explosion - this time, much closer - sent a hard jolt through the ground under our feet. Castles, obviously, were built to last, but there was a limit to their durability when it came to high explosives, and the floor itself seemed to lurch against the force. Dust and mortar were starting to rain down from the ceiling, and a few of the windows lining the corridor - those looking out onto the central courtyard - suddenly exploded under the massive vibration. Emma stumbled, letting out a shrieked sort of yelp as she lost her footing - the floor seeming to move out from under one of her frantic footfalls - and tumbled over. Rhodri grabbed her, but even he was taken by surprise by the air suddenly being filled with shards of flying glass. His natural instinct was to flinch away from the danger; one hand, which should have been used to help Emma, came up to protect his face, but with the other firmly clasped onto Emma's arm, her falling weight pulled him down with her. They both crashed to the floor with the shattered glass raining down onto them.

There was, as ever, something to be said for timing. I had been so focused on where we were headed and how to get there I hadn't been paying attention to what was beyond those newly shattered windows - more than that, I hadn't imagined that the enemy could already be that far into the castle - and the alarmingly close sound of rifle fire filled my ears just as Emma and Rhodri hit the floor. Bullets thudded into the wall directly behind where they would have been standing had they not fallen, and more than a few crushed themselves against the bulletproof skin of my shoulder and the side of my neck. Rhodri acted immediately, throwing himself over Emma and using his body as a shield while I skidded to a halt. It took less than a second for me to check they were alright and that they hadn't been hurt, but that was all that was needed to see the danger of their position.

Beyond the shattered window was the central courtyard, an area which - at the time of its construction - would have been used as something of a garden to provide food for the castle in the case of a siege. It wasn't a bailey, one of those massive mustering grounds used to house soldiers or animals, that was on the other side of the complex. This was just a small, rectangular open space that was currently being used as an extension of the perfectly manicured gardens that I had seen a few times since my stay, and the two-story walls of this part of the castle wrapped around it. Directly opposite us, in the corridor that ran parallel to ours, however, were four men - two to a window - with rifles unloading in our direction on full automatic.

Contrary to what you may see in the movies, rifles only hold about thirty bullets per magazine, and with an automatic fire rate of about ten shots per second - sometimes significantly more than that - it didn't take a math-genius to realize that they couldn't sustain that level of firepower for long before having to reload. But that was also where it became clear that these men were neither idiots nor were they amateurs. They knew what they were doing, and their aim was inch-perfect.

Two of the men had their weapons targeting me, one firing while the other reloaded, ensuring that a constant stream of lead was being hurled in my direction and an overwhelming majority of their bullets finding their mark. The other two men were being more conservative, one of them throwing a few rounds into the wall above Emma and Rhodri's head, pinning them down, while the other carefully aimed at any sign of movement. This was an almost perfectly choreographed ambush, deployed with next to no notice at all. They would only have had a few seconds after spotting us to get into position, take aim at moving targets, and open fire with what would have been brutally lethal accuracy, and not only had they done that seamlessly and silently, but they would have been incredibly effective if it wasn't for that explosion that knocked my two followers off their feet. Emma and Rhodri, had they been standing a second longer, would have been slaughtered. They had managed to hit me before I had even stopped.

It would have been impressive if it wasn't for how much it pissed me off. Ten seconds out of the door, and I had already stumbled straight into a mistake that would have killed the two people I was trying to protect if it hadn't been for an extraordinary piece of luck.

Emma's scream ripped through the air as the full weight of the moment crashed down on her. This was not a woman with even the slightest shred of experience when it came to combat. Rhodri wasn't doing much better but was managing to keep his composure despite his last experience with bullets flying in his direction had been the day he had lost Neil, still, his panicked, pleading eyes quickly found mine.

"Pete...!" He called out over the din of the rifle fire.

I didn't answer. I had been pissed off before leaving the office; now I was fucking furious. Not necessarily at the men shooting at us - or at least not only at them - but at my own stupidity. I was rushing; my time in Ukraine had beaten the idiocy of that into my head, slow and steady won the race, but it was a lesson that I seemed to have forgotten a little too quickly for my liking. Still, it was one that I needed to re-implement as soon as humanly possible.

The ball of energy was already growing in my hand; it was almost a reflex at this point, but the feral growl that left my lips was tempered by the rapid flurry of thoughts rushing through my mind. The full power of one of those blasts would obliterate the four men shooting at us, but it would take a fair chunk of the castle behind them out with them, and I had no idea where anyone else was. Were Charlotte, Jerry, and Fiona on the other side of that wall? Were Bob and Isabelle? Would I be dropping immeasurable tons of stone onto their heads? I had memorized the route back to the main hall, but I had next to no knowledge about the layout of the rest of the castle. Would taking down those walls block off the route to the armory? Would it cut off our means of escape or that of one of our friends? The second option was the wall of fire that had been so effective in the Inquisition offices in Donetsk, and although that held a much smaller risk of immediately bringing down the wall, those fires would spread and were much more likely to cut off any avenues of escape. No, I needed to be careful.

Option A would have to do.

The energy ball that flew across the space between my window and theirs was not the size of a small car, as all the others before it had been; it was about the size of a basketball aimed for the wall between their two windows. The impact was silent, and maybe I was the only one who could see the yellow-green ball crash into the ancient stonework, but as soon as it did, it washed out like the shockwave of an artillery shell, leaving a large crack in the otherwise still standing stonework. The four men who had been firing at us were caught up in the blast, and their bodies contorted as the power behind it smashed into them. Bones shattered, blood vessels burst, internal organs ruptured and liquified, and their bodies - what was left of them - were hurled with terrifying force against the back walls of their corridor. The whole ordeal had lasted maybe five seconds, but all that was left of them was the comparative silence of their now twisted and deformed rifles and four messy stains on the back wall.

My eyes quickly scanned the rest of the courtyard and the windows surrounding it; there was no more movement, at least for now, and I turned and jogged back to the others. Reaching down, I pulled Emma back to her feet and gave her a quick once-over. The hard stone floor had skinned the palm of her hands, and a small cut was bleeding above her left eye - probably from its impact against the floor. Her blonde hair, hair that had dazzled me with the way it played with the light during her yoga exercises only that morning, was clinging to the blood that had run onto her forehead, and her dazzling cerulean eyes were darting around with fear and confusion.

"Why?..." she panted, her voice thick with the tension that was filling the air. "Why would they shoot at us? I... I don't understand." Her eyes stayed fixed on me, consciously and purposely avoiding looking out across the courtyard to the blood stains that used to be our attackers.

"We need to keep moving," I replied, helping Rhodri up too, and not really answering her question. "We go slow, we go quiet, and we stick close together."

"But..." Emma's eyes were now pleading.

"I can stop the bullets, but not if we are spread too far apart," I didn't know if that was technically true, but now didn't seem the time to experiment, and the mention of stopping any future interaction with bullets would hopefully be enough to get the Princess moving again.. "Which way?"

"But..."

"Emma!" I barked, "I need you to snap out of it. I know your mind is running a mile a minute, but you can analyze and ask questions later. We need to get to your parents and the armory, or we need to get out. I don't know the way, so I need you to tell me. Can you do that? If you can't, I promise that is fine; nobody will blame you. I can make my own hole in the wall and get you out of here that way, but it means leaving your parents behind, and I don't think any of us want to do that."

That seemed to do the trick. She blinked, swallowed hard, took a deep breath as she looked around, and nodded. "It's... It's this way," she said, nodding along the corridor in the direction we had been running. "Through the doors and take a right. There's a long corridor, and it's close to the end of that."

"Well done," I nodded. I had to admit that she had pulled herself together remarkably quickly, much faster than either Rhodri or I had done when we were in the same position at the party. In fact, I hadn't really pulled myself together at all; I had just lost my temper and let rip. She didn't seem to hear me, though. I flashed a glance to Rhodri, silently asking if he was good to go and receiving a breathless nod in return. "Okay, let's move. Slow and quiet."

If either Emma or Rhodri saw the shield that I had put up around us, neither of them commented as we started to move again. It was an idea I had come up with in the aftermath of Becky's death, during that time when I had asked myself a million times if there was anything I could have done to save her. A shield was the best idea I came up with, putting an energy barrier between her and the bomb, but I had no idea how to do it at the time, and I still wasn't sure if I could contort one to wrap around a human form. I had come to accept that as soon as Toussant and the Praetorians had taken her, there was nothing I could have done, but that didn't mean I couldn't learn from the tragedy. This was one of those lessons: a way not just to protect myself but those around me, literally, in this case. I had first used it on the same night as those sheets of fire in Donetsk, but the difference here is that this one needed to move; that one just stayed in one place. The shield surrounding us now was a crude bubble, about two meters in radius and strong enough to ensure that nothing was going to pass through it unless I wanted it to. Not bullets, not people, not even air if I so decided. The only question was, how long could I keep it going? As much as my power seemed to dwarf any other Evo in history, it wasn't limitless, and this shield was pulling a hell of a lot of energy from my power plants.

It didn't take us more than a few minutes of slow jogging - listening to the rattle of gunfire and smaller explosions echoing around the castle - to reach the large oaken door at the end of the corridor, and I stopped our little group to quietly and carefully pulled it open and then peeked around the corner. "It's clear," I said quietly. "Let's..."

"Pete! Fuck, Pete, can you hear me?" Jerry's voice suddenly yelled into my mind, making me freeze in my tracks.

"I'm here, Jer."

"Pete, they're fucking everywhere, and I'm running out of your power. I'm getting the girls out, Bob... Bob is in trouble."

"What??"

"We made it to the main hall; they were fighting off the attack. Isabelle was being pulled out by her guards; Bob was covering her... He was hit, I... I don't know how, but he was still fighting them off. He ordered us to pull back and covered us. He's a tough bastard, but not even he can hold off that many of them; he needs your help."

"Shit. Okay, I'll head in that direction. Are you guys all alright?"

"I'm running close to empty. Pete, we can't hold them; we've gotta go. We're headed to the north gate; I think we're clear."

"Get out, Jer. Keep yourself and the girls safe. Get back home."

"I'm sorry, Pete. I really tried. I will get them home, then I'll..."

Silence.

"Jerry? Can you hear me?"

Silence again.

"Fuck," I growled. A quick internal check was all it took to see that my link with Jerry had been severed; the only question was whether it was because the power I had given him all that time ago had finally run out or... No, that didn't bear thinking about. Jerry said they were getting out via the north gate, and I trusted him to do just that. But Bob... I flashed a glance to the nervous looking Emma.

"What is it?"

"Jerry and the others were cut off; they've had to pull out. Where is the main hall from here?"

"The main hall? Why? I thought we were going to the armory?"

"That's..." No, I couldn't tell her the truth. Not yet, it would only make her panic. "That is where they last saw your parents; we need to try to link up with them, and they're not headed to the armory anymore."

"It's..." She thought for a moment. "That's left here, then second right, then up the stairs that we came down earlier."

"Got it," I knew my way from the stairs, but I was fighting off a very visceral urge to charge to Bob's rescue. He was a good man, an ally, and a friend, but stampeding through an occupied, besieged castle was a quick way to get his daughter killed. We still needed to go slow, to be careful, but with every moment we delayed, the chances of Bob being alive when we got there diminished. These fuckers came here for a fight, and they meant business. As good as Bob was, I was under no illusions that he could hold off hundreds of them, yet I knew that he would give up his own life in a heartbeat if it meant keeping his wife and daughter safe. "Alright, slow and steady. Stay close."

It was a gentle jog, no more than that. I couldn't risk breaking into a full sprint, even if Rhodri and Emma were perfectly capable of keeping up with me. A sudden stop or a sharp corner was all it would take for one of them to fall outside the reaches of the shield, and knowing my luck, that would be the exact moment some bastard would start shooting at us. It only took a few minutes to reach the stairs and only a few more to climb it, but as soon as we reached the next floor up, the signs of combat became instantly and viscerally obvious.

Bodies were strewn everywhere. It was clear by their positioning which ones had been friendlies and which had been the Praetorian aggressors. Two or three bodies at a time were lying behind hastily constructed barricades and covered firing positions, with a significantly higher number of bodies lying in the corridors that those positions were covering. Blood was everywhere. Spattered against the walls behind our fallen Inquisitor friends, pooling in large, viscous puddles around the dead, bullet holes riddled the walls, the floors, and the barricades themselves, empty shell casings were scattered along the floor, and the unmistakable coppery scent of blood, mixed with the acrid smell of gunfire was thick in the air. Emma gasped and sobbed out a meek wail of despair as we passed the first barricade - a small, waist-high construction of sandbags and discarded furniture. She recognized one of the dead.

"Jamie," She cried quietly, skidding to a halt and dropping to her knees just beyond the pool of 'Jamie's' blood as her eyes flicked to the other two bodies. "And Raj... No, please, God, no." Her shoulders were bouncing with silent sobs now as her hands reached over the blood to touch all that was left of what must have once been her friends. Raj had taken a round to the face, the entry point just below his left eye. I didn't want to think of what sort of damage the exit wound would have done to the back of his head. Jamie, on the other hand, had simply been riddled. There were at least a dozen bullet holes in his body. But to his eternal credit, the man had gone down fighting. His lifeless fingers still held his depleted rifle.

Rhodri and I let her take her moment; she needed it. Partly because she needed to give her friends their final goodbyes but also partly because she needed to see this. She needed to see the death, the indiscriminate violence, the lack of hesitation and unwavering resolve and mercilessness of our enemy; she needed to finally understand that this war was real and not just some intellectual, moral exercise that could be rationalized away. The bullets were real, the blood was real, the death was real, and it had happened to people she knew. It wasn't theoretical anymore. If this is what it took to make her see that, to make her take her own safety seriously, then we could spare a minute to let her have it.

But only a minute.

"Why?" She sobbed, looking up at me. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy now. The stress and the grief of her circumstances changing those dazzling eyes into pools of pure pain and confusion. "Why are they doing this? We didn't do anything to them; we would never..."

"It doesn't matter," I was trying to sound caring, or at least not harsh, but I had no idea if I was being successful. We were, after all, still standing in the middle of a very open and clearly dangerous part of the castle. "Not right now, anyway. Your father asked me to keep you safe. These people, your father, they are fighting for you. They are buying us the time we need to get you out of here. Emma, they will have died for nothing if we can't make that happen. Their deaths are a tragedy; you won't find any argument in me on that, but they will be downright criminal if we don't."

She held my eyes for a moment. That hostility in them was gone, or at least replaced by the pain and panic of the death around her. "You told me this would happen. You tried to warn me. I didn't listen. I called you... an animal."

"And you were right," I said, still trying to keep the urgency out of my voice. She had no way of knowing that Bob was fighting for his life at that very moment, and we were wasting time, but barking that at her would only make her panic even more. "I am an animal. This?" I waved a hand at the carnage around us. "This is not something you ever want to get used to, let alone be the cause of. Both are already true for me, but they don't need to be for you. I am an animal, but that means that you don't have to be. Now, I need you to say your goodbyes, and we need to keep moving. Don't let their deaths be meaningless. They chose to fight and die for you; they have shown you the level of their loyalty and their resolve... take their word for it. It's the only way you can really honor them."

Emma swallowed hard, her eyes quickly flicking back to her fallen friends before they returned to me. She gave a hard, determined nod and reached out her hand, and I took it. For a moment, something sparked between us, like a static shock. It was a tiny transfer of energy, but sudden enough for us both to look in confusion at the point our hands touched.

Another rattle of gunfire, this time startlingly close, snapped us both out of it, and I pulled Emma to her feet. Something was different in her eyes now: a hardened resolve, a cold determination, maybe even a hint of the pain that I had seen so many times in my own eyes. But now wasn't the time to dwell on the change in her; we needed to move. Time was running out for Bob, and we still needed to get the fuck out of here.

With a glance down the corridor, I waited for both Rhodri and Emma to nod their readiness, and then we started to move again. The Main Hall had a large door on either side of it, which in turn led into a corridor that ran around its circumference. That branched off to smaller hallways and side rooms, then onto more hallways, corridors and connecting rooms, and so on, all the way to where we were now, and we had to do that backward. There was no straight run, there were no clear sight lines, there was only one ambush-ready corner, one closed door, one blind turn after another. The Castle had been purposefully designed with defense in mind, and the main hall was the last stand bastion within it. It wasn't supposed to be easy or straightforward to get to, and we were now essentially trying to get to a highly defensible position while fighting through the people trying to attack it.

The voids were everywhere, and I still couldn't tell which were friendly and which of them weren't. It was clear - now that we had seen the carnage around us - that the guards were fighting a losing battle. As well prepared and defensible as their position may have been, the enemy numbers and - though I was loathe to admit it - skill was simply overwhelming. Which meant we would have to get through them to reach and relieve the attack on Bob.

The day was getting better and better.

We dropped back into our gentle jog, fast enough to cover the distance we needed to travel in a reasonable amount of time but slow enough to still be careful. Every door, every ninety-degree turn, every window able to be targeted from another room or the castle grounds outside forced us to slow down and to look before we leaped, so to speak.

It was lucky that we did. Two corners after the stairwell and he butchery it represented, we almost ran head first into another group of Praetorians as they walked toward us. Time seemed to slow down again as, one by one, we all looked at each other. But something was immediately different this time.

I knew two of them.

Rachael and Mason, two of the traitors that I had purged from the Sect. They had been transported here on the same plane as the one that had brough me and my friends here, but after handing them off to the Inquisition, I hadn't seen them. It would seem that someone in the Praetorian leadership wanted them liberated as part of this mission.

Both of them were Evos, so although neither of them technically needed to be armed, both of them were. I guess that made sense, if Isabelle and her clan were all Inquisitors, then even a fairly powerful Evo - which these two were not - would have a hard time taking on any Inquistor of even moderate power. The third person with them, a man, was an Inquisitor, and by the way he immediately started to raise his rifle as soon as he saw us, not one of ones on the friendly team.

The powerball in my hand grew in an instant, but for the first time in ages, I found myself on the receiving end of a pleasant surprise.

The man had leveled his weapon at us, he was about to pull the trigger, when Rachael, a look of stoic resolve suddenly washing over her face, stepped forward, put the barrel of her pistol to the back of the Praetorian's head, and pulled the trigger.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie; I didn't see that coming either.

"Is Charlotte alive? Is she okay?" She asked, looking at me with an expression that could almost be described as desperation.

"Last I heard, yes," I gave my cautious reply. For all I knew, she would use that information to find her and try to recruit her into the Praetorian order. That was something I was never going to let happen, so although I was grateful, and more than a little surprised by her actions, I wasn't about to consider her a friend. "Why did you do that?" I nodded down at the body crumpled on the ground. "You were on the same side."

Mason shook his head. "Not after what they did to Marsha. They wanted her dead for no reason at all. I... I can't be a part of that. Its not what I signed up for."

Rachael was nodding. "We were always told that we were a peaceful order, that all we wanted was unity and safety, and that some people needed to be shown the error of their ways, but this? This is too much. That piece of shit was bragging about how they were going to kill everyone here, and I knew that included Charlotte. Whatever I have done wrong, I never wanted her to be hurt. I really do see her as my sister, and I need to make sure she gets out of here."

"Don't bother," I shook my head. "If you want to prove your affection for her, turn around and leave, take no more part in what is happening here, and I will know if you do. Get out of this castle and use it as an opportunity to let the Praetorians think you are dead. When the dust has settled, surrender yourselves to the Collective at the Sect's mansion. Do that, and I will make sure they give you a chance to appeal to the Sect's mercy, I will even speak on your behalf. But do anything else, and I will hunt you down myself."

Mason nodded firmly. "I don't know abou the others, the ones you brought us here with, we were all separated when we arrived, but, I don't think any of them would want anything to do with this... madness."

"Please, don't just kill them on sight if you come across them," Rachael pleaded. "They are good people, all of us are, or thought we were... we were just misled."

"I'll consider it," Time was running out and we needed to get moving. I was utterly astonished that another Praetorian team hadn't stumbled across us already. "Don't forget, get out, disappear, turn yourselves in later."

"We understand," Rachael, nodded. "Thank you." With that, she grabbed Mason's arm and pulled him in the direction they had come from. Rhodri - who hadn't been with me at the Sect - just gave me a short shrug, but Emma was looking at me as if this was the first time she had seen me.

"Come on," I said, and started off again.

It was in a hallway, about five minutes after leaving Rachael and Mason that our luck finally ran out. Another large double door leading to a part of the castle I was unfamiliar with swung open, and six men - all armed and all wearing body armor - stepped through with their weapons raised. They were also being careful, checking corners and sightlines before committing to stepping through. It took them less than a second to see us, but Emma spotted them first.

"Ian!" she called out excitedly, her face breaking into a wide, relieved smile. "Ian, over here!"

My eyes shot from her to the crowd of men all turning to face us. One face in particular, the one that had whipped around first - no doubt the one called Ian - was instantly familiar to me. Mister-fucking-slappy from The Hague, the one whose arm I had broken on my first visit to the Inquisition and my first meeting with Isabelle and Bob. He had been unnaturally, viscerally hostile toward me from the moment he had stepped into that holding room. At the time, I hadn't thought much about it; I was still operating under the misguided assumption that the Inquisition, or at least a rogue element of them, were the people responsible for the attack on the party, so I had assumed that all of them would treat me that way, and although Bob and Isabelle had more than changed my mind on the trustworthiness of my Inquisitor allies in the time since, I only now realized that I had massively overlooked the way that this one man had reacted toward me.

"Target acquired," he smiled into a radio mic on his collar before he and the rest of his team started advancing toward us.

I had started to slow, and Rhodri, sensing my suspicion, had followed suit, but it took me reaching out and grabbing Emma's arm for her to pull her eyes away from the Inquisitors ahead of us and back to me. "That's Ian," she smiled with a slight pant from the exertions. "He's one of the castle guards and a friend; I've known him for years."

I looked back up the corridor and studied the man more closely; there was something off about him, more than just the lingering resentment from my treatment at his hands in the Hague. For a start, there were splatters of blood on his face and traces of more on his hands. The loop on his body armor made for carrying a combat knife was conspicuously empty, too. More than that, more than anything else, it was the look of predatory glee in his eyes as he first spotted Emma and then me. "Then why is he covered in blood?" I asked, my voice low enough for only her to hear it.

"What?"

"Get behind me," I growled. "I don't think he's a friend."

"No!" She barked, yanking her arm out of my grasp. "You are not going to kill him. I've known him almost all my life. He's a..."

"Well, well, well," Ian's menacing voice echoed down the hallway. "Two birds with one stone. I was hoping I would be the one to find you, either of you, but finding you both... You've just made my day." He started raising his rifle toward us.

The world seemed to slow down. Emma's face drained of color as the shock of his little speech registered in her mind, but she was already moving - or being moved by me - as the first shots from Ian's assault rifle left the barrel. One hand dragged Emma behind me, the other hand extending outward as I forced more energy into the shield. A fraction of a second later, the bullets smashed into it. An entire clip's worth of ammunition crushing itself against - as far as Ian and his buddies were concerned - the thin air around us.

"Yeah, I remember you," I taunted back. "How's the arm? I guess you've picked a side in all this."

"Oh, I had always picked a side," he smirked triumphantly back at us despite the confusion at the fate of his bullets. "Who do you think told the Praetorians that you were here? God, it was good to finally stop living the lie, even more so when I opened that bastard Marcella's throat."

Emma's gasped whimper came from behind me, and her hand shot up to cover her mouth. "He was the head of the castle guard," she whispered. "And my uncle."

"Mother or Father's side?" I whispered back.

"He was my Dad's brother." She sobbed behind me.

I nodded. "You sure you don't want me to kill anyone?" I asked, not really meaning it as a real question, but - while we were safe from the bullets - I could at least take the opportunity to show Emma the sort of people we were dealing with.

"I really wanted to be the one to gut your mother though, you stuck up, little bitch," Ian was still talking. "I guess you will have to do."

"Why?" She cried back at him. "We were like family."

Ian just snorted as he reloaded, that evil, zealous laugh bouncing off every surface as his friends joined him on a firing line, all of them aiming their weapons at us. "This is my family," he announced smugly. "These have always been my family, and they will still be my family long after we have killed you and yours. Time to die, Princess."

The sounds of their rifles opening fire blasted through the hallway, and even though Emma had seen what had happened to the first load of bullets, she still instinctively flinched further behind me to get away from them.

"You don't seem to remember who you are dealing with," I calmly said as the clicks of their rifles finally sounded the depletion of their ammo a few seconds later, and watching - with no small hint of amusement - the expressions of confusion crawl onto their faces. "I would have thought you'd have learned your lesson by now. Emma..." I called over my shoulder without breaking eye contact with Ian. "...turn around. You don't want to see this."

Ian opened his mouth to say something, but a loud squelching sound, movement on either side of him, and the warm spray of blood on his face was enough to shut him up.

His five friends were gone... well, most of them were. What was left around him was the eviscerated evidence of what would happen to a human body if the steel-plated armor they were wearing was instantly accelerated to the speed of a supersonic jet directly backward. That sort of force does strange and mysterious things to a body. The joints around the arms and legs, for example, are not built to withstand that sort of sudden movement and were simply cleaved off, meaning that legs just toppled over and arms - still holding rifles - just clattered to the floor. The torso, still wrapped in the body armor, was turned to a fine, bloody pulp as it was crushed under its own weight against the front of the vest, and by the time they hit the wall a few dozen feet behind them, they were mostly empty of everything except a thin, liquidy paste.

Five severed heads hit the floor just as the bulletproof vests hit the wall, and Ian, a look of dumbfounded confusion on his face, spun around at the sudden crash, then paled as his eyes finally found what was left of his friends. Wide-eyed and terrified, he spun back to face me and started backing away, furiously trying to reload his weapon despite knowing it was useless against me.

"So you were saying something about being a traitor," I growled ominously as Rhodri wrapped his arms around Emma and shielded her eyes and ears from what he knew was about to happen. "I don't like traitors!"

Again, Ian was about to say something when movement shut him up. This time, however, he was the one who was moving. His body was as immune to my powers as any other Inquisitor was, but no such limitations applied to his clothes.

His jeans, already worn and frayed above the knee, suddenly gained the structural density of reinforced concrete. The transformation was instantaneous, converting fabric into an unyielding prison. A heartbeat later, his combat boot--still firmly affixed to his foot--jerked violently upward toward his head in a brutal motion that saw the tip of his boot hit his own thigh. The sound of a loud crack reverberated through the hallway, resonating with a bone-chilling intensity. It was immediately followed by a scream--raw and primal--that echoed in the confined space, a siren of agony as his leg snapped like a dry twig underfoot.

The horrific symphony of destruction continued. His other leg succumbed to the same merciless fate, its bones fracturing in an excruciating chain reaction. Then it was his arms, one folding backward behind him and the other following a few moments later--the sinew and muscle yielding to an unimaginable force of his sleeves. Each finger on his hands crumpled one after the other as though they were being crushed by an unseen force acting on his gloves. The grotesque ballet of trauma went on unendingly as his toes were compressed within the rigid confines of his boots, turning the sturdy leather into a granite-hard vice, mutilating his extremities.

Loud snaps, followed by louder screams of agonized anguish, echoed off the stone walls as both his arms and his legs were broken like dry spaghetti, over and over again, each break coming only a few inches further up the limb than the last one. After every break, the newly limp part was... rolled... upwards. His sleeves and pant legs snapped and folded his extremities like one of those whistles that kids play with, the ones that extend when blown... or perhaps like a depleted tune of toothpaste. He was being... crumpled was the only really accurate way to say it.

His collarbones splintered under the oppressive weight that suddenly bore down on him, the sound of cracking echoing ominously. Each breath he drew became more labored as his ribs caved in, and his jacket tightened cruelly around him, ruthless in its constriction.

Time seemed to stretch and twist at this point - literally and figuratively - warping reality into a nightmarish vision. His wristwatch, a seemingly innocuous accessory, began to rotate on his wrist, gradually gaining speed until it became a lethal saw. The watch face sliced through skin, tendon, and ligament with horrifying efficiency, the metallic links of the strap diced through meat and bone with a wet mulching sound, burrowing into flesh until it severed every vital connection, ultimately spiraling to the floor to join the remnants of his hand.

Warm blood began to seep from the gaping wounds and pour from his severed wrist, cascading onto the floor as he was robbed of his bodily autonomy, bones tearing relentlessly through his skin. His screams, once filled with defiance, became stifled wails, fading into an anguished silence only when one of his ribs punctured a lung, the sound barely a whisper amidst the chaos.

He was being crushed, twisted, and shattered in torturous slow motion, each twist and crack etching its pain into his mind for the entirety of the short time he had left. I held his gaze, making sure that his eyes remained locked on mine, grounding him in this reality for as long as possible, a spectator to his own destruction.

Gasping and panting, gargling as his lungs filled with blood and his essence leaked into his now-ruptured chest cavity, bleeding internally and lacerated in countless places, every bone in his limbs and most of his torso broken, and numerous internal organs punctured, including his lungs, his liver, and his heart, he was unceremoniously dumped into the corner of the hallway, propped up so he could spend his last few moments feeling every ounce of the pain I had effortlessly inflicted on him.

His arms and legs were allowed to unfold and hang limply where they fell. This wasn't the mercy it may have seemed, and the blood that had been forced out of them by their... rearrangement... now rushed back in, pouring through more punctured skin, mixing with toxic, leaking bone marrow, and plummeting the blood pressure of the rest of his body.

He was dying. He knew it. I knew it. And it was a long, slow, torturous way to go. His eyes were rolling in his head as consciousness started to escape him, but the adrenaline was too high. He would feel everything during his last few moments.

I stooped down and stared at him. I didn't gloat, I didn't mock; in fact, I didn't say anything at all; there was nothing I could say that his agony hadn't already said. He was beyond the ability to hear me anyway; there was just too much pain for his mind to focus on anything else. I just watched as the light behind his eyes faded away and his last haggard, gargled breath frothed out of his mouth.

Somewhere deep inside me, the Dragon purred with approval.

After only a few seconds, the only sound in the corridor was the quiet sobs of Emma. "We need to move," I said after standing myself back up. "Keep your eyes closed, Emma."

"Are they... are they dead?"

I took a deep breath and nodded... before remembering that her eyes were closed, and she couldn't see me. "Yes, they are."

Emma just nodded. There was no anger or disappointment, there was no rage, there was not even any disapproval, nor was there any righteous satisfaction, just a nod of acceptance. It was certainly a dramatic improvement on how I had expected her reaction to be when we had left her office, but I still didn't relish the idea that I had basically proven both of us right... me in that the violence was coming, and her in that I would meet it with more of the same.

Rhodri started guiding her forward, first looking at the dismembered bodies around his feet, then at the broken corpse of Ian. "Damn, dude," he whispered quietly, a look of something between awe and... something... - anticipation, maybe? - painted onto his face.

The going was slower after that. The headlong dash--or whatever a jogging version of that would be--to get to Bob had been drastically tempered by the encounter with Ian and the knowledge that our enemy stalked these hallways. More than that, the knowledge that we were being actively hunted, as opposed to chance encounters with our enemy so far, was having a measured effect on how we were moving.

Emma, for her part, appeared utterly crushed, the light in her eyes dimmed to a mere flicker. Defeat clung to her like a heavy shroud, wrapping around her shoulders with a suffocating weight. I couldn't read her thoughts--not that I'd made an effort to probe--but I could vividly picture the storm raging in her mind. Here was a woman who had spent her entire life believing the very best about our kind, holding on to that belief with every fiber of her being. Her identity was woven into the conviction that we--non-humans--had transcended the need for senseless violence, that we had evolved to a state where killing one of our own was the ultimate betrayal.

Yet now, within the span of a single day, her world had been turned upside down. She was grappling with the painful realization that her moral compass, the very code that had guided her existence, was not shared by everyone around her. She had already suffered the loss of cherished individuals: her Uncle Marcella, who had always offered her wisdom and guidance; her friends Jamie and Raj, whose unwavering support had bolstered her spirit. The deep hurt mirrored in her eyes revealed that she understood, all too well, that they wouldn't be the last she would lose.

Her ignorance about Bob's dire situation hung in the air like a dark cloud. He was still fighting for his life, enduring a battle that she was blissfully unaware of. Our decision to change our course, heading toward the main hall instead of the armory, was driven by the urgency of his plight--a desperate attempt to save him from whatever fate awaited. The booming gunfire ahead echoed ominously, serving as a cruel reminder that time was not on our side, and we might already be too late to help him.

Emma's world was disintegrating around her, the very foundation of her beliefs crumbling as if it were built on sand. Everything she had accepted about her life until now was tilting on its axis, threatening to overturn all her notions of love, trust, and camaraderie. Yes, she had lashed out at me, angering at the bitter truth I had tried to convey. She was stubborn in her convictions, unwilling to see the darkness I had weathered. After all, I had faced my own brand of heartbreak long before this moment. I had stood in her shoes and felt the turmoil that now twisted her insides. I had felt the same crushing hopelessness, the kind that leaves you feeling fragmented and raw, and I didn't envy her for one second.

Still, I could empathize with her plight. I understood what it felt like to have your beliefs challenged and your heart broken. I wanted to reach out, to bridge the chasm that had formed between us. But in that moment, all I could do was silently bear witness to her suffering, that and keep moving forward toward her father.

We skidded to a halt at another corner, and with the same practiced motions they had performed at every other corner we had come to, Rhodri and Emma pressed themselves against the wall while I looked around it. But before I did, I looked to my companions. "You both doing okay?"

Rhodri nodded, although the flicker of his eyes from one direction to the next hinted that maybe he was just putting on a brave face.

"No, not really," Emma shook her head, her eyes finding mine for a single heartbeat before they faltered and fell to the floor.

I cast a quick look around the corner, just to make sure nobody was approaching, then looked back to her as I rested a hand on her shoulder. "You will be," I said, giving her a soft, reassuring squeeze... or at least I hoped it was reassuring. "It will take time, and it won't be easy, but you will be okay."

"How do you know?" It wasn't a harsh question; there was still no venom in her voice, just a quiet, timid curiosity and perhaps a little hope.

"Because he's been there," Rhodri answered for me. "We both have. I shrank into myself when I lost Neil. I just... stopped functioning. Pete..." he smiled weakly at me. "Pete took a different path."

"Is that what I should do?" Emma asked softly.

"No," I shook my head. "I let the anger and the rage and the hurt consume me, I lost myself more in that than anything the loss could have taken from me. I chose this path. Yes, it was a choice guided by blind fury, but it was still a choice. Don't make my mistakes. Mourn your losses, let yourself feel it, the pain, the loss, the anger even, but don't give in to it. You're better than that, and your people deserve better than that."

Her brow furrowed for a moment as her eyes stayed locked to mine, but there was a softness to her gaze, an understanding, maybe. She hadn't expected that level of honesty, and I'm sure she was wondering if there was even a compliment hidden beneath my message, but she seemed to accept the message. She gave a sniff, wiped her eyes, and nodded. "The main hall is down that hallway," she flicked her eyes to the corner we were hiding behind. "And then follow the corridor to the right. Hopefully, parents should still be there."

My jaw clenched. Fuck, I needed to tell her. Why couldn't I lie to this girl? "Listen," I said slowly, the seriousness in my eyes making both of them take pause. "I don't know what we are going to find in there. Last I heard, Bob was holding off the Praetorians while your mother was evacuated."

"Bob?" Emma asked.

"Oh, sorry, my name for your father."

She scrunched up her eyes, then laughed a little. "Well, that explains a few things. But..." her frown returned. "...wait... How do you know?"

"Jerry told me."

"And you didn't say anything??"

I held her eyes and took a deep breath. "Would you have left? If I told you that, then - if it got too dangerous - if I had to drag you out of the castle, would you have left? Or would you have charged head-first into danger to help your father?"

"I don't need you to protect me!" she hissed. Her anger, or perhaps indignation, returning instantly.

"Yes, you do," I answered calmly. "Even if only from yourself. Your father knew that. He specifically asked me to keep you safe. Do you think he would rather you risk your life... that I risk your life trying to rescue him? Or do you think he would want you safe?"

Emma opened her mouth to answer, but her words failed. She knew the answer, and her anger vanished.

"Unfortunately for Bob," I carried on with a small smile after flicking another glance around the corner. "I don't answer to him either, and if I can save his stubborn ass while keeping you safe at the same time..." I finished with a wink. "But... you need to be prepared for what we find in there and what I will have to do to the people he's holding back."

"I'm ready," Emma said, understanding my meaning and holding my eyes.

"It may get messy," I warned.

"I'm ready," She repeated, a steely resolve forming behind her gaze.

I held her stare for another few seconds and then just nodded. "Okay, stay close, stay low, and... I don't know... try not to get shot. Rhod?"

"Yeah, I've got her, Pete. You do your thing."

"Okay..." Another glance around the corner, "...Let's go."

The three of us burst out from the corner and started sprinting toward the end of the corridor, one of my hands maintaining a shield around us as we moved.. The sounds of gunfire, muffled and muted by the thick stone walls, started to grow louder by the moment. There were a lot of them, and they seemed to be coming from everywhere. Sounds were still doing that thing where it bounced off the stone walls in every direction, making it sound like they were coming from every direction, but it was clear we were running into a full-blown firefight. Another small ball of power, like the one I had used on our attackers outside Emma's office, grew in my free hand. If I had reason to be careful earlier, it was doubly so now, but I was under no illusions about what was coming.

We hadn't quite made it as far as the end of the corridor when we finally entered the fray. Three men, all armed, stepped out of a room and started running toward the main hall, none of them bothered looking in our direction, but one of them was frantically calling into his radio.

"Flank him from the southern doors," a breathless voice could clearly be heard on the other side of the comms. "We can't get around him, and the main target has already been evacuated!"

"We're almost there," the man with the radio called back.

"Teams four and seven are assembling at the doors. You have thirty seconds before they breach. Haul ass!"

"Roger that, twelve out."

I flashed a look at Emma as we ran, the question silent and simple. She gave me a short nod. We were headed toward the southern door to the main hall as well, we were about to interrupt their little ambush party. The "he" they were talking about? It had to be Bob, not that there was no other option; it could have just as easily been one of the castle guards. No, I just needed it to be him. For my sake as much as Emma's. Bob needed to be alive; I didn't want to lose another friend, I didn't want Emma to lose her father. I didn't want to feel that pain or see it in her. I had to be Bob.

Movement behind him, maybe the sounds of our running, seemed to attract the attention of the man with the radio, and he turned to look over his shoulder at us.

"Oh Fu..." He never had a chance to finish his exclamation; a split second was all it took. The ball of power surged forward, striking him squarely in the back. The impact was catastrophic, a violent explosion of energy that folded his body in on itself, shattering bones and severing ligaments before it continued its deadly trajectory. Within moments, the two men flanking him were caught in the deadly wave--no escape, no mercy.

The aftermath was grotesque; body parts were sent flying in every direction, limbs and shreds of flesh splattering against the cold stone walls with sickening thuds. The air filled with the acrid scent of blood, a visceral reminder of the violence that surrounded us. Arterial spray painted the walls and ceiling, a gruesome masterpiece born of chaos. A thick wave of blood surged across the hard stone floor, rapidly transforming it into a treacherous slick.

As we raced through it, the crimson liquid splashed beneath our feet, pooling and frothing as we tore forward, yet we didn't falter; our strides remained steady and unwavering. The urgency of our mission propelled us onward, even as the horrific scene flashed behind us.

I cast another glance at Emma. Her face had drained of color; the vibrancy that I had seen in her when she had been practicing yoga in the gardens that morning was gone, replaced by a pallor that spoke volumes. Her eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the remnants of the Praetorian dead, motionless in their final moments. In that bleak instant, I could feel the weight of horror resting heavily on her shoulders as she processed the visceral reality of what I had just unleashed and she had condoned.

Despite the trauma of the sight, she didn't utter a word; she didn't even break her pace. Her silence was both unsettling and resolute. It was a stark contrast to the chaos surrounding us, and I admired her strength even as concern gnawed at my insides. We were deep in the storm now, and there was no turning back. We had entered a realm where survival reigned above all else--where the line between life and death blurred with every step we took.

We rounded the corner a few seconds later, in time to watch eight men, again, all armed, stacked up against the door, reach to breach. The heavy wooden portal had been rigged with explosives. I could make them out even from our distance, but it was already too late for them.

For a moment, my mind drifted back to the party, the moments before the second wave tried to make entry, the moment my mind, now aware of the voids in my senses, finally saw them stacking up - just like this - on the other side of the workingman's club walls. I had turned that wall into an oversized claymore mine, those men had been turned into stains on the parking lot pavement, and as much as I would love to have done the same to these assholes, Bob was now on the other side of it.

Or at least I hoped it was Bob.

"Breach in three, two, one..." The voice at the other end of the corridor, hushed and urgent, was drowned out by the sound of the explosives detonating. The door was turned to flying splinters and concussed air as the blast obliterated it.

Unfortunately for the men who had been ready to pour through it, an energy barrier that I still thought I was the only one who could see had been erected around it, and the bomb... and the Praetorian attackers.

The once deadly figures of the men became mere silhouettes in the chaos. They were caught in the eye of the storm, unprepared for the wrath unleashed upon them. As the explosive energy collided with their bodies, they were torn apart with horrifying brutality. Flesh was shredded, bones shattered, and the cacophony of their screams integrated with the violent sound of the blast, creating a horrifying symphony of destruction.

In mere moments, what had begun as a formidable group of attackers now lay scattered, fragments of humanity strewn across the floor--a grim testament to the raw power I wielded. We kept moving, the door was now open... or gone, whatever term was more accurate... and Bob, I hoped, was on the other side of it.

I raced ahead of Emma and Rhodri, leaving them to catch up. I needed to be the first through the door, not for reasons of ego but of simple practicality. We were literally running into a gunfight and I was the only one even remotely capable of defending my companions.

I burst into the main hall of the ancient castle, my heart hammering in my chest, each beat a frantic reminder of what was at stake. The towering stone walls loomed around us, remnants of a time long past, their cold surfaces soaked in history yet now tinged with the unmistakable scent of gunpowder and blood. The flickering light from broken overhead sources cast eerie shadows that danced across the floor, but there was no time to ponder the age of this place.

Behind me, I could hear Emma and Rhodri's heavy footsteps echoing as they followed close, but I didn't dare look back. We were running into the eye of the storm, and I needed every ounce of focus I could muster. Ahead of us, the sight that greeted me was both familiar and terrifying.

Bob was crouched behind a rough-hewn table, the remains of the table I had sat at with him and Isabelle only a few hours earlier, its surface peppered with the splintering splats of bullets ricocheting harmlessly off the solid, reinforced wood. His demeanor was a portrait of gritty determination as he fired his assault rifle with precision over the upper edge of it, each shot ringing out like a declaration amid the chaos, and each shot sending an attacking Praetorian either stumbling for cover on the opposite end of the room, or dropping him in a heap of blood and pain.

I could see him flinch slightly with every recoil of his rifle, a grimace crossing his features as he shifted his weight, clearly favoring his right shoulder. Even in his weakened, desperate position, he was a force to be reckoned with, and no matter how skilled or determined the Praetorians seemed to be, Bob was holding them off in a manner that could only be defined as fucking heroic. He was the stone wall against the onrushing tide.

"Bob!" I shouted, urgency lacing my voice as we closed the distance. He glanced up briefly, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and determination, but then immediately shifted his gaze back to the door at the opposite end of the hall, where the attackers poured in like a wave of malevolent intent.

He was not unscathed; Jerry had been right. I could see the darkening stain on his shirt, the fresh wound in his abdomen that hinted at the toll this fight was taking. Yet, despite the blood that seeped through his clothes, there was no faltering in his resolve. The very sight of him fueled my adrenaline, igniting a fire within me--a desperate need to protect him and end this fight.

The thrumming of gunfire exploded in the air as rounds zipped past us, the sound mingling with the shouts of the encroaching attackers. I could barely hear Emma and Rhodri at my back, but I was mindful that they were still there, and the new outpouring of bullets in my direction at my sudden entrance just highlighted how much danger everyone was in. My hand raised up again, this time making a shield that filled a cross-section of the entire room. From wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, nothing was getting through, but bullets were bouncing off it nonetheless.

"Where's Emma?" Bob barked at me as soon as he realized that enemy bullets were no longer flying toward him.

"I'm here, Dad," she called out, running carelessly across the space between the door and Bob's cover, skidding to her knees beside him. I suppose it may not have been careless; she had seen enough of the shield - or at least its effects - to know what my still outstretched arm meant, and, for the time being, at least, she was in no danger. "You're hurt!"

"There's no time; you need to get out," his eyes turned to me. "You should have gotten her out by now!"

"Do you know how stubborn your daughter is?" I smirked at him, ignoring the anger in his voice. "Can't imagine where she gets it from."

Bob rolled his eyes, but there was no hiding the pull at the corner of his lips. He turned his adoring eyes to his daughter, his hand coming up to rest on her cheek, leaving a trail of blood over her soft, pale skin and wiping away some of her own thast had leaked out of the small cut above her eye. He spoke softly. "Emma, honey, you need to leave. The castle has fallen, and Pete can't hold that shield forever. When it falls, they'll kill us all. Your mother is already out; Pete's friends have pulled out too; now I need you to do the same."

"No," she shook her head vehemently. "I'm not leaving you."

"You have to."

"No!"

"Emma, you are going to leave. You are going to do this for me; I'm already dying."

"Pete can help you!" She barked, not listening to what her father was trying to tell her. Her eyes turned to me, "You can help him, right?"

"I'm an Inquisitor, darling," Bob said softly, both he and Emma seeing the pained expression on my face before he went on. "His powers don't work on me. I've already lost too much blood; I can't move. If I do, I'll be dead before I get to the stairwell. So I will stay and make sure my family gets out safe..." his eyes turned to me. "All of them."

My jaw clenched again, but a loud bang - a grenade detonating uselessly against the shield wall - pulled my attention back to the rest of the room around me. I growled and forced my will into the shield. It burst outwards, racing down the room at breakneck speeds and crashing into the men firing at us. Cover did nothing to help them; the few of them who were standing in front of the door were thrown out of it, and the rest of them were crushed to a fine paste against the solid stone wall. As soon as it flickered out, a new shield - in its original position - rematerialized, but more Praetorians flooded into the room just as quickly and perhaps just as recklessly.

I squashed those bastards, too, out of principle, then turned my attention back to Bob and his daughter.

"Dad, I'm not leaving you here!" she barked defiantly. "There has to be something we can do."

"If you stay here, you're going to die," Bob said gently, "or you do as I ask and get out." His hand was still on her cheek, but his face was draining of color rapidly. Bob had always had a vibrancy about him, an energy that made him look almost tanned, but now that was paling as he lost more blood by the second. "Your mother needs you," he went on, "and I need you to be okay."

"How can I be okay? How can I be okay with any of this?!?" Emma sobbed, her eyes sinking down to the growing patch of red on what had once been Bob's pristine white shirt.

"By living, by growing, by learning," Bob smiled affectionately at his little girl. "By making a world where this...," he gestured at the room around us, "...never happens again. You need to be alive to make a difference; your mother and I have known since you were a baby that if anyone would ever make a real difference to our world, it would be you... and him." he nodded to me. "You will need each other before this is over. I trust him, I trust him with my life, but more importantly, I trust him with yours. I need you to listen to him; he will keep you safe. It doesn't matter what you think of him or what he thinks of you; you are in this together now."

"But..."

"No, Emma, no buts." Bob coughed a little, but maintained his smile. "You are my life's greatest achievement and its greatest joy. You will never know how much you mean to me, how much I love you or how incredibly proud I am of you. You are the best of us, the best parts of me, you are everything good about my life, and it has been the privilege of my life to be your father."

"No, Dad, please. I'm not leaving you here! I'm not saying goodbye! I'm not leaving you here alone!"

"He won't be alone," Rhodri's astonishingly calm voice cut through the chaos, all of us spun around to look at him. He had crossed the hall from the door almost silently, or at least quietly enough not to have been noticed over the gunfire, death, and heart-wrenching conversation, but now he was standing beside the table, his eyes flicking to each of us in turn.

"Rhod, what are you talking about?" I asked cautiously.

He smiled at me; the serenity on his face was startlingly at odds with the gunfire and carnage around us. "Pete, I lost the love of my life at the party. Neil was it for me, he was the world, and mine ended the day he died. When I heard about you and what you were doing, I realized that I could do something that I should have done that night. I should have fought back, I should have died with him. Now I get to deliver some justice for Neil, while saving your lives, just like you saved mine."

"No," I tried keeping my voice calm and level, matching his, but the tension was building. The shield was taking a massive toll on my power reserves, and each bullet that hit it was pulling another burst of energy from my power plants. I wasn't in danger of running out any time soon, but I was painfully aware that I couldn't hold it indefinitely, and I still needed to get us out of there. "Not acceptable, we are all leaving!"

"I was never leaving," Rhodri smiled. "If it didn't happen here, it would have happened somewhere else. I never planned on surviving this war, and I owed it to Neil to do more with my time left than just kill myself, but living without him... I just can't. You don't owe me anything, Pete, but I'm asking you for this. Bob is right; he can't move, it'll kill him, and we can't heal him, so if he is staying here, I'm staying with him. If we are going to die protecting the people we love, then we are taking as many of these bastards with us as we can."

One look into his eyes was all I needed to see the measure of his resolve and to see that there was no talking him out of this. The acceptance, the calm, the love for his dead bonded partner was clear from a single glance. He knew what he was asking, and he was ready to go down fighting; no matter how much I didn't want to lose someone else, I could see the allure of what he was proposing. This wasn't about the romance of fighting until the bitter end. This wasn't the juvenile fantasy of a heroic last stand; this was something more. This was an end to the pain caused by the Praetorians while inflicting as much of it on them as he was able. This was his atonement for the moment he froze at the party. He blamed himself for Neil's death, just like I did for Becky, Philippa, and Faye, and even though there was nothing he could have done, even though there was nothing I could have done, the sentiment remained, and this was his chance to make things right, even if only in his own mind.

It was a feeling I was more than a little familiar with.

"Fuck!" I spat, the anger and rage at the unfairness of it all coiling again within me. Two more people, good people, were about to die for the Praetorians and their fucking crusade. This needed to end, and going on a rampage through the castle alone was not an option if I was to keep Emma safe. I needed to get her out, I needed to honor Bob's last wish, and I needed to get myself out so I could burn Rome and the Praetorian leadership to the motherfucking ground! I took another look at Bob, ideas flashing through my mind, possible ways to get everyone out unharmed. Could I use his clothes, as I had to Ian, to compress the wound, to add pressure? That is what you did in situations like this, right? Put pressure on the wound? Stop the bleeding? Would that even work? Was that another one of those Hollywood-inspired myths? I didn't have the slightest idea, and I didn't have the power at my disposal to use my internal editing station to teach myself. I needed every shred of it that I could spare if I wanted to get Emma out. Could I move Bob? Turn his clothes into something like a stretcher and basically carry him out? I doubted it. I had absolutely zero medical training, but even I could see that he had lost a lot of blood, and moving him was a very bad idea. What about a blood transfusion? Fuck, I had no idea how to even start with that.

The frustration was building; the anger was coiling inside me like a viper ready to strike. It was like a pressure cooker was bubbling furiously inside me, and one more knock would be enough to make it explode. I pitied the person who gave it that one final jolt. The fate of Ian would seem like a happy memory to whoever got on the end of that particular outburst.

Three men, none of them armed - Praetorian Evos - burst into the room behind their friends, immediately linking hands and throwing the combined weight of their minds against mine. It took less than a second for the Dragon to handle the threat, saving me the power and the time it would have taken to crush them myself. Thirty seconds of mindscape time was all the Mantle needed to incinerate their cities and their minds along with them. They all fell to their knees, screaming and clawing at their faces as their brains were literally turned to ash.

Things were getting hairy, and time was running out.

God Fucking Dammit!!!

I looked back to Rhodri. "Are you sure? There is no coming back from this."

"I'm sure, Pete. Bob's right, you both need to get out of here..." He looked down to his new Inquisitor ally, something I doubted he would ever have thought to himself before he met me. "...We will hold them off for as long as we can."

"No!" Emma stamped her foot in agonized frustration. "I'm not leaving!"

"Emma, please," Bob spoke softly. "Do this for me. This one last thing. Don't let me die for nothing."

I grimaced. I knew what she was thinking; I knew her mind was already pulling up the memory of what I had said to her at the top of the stairs, and her look at me confirmed it. There was a desperation behind her eyes, a silent plea for... something, anything, to stop this madness. But even she could see that the Praetorians wouldn't stop, that this would end in one of only two ways: with her escape or with her death. "I'm sorry, Emma," I almost whispered, tears of frustrated anger starting to cloud my eyes. "They're right. I can't hold them forever, and I can't help your Dad. We need to leave now before it's too late."

"No, Dad." Emma's mask of defiance crumbled like a sandcastle against the rising tide, and her words broke into a heartbreaking sob. "Please, I can't leave. I can't do this without you."

"You can," Bob smiled, pulling her into his arms and holding her tight to him. The wince on his face told me how much that movement must have hurt him, both physically and emotionally, but he ignored it. He was going to hold his little girl; he was going to let this embrace be the last memory she had of him. "And you will," he went on. "You are strong, so much stronger than you know. You are going to build a world where none of this will ever happen again. That is the greatest honor you can pay me. But I will always be with you in every way that matters."

Emma didn't answer; she just cried. Her shoulders bounced with every sob as she clung to her father with everything she had within her. I took a step forward toward them, my other hand sweeping the room, gathering up every ammunition clip and every intact rifle dropped by friend or foe alike, and pulled them all into a neat pile behind the table. Rhodri watched them with a nod before looking back at me. He held out his hand; he must have heard from Jerry about what was coming. "You ready?" I asked somberly.

"As ready as I will ever be," He smiled. I took his hand and flooded his well with my power. I didn't need to be careful; I didn't need to control the flow, I didn't have to worry about overflowing his well and rupturing his city; any damage I could do to him would take longer to manifest than he had left to live. He would be dead within the hour, probably significantly less than that, and I was giving him what he needed to make every minute of that time count.

He sucked in a deep, gasped breath as he felt it, all of it, all of my power poured into him.

"It's been an honor." My mind spoke to his.

"The honor has been mine, Pete," He answered with a resolute smile. "Make it count."

"You have my word."

"Goodbye, my friend."

"Goodbye, Rhod. Make them pay."

I let go of his hand, letting him take up his position behind the table before I stepped over and wrapped an arm around Emma, giving a nod to Bob--a silent gesture of affection and respect--and lifting her away from him. "Pete, keep my girl safe," my friend said before turning his smiling eyes to his daughter. I love you, Emma."

Emma just cried.

"Answer him," I whispered gently into her ear as I lifted her to her feet. "You will hate yourself later if you don't."

Emma glanced over her shoulder at me, the pain and sadness streaming from her eyes as they met mine, and she nodded. She looked back at her father. "You are the best man I've ever known," she whimpered. "I am so lucky to have been yours. I love you, Dad. I will always love you."

Bob wiped a tear from his eyes, and nodded with a smile, then gave a more determined smile to me. "Make me proud, Pete."

"Give them hell, Arnold."

"Bob," his smile grew. "My name is Bob."

I held his eyes for another second, then spun around and dragged Emma from the room, making sure to send the shield wall hurtling toward our attackers as I left. I didn't even watch to see how many were crushed between it and the wall as I hauled the inconsolable Emma out of the room.

The sounds of resumed gunfire started echoing after us as soon as we entered the corridor. It was an odd experience: the majority of my mind was focused on our flight from the castle. I knew the way from the main hall and was dragging Emma through the labyrinthian succession of corridors and doorways to get us out as quickly as possible. But part of my mind was back with Rhodri, it was like I could see through his eyes as he fought back the attackers with Bob. He didn't bother with the bulletproof skin; it simply took up too much power, the same logic went for a shield, he simply took cover behind the table, slowed down his perception of time, and launched one admittedly smaller ball of power at the enemy after another. Grenades were swatted out of the air, batted back toward the dumb fuck who threw them, bullets were dodged with perfectly timed ducks back behind cover, and throughout it all, the unwavering Bob launched round after round at any target stupid enough to present themself to him.

The dead were piling up fast. I had killed about a dozen of them with my three shield tricks, but there were dozens more behind them, and they were pouring into the hall faster than either Bob or Rhodri could hold them back. Most of them were firing wildly at my friends' general direction, hoping to keep them pinned down long enough to reach cover, and although the vast majority were cut down by Bob's unerring fire and Rhodri's power balls, a few managed to make it. It was those people who posed the greatest threat, able to focus their fire and take the time to aim properly.

Their shots were getting alarmingly close, and Rhodri had been forced to duck more often with each passing minute. Still, they were holding them off. His glance, during one of those retreats back into cover, fell onto Bob. Bob was a stalwart of composure, he neither ducked away nor even flinched against the bullets, no matter how close to hum they thudded into the table. By now, his right arm was hanging almost completely limply against his side, and he was resting the barrel of his rifle onto the top edge of the table, only bringing it off to reload, something he was managing to do with the reduced use of his right hand but at nowhere near the speeds I had seen him manage in combat during our venture into Ukraine. The dark patch on his abdomen had stopped growing, not because he had stopped bleeding, but because there was no white left on his shirt for the blood stain to grow into; instead, it was just getting darker as his essence soaked into it.

There was now a considerable pool of blood growing ever larger on the ground where it dripped from the untucked hem of Bob's shirt. Rhodri could see it as much as I could: he was losing blood too quickly. He couldn't last a huge amount of time longer.

But still, he was fighting; he was giving his last full measure of devotion to making sure that his wife and daughter were safe, and he would keep on fighting with everything he had left - no matter how little that may have been - until his body failed him.

My senses were in overdrive, with the visual and audio stimulation from two entirely separate sets of eyes and ears assaulting me at the same time. I could hear the delay from Bob's rifle, first heard by Rhodri, and then, a second or so later, by my own ears. I could hear the slamming of my feet on the stone floors, Emma's right next to me, the mingled sounds of our breathing, but at the same time, I could hear Rhodri's own furiously strained huffs and Bob's increasingly wheezy gasps. But more than that, I could feel it all; the cold fury in Rhodri's chest, the blazing rage in my own, the resigned acceptance of my friend at odds with the frantic hunt for another way out of this mess in my own mind. I was literally two people at the same time, even if only a silent witness to one of them. It was nothing like how it had been when I had shared my powers with Jerry and I could only imagine why that could have been.

Rhodri was letting me watch his final moments, not through some sick or twisted need to be martyred, not so his death could torment me further, but for one simple reason, one that I never expected him to understand.

He was telling me that I wasn't the only one.

I wasn't the only one bearing the crushing weight of loss, I wasn't the only one who had spent the past months battling against that crippling sadness and all-encompassing rage, I wasn't the only one willing to fight, even if I was the only one able to. He was telling me that he understood; he was letting me feel what he was feeling, that exaltation at the opportunity to finally pay back some of the pain that had been caused by these Praetorian cocksuckers, that exhilaration of being a force to be reckoned with, even if that was the last thing I ever saw myself being. That death, either of ours, was a price worth paying if it meant putting an end to all of this.

Rhodri understood me on a level that nobody, not even Charlotte, could ever come close to. He was a man who had experienced a pain that eclipsed even my own, a loss that felt even deeper than what I had experienced after the deaths of Becky and Faye. Neil really was his world in every meaning of the word; he was everything to Rhodri, so much so that the prospect of life without him not only held no meaning; it was the most anguishing form of torture Rhodri could imagine. His was a grief and a rage that wouldn't be diminished by time; there was no future in which the pain would become manageable; Neil's loss was a black hole in the center of Rhodri's existence that swallowed everything it could reach in an endless effort to fill the void that could never be filled.

No, Rhodri didn't just understand my pain, he eclipsed it-by a margin so massive that it almost made me feel melodramatic for how I had acted since the party. How he had managed to stay so outwardly composed was baffling to me. How he had even managed to function at all was a feat of such herculean internal strength that it beggared belief. To the outside world, he was a shadow of his former self; he had lost his ambition, his humor, his easy-going nature. He was hurting in every way a man could hurt, but he was getting by, he was coping, he was healing. That was a lie, one he had told to every single other person he had met with between that night and now. The truth was that he was holding onto a fury so great that it made my own look almost petulant. He was letting me see that; he was letting me understand him in the same way that he could understand me. He didn't blame me for the acts of violence that I had committed in the past several months; he didn't fear me, and he didn't think less of me for it.

He envied it.

Now, however, was his time to put action to sentiment. To stand by the promises he had made to himself and to the memory of his lost love, and with the power I had given him, he was finally able to do what nature had denied him.

He was fighting. He was fighting for love. He was fighting for perhaps the only thing that was truly worth fighting for.

A bullet ripped through his shoulder, spinning him around and dumping him unceremoniously onto the floor behind the table. The sharp, blinding stab of pain slammed into my own body, too. I could feel his anger, but apparently, I could feel what was happening to him, too. It turned out that getting shot hurt like a fucking bitch! I could feel myself stumbling forward from the shock of it; taking a gunshot wound vicariously was not a pleasant, let alone expected, experience. Rhodri snapped out of it faster than I did and looked up in time to watch Bob give him a quick glance to check he was okay, then carry on shooting. Growling dangerously, Rhodri forced a little of my power into his own body, not to heal himself - that was pointless considering he didn't plan to live more than a few more minutes - but just to numb the pain, then he pulled himself back into his crouched position, raise his hands, and start blasting those smaller balls of power towards our enemy.

"This way!" Emma's voice yanked me back to my own body as she grabbed my arm and tugged me to the right, stabilizing my footing in the process. We were barreling along the ground floor now, having traversed the stairs while I was watching Rhodri, and were now running beneath a roofed pergola that ringed around yet another set of gardens. Another set of large wooden doors loomed ahead of us, the black iron studs - planted into the thick oak boards centuries ago - seeming to glisten in the daylight as we got closer. I couldn't quite tell where we were in the castle, how close we were to one of the main gates, or even if we were getting closer to an outer wall that I could just blast through, but Emma seemed to know where we were going and I was in no position to argue. "What the hell was that?" She asked as we carried on our charge in this new direction. "You blanked out on me for a moment there."

"It's Rhodri; I gave him some of my power; I can see and feel what he does... and he was hurt."

"You can see..." Emma gawked at me. "Is my father...?"

"He's still going, still fighting." I nodded, pulling my attention to my own predicament, rather than my friends'. My eyes focused on the doors ahead of us. "Rhod is back up, too, they're holding them as best they can."

I felt them before I saw them: voids on the other side of the door, a group of them, five, maybe six in total, but they were packed so closely together that it was hard to be certain, but the door swung open.

The ball of power left my hand before the group had the chance to even see us, let alone pose a threat to us. I was past the point of checking to see if they were friendlies anymore. They weren't us, so they were a threat, and the ball of power that smashed into them was a perfect demonstration of how I planned to deal with threats from here on out.

The door exploded, as did the two or three men directly behind the gap between them. A hail of splintered wood, flying nails, shredded hinges, and eviscerated body parts ripped through the members of the group I couldn't yet see. All that was left of them by the time Emma and I raced through the tattered remains of those ancient doors was bloodstained walls, scattered body parts, and another inch-deep wash of blood. Our feet splashed noisily as we kept running. I glanced at Emma, expecting some reaction to the carnage I was unleashing so indiscriminately, but there was nothing. There was no anger, no disappointment, no disgust, not even any sadness on behalf of a species she had been so ardently in defense of an hour ago. Her eyes were just hollow, a haunted, vacant look in them as she did what she needed to do to honor her father's wishes. No more, no less; that is all she was at that moment: a guide. I was getting us out, and she was showing me the way; that was all her mind seemed capable of doing right then.

Another door slammed open further up the corridor we were now running through. The two men who stepped through - their silhouettes outlined by that familiar Inquisitor glow - were lucky that my eyes were on Emma when they stepped into the hallway, but the look on Emma's face was all it took for me to snap my attention forward again.

The next power ball grew in my hand.

The men raised their weapons but froze when they saw us, seeming to recognize us just as Ian had done earlier.

They quickly dropped the barrels of their weapons and started shouting at us.

"Emma! Jesus, get over here!" one of them yelled.

"We have to move!" the other barked, waving us closer. "We have orders to get you out!"

"You know them?" I asked her, panting under the exertion of our mad dash across... however much of the castle we had covered in the last ten minutes or so. Emma just nodded; she had recognized Ian, too. Her mouth opened to say something, but the sudden yell of one of the men ahead of us cut her off.

"Get down!" the first man shouted, lifting his rifle again. I don't know if it was just instinct or if it was something more, but I grabbed Emma and dove to the ground. Both men opened fire the instant my shoulder hit the deck. I scrambled to look behind us. Another group of men, men who had doubtlessly been chasing us since our flight from the main hall, dove for cover as the two men in front of us emptied their clips toward them. Four of them dropped immediately, another one going down before he made it to the cover of a doorway, and another two were hit but managed to keep moving.

One of the men ahead of us ran forward, hooked an arm under Emma's shoulder, and started pulling her toward the doorway they had emerged from. The second man started to reload, managing to finish inserting the clip and slapping the receiver closed in a matter of seconds before he opened fire again, this time to keep our pursuers in cover while he shouted to me. "Can you move?"

I didn't answer. Well, I did; I moved. I got up and ran after the first man, hooking my arm under Emma's other shoulder and pulling her toward the door. "Move, move, move!" The second man was shouting. Our assailants were getting brave again, popping out from their hiding places and shooting down the hallway after us.

"The hell have you been?" The first man panted as he managed to drag us into the cover of this new, smaller hallway. "The princess sent us to get you but you weren't in your office."

Emma's eyes shot up. "You were with my mother?"

The first man nodded. "She sent us after you after we evacuated her from the main hall." His eyes flashed back to the second man, who had taken up a position on the opposite side of the hall, hunkered into a doorway's alcove and maintaining suppressing fire on our pursuers.

"She's out of the castle?" I asked, pulling his attention back to us.

He nodded again. "The rest of her bodyguards got her clear. We volunteered to come back for her."

Another rattle of gunfire snapped my focus back to the second of the friendly guards before he ran dry, ducked back into the alcove, and reloaded once again in record time. I was starting to feel the exhaustion now, not in the same way as I had been after the Praetorian compound, but it was getting there. I had used an extraordinary amount of power today, a massive amount more than I had ever used in a single day before. Dealing with the Conclave, as long ago as it seemed, had only happened a few hours earlier, then the little performance I had put on for Marco via Toussant's body - control of which was vastly more draining than projecting my power directly from myself - and then the attack on the castle. The shield, in particular, was much more demanding than anything I had projected before now, not that it was any stronger than the rudimentary version of it I had put up outside the Inquisition offices in Ukraine, but because it was moving. Trying to keep it steady, keep it big enough to cover both Emma and me, and Rhodri before that, and keep it in place was hard enough, but every bullet that hit seemed to take an enormous amount more power than I had expected. It was like I was having to reform it after every shot and after every footstep, over and over again. It was like turning a light on and off; keeping it on used up power, but continuously flicking it on and off was a much faster way to burn out the bulb, and all of that was before I had infused Rhodri with enough power to flood his city ankle deep in energy. I was starting to feel it; I could keep going for a few more hours at the rate I had been burning through my powers, but after that would become risky. I wasn't all that concerned about my own safety if I finally ran out of power; I was pretty sure the bulletproof skin, for example, was a latent ability that used next to no power, but not being able to maintain my shield or throw out any of those power balls would make Emma's survival chances a very grim prospect indeed. No, we were on a clock now. Time was ticking away, and the window to get us out safely and do whatever needed to be done once we had escaped was closing rapidly. "We can't stay here," I muttered loud enough for everyone to hear while watching bullets slam into the Mortar and stonework around the edges of the alcove in which our other friendly guard was taking cover and trying to return fire. "There are too many of them."

"The route back to the motor pool is clear, for now." The first man said, his eyes, like mine, on his friend. "We'll stay and hold them off."

"What? No!" Emma gasped, her eyes snapping up as if that was the last thing she had expected to hear.

"Princess," the guard smiled. "Serving your family has been the honor of my life and has brought me more peace and purpose than I will ever be able to say. We swore an oath to protect you, not because we were forced to, but because we chose to. It's our time to fulfill that oath, and we do it gladly."

"No!" Emma pulled herself to her feet and stamped a foot impetuously against the solid stone floor. Of course, the unyielding ancient stone didn't produce anything like the authoritative sound that I think she wanted it to, but she carried on regardless. "No more death! No more noble sacrifices! I won't lose any more friends to this... to this bullshit!"

The man's smile grew a little wider. "And that is why it is our privilege to serve you, Emma. Only the worthy would put themselves in harm's way to save a lesser member of your house." Emma made to speak again, but the guard held up his hand. "Your mother once said to us, long ago, that although we were not connected by blood, we were all bonded by something much more important: choice. We chose to stay loyal, we chose to serve, and your family chose to enrich our lives and the lives of our own families in a way we could never have asked for. You are the family we chose; you are the..."

His speech was cut off by a sudden yell from the other guard. "TAKE COVER!!"

I barely had time to look up.

The RPG projectile smashed into the cornice of his doorway a second after all of us snapped our attention to him. The shield went back up instantly, halting the rush of air and shrapnel dead in its tracks as it raced toward us. But I was nowhere near fast enough to save the second guard, a man whose name I still didn't know. I could only watch in that torturous slow motion as his body was lifted off the ground, contorting and deforming as the shockwave shattered bones and ruptured his internal organs before it threw him across the not-inconsiderable length of the doorway and slammed him into the opposite wall. He was dead before he hit the floor, and the echoes of the blast had barely faded away when the shouted voices of our pursuers and the sounds of rapidly approaching, running footsteps replaced it.

"Go! Now!" The first guard yelled. He didn't wait for Emma's answer, he just raised his rifle and sprinted to the doorway, peeked around it, and started to fire.

"Fuck!" I spat, knowing that what was about to happen wouldn't go down well later. I grabbed Emma's elbow, leaving no room for argument, and dragged her down the hallway away from the fight.

"No, let me go!" she screamed, pulling futilely against the vice-like grip of my hand, but I ignored her. We didn't have time for this; the guard - another man whose name I would have to learn after his fall - had made his choice clear. As heroic and noble as it was, as much as I wanted to stand and fight beside him, as much as I wanted to inflict a whole new world of pain on the people responsible for all this madness, I just couldn't. Not reliably, not without knowing exactly what would happen between now and the next point, I could get a decent night's sleep to recharge. If I could be certain that everything after we left the castle would be clear sailing, then I would have stood my ground and fought the good fight in a heartbeat, but I wasn't. There was no way of knowing what the rest of the day would bring, and with well over half of my power reserves being burned through faster than my power plants could replenish them, I knew I had to make a concerted effort to make the rest of it last.

I couldn't do that and fight. It was one choice or the other, and Bob - a man I respected more than almost anybody else - had asked a single thing of me: to keep his daughter safe. Standing and fighting, laying out some hurt, as appealing as that idea was, was a choice that could put Emma in serious danger. No, the only option was to run. I hated it, I hated these bastards more than any living creature in my entire life for making me take that option - more than Marco, more than Toussant, more than my parents - but there was no escaping the fact that it was the only option.

So I ran, dragging the kicking and screaming Emma along behind me while trying to keep the shield in place as we moved.

Emma was still looking behind us as we ran, her eyes wide with anger, desperation, and grief. Those emotions, coupled with the daunting task of processing the events of the last hour, were a lot for her unprepared mind to cope with, and the cracks were beginning to show. Tears streamed down her face, and her legs - although moving her in the right direction - had lost all of the urgency they had possessed after we had left her father in the main hall. She wasn't fighting against me, as such, but she sure as shit wasn't making things any easier when it came to getting herself away from danger, and she had completely stopped directing me on which way to go. That was a pretty big problem, considering I had absolutely no idea where the motor pool was.

"Emma! I need you to focus!" I barked at her, turning my head to look at her. "Which way do we need to go?"

Emma gulped hard, and defiantly held my eye for a second before seeming to pull herself together, at least a little. "Um..." she spun her head left, then right, before turning back to her left again. "That way. The motor pool garage leads out onto the main field. It's a straight run to the front gates from there."

"Perfect. Are you good to go?" I asked, trying to sound as calm as I could manage. Emma cast one last look back along the corridor, mine instinctively followed.

I think we both wished we hadn't.

Just as my eyes found the last remaining friendly guard, a bullet ripped through his thigh, the one just slightly out of cover as he fired around the corner. The sudden loss of strength in his leg tipped him forward and onto his knees, now completely out of cover and at the mercy of the dozens of bullets hurtling toward him. One found its mark, hitting him in the side and spinning him around like a top, before another smashed into his chest. A fountain of blood spluttered from his lips as his back hit the ground. Even from our distance, I could see he was still alive. He rolled himself onto his stomach and started dragging himself back toward cover and his weapon.

Before he could reach anything that could be called safety, a shadow, silhouetted behind that glowing white aura, stepped into view. He was in no rush, clearly seeing our guards for the lack of threat they had become, but there was something else about him, a malice, a contempt for the resistance our guard had shown, a need to end that fight personally. He slowly walked closer to the crawling form of our comrade, looking at him in the same way a sport hunter would look down at a wounded animal, one that held no value as a prize: a sort of pity mixed with disgust.

With all the casual disregard one may hold for a maggot, the shadowed man lifted his rifle and squeezed the trigger, putting two bullets into the head of our friend.

Emma's howl of despair snapped his attention to us. I didn't give him time to turn his weapon our way, too, and another blasted shield wall raced along the hallway toward him.

He casually stepped back out of sight and behind cover, letting my power crash harmlessly into the opposite wall. I didn't wait around to see what he did next. Sure, I could have finished him off, but, again, power was an issue, and breaking his pursuit of us, even for only a few moments, was a good enough result for now.

It would be almost impossible for me to describe the feelings running through my mind as I grabbed the sobbing Emma and resumed dragging her down the corridor. Rage, fury, so cold and so profound that I felt like I may lose myself to it completely. But this wasn't the blinding anger I had lived with for so long; this wasn't the beast I had tamed, nor was it the Dragon it represented. This was something... deeper. It was a tide pulling me along with the current of events around me, almost serene in its ease; it was the calm at the center of a storm of howling winds; it was patience, not the cold, calculating thirst for violence that needed to wait, that was something I had felt before, this was more like a master chess player, knowing the moment would come to make its move, it just wasn't time yet. It was the rumbling growl that preceded the roar of the apex predator.

The Dragon was stepping aside, yielding to it, letting me know that the actions taken against the perpetrators of the crimes being committed around me were mine to answer how I saw fit. The Mantle had seen all it needed to see; the Praetorians attacking this Castle had been judged, even without their knowing it, and had been found guilty. I was free to unleash the seven rings of hell on them If I so wished, and the highest moral authority of our people would consider it justice. He would neither help nor hinder me, I was the Dragon's instrument, and it trusted me to dispense justice in its name without fear of overstepping.

I was being given free reign, the keys to the kingdom, unlimited authority. It may come now, it may come later, but when it came, the dragon would do nothing to stop me. No matter what I did to these people, I could do no wrong in his eyes.

Absolute power. Zero consequence.

That was the sort of shit that could corrupt even the best of us.

But that wasn't going to stop me when the time came.

We raced wordlessly down the hallway, not bothering to look behind us for our pursuers. They weren't stupid enough to step into the confines of the corridor with nowhere to escape one of my weaponized shield walls, but there were still doors every few hundred feet. Large, thick, strong wooden and iron doors that were once part of the castle's defensive systems. They hadn't been closed in decades, maybe longer, but - as we sprinted past one particular set of them - an idea occurred to me. I spun around and waved my arm at them. Hinges creaked, and wood groaned, but the doors slammed closed, barring passage to anyone thinking of following us. I poured my power into them, melting the hinges and the ironwork, then resetting them again, warping the doors and fusing the metal of its locks into a solid hunk of iron. It could never be opened manually again, no matter how strong they were. Of course, explosives would turn those doors to splinters in seconds, but that would take time to set up, and time was all I needed right then. It wasn't much, But it could buy us a few minutes.

If I could get us to the motor pool, we could get into a vehicle, and, just like the SUV that took us to meet Olena in Ukraine, I could turn that vehicle into a tank that could drive through the heart of a nuclear detonation without so much as chipping the paintwork. More than that, I could pull that off with a fraction of the energy consumption of the shield I had been keeping up for the last hour or so. I could keep the gas tank full, I could make it immune to every type of ordinance these bastards could throw at it, and I could drive us the fuck out of here with ease.

All I needed was to get us there.

The Corridor banked to the right, and there it was: the grated metal doors leading to the motor pool garage. Black steel covered the portal where another oaken door would have once stood, a solid metal door carved into the newer edifice, and grated steel panels at the top and bottom of it showing the garage beyond. I could see the outlines of vehicles even from where we were. Just a few more meters, and...

"Pete..."

Rhodri's worried voice echoed through my mind; I skidded to a halt as I immediately reconnected with him.

The carnage of the main hall was everywhere in Rhodri's vision; bullet holes were everywhere, plastering the walls around the table that he and Bob had been using for cover. There was barely anything left of the table itself; it was a patchwork of splintered holes being held together by the quality of its construction and the reinforcing steel that layered the underside of it, but not even that level of protection could hold out against the volume of military-grade ordnance being shot at it.

Bodies were everywhere, the place they had fallen marking not only how far into the hall they were managing to advance but the desperation - bordering on suicidalness - of the men attacking them. There had to be at least forty of them, some riddled with bullets, others blown to pieces from the impacts of Rhodri's power balls. He still had some of my power left, but he had been burning through it at an alarming rate.

He didn't have long left.

But that wasn't why he had called out to me.

Bob had stopped shooting, slumping back in a sitting position with his back resting against the wall and leaning his left side against the table. A small trickle of blood was seeping from his lips, his eyes were rolling, and even without any real medical knowledge or training, I could see his breathing had become labored.

"He's dying, Pete. I thought..."

"He will die as he lived, Rhod," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "Protecting the people he loved. Please tell him it was the honor of my life to know him and to fight beside him. Tell him I will keep Emma safe."

Rhodri relayed the message, flinching away from the sound of bullets hitting what little of the table was intact enough to protect him. Bob's eyes rolled again but then focused on Rhodri.

"Can he hear me?" Bob croaked. The strength that had always been so present in his manner was now gone. Rhodri's vision tilted as he nodded. "Pete... You were the son I never had... and the strongest ally our family could have ever asked for." A cough, an agonizing one, by the looks of it, rattled through him before he continued. "Finish this war, keep our people safe... Tell Emma... I love her... Find Isabelle... Tell her... the... same. Goodbye... My frie..." His voice trailed off into a long exhale as his eyes rolled again, then slowly fell closed.

"Pete, I don't think I'm gonna be able to hold them much longer." Rhodri's voice echoed again after a few moments. His vision flicked up over the edge of the table in time to watch another three men dart into the room and dive into cover. Only two of them made it, though; a power ball crashed into the third, hitting him to the right of his navel and blowing away most of his side. His scream, the last sound he would ever make, bounced off the walls as he fell, his Praetorian friends watching in horror and growing anger as yet another one of them died in that god-forsaken bottleneck. "Once they get through me, they'll be coming after you."

"Rhod, you don't have to do this. There's still time for you to get out." I pleaded with him.

I could feel Rhodri's grim smile. "That time has come and gone, my friend. I'm doing this for Neil, and I will be with him again soon, exactly where I belong."

I could feel the granite-strong resolve in him; I knew there was nothing I could say that could change his mind. Rhodri had joined this war not to win but to fight in his bondmate's name and die in the process. Suicide by Praetorian. I hated the idea, but I could respect it.

"I... thank you, Rhod. Neil would have been proud."

"As would Faye, my friend. Make them pay."

"Give them hell, brother."

Rhodri smiled again, then spun around and stood up, no longer using the table for cover but throwing every single ounce of my remaining power into his onslaught. The two remaining praetorians who had escaped his first barrage were ripped to pieces along with their cover as Rhodri threw one ball after another against them. More men, ones who must have entered before I re-established my connection to Rhodri, tried to dive to safety as he turned his attention to them. Three men huddled behind an old, overturned desk, were blown to pieces as they tried to fire at him; another five were eviscerated as they tried to sprint into the hall. But it was the footsteps behind him, through the door we had entered from when he had come to Bob's aid, that was the end of him.

Rhodri had time to spin around, launching one final ball of power at the men firing at him, but it was too late. The Praetorians flanking him had already sent their bullets on their way. The Powerball smashed into the lead attacker, turning him and the three men with him into a mess of blood spray and flying body parts; arms and legs, heads and weapons, being turned into the equivalent of autumn leaves on a stiff breeze. But at the same time, the bullets started to hit. First into the table behind Rhodri, then one hit his leg, another hit his hip, and - as one of the most heroic men I had ever known started to fall - one hit his head, just below his right eye.

I felt it all; I felt the bullet slicing through his skull and ripping through his brain. There was no slow-motion view of his city collapsing as there had been with Uri; there were still some things that needed a physical touch. The connection of my power in his well was all we had, but it was apparently enough. I felt the last embers of Rhodri's life vanish as the back of his skull was blown out in the same maelstrom of brutal carnage as had befallen the men who killed him.

He had literally taken them down with him.

Just as he had planned to.

The connection was severed immediately, and the pain - the excruciating, nauseating, terrifying pain - vanished with it. I was on my knees, my head in my hands, and tears streaming down my face. Some for Bob, some for Rhodri, and the rest for the agony I had just felt. "Pete! Pete! What's wrong? Please, answer me!!" Emma was crouched over me, her head snapping left and right, then back to me, as I knelt limply on the stone floor.

"Rhodri's gone," I whispered softly. "I... I felt it."

Her eyes widened in horror. I guess she was getting a crash course in the things I had been dealing with for the better part of a year, the things that had turned me into the animal she despised, or at least the one she had despised that morning. I could see the realization in her eyes, her mind racing to try to comprehend what it must feel like to feel - not just see, but actually feel - a person's final moments, and then couple that with the knowledge that this was not my first time.

But then another thought occurred to her. "My... My father?"

I lifted my gaze to hers, our eyes met, and I could see that small glimmer of hope shining behind them, hope I was about to crush... I shook my head.

Her face crumpled. Whatever composure she had been hiding behind since we left Bob in the main hall shattered like broken glass, and she fell to her knees beside me. My arms wrapped around her almost by instinct, holding her close. Her arms fell around me, too, her face buried against my shoulder as violent sobs racked through her.

Her world, everything she knew to be true, had been destroyed in a few hours, it had claimed the lives of her friends, it had shattered the illusion of trust that she had based her entire world view on, and now it had claimed her father.

I knew that sort of pain all too well.

My heart broke for her.

"Emma," I whispered softly. "We need to keep going; we need to make it count. There will be time to grieve later, and it will hurt more than you can imagine; I promise that I will be there with you for all of it if you want me to be. But right now, we need to get out of here."

She pulled her head back; her eyes were red and swollen, and I didn't need to be able to read her mind to be able to see the agony on her face. "I'm sorry," she croaked, "I'm so sorry. I didn't understand what could make you do the things you did. I didn't know what it was like. I didn't know anything could hurt like this."

I shook my head. "And I wish you never had to find out, but you have nothing to be sorry for. You're only human... ish," I smiled weakly at her. She snorted out a weak, tearful laugh, using the back of one of her hands to wipe at her eyes as I stood and offered my hand. "We do this together, okay?"

"What... what are you going to do?"

"Whatever I have to."

I could see it. That moment when her usual, reflexive retort came bubbling to the surface, only to be crushed by the weight of everything she had seen and learned since that morning. The new understanding and realizations dawning on her in real time, starkly enough to make her see how ridiculous that usual retort would be. She had been baptized by fire; the Emma I had met that morning was long gone; in her place was a woman with a new, albeit incomplete, understanding of the realities of the world she lived in. She understood loss, she understood death, she understood the real meaning of danger, things that were simply beyond her comprehension just a few hours ago.

Instead of that bitter, hostile retort that I would have met only that morning, she just nodded. I pulled myself to my feet, reaching out for her hand, she glanced at it, then back up at me, before she took it.

Another flash of energy sparked between us as I helped her up, like a flash jumping from her fingers to mine or from mine to hers, whichever way it went; we both distinctly felt it that time, but it still wasn't the time to dwell on it. Latent static shocks were a puzzle for another day. I laced my fingers with hers, turned us toward the motor pool garage, and we started to run. This wasn't me dragging her like before; this was us fleeing this nightmare together.

The motor pool, the garage, our chance to escape; it was right there, only thirty feet away, then twenty, then ten...

And then it vanished as a massive explosion ripped through it. The shockwave smashed into my shield hard enough to make me stumble back, dragging Emma to the ground with me. The reinforced metal door was blown off its hinges and tossed a few dozen feet past us and into the corridor as if it weighed nothing. More importantly, though, the garage beyond the doorway it once guarded was now strewn with the burning wreckage of the vehicles that had called it home; it was missing a wall and most of its roof, too. The heat from the fire, fuelled by the contents of ruptured gas tanks, was blindingly intense, even from where we were crouched. The cars - a couple of panel vans and a trio of burning SUVs - had all been blown away from a central point, the detonation site of what was either a very large bomb or a ridiculously large rocket fired from somewhere outside. Two of the SUVs were on their sides, and one of the panel vans had its flank buckled so violently that it looked like it had been bowed inwards far enough to touch the other side. Even from our distance, it was clear to see that none of the vehicles in the inferno would be of any use in our escape.

"Fuck sake!" I growled. "These fuckers are starting to really piss me off!"

"What do we do now?" Emma's timid, frightened voice came from beside me.

"Where are we?" I answered after a few moments of thought. "In relation to the nearest gate, or an outer wall or something, I mean."

Emma thought for a second. "We're about as far from the gates as it's possible to be," she finally admitted. "The driveway comes through the main gates, through the grounds, and then to the motor pool garage. We're pretty much in the center of the castle. If we want to get to the gate..." She looked back over her shoulder at the door i had sealed closed. "...we need to go back the way we came... Or we have to go straight through the bailey."

"The Bailey, " I sighed. "The massive field between the walls with absolutely no cover?"

"That's the one," she grimaced.

"How far?"

"To the gates? About three hundred yards? Give or take."

"And there's only the one set?"

"Still in use, yes." she nodded. "There are a couple of old bricked-up ones, but they're even further away than the main gates."

"What about the walls? How close are we to any part of the walls?"

She seemed to understand my intent immediately. "They're closer, maybe about two hundred yards to the nearest edge of the castle, but..."

"Don't worry, getting through them won't be as much of a problem as getting to them... How do we get there?"

"Through there," she nodded at the inferno of the garage. "There's a side door, but..."

"It's back the way we came, and there are probably a dozen Praetorians on the other side of that door I sealed by now."

Emma just nodded, her eyes flicking nervously back along the corridor behind us.

"Alright, the only way out is through," I sighed. "You okay?"

"Not even a little bit," she hugged herself.

"Em," I waited for her eyes to reach mine. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you."

"It's not that, it's..."

"Your father, I know." I offered a weak smile. "Let's make him proud, shall we?"

Emma turned her head to look at the flames billowing out of the garage door. "Is it going to hurt?"

"Walking through fire? Nah, it's easy. I do it all the time."

She chuckled, a strange, alien sound that seemed even more foreign, given the pain etched onto her face. "Okay," she finally nodded.

I took her hand again, nodded back to her, turned us toward the garage, put the shield back up, and we started to jog forward.

" Sir, something is wrong," Jeeves announced carefully as we rushed through the door and into the garage. I was trying to keep a strong grasp on Emma's hand. The shield was the only thing holding back the flames or the deadly heat they produced, so if she tripped or fell, or if she sidestepped something widely enough to slip out of the boundaries of the shield, she would be dead in seconds.

But I felt it, too.

Something had always bugged me about the party, a little detail that had never quite made sense, at least not after learning more about the Inquisitors and their biology. Just before the attack, just before the first breach was made and the first shots were fired, I had felt an overwhelming sense of... well, disconnection, for lack of a better word. It had been like sitting inside a bubble. My ability to stretch my power further that the walls of the workingman's club had vanished, and even my ordinarily eidetic memory had been undermined. At the time, I had thought it a byproduct of so many Inquisitors being in the area, that maybe it was a way their bodies had evolved to counter an Evo's powers. But in the time since then, I had been surrounded by Inquisitors on countless occasions, and that effect hadn't been repeated in a single one of them. Yet I was distinctly aware of it happening again. It was further away, fainter, but it was there. It was still like being inside a bubble, but that bubble was extraordinarily larger than the one that I had been in at the party. The only other time I had felt anything close to this was...

"Shit! The Praetorian cell. They must have found a way to mobilize and weaponize its effects. That must have been what they deployed at the party; I just must've missed it!"

"Sir, if they close that bubble, your shield will be useless." Jeeves warned, "Possibly the bulletproof skin element of the red alert program, too, and they already have you surrounded."

"Ideas?"

This time it was Uri who spoke up. "Brute force, my friend." He said. "Sometimes the best form of defense really is to go on the offense."

"Fuck," I snarled, my eyes finding the main door of the garage through the flames, or what was left of it, anyway.

"What's wrong?" Emma shouted over the roar of the inferno.

"They've got some sort of technology that nullifies my powers, and they are surrounding us. I can feel it."

"What?? What do we do?"

"Emma, I know how you feel about violence, but we're going to have to fight our way out. At this point, it's them or us."

I could see that look on her face again, that instinctive revulsion at the idea of harming any of her own people. No matter how much she had seen and learned in the last few hours, it was still an instinct that was marrow-deep within her. I had to admire her, though. We were currently running through the burning remains of her home; she still had a smear of her father's blood on her cheek, a father she now knew was lost; she had watched friends die, she had seen the face of betrayal, she had seen - with her own eyes - the lengths that these fuckers were willing to go to kill her, and yet her first instinct was still to show mercy.

She was a better person than I was.

But she wasn't stupid. She knew the reality, even if it went against everything she thought she knew to be true. She swallowed hard and just nodded, her hand squeezing a little harder in mine. I could see the contours of her face, illuminated in the flickering shadows of the fire we were running through; it wasn't quite hardening with resolve but maybe preparing itself for the inevitable.

The instant we stepped out through the hole where the garage doors had once been, my shield was raked by a huge volume of gunfire. The little ripples in it, the points of impact of every bullet - ripples that I still wasn't sure if anyone else could see - erupted in every direction, from directly in front of us, from both sides, from above, and - as soon as we cleared the garage - from behind as well. It was like a sudden downpour on the surface of a calm lake.

Surrounded was an understatement, and a lazy one at that. We hadn't stumbled into this point by accident, we had been corralled here. Every attack, every appearance by the enemy, every turn we had been forced to take, it had all been by design. It was a masterclass in military planning, as profound an illustrator of the skill of our attackers as I could imagine because in every direction - atop walls, through upper windows, and completely surrounding us on the ground level of the bailey - were men with guns, all of them pointed at us, and the only ones that weren't firing were the ones that were reloading.

We skidded to a halt. Each bullet that hit my shield was draining a little more of my power. Each one sapped a minuscule amount of energy from me, but combined, it became a flood. Emma's frantic eyes snapped in every direction as, like me, she desperately searched for a breach in the lines, some way to get out.

There wasn't one.

The men on the ground level, their faces creased in malevolent smirks, were starting to advance on us, every step bringing them closer. Behind them, moving at the same speed, were what looked like armored Humvees, just on much higher suspension and with cargo containers bolted where the passenger compartment would normally be.

"Sir," Jeeves said after a few seconds, his voice eerily calm given the circumstances. "It would be my assumption that whatever technology they are using, it is in the back of those trucks."

"One way to find out," I growled back.

The Powerball grew in my hand in an instant, and with a forceful, under armed swing, I launched it at the group of men and one truck directly between us and the distant shape of the castle's main gate. Just like it had done before, the Powerball raced across the distance between us, the force of it cracking open the very air itself, gouging a trench of sundered earth beneath it, then letting that air slam closed behind it in a deafening sonic boom.

Then, it poofed out of existence.

Ten feet in front of the men firing at us, it just vanished. It didn't burst, it didn't lose strength, it didn't hit some invisible wall like the enemy bullets were doing to my shield, it just stopped existing in mid-air, a second before it eviscerated its targets. The men firing from behind its protection just smirked a little wider, and resumed their fire.

"Shit! Back up," I barked, putting my hand on Emma's chest and starting to push her behind me.

Okay, think, Pete. How did you break the bubble at the party? That was with a Powerball, right? No, fuck, it wasn't. I turned the front wall into a massive claymore mine. I never touched the people outside of the vans; the bricks and shrapnel from the wall did. Okay, I can work with that.

I reached my hand out, turning to grab some debris from the shattered remains of the garage; three large pieces of masonry, each one weighing the better part of a ton, floated into the air. I turned my attention back to the men in front of us, utterly determined to wipe those fucking smirks off their fucking faces.

A moment before their skulls were introduced to solid stonework, the pieces dropped limply to the ground. I blinked at them, lifting my hand to pick them up again.

Nothing happened.

The bubble had closed.

"Fuck!"

Okay, don't hit them with power; hit them with stuff. But what stuff? Think, dammit, you used to be pretty good at that before these powers made you lazy. What can you hurt them with that...

An idea sprung into my head. It could work, but it would be risky.

"Emma, I have an idea, but..."

Emma turned to look me in the eyes. The fear, the panic, the dread, all of it was washing over her face in waves of terror, but behind it all, somewhere deep in there, was that resolve, a strength that I doubted either of us knew she had. But more than that, there was an understanding. She got it now. When I said that it was them or us, she now knew what that meant; she understood that if we were to live, it wouldn't mean just clearing a path to safety; it would mean that all of them - all of them - would need to die.

Time froze as her eyes met mine. "Do it."

I spun back to face our enemy, closed my eyes, took a deep, calming breath, and then reopened them.

Just like outside the Inquisitor offices in Ukraine, the last time I had turned my foes to ash, the world turned white.

Fire erupted out of me in every direction, but unlike the last time, it didn't wash outwards at a hundred miles an hour to cleanse the area of bad guys. This was more deliberate, more purposeful, and, frankly, more impressive. Washing out about twenty feet in every direction, the flames suddenly stopped, not because of anything the Praetorians had done, but because I willed it to. Then it started to grow upwards. Up and up it went, twenty feet, fifty, a hundred, a towering funnel of pure fire that loomed over the men in the bailey, the men on the walls, over the castle itself, and then it started to spin.

With one hand outstretched to keep the shield as powerful as I could, the other hand holding Emma as close to me as was physically possible, I watched as the column of fire rapidly turned into a tornado.

Don't hit them with your powers, hit them with the effects of them.

Well, heat was an effect, and heat - in high enough quantities - could be one of the most dangerous forces on Earth.

I couldn't see them through the maelstrom of flame, but I could feel them; the Praetorians had stopped shooting, all of them watching in horror and wonder as the funnel of fire spun faster and faster, heat washing out toward them in waves. It was that heat, growing more and more intense by the second, that was pushing them back. Sure, I could have moved it with them; I could have made it walk slowly over the grounds of the Bailey to the main gate, clearing a path for us as we went, but the time for half-measures was over.

Panic suddenly washed through the ranks of men at ground level as the heat started to get dangerous. They didn't quite break and run, but the pace of their backing away picked up dramatically. The trucks were thrown into reverse and started to retreat in time with the men, being careful to keep them close enough for the power-nullifying technology to still work, but that was also their undoing.

Higher and higher, the temperatures rose. Rapidly building from the ambient springtime temperature of Southern Germany, about twelve degrees Celsius, to twenty times that number in only a few minutes, and still it kept building.

The first casualties came a few seconds later as the tires of those trucks started to melt, the air inside them heating along with the temperatures around them. When they burst, the trucks came to a sudden, shuddering halt. The men using them for protection against the full measure of my power were now in something of a predicament. If they stayed with the vehicles, they would be safe from a direct attack, but they would slowly boil alive, or they could make a break for safety and hope a Powerball didn't follow their asses in their flight.

But as the old saying goes, he who hesitates, loses.

The heat ramped up again, and more power was poured into the spinning funnel of fiery death. But this heat wasn't meant for the indecisive men on the ground, nor was it meant for the drivers of those trucks, frantically trying to get out of the cabs that were quickly being turned into ovens. This was for another target altogether.

The combustion temperature of the diesel in the trucks' tanks had already long passed, but with the fire protection features of their containers, the gas hadn't ignited, but it had certainly started to boil, and as soon as that pressure reached critical, it burst. Suddenly released from the fire-protective confines of the tank, the vaporized diesel exploded, the rest of the tank being blown apart, which in turn, detonated the rest of the fuel. The explosion ripped through the first truck, the fireball engulfing not only that Humvee, but the men stupid enough to still be standing around it. By the time the men around the other trucks realized what was happening, it was too late. A second truck exploded a moment later, then a third, then another. A chain reaction swept through the lines of enemy ranks around us, explosions swallowing men or just bowling them over as the only protection they had from the full weight of my power... and my fury... was turned to fire and shrapnel.

This was the moment; this is what that cold, calculated patience had been waiting for. I had thought, a little earlier, that when the time came, the Dragon would let me do whatever the fuck I wanted to do to these men. No matter how torturous, no matter how twisted, no matter how much it was fueled by pure, undiluted rage, he would just smile and watch, offering no objections. These men had forfeited the right to mercy; the Dragon knew it, I knew it, and now, finally, the time had come to let them know it.

Like the pyroclastic cloud of a vengeful volcano, the smokeless column of flames collapsed to the ground, smashing into the bailey and washing out in every direction. A twenty-foot-high tsunami of fire, hitting speeds of about eighty miles per hour, closed the gap between the Praetorians and us in seconds, not even giving them the dignity of a chance to run before the flames hit them. But this wasn't fire, not really, this was an extension of my will and my fury. Instead of washing over them and consuming them as the flames had done to the Praetorians in Ukraine, this wall of fire hit them like a physical blast, lifting them off the ground and carrying them along with the wave of blistering heat.

Some of them were washed as far as the walls, being held in place and subjected to the full measure of my burning wrath, others were swept away in a direction that didn't involve being crushed against ancient stonework, but all of them - no matter where the flames carried them - were swallowed up by the merciless oceans of fire.

In most cases, a person in close proximity to fire dies from asphyxiation, the inhalation of smoke clogging their lungs until they could no longer breathe, but for those rare few who were made to feel the flames - those tortured to death with fire, or those burned at the stake, to name but a few - the physical effects were far less forgiving, as I would be.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the men being carried around on the wave of fire and those being held against the colossal stone walls, were made to die in the last way you would expect in the middle of a fire. They drowned.

Lungs sucking in searing hot air were scoured clean, bronchi being turned to cinders and the blood that came pouring from those wounds, what little wasn't being boiled out of existence, filled up their lungs, slowly, painfully, and very very heatedly.

Ironically, they were the lucky ones. Those who weren't held with their heads under the flames were tortured in a whole different manner. The blood in the vessels in their skin, the blood in the capillaries of their muscles, the blood transporting the oxygen to each of their vital organs, started to boil away. More than just being agonizingly painful, it led to those bodily systems starting to shrink and contract. Muscles and tendons shrank, pulling and curling the bones back until they snapped, the organs ceased to function as the little remaining blood was directed away from the extremities and secondary organs in order to keep the major ones functioning, keeping them alive and ensuring that they were forced to feel all of this. But it was their skin that finished them off. It contracted around them like a vice, crushing what bones hadn't been snapped, constricting the lungs and the heart until they simply burst. The lungs filled with blood and, once again, they drowned on their own bodily fluids.

But that was where the similarities between this and actual fire ended. Fire, contrary to popular opinion, is not the agonizing way to die that most people think it is. Well, it is at the start, but after a few seconds, the heat burns through the nerve endings and that pain just stops. Of course, I wasn't feeling that merciful, and I made sure that while the heat was enough to kill them as painfully as possible, it wasn't high enough to scorch their nerve endings and end that pain prematurely. They weren't just burned to death, they were tortured until their bodies simply shut down, while being made to feel every single unending second of it.

But the men on the ground, as their screams were drowned out by the roar of the fire, were far from alone in their fate. The men on the walls were made to watch, mistakenly feeling safe from the inferno by virtue of their place above it. But if the fact that the flames had been a swirling vortex of apparently-magical death only a few seconds earlier hadn't told these cretins that this wasn't a naturally occuring fire, the fact that the flames quickly washed up and over the walls certainly did.

Like the tempestuous waves of a mighty storm surge, crashing against the breakwater of an ancient port, the fire crested the top of the walls and crashed down onto it. The men who had thought themselves safe on its ramparts were quickly shown the folly of not running while they had the chance. Those not thrown off the walls and into the fires below, were pinned to the battlements and subjected to the same fate as their burning friends below. But this still wasn't fire, this was still my will, and my will did not bend to such trivial things as gravity. The fires kept going, washing up the sides of the castle and flowing through the ancient windows. The fire was like a fluid, clinging to the stone walls of the castle's keep and rushing up it as if gravity itself was nothing more than a nice idea that could be ignored when needed.

I could see it, I could feel it, I could sense where the fire was, where it could go, what - or who - it could consume on its rampage. It raced through hallways, filling them from floor to ceiling and immolating anything or anyone in its path, side rooms and corridors, main halls and bedrooms, offices, armories and kitchen, all of them were bathed in flame.

Men tried to run, men always ran, but none of them made it more than a few feet from the moment they broke and routed.

The dead burned alongside the living.

I could feel the moment the fire smashed into the main hall, I could feel it wash over Rhodri's body, I could feel it scour away the blood and body parts of the people he had helped hold back and those who had fought beside him I felt the moment the flames entered the apartment in which I had spent the previous night. I felt the moment it burst through the door into Emma's office, turning years of her hard work to ash along with everything else. That desk, her books, her notes, the pictures of her with her father, her mother, her friends, her work and her memories.

Gone in seconds.

But still, the temperatures rose. This wasn't just my power anymore; of course, that was what was feeding the fire, but its movements, its will, the carnage, death, and destruction it wrought, that was my rage.

"They killed them," I growled, the words clawing their way out of me. I wasn't talking to anyone specific, but I could feel Emma's presence, the only one close enough to hear. "Bob risked his life for strangers--people he'd never laid eyes on! But they were his people, so he dove into a fucking war zone for them. He nearly died for them! That's the kind of man he was. A good man. A goddamn leader! And they murdered him! They killed Uri, Rhodri, Neil--every one of them they could at that party. They killed Becky just for knowing me, and Faye, they killed her twice! They'll kill anyone who doesn't bow to their twisted, fucked up worldview!

They were all good people! Innocent of any crime other than being born, and they fucking killed them! No, it wasn't just killing--they took pleasure in it! They fucking enjoyed it! They came here today with every intention of killing more innocent people! Well, now it's my turn! I won't let this slide! I won't stand for it! They came here hunting for death? Well, death is exactly what they're going to find!"

The roar that ripped from my lips was more animal than man, the force of it was almost enough to finish the work that the flames had started. If any men had been alive and standing in the bailey when that force hit them, they would have been obliterated by the wall of sound faster than they had been by the wall of fire. Still though, the burning wreckage of those Humvees were tossed aside like they were toys, being sent toppling and careening over the burning grass. Between the devastating heat of the fire and the impact of the sonic blast, the twisted and crumpled carcasses of those once-dangerous vehicles were barely recognizable as more than hunks of charred scrap metal.

The impact further away from me, however, was even more pronounced. Stone cracked, mortar that had held up ancient stones for centuries could no longer handle the stress being inflicted on it, and huge sections of the once mighty stone walls started to crumble. More than that, whole sections of the castle's keep, undermined by an inferno before that wall of sound smashed into it, started to collapse. The deafening sounds of masonry cracking, of enormous stones hitting the ground, of wooden beams - those not incinerated in the heat, at least - snapped like dry kindling before they too were effortlessly consumed by the fire. More importantly, though, the number of voids in the area - men and women whose minds I could not read - were either being snuffed out of existence, one by one, or - those who had never entered the castle grounds, anyway - were rapidly retreating.

My senses, able to pick them out against the backdrop of nothingness, was making sure the fire reached every last one of them that it could. I had no idea how many blocking Evos were caught up in the conflagration, but there were many occasions - a hundred, at least - where an Evo's mind flashed into existence as they were caught by the flames. Their cities working overtime to protect them against the fire and the deadly heat diverted their power away from their efforts to block me, but it was futile, nothing could survive the inferno I had unleashed. It didn't matter if they hid, it didn't matter if they ran, it didn't matter if they barricaded themselves away from the encroaching firestorm, none were allowed to escape. Either the fire caught them and turned their skin into human crackling, or the heat from it seared their lung into uselessness, and if none of that killed them - if they somehow managed to hide themselves in a place my mind never thought to send the fires, the collapse of the castle around them would make sure that their hiding places became their tombs.

No, the time for half measures was over. Bob, in his final words, had been right: It was time to finish this war, one way or another, once and for all. If that meant leaning into the animal side of me that made Emma recoil from me so vicerally, if that meant embracing the violence and the vengeance that seemed to be the only language these assholes understood, if that meant losing myself so nobody else would have to, so fucking be it!

The Dragon, somewhere deep inside me, purred once again in approval. He knew that justice demanded a steep price, both from those who deserved its wrath, and for those who enforced it; it was too important a concept to require anything less. Part of me, I now realized, had been reluctant to give myself over completely to the idea that I was the bearer of the mantle, that I was an instrument of the Dragon, and that I was the voice and the will of the highest form of moral authority for our people. I didn't want to be defined as the judge, jury and executioner for an entire race. I had held onto hopes, however naively, that I may one day return to a life with a semblance of normalcy.

That seemed almost laughable now. This was my life. It was war, it was death, it was violence, it was the hunt for those in dire need of being introduced to the judgment and justice they so desperately deserved, and then the enforcement of the Dragon's will.

I was no longer Pete. I wasn't Pete the shy, insecure, unconfident student. I wasn't Pete the epically powerful Evo, on the front lines of a fight he never wanted to be part of. I was the Angel of fucking vengeace himself.

"Pete, can you hear me?" A voice crept through the cascade of thoughts racing through my mind. "Are you okay? Please answer me."

My eyes blinked open. I was on one knee, crouched down and panting hard, partly from the exertion I had just subjected myself to, and partly from the adrenaline coursing through my veins from the pure rage that I was still feeling. But Emma was right there with me, crouched down in front of me, holding my face and angling it to hers. Her brilliant blue eyes, almost bottomless in their depth, stared back into mine.

God, she was beautiful.

But the rest of her face was contorted in barely contained panic, her eyes searching my face for any signs of life after I had dropped to my knees and the fires had suddenly vanished. "I'm... I'm okay," I croaked. "Are you?"

"Yeah, I'm okay," She turned her head to each side, looking around us. "That was... That was... a lot."

I nodded, taking a moment to see for myself what was left of the castle around us and the men and women who had attacked it so mercilessly. We were kneeling in a perfect circle of pristine, springtime grass, maybe three meters in diameter, but beyond that was like looking at one of the seven rings of hell.

Everything was smoldering, blackened ruin. Literally the physical incarnation of that single word: ruin. The grass was gone, the perfectly tended gardens were gone. Trees, shrubs, statues, scented flowers, the pristine asphalt driveway, the water features, all of it was just... Gone. All that remained was ash and smoke. The ground itself had been baked into a solid mass akin to the hardest, driest desert, the moisture boiled out of every living cell of every plant that had once called this place home. Every rock, or anything that could be said to have once been made out of rock, had been reduced to blackened dust which had been blown away on the raging firestorm winds.

The men who had attacked us were gone, too. There were no charred bones, no hollow poles of men made ash, there were no dark stains where they had fallen, they were just gone. The only reminder that they had ever existed was the twisted, mangled corpses of the trucks that had accompanied them, but even those were barely recognizable as the Vehicles they had been a few minutes earlier. The heat of the inferno had reduced Most of the humvees to their constituent parts, half melted metal - be that from the frame of the chassis, or the springs in the car seats, or the electrical system's wiring - had run together, everything else burning away, leaving behind a, well, a clump of scrap metal in only the vaguest shape of a vehicle.

Beyond them, the walls were no longer the impenetrable defensive structures they had been when we stepped into the bailey. It would be inaccurate to say they had all collapsed; some parts were stronger than others and had survived, albeit as blackened And burned as everything else. Other parts, however, had collapsed completely. Whole sections of the wall were now nothing more than piles of rubble forming a small hill over which any semi-mobile person could climb to get to safety outside. The gate house in the distance was still burning. So was Emma's apartment. Actually, I didn't Know if that's what it was, it was the building where she had been practicing her yoga outside that morning, and the longing, pained look she was giving it told me it held more meaning than just a humble guest's quarters. its Roof had collapsed, so had one of its walls, and flames licked lazily out of the windows of the walls that remained.

But then I turned to look at the castle itself.

I hadn't been afforded much time to truly appreciate the beauty and the majesty of this place before now, just the few minutes we were given as we arrived and the very limited view from my apartment, but it had genuinely been a thing of genuine splendor. It reminded me of the Palace at the center of Charlotte's city, but whereas hers was a glamorized version of the Disney castle, this was the sort of fortress the Disney castle tried, and failed, to emulate.

It had once been a square keep castle, but modernizations over the years had changed it to more of a grand manor house with tall, elegant, rounded towers jutting up at various heights depending on where they were on the building. Shorter ones on the outer edges, the newer parts of the building with the original taller ones on the keep itself. All of it had been made in a limestone-esque, very light gray, almost white stone that made it seem to glimmer in the light. It spoke of timelessness, of fortitude, of elegance, and of strength.

But now, it spoke only of that same single word: ruin.

The corner of the castle Closest to us had completely collapsed, Exposing the inner floors in a grotesque display of fortress anatomy. Those floors had either collapsed as well, or were burned out of existence. Most of the keep, including the main hall where Bob and Rhodri had fallen, had been immolated out of existence. The central keep was little more than a hollow shell with a few sections of intact floors and a whole lot of rubble. The rest of the castle had fared a little better, but not by much. Flames still licked up the walls from shattered windows, smoke billowed out of any hole it could find in the structure, and although the fires no longer raged, they still burned while fuel was still available.

It would take a generation of work and more money than I could comprehend to bring this once mighty castle back to anything approaching its former glory.

And I had been the one who did it.

Part of me felt... not sad about that. Sad was the wrong word. Maybe hollow. There was a gaping hole in the pit of my stomach, filled with regret that things had come to this. Not because I had done it, but because I had been forced to. This was a building, a legacy, that had stood for centuries, and I had destroyed it in an afternoon because some megalomaniacal fuck muppets had decided to pick a fight they couldn't win. It was a regret that I'd been backed into a corner, it was a regret that this thing of beauty had paid the price for their crimes. I hated that I'd been forced to unleash that destruction on the castle, but that new self I had understood during my rage had firmly taken place now. I hated that I'd been forced to do it, but I didn't hate myself for pulling the trigger. I had no choice, this was their doing, not mine, and it was one more crime I would be sure they paid for.

"Yeah, it was a lot," I nodded, finally answering Emma. "But it was them or us. I hope you..."

"I do," she answered before I could finish. "I understand, and I see how much it took out of you to do it, and how far they pushed you before you did. For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

"Sorry? For what?"

"For not understanding sooner. For... For what I said to you."

"That's not important now," I nodded. "We've earned a little room to maneuver, but they'll be back soon. We can't be here when they do, I need to rest before we go any further, that little outburst has me running on fumes."

Emma nodded, her eyes still wandering around the remains of the castle. "I know a place we can go for you to rest, as long as you're okay with roughing it a little."

"Roughing it? How rough are we talking?"

"A cave system a few miles From here. Hardly anyone knows about it, but it won't be comfortable."

"At the moment, I'm so tired I could sleep on a chicken's lip.'

She blinked at me, and then burst out laughing. "On a what?"

"It's an old saying from back home," I chuckled back. "You'll see soon enough, I'm sure we'll end up back there before this is over."

"I'm looking forward to it. But... What do we do next? After you rest, I mean?"

"We find your mother, we regroup, and then we mourn our losses."

She nodded again, slower this time. It was far too soon for her to feel the full weight of her loss. That would come later, but she was still feeling the worst kind of pain. "And then what?"

I took a deep breath and sighed, pulling myself to my feet and offering my hand to her. "Then I hit them back. And keep hitting them till they give up this crusade and sue for peace, or..."

"Or until there are none of them left." She finished for me again

"This war will end, Emma, one way or another."

She held my eyes as she let me pull her to her feet. "I hope so, Pete. And thank you. Thank you for keeping me safe."

I smiled. There wasn't much more I could say to that, and I hadn't been lying. I really was exhausted. "Come on," I said without releasing her hand. "Let's see these caves of yours".