I want to take them. Hold them. I want to lick her wounds clean and then leave marks of my own.
I don't move.
She stopped me from killing someone tonight.
The list of names is already forming in my head. Daiven first. Then his captains. Then every Coin operative who touched this operation.
I'm going to burn them all.
But that's tomorrow.
War has started. Discord will be ready.
The medical tent is chaos—bodies on every surface, medics shouting for supplies, a woman screaming somewhere to my left. I grab a roll of bandages someone dropped and shove it into the hands of a medic running past. She doesn't thank me. I don't need her to. I just need to be doing something that isn't standing around being useless while a god's territory burns.
A rumble, deep enough to shiver through the ground under my feet.
"Western section's going!" Someone yells it, and suddenly everyone is moving—away from the remaining structures, toward open ground—and I'm moving too because I'm not stupid enough to stand still when buildings are coming down. Self-preservation. The one skill I've actually mastered.
Another rumble. Louder.
I stop. Look back.
There's a structure still standing. Barely. Three stories of fractured stone, and there's movement at the base—a woman on the ground, her leg pinned by a beam that looks heavier than I am. A child clings to her, refusing to move. Small. Maybe five. Face buried in her mother's shoulder.
The building groans.
Everyone can see it's going to collapse. Every person in this square is watching, and the Discord elites are shouting, moving, someone's running for equipment that won't get there in time. The math is obvious. The math is brutal. They're not getting out.
Koshin moves.
He just—moves. One second he's thirty feet away giving orders, the next he's running, and the building is coming down around them and he doesn't stop. No hesitation. No fucking logic. Just a god sprinting toward a collapsing building because apparently self-preservation isn't a skill he's mastered.
He's over the rubble before my brain catches up to my eyes. He drops, covers them with his body—the mother, the child, all of them pressed against the ground beneath him—
The structure collapses.
Everything goes white. Dust and debris and the sound of stone slamming into stone, metal shrieking, and I can't see anything, can't breathe, can't—
…
Rubble. Just rubble, where a building used to be. Where three people used to be.
Where he—
I'm across the square before I decide to move, hands on broken stone, pulling, tearing at debris. Fantastic. Now I'mdigging through rubble for the psychotic god who stole me from my buyers. This is what my life has become.
A Discord elite appears beside me, then another and another. Hands everywhere, digging. They're panicked—actually panicked—these massive soldiers with their weapons and their scars, tearing through stone with their bare hands because their god is under there. The devotion would be touching if I had time to think about it.
"Here! Over here!"
The mother first. Her leg is broken—I can see the angle of it, wrong—but she's conscious and the child is in her arms, crying but alive, alive, and someone is lifting them out, carrying them toward medical.
I keep digging because he's under there. He's still under there, and my hands won't stop moving.
Stone cuts my palms and I don't feel it. Renan is beside me now, face bloodless beneath the soot, and he looks terrified. Actually terrified. I've seen this man grin at violence and crack jokes about corpses, and right now he looks like he's about to shatter.
"Koshin—"
