I refused it.
Instead, I moved.
My fist connected with the first cultist's throat, crushing his windpipe with strength I shouldn't possess. He dropped, hands clawing at his neck, eyes bulging as he tried to draw breaththrough a collapsed airway. The second one's blade came at me from the left, and I caught his wrist, twisting until bones snapped like dry twigs. His scream cut off when my knee drove into his solar plexus, dropping him to the wet stone.
The third one, the one who'd laughed, managed to score a hit.
His blade opened a gash along my ribs, parting flesh with ease. Pain bloomed, sharp and immediate, but underneath it something worse, the crawling wrongness of his corrupted magic trying to burrow into the wound. My blood hit the stone, and where it landed, golden light flared.
That's when I killed him.
No thought. No hesitation. My hand drove through his chest like his ribs were made of paper, fingers closing around his heart. It beat once against my palm, then stopped. He looked surprised as he died, as if he hadn't expected the Gate's keeper to have teeth.
The ease of it terrified me.
Not the act itself. I'd been trained to defend the Citadel since childhood. But the simplicity of it. The way his life ended with no more effort than snuffing a candle. The way his blood on my hands felt warm and utterly insignificant. The way some part of me, some new part that grew stronger with each golden vein, whispered that this was right. Natural. What I was meant for.
The two surviving cultists scrambled backward, the one with the crushed throat making horrible wheezing sounds. The other cradled his broken wrist, but his eyes burned with zealous fervor undimmed by pain.
"The Gate will fall," he laughed, spite and madness tangling in his voice. "And you'll help us, whether you know it or not. You're already broken, already theirs. Every choice you make weakens the seals. Every breath you take brings the ending closer."
He pulled something from his robes, a glass vial filled with liquid that seemed to writhe. Before I could stop him, he shattered it against the stone. The substance spread like living shadow, eating through reality itself, opening a wound in the world. Through it, I caught a glimpse of something vast and writhing, something that existed in the spaces between spaces.
Then both cultists threw themselves into that wound, vanishing into wherever chaos worshippers went when they needed to escape. The tear sealed itself moments later, leaving only the corpse of the one I'd killed and my blood still glowing on the stones.
"Aria!"
Natalia's voice cut through the morning like a blade. She stood at the training ground's entrance, taking in the scene with those cold grey eyes. The dead cultist. The blood. Me, standing over the corpse with gore coating my hand to the wrist.
For a heartbeat, I expected condemnation. Horror. The final judgment that I'd become too dangerous to allow.
Instead, she smiled.
It was a thin, cold thing, sharp as winter's edge, but unmistakably approving.
"Good," she said, stepping closer, her boots carefully avoiding the spreading blood. "You killed it cleanly. Efficiently. Without hesitation."
"I—" My voice came out raw. "I didn't mean to. It just happened."
"Intent is irrelevant. Results matter." She circled the corpse with clinical interest, noting the perfect hole where his heart had been. "The Order of Khaos grows bolder. They penetrated our defenses, reached our training grounds. This is unacceptable."
She wasn't concerned about the death. Wasn't concerned about what it meant that I'd killed so easily. She was concerned about the security breach.
"High Keeper, they knew about the Gate's condition. They called me—" I swallowed the words. The princes' whore. "They knew things they shouldn't."
"Then we have a leak." Her eyes narrowed to slits. "Someone within the Citadel is feeding them information. Security will be tripled. Patrols doubled. And you?—"
She turned that laser focus on me, and I felt like a specimen being evaluated.
"You will spend more time stabilizing the Gate. Whatever corruption is spreading through you seems to make you more effective against our enemies. We'll use that."
Use me. Like a tool. Like a weapon. Like my mother before me, until she'd outlived her usefulness.
"Yes, High Keeper."
She studied me for another moment, gaze lingering on the golden veins visible through my torn training clothes, then nodded sharply.
"Clean yourself. Report to the Sanctorum in an hour. The Gate's instability has worsened since dawn."
