The lightning comes.
It leaps from his conductor in a crackling arc—blue-white and searing, not the wild erratic bolts from the hill but a focused beam of electrical energy that bridges the distance between us in a fraction of a second. It hits my chest and the heat is instant, blinding, a fire that roars through my veins and collides with the cold of Callum's shadows.
I scream. Or I think I scream—the sound is swallowed by the thunder that cracks overhead, the sky reacting to Atlas's output, and my body is a battleground. Ice and fire, shadow and storm, two disciplines that shouldn't exist in the same vessel slamming against each other inside my rib cage. The lightning wants to burn. The shadows want to freeze. I'm caught between them, shaking, my feet planted on the stone because if I fall I don't think I'll get up.
Don't fight it. Go with whatever your magic wants to do.
I stop fighting.
The ice and the fire find each other. Merge. Not peacefully—violently, a collision that sends a shockwave through my body that I feel in my teeth—but the result is something that holds. A balance. Shadow and storm, cold and heat, occupying the same space through sheer force of will. Mine or theirs, I don't know.
The sphere on the pedestal flickers with storm-light. Blue arcs inside the glass, tangling with the dark, and the crack glows white—bright enough to see from the stands. The crowd murmurs. Someone saysoh God.
Two disciplines. My hands are shaking. My vision is doing something strange—flickering between normal sight and something darker, the world overlaid with shadows and static like a television losing signal. But I'm standing. I'm holding it.
Two down.
"Mr. Ashford."
Ren moves like he's walking to his own funeral.
Slow. Deliberate. Each step measured, his ritual knife in his hand now—drawn, the gem in the hilt pulsing crimson, the blade catching what's left of the afternoon light. His face is the stillest thing on the platform. Not Callum's blankness, not Atlas's anguish. Something beyond both—the face of a person who has already grieved what's about to happen and is moving through the aftermath.
He stops six feet from me. Raises the knife. Draws the blade across his own palm.
Blood wells up—dark red, almost black—and the gem in the hilt blazes to life. Crimson light spills from the knife, from his hand, from the blood that runs between his fingers and doesn't drip. It hovers. Gathers. Shapes itself into a stream that flows through the air between us like a ribbon of living light.
It touches my chest and I break open.
Blood magic is not like the others. It's not temperature or electricity or physics. It'sintimacy. The moment Ren's magic enters me, I feelhim—not his thoughts, but his existence. The steady rhythm of his heart. The blood moving through his veins, warm and purposeful. The vast, quiet network of sensation that connects every blood mage to every living thing in their radius, amplified now to a frequency that makes my whole body vibrate.
I feel the crowd. Three hundred heartbeats, slamming against my awareness like waves against a breakwater—fear andexcitement and curiosity and dread, all of it pouring through the blood magic channel, all of it mine to hold. I feel the professors' elevated pulses. I feel Brittany's heart hammering in the third row. I feel Herbert's tiny, rapid circulation.
And I feel Ren. Not at the edge of my awareness butinsideit—his heartbeat twinning with mine, synchronizing the way it did in the library, and through the connection I feel something he's been hiding. Not just calm. Not just control. Terror. Absolute, white-hot terror, sealed behind the stillest face on the platform, and underneath the terror—
Grief. For something that hasn't happened yet.
The sphere pulses crimson. The crack spreads—I hear it, a sharp sound like a branch snapping, and the spiderweb of fractures extends another inch across the glass. The three colors inside—shadow, storm, blood—crash against each other in a maelstrom that makes the sphere rock on its pedestal.
Three disciplines. My body is shaking so hard my teeth are chattering. I can't feel my hands—the cold and the heat and the intimacy are all fighting for the same space and it's too much, it's too full, I'm the sphere and the crack is spreading and if one more thing goes in I'm going to—
"Mr. Ferrix."
Felix doesn't step forward. He's already there—when did he move?—standing closer than any of the others, close enough that I can see the freckles on his face and the way his green eyes have gone wide and glassy with something that isn't fascination anymore.
His cards are in his left hand. He draws one with his right—I catch a flash of the sigil, the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail,an outcome that causes itself—and he flicks it toward me.
Chaos magic is the worst.
It doesn't feel like anything physical. It feels like my brain detonating. Every probability branch I've been catching at the edges of my vision since the absorption in Long Shot Mansion comes flooding in at once—not flickering, not faint, but vivid, real, each one a fully realized version of this moment branching into a future I can see and feel and almost touch. The version where I hold it. The version where I shatter. The version where I drain them dry. The version where the explosion kills everyone in the amphitheater. Hundreds of outcomes, thousands, branching and splitting and collapsing in a cascade that fills my skull to bursting.
The sphere goes wild.
All four colors crash against the glass—shadow and storm and blood and chaos, not swirling anymore butcolliding, slamming into each other and the crack and the walls of their glass prison with a violence that makes the pedestal shake. The fractures spiderweb outward, splitting and branching across the surface like lightning frozen in glass. The hum has become a whine—high, thin, rising—and the sphere is shaking so hard it's blurring at the edges.
Four disciplines. All at once. All of them inside me and inside the sphere and the glass can't hold it and I can't hold it and the crack is spreading and the sound is rising and I can feel it coming—the break, the shatter, the moment when full becomes too full and everything inside me decides to get out—
The sphere explodes.
