She flicked her wrist.
Ice—sharp and jagged—erupted from the marble floor, forming a barricade behind us, cutting off the exit.
We were locked in.
“Goran. Dane,” I murmured, not taking my eyes off her. “Centre.”
We formed a triangle. Back to back.
The Anvil was set. Now we just had to survive the strike.
Frost creptacross the atrium as Varessia flicked her fingers. At the signal, the six augmented guards rushed forward—a wall of tactical armour and chemically induced rage.
“Now,” I said.
Beside me, the air warped.
Dane surrendered to the change, his body twisting with the wet tear of reinforced canvas and webbing. He burst through his tacticalgear in a spray of tatters, landing as a midnight-black wolf with amber eyes.
Beside him, Goran shrugged off his trench coat, letting it pool safely on the marble. Then he expanded. The transformation was a violent, primal event that cracked the stone floor. He rose as a massive beast—twice Dane’s size—his rough coat encased in a thick shield that hummed with power.
He roared, a sound that shook the window frames, and a translucent barrier of old magic snapped into place around him and Dane.
“Kill them,” Varessia commanded.
The guards opened fire. Kinetic blasts and suppression rounds hammered into Goran’s magical shield, rippling across the surface like rain on water.
Goran lunged. He hit the line of guards like a battering ram. Two men were thrown into the air, their armour crumpling like tin foil under the impact of his shoulder.
Dane was a blur of black motion in his wake. He went low, aiming for the gaps in the armour—knees, throats, groins. He was faster than the eye could track, a shadow with teeth.
I locked my eyes on Varessia.
She stood on the stairs, watching the carnage with a faint sneer. She raised a hand, and whips of inky darkness materialised around her. They lashed out, snapping the air around them, leaving trails of falling frost.
I stood my ground. I threw up a wall of my own Shadow, dense and hungry. Her freezing darkness collided into mine, the impact sounding like a cracking glacier.
“Is that it?” I called out, stepping through the falling mist of shattered magic.
Varessia’s voice cut through the ruin, smooth and perfectly level. “I am barely trying, Riven.”
Two guards broke away from the pack, charging me. They moved with that jerky, augmented speed, batons crackling with electricity.
I sidestepped the first swing, grabbing the guard’s wrist. I clampeddown, letting the Shadow invade him. Dark smoke poured from my grip, sinking into his skin.
He screamed as the cold seized his nerves. I spun him, using his body as a shield against the second guard’s strike.
The baton hit his armour with a crack of discharged energy.
I shoved the first guard back, creating space, and swept my hand upward. A tendril of solid darkness lashed out from the floor, snagging the second guard’s ankle and jerking him off balance.
I shoved him hard, sending him stumbling backward—straight into the path of the black wolf.
Dane had just dropped his own opponent. He turned, seeing the threat stumbling towards him. Instinct took over. He launched himself upward, jaws snapping shut on the exposed throat above the gorget.
The bite was brutal, efficient, and final. The guard went down in a spray of crimson, and the wolf stood over him, chest heaving, amber eyes wild with adrenaline.
I turned back to the centre. Goran was fighting two at once. He took a punishing blow to the flank from a shock-baton, the smell of singed fur filling the air, but he didn’t even flinch. He snapped his jaws, crushing a guard’s arm, then swiped with a paw that tore through ballistic armour like paper.
