Fly flickered faster now, his body almost transparent. They were losing him, running out of time. If he died here…
His gaze snapped to Fly. The moment their eyes met, Fly’s realization crashed through the hub.Flash, the assassinsexpected stable targets. Predictable movement. Human reactions. We aren’t fully human anymore, but they aren’t fully in the Veil either. We’re unstable, unpredictable together.
Fly, you fucking genius! Hang on!
“Link up!” Flash roared.
Without hesitation, his brothers moved. Even compromised by transformation, their training held. Easy and Shark formed a perimeter around Fly. Dagger and Brawler flanked the assassins, forcing them to split focus. Twister shifted constantly between healing and stabilization.
North didn’t move.
Flash reached again.
Golden light blazed between them, connecting each SEAL to the others, and suddenly their partial incorporeality synchronized. When Null struck at Fly, all seven phased at once. When Rupture tried to fracture the floor beneath North, the entire team slipped partially ethereal together.
The assassins had come to kill individuals.
Instead, they found themselves fighting a unified supernatural entity that thought and moved as one.
“Kiss our tactical asses. Adapt and overcome, fuckers!”
* * *
The earth was gone.But Fly’s intent telegraphed to him, and Flash’s interpretation struck him like a cold slap to the face.
North knelt on a shifting foundation, but beneath it, there was nothing. The memory of solid ground, the unshakable trust of a lifetime, had been violated. Rupture was a presence of pure disruption, and it was undoing the world around him. The room dissipated, the edges blurring into a sickening purple haze.
Flash’s desperate commands crashed through the nexus. Easy’s despair shuddered through him. Fly’s life draining out ofhim made North dig deep. The frantic pull of unity fraying and reforming around him.
The ground isn’t holding.
His grandfather's words echoed in his mind.You were built to hold. The strongest oak is not the one that never bends, but the one that bends and remembers its roots.
But what if the roots were gone?
Rupture raised a hand, and the very air in front of North began to disintegrate. Flash was yelling about extraction, about getting out. But there was only the expanding, dissolving wrongness of this place.
No.
That was an illusion.
He closed his eyes, ignoring the phantom horns hugging his skull, the tearing pain in his shoulders. He reached past the violation, and the memory of sand that betrayed him.
He reached for what was real.
For the bedrock beneath the foundations. For the ancient, unshakable core of his beliefs, his tribe, and the planet. For the memory of what bondswereand always would be, no matter what Chaos did to them.
A low chant began in his chest. The words his grandfather had taught him. A prayer for strength in battle, for unity in struggle. It was solid. Real.
A flicker. A response. The barest hint of stability from a world away.
Rupture struck.
The floor where North had been a second ago simply vanished, but North was already moving.
He drove forward with his legs, the buffalo haunches propelling him away from the assassin,towardhis brothers. He hit Easy and Fly, wrapping his arms around them, dragging them close.
"Now!" he roared, the word tearing from his throat. "On me!"
