And they smiled. Despite their mutilated faces, despite their obvious agony, they smiled with pure rapture as they prepared to die for their masters.
"Battle formation!" Fenric's voice cut through their chanting. "Protect the Chalice-Bearer!"
The agents responded with professional efficiency, supernatural abilities flaring to life as they engaged the cultists. Werewolves shifted mid-leap, claws and fangs tearing into fanatical flesh. Witches sent bolts of purifying fire crackling through the air. Barrier mages erected shields of crystalline light that turned aside the cultists' weapons.
But the enemy fought like they wanted to die.
No, not wanted.
Needed.
They threw themselves onto blades, laughing as bullets tore through their bodies. Some exploded into prophecy fire when killed, their stolen magic lashing out one final time. Others kept fighting even after fatal wounds, driven by devotion so absolute it transcended physical death.
I stood frozen in the center of the chaos, watching supernatural warriors battle fanatical zealots in a landscape pulled from nightmares. Part of me knew I should be helping, should be using my power to tip the scales. But another part was transfixed by the horribleness of it all.
A cultist broke through the defensive line, his carved symbols blazing as he lunged toward me with a curved knife. Before I could react, before my bodyguards could intercede, Horrace moved.
The transformed entity crossed the distance in a heartbeat, his massive claws tearing through six cultists like they were made of tissue paper. His roar shook the floating ruins overhead, sending chunks of ancient stone crashing down around us. Feathers and scales and shadow wings created a wall of protective fury between me and the attacking fanatics.
The message was clear:Touch her and die.
More cultists pressed forward, driven by their broken devotion. Horrace met them with primal violence, his tentacled appendages moving with deadly precision. Where his claws struck, reality itself seemed to fray, leaving tears in space that swallowed his enemies whole.
But in the chaos of battle, I'd become separated from the others. Rook and Zane were fighting back-to-back against a cluster of fanatics. Milo was directing his skeleton crew like a tiny undead army while Fenric coordinated the broader battle. They were all too far away to reach me quickly.
That's when I felt it. The power stirring beneath my skin, responding to the danger around me.
A cultist slipped past Horrace's defenses, his galaxy eyes fixed on me with hungry madness. "Join us willingly," he gasped through his stitched mouth, "or we take what we need from your corpse."
He lunged with his ceremonial blade raised.
And I reached out without thinking, my hand closing around something that shouldn't exist.
Time.
The cultist froze mid-attack, his blade inches from my throat. Around us, the battle slowed to a crawl, bullets hanging motionless in air, magic crackling in slow motion. I could hear my own heartbeat, the only thing moving at normal speed in a world caught between seconds.
I stared at the frozen fanatic, at his mutilated face locked in an expression of zealous hatred, and felt something crack open inside me.
This wasn't elemental magic. This was reality damage.
I closed my fist around the borrowed time andpulled.
The cultist aged a century in an instant, his flesh crumbling to dust while his bones clattered to the ground. Time resumed its normal flow, but I was already moving, my hands weaving patterns in the air that left glowing symbols hanging like deadly snowflakes. Instinctively.
The symbols detonated.
Waves of pure force rippled outward from where I stood, catching a dozen cultists in their path. Bodies flew apart, not from physical impact but from having their personal timelines scrambled. Some aged to dust. Others reverted to infancy before dissolving entirely. A few simply ceased, erased from existence by temporal paradox.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Even the battle-hardened Bureau agents had stopped fighting to stare at me. I stood in the center of a circle of ashand scattered bones, my hands still glowing with residual power, feeling more alive than I ever had before.
And that terrified me.
"Winter," Rook's voice came from somewhere behind me, careful and controlled. "You need to dial it back."
I turned to find all four of my Keys watching me with expressions I couldn't quite read. Not fear, exactly, but something close to it. Wariness. The look you'd give a natural disaster that had just remembered it was supposed to be dangerous.
