Ren looked at what he was holding for exactly the time it took to understand that he had achieved what he wanted to achieve.

Then he turned towards Luna, face covered in black veins, eyes burning with that light that had that bad color, body still active by pure stubbornness because any honest accounting of his reserves said he should have been on the floor several minutes ago.

He didn’t say anything heroic.

He just shouted her name and threw her the crystal.

♢♢♢♢

Almost nothing had been left.

Ren had known it the moment his feet left the floor, the instant he launched himself, covered in crackling energy, toward Orion and the crystal.

His body had been registering its objections in real time and with increasing urgency through the last several seconds, and what he had just done with that final absorption and return of the big beam was the kind of expenditure that didn’t come from reserves. It came from the debt column... Debt with a very high interest rate.

The kind where the invoice arrives in your mind before the transaction even finishes clearing.

It wasn’t just the major bonds being dormant. The mantis was present but down to almost nothing. The corrupted energy he had been using as fuel had burned through him in the process of holding that last beam long enough for the barrier to crack, and what remained of his capacity to keep moving through pain and exhaustion measured in seconds. Not even minutes.

What he had done wasn’t a combat move, although it might have seemed that way because of the spectacular impact.

But that spectacular impact, the barrier bowing, the crystal spinning through the air, those were just the visible surface of something that had nothing to do with a fight in the conventional sense.

What was really important was that he had solved the barrier problem, and it was thanks to the sum of everything.

First... It had been possible because of the sum of what he had learned and everything he had lived through and everything the people around him had contributed, some of them without ever knowing they were teaching him exactly what this moment would require.

His energy, his development, his stubbornness and tenacity, everything that had been growing in him, all of it concentrated into a single point, a single moment, under conditions that would not repeat because the conditions themselves had required being spent to exist at all.

The crystal had pulsed in his palm.

Alive...

That was the only word that instantly arrived in his mind. Alive in a way objects weren’t supposed to be, with a presence that had nothing to do with mana and everything to do with something that had been waiting inside it for a long time.

He didn’t have time to think about that.

The momentum that had carried him to where he was still had him moving forward, and Ren used it for the only thing that felt correct to do with what he had left.

"Luna!"

He shouted it with everything left in his lungs, which wasn’t much, his lungs had spent the last several minutes receiving corrupted energy and had developed strong opinions about the experience that they were in the process of expressing.

He threw the crystal.

Luna saw it coming before Ren finished shouting her name.

Not because she had time to react consciously. But because the crystal pulsed in a specific way as it moved through the air and something in her responded to that frequency before her mind finished processing what was happening, the way you recognized a voice you had known since before you knew how to speak, before the conscious part of the recognition arrived.

A shadow step took her to where she needed to be.

She caught the white crystal with both hands.

The impact was soft. Completely soft, like her hands and the crystal were things that fit where they belong, and Luna felt the warmth of the energy it held before she even saw the light pulse, a warmth that had nothing to do with combat mana and nothing to do with the temperature of the hall, it was something that was more important than both of those things and that recognized her in return.

’LUNA STARWEAVER... ARE YOU GOING TO CRY IN A CEREMONY HALL IN FRONT OF ORION?’

She didn’t care in the end. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

’REN PATINDER JUST DID WHAT I THOUGHT WAS IMPOSSIBLE!’

He had broken Orion’s barrier even with his body that tired and destroyed, his beasts dormant and with whatever fraction of energy remained after everything the last days had taken from him.

’He was truly different, from the first day...’

The day she found him was the day everything shifted again.

Not back to happiness she’d lost when her mother died.

Not toward the goals her father had set for recovering faction influence.

But toward something new, something that scared her more than any political maneuvering or combat challenge ever could.

Because losing things you never had hurt less than losing things you’d come to depend on.

And she was starting to depend on Ren in ways that would destroy her if he left like everyone else eventually did.

But for now, in this moment, she let herself hold on to hope anyway.

Because sometimes you had to risk breaking to have any chance at finding what you will treasure...

She had felt her heart skip when she heard him shout her name.

’MOM! Mom, how do I pay this back? How do I thank the most absurdly stubborn boy in the entire world for this?’

’NO, THERE IS NO WAY TO PAY THIS BACK... NONE, IT’S DONE. I OWE HIM EVERYTHING!’

Externally, the tears came before she could stop them, and it no longer mattered if they came because the crystal was in her hands and what she felt right now by holding it left no room for the composed expressions she had maintained for years.

The essence of her mother pulsed again.

Luna closed her eyes.

It wasn’t the crystal as an object. It was Lykea, or what remained of Lykea after rounds of depletion that had not been gentle, but she was still strongly present, still there in a way that wasn’t exactly the same as memory but was recognizable with the certainty of something like the smell of childhood, or the texture of a specific hand that had held yours when you were small and the world was large and frightening and that hand was the thing that made it manageable.

’You are finally here...’

She made a promise in that moment without words, but with all the weight of something she had already decided before it was articulated: no one else... Never again.

Not a single breath of what power remained in this crystal was going to be spent on anything. Not defense, not politics, not any negotiation regardless of what position it put her in.

They would use her treasure again only after stepping over her corpse.

’And Orion,’ she thought, not with heat, but with the cold of something more permanent than anger, the temperature of a decision settled and filed, ’who has depleted it this much, I am going to make sure pays an extremely high price for what he has done. With my own hands if it comes to that.’

Luna pressed the crystal against her chest and let the tears be what they were for the seconds she could allow before the situation demanded something else from her.

Which would be sooner than expected...

♢♢♢♢

A moment earlier...

Ren still didn’t have ground under his feet and the inventory of what remained in his body was enough for one more thing that could be useful if he chose correctly.

Orion’s body was still falling, hadn’t finished landing from the impact that had sent him backward, and that window of exposure was still open. The angle was calculable. The distance was calculable. A final strike with the beam’s energy residue, everything he had left, concentrated on a target that hadn’t recovered yet.

If it landed clean and left Orion more stunned than he already was, the cost was maybe worth it.

Ren began gathering the remaining energy into his hands, feeling the edges of it, extracting until the very bottom of what was available.

But Orion’s eyes opened.

He turned in the air.

The black beam came out again before Ren finished loading his attack. What Ren had planned as the final remate, the last punch sent into an already-falling opponent, arrived instead as an impact against him.

It flipped his trajectory a clean 180 degrees.

After flying some extra seconds back, Ren would hit the ground without the elegance of someone who had calculated the landing and with all the force of someone who had arrived at the floor the way things arrived when they could no longer manage how they got there.

Orion was already rising by the time Ren hit.

Or he thought so. Because the boy never actually touched the floor.