The breath arrived like a cathedral collapsing from the inside out.
Pressure made into weather. Light turned to argument. Sound swallowed itself until silence rang.
It rolled in a cone that wanted to erase the ridge and anything small enough to love. Color ran off the world in long, rubbery sheets. Ash peeled away from the ground and fled as if it had learned what fear was for.
Nia's lattice cried like a bow pulled over a violin string that had been tuned too high. Her circles bowed inward; sigils broke into blurs and then remembered themselves again because her hands told them to. The Staff of Lumina dug a bruise into her palm. Light bled along the bones of her fingers; her veins glowed like thread pulled through skin.
"Hold," she whispered. She wasn't asking.
Aurelia's daggers thrummed, hilts hot enough to sting. She tasted iron and old smoke as she grinned at a horizon that had decided not to be there. "Too wide," she said. "You can't cut the ocean with two knives."
The system's voice entered Andy's mind the way cool air enters a room where a candle has just gone out.
[Crisis Event Detected]
Recommendation: Dual-Channel Sync (Mage + Huntress)
Form: Maintain Tier II
Window: 3.2s
"With me," Andy said. He drove the Oathblade point-first into the ridge.
Heat climbed the blade's spine—a low ember that refused to hurry. Tide rolled down the fuller and pressed outward, patient as a hand flattening cloth. Gale drew a fine edge and hummed until the air around the steel remembered to be thin. His aura poured outward in a clear, deliberate shape, as if glass had been deciding all along to be a prism and only now received permission.
Nia's left hand found his shoulder; her touch was calm and electric at once. Glyphs left the staff and slid into him, silver lines threading along his arms and across his chest, slotting into the aura like a map overlay snapping into place. Her breath clicked into his. He felt the moment her fear arrived and took a seat next to her discipline and put its hands in its lap.
Aurelia's right palm settled on his forearm. Moon-seals uncurled from her brooch and crawled over his skin, cool and certain. Her pulse knocked once, twice, and then found the rhythm he was setting. "Don't drop me," she murmured, as a joke and a law.
For a moment longer than sense and shorter than prayer, there were three heartbeats and one body.
The prism closed.
The Cathedral Breath hit. It didn't splash; it came to pieces. The prism turned one flood into many little rivers. Nia's rune-lines bent the streams into narrow throats. Aurelia's arrows threaded those throats—each bolt taking on too much light and becoming a lance of silver that punched a hole through shadowfire and taught it to forget itself. The sound was dry glass shattering into rain that didn't know where to fall.
Ash gusted backward. The ridge did not go away.
The villagers did not cheer; chests heaved like bellows that had survived a forge and weren't sure that survival had been kind. A child reached toward the white-black cone with two fingers and stopped because her grandmother lifted those fingers and pressed them together around a different kind of prayer.
The system chimed in Andy's chest, satisfied as a craftsman seeing a tool used properly.
[Constellation Technique — Vector Prism Sync]
Effect: Split incoming AoE into targeted channels.
Synergy Bonus: +15% Move | +12% Resist (5s).
The Corrupter stepped back as if the ground had remembered a debt and moved under him. The fused wings cracked in three places; ash poured from the seams like sand out of a broken hourglass. His wrong blade stuttered—just a breath, a hitch where the lie had to look at itself and admit it had learned the shape of truth by accident.
"You braid their breaths through yours," he said, and distilled hatred into curiosity. "Borrowed power makes brave mouths."
"We're not borrowing," Andy said. He lifted the Oathblade free with a sound like a line drawn. "We're sharing."
The Corrupter's smile became thinner. He stabbed his blade into the ridge and the land answered like a dog who had been beaten for coming when it was called. Shadow bled outward in capillary curls; rot rose from the ground with a smell like old coins kept under damp straw. Husk-shapes found themselves—knights with hollow helms, men in work shirts whose hands remembered tools and were willing to use swords as bad substitutes, wolves with too many teeth arranged in a patience they had not earned.
They came up not with life but with intention.
Nia's outer ring fanned wider; the light smelled like a storm two valleys over. She said nothing. The staff turned in her hands and three tiny stars pinned themselves to the lattice where it had begun to fray.
Aurelia rolled her wrists and let the daggers sit low, tips pointing at the dirt like she was ashamed of what they were about to do and also delighted. "Twenty became fifty," she said. "I'll invoice the extra."
Andy took one step forward and the ridge held its shape because he expected it to. Tier II folded over him like a coat stitched in a life he'd already worn.
"Stay behind the inner ring," he told the villagers; he didn't raise his voice. The ring obeyed him.
The first wave of husks arrived like hungry weather. There was no war cry, only the scrape of metal on gravel and the moist sound of boots that hadn't remembered feet.
Andy met them with the geometry of a man who had decided years ago that poetry and murder were both problems of line and angle.
"Stormbreaker—Gale Rift."
Air agreed. The front lines split down invisible seams, stuttering as if the world had developed hinges in inconvenient places.
"Tide-Singer—Aqua Fang."
Water-teeth burst along a shadow conduit running under the husks like an irrigation pipe feeding a field that no one should have planted. The pipe broke; the field wilted.
"Ember Edge—Flame Spiral."
Heat took the lanes he'd made and turned them into rails. The spiral rose without screaming and the husks it touched came apart as if they had been made of dry grass with black paint.
The smell was damp iron and old rain burning on hot stone. Ash clung to the back of Andy's tongue and tasted like a coin you put between your molars when you were seven to make yourself feel braver.
Aurelia was movement's favorite student. She went where the lattice's thin places tried to be—arriving at a seam half a breath before the seam realized it existed. "Moonpiercer Arts—Ribbon Feint," she sang, and her body drew a fake line that nine helms tried to follow. "Crescent Guillotine." Two bolts blurred from her offhand; three husks fell with their jaws trying to remember what surprise is.
Nia worked like a seamstress who refused to accept that a tear was permanent. "Lumina Ward—Second Band." A ring unfurled like a new rib. "Aurora Stitch." Light-thread crawled across the lattice's cracks and set, pulsing in time with her heart. She tasted metal; she swallowed it and it became resolve.
A knight with no eyes slammed his sword against the inner ring above the cart. The blade shattered with a sound like frost giving way under a boot heel. He tried to scream and remembered too late that he had no throat. Nia stepped in and used the staff like a lever: a short, merciful motion under the sternum. The body folded neatly without breaking anything else.
The Corrupter stayed outside the lattice and inside the problem, wrong wings twitching as he drew from his husks. Andy watched, waiting for the drink. He had felt it once—the half-breath where the blade became honest. He wanted it again.
A husk with a grain-sack tied over what had used to be its head reached for the seamstress's granddaughter. The girl held very still because stillness was the only thing she had ever had that impressed cows and perhaps it would impress this. It nearly did. Aurelia's heel turned the husk's wrist into a wrong angle and then a dagger asked the neck to reconsider its connection to the rest. The body took the advice and lay down.
"Eyes on me," Andy said, not to Aurelia, not to Nia, not to the villagers, but to the Corrupter.
The wrong blade obliged with something like grace.
Andy took three quick steps and the ridge provided three short steps of wind because he would have been disappointed if it hadn't. "Gale Platforms." He dropped from the last with the Oathblade low and to the left. "Triune Severance."
Fire marked. Water fixed. Wind carried. The cut opened a seam across the Corrupter's ribs that bled light backwards. Black steam came out and tried to be birds; they dissolved into the kind of ash that knows it has to go nowhere but would rather have been asked.
The Corrupter's smile wrinkled into something that remembered anger as a theory and decided to practice it.
He scooped a wedge of shadow out of the ground and flung it like a farmer throwing a shovel of wet dirt at a wall to see if it would stick. It did; the wall was the lattice. Nia let the impact move through her into the ring; she didn't try to stop it, she tried to tell it how to leave. Her knees put down a rule; the rule was obeyed.
"She's leaking," Aurelia sang cheerfully as she decapitated an argument about courage. "You're bleeding light."
"I know," Nia said. "I choose it."
The system tasted the air and found what it wanted.
[Bond Pulse ↑]
Nia ⭐ 86% | Aurelia ⭐ 78%
Tier II Combined: 62%
Resonance: +16% (Move +12% | Resist +12%)
Aurelia laughed, not cruelly, and the laugh made three people within hearing remember that they would like to live until morning. "You make it hard to rival you," she admitted, and slashed a shadow tendon the way you cut the last strap on a bundle.
"Do it anyway," Nia said, and fed light into Andy's left heel. "Vector anchor."
His next pivot landed exactly where the Corrupter was about to make an unkind offer. The wrong blade drew a diagonal meant to invite a parry and punish the hand. Andy offered nothing to the invitation. On the return, the Corrupter drank from three kneeling husks with a motion that should not have had a wrist in it. The lie in his blade had to take a breath.
"On the drink," Andy said, and the Oathblade took the space between heartbeats.
The cut didn't go deep; it went correct. It shaved a ribbon off the Corrupter's core and the ribbon fluttered like a fallen petal that had decided to be a moth. The wrong wings stuttered. The Corrupter's balance went hungry for a blink.
He answered with a dome of quiet that made the light hold its breath—Null Prayer—and the crowd of husks surged to fill the place where spells had been.
Nia closed her eyes and did not speak out loud.
Do not forget me, she said down the bond, and the system placed its hand at Andy's shoulder like a friend who enjoys proving a point.
Runes relit inside the dome, dim as coals under ash but obedient. Wards small as thumbprints stitched holes before holes remembered to be there.
[Constellation Technique Unlocked — Whisper Cast]
Requirement: Dual bond pathway + High trust
Effect: Limited-magnitude spellcasting inside silence fields
Aurelia felt the whisper as a cool line across her mouth. She flicked a bolt along it and it split mid-flight, one half slipping through a gap that had not existed a heartbeat before. The husk behind the gap imploded politely.
The husks learned. They always did, lately.
They began to feed power back into the Corrupter through the ground, not only with death but with the simple action of standing in the wrong place. Nia saw it—dark veins under dirt. "He's using them as wicks," she said, and disgust sharpened her syllables.
"Then pull," Andy said.
She did. The lattice didn't harden; it slid. Rings shifted and caught. The wick-lines were redirected into the prism's channels with a twist of her wrist and a lie told to gravity. Aurelia shot along the curve, riding the change like a fish arrowing up a stream that had been turned sideways.
"Moonline Dash," Aurelia whispered, mostly to delight herself. She touched down on a moving glyph with the casual disrespect one reserves for strict teachers and drove both daggers under the Corrupter's shoulder blade—low, without pride. Black ichor spit at her like a cat. It hissed when it touched her bracer and went away.
The Corrupter broke half a wing to get free of her and the pieces turned to knives as they fell. Andy cut them in the air—one, two, three—each cut a word that didn't need a friend.
Somewhere behind the inner ring, the seamstress had ash in her eyelashes again. She didn't wipe it. Her hands had found a rhythm on the girl's shoulders—one-two-three-four—and when the breath came wrong, she said five for both of them.
The ridge smelled like rain that had decided to be rusty and like sweat cool enough to be afraid of. Blood smelled like words no one wanted to argue with.
The husks thinned, then surged in a last, dumb, loyal spill.
Andy rolled his left shoulder and let ember soak further into the Oathblade's spine. He didn't light the world; he made it warmer in the places where it mattered. "Terrafang—Earthen Shackles," he said, and the ground obliged—knuckles of stone rising to hold ankles for the time it takes to apologize properly.
Aurelia took those apologies as permissions. "Ribbon Guillotine," she sang, voice bright, and helmets came off like lids removed from jars you wish you'd never opened.
Nia fed herself three slow breaths and moved half her light from breadth into depth, choosing, as she always did, the cost closest to mercy.
[Constellation Sync — Orion]
Nia ⭐ 87% | Aurelia ⭐ 79%
Tier II Combined: 64%
Status: Momentum Held | Vector Prism Stable
The Corrupter did not notice that the villagers had started breathing together, or that the hush around the cart had changed from terror to attention. He noticed only that his blade had begun to confess things when it drank and that the boy with the dragon oath in his hand had not yet shown the part of his face that wanted to hurry.
He raised the wrong blade in both hands and sank it a second time into the ridge. The earth heaved like a horse that wanted a different rider. Shadow lines braided tight, thicker than before, running from the husks to him and back. The fused wings unfolded to their full, obscene spread and black light pooled under his tongue.
"Again," Aurelia said, breathless and pleased. "He thinks we are the same people twice."
"Sometimes practice is the point," Nia replied. She touched Andy's shoulder without looking. He didn't turn.
The system did not recommend escalation. It set a small metronome in Andy's bones and let him decide how much of himself he was willing to spend.
He stood where the ridge would hold him. He felt Nia's light fix the prism's angles the way you fix the angle of a needle before it goes in so you don't make a bigger hole than necessary. He felt Aurelia's laugh at his right elbow, bright and vulgar and devout.
The Corrupter's mouth opened. The breath began to gather again, heavier, threaded with the wick-lines he had stolen.
Andy angled the Oathblade. He could already taste the ash the breath would make, coppery and stale. He set his feet as if he were planting a standard. He did not pray. He did not count. He waited for the exact beat where a stutter would turn a lie into a window.
The ridge drew a breath with him, and for a heartbeat longer than sense, the night paused to see what vows were worth when the sky disliked witnesses.