The tower burned with colorless fire.
Not literal flame—worse. It was spectral: heatless, formless, yet devouring. A shiver of light like shattered rainbows streamed across the courtyard, crawling up walls and over people like it was searching for something to erase.
Luma staggered backward. "What is that?!"
Ion stared, his usually calm eyes wide. "Spectral siphoning. Tarn Vesh is channeling light frequencies through entropy resonance. He's weaponized the visible spectrum."
Juno blinked. "That's… illegal. And brilliant. But still very illegal."
The shimmering flame erupted from the top of the Bureau of Harmony like a fountain of fractured sunlight, forming into arms. Arms that swept across the plaza like they were brushing away history itself.
Resistance fighters screamed as the wave struck, not in pain—but in confusion. Their memories flickered. One boy dropped his rod and blinked at Luma, dazed. "Who… who are you again?"
"They're rewriting perception!" Ion shouted. "Like deleting the contrast in a painting—you forget what the shapes were."
"Then let's remember louder," Luma growled.
She clenched her gauntlet, and with a deep breath, turned the frequency dial to burst mode. The metal flared gold, then green. "Juno. We need a blind spot."
"I've got one lens left," Juno said, pulling out a cracked spectroscope. "But I'll have to hold it manually."
"Then we'll both go blind together," Luma said, grinning.
They sprinted through the chaos toward the tower's base.
Above them, on the high balconies of the Bureau, Tarn Vesh stepped out—draped in a shimmering robe that flickered between wavelengths, his silhouette barely visible beneath the ripple of spectral defense.
"You're a bright flame, Luma," he said, voice amplified through refracted sound. "But fire without focus only scorches allies."
"You should've stuck to teaching," Luma shot back, already climbing the support cables.
"I am teaching," he replied. "Just… not you."
From his palm, he summoned a beam—split across seven colors, each vibrating like a scream in slow motion. He hurled it downward.
Juno pushed Luma aside.
The light blast struck her lens, shattering it, and exploded in a cascade of sound and color.
Juno hit the ground hard—alive, but unconscious. Her backpack sparked beside her.
Luma screamed her name—and in that scream, her resonance spiked.
Her gauntlet blazed white.
The harmonics that surged from her weren't notes. They were choices. Sounds formed from every lesson, every failure, every moment of laughter in the face of math.
She jumped, flipping midair, and slammed her fist into the tower wall.
The spectral flame broke.
A wave of coherent light burst out like a rainbow released from prison, carving into the entropy coils embedded in the building.
Tarn staggered, robe flickering erratically.
Ion joined Luma at the top of the scaffolding, breath ragged. "He's destabilized. Now or never."
Together, they formed a two-frequency echo—Luma on high, Ion on low—and their harmony surged into the Bureau's structure.
With a final shuddering note, the entire spectral field imploded, collapsing into a prism of light that twisted inward… and vanished.
Silence fell.
No alarms.
No light.
Just wind, and the smell of hot ozone.
Juno groaned from below. "That… was so cool. I think I forgot how stairs work, though."
Luma laughed, then cried, then laughed again.
Ion smiled gently. "You sang him down."
"I'm going to be humming weird notes in my dreams," Luma muttered, flopping onto the roof.
"But we're alive."
"And the Bureau?" she asked.
Ion pointed. The Harmony Beacon, its core generator, cracked down the center.
"It's out of tune."