Bodies ducked. Someone yanked a child behind a door. Sand scuffed under boots. The crowd's panic shifted like a tide changing direction.
The Riftbasilisk demon's coils tightened. Tail still hovering, but the real change was in its head. It tilted a fraction, crystals laddering yellow-blue, yellow-blue, like a signal firing up a spine.
That tilt. That look-line.
The air by its mouth rippled, wrong-direction heat haze, and the beginning of teeth tried to happen where it was staring, not where its jaw actually was.
"Lane! Down!" Khalen snapped.
Not a bark for obedience, a call for geometry.
He flicked two fingers and punched a tight fireburst into the ripple before it could become a mouth. The forming jaw fuzzed, tore, vanished, like smoke slapped flat.
But the demon did not recoil. It recalculated.
Its head angle shifted just a hair, the crystals brightening again, and the next ripple started to gather offset, away from the obvious spot where fire always hit.
Across the lane, Lys planted her feet. Her weapon came up, long and compact, wrong in the torchlight. Crystal glow thickened in the barrel, a rising whine that set Aydin's teeth on edge.
She exhaled once, shallow, then held. Her shoulder started to shake under the load, a small tremor that said this was not a quick shot. This was a committed one.
Khalen's eyes flicked once, a measure, then back to the demon.
One shot. No correction.
The wardstone pulse skipped. The dust halo along the Veil wavered like it could not decide if gravity still applied.
The demon's tail dipped in a feint and every surviving instinct in the lane flinched toward it.
Then the head snapped, fast as a thought, angling toward the place the civilians would run if they panicked. Toward the bottleneck between a broken cart and a half-collapsed wall.
Toward the choke point where bodies would stack.
The air there rippled.
Not at him. Not at Aydin.
At the humans.
Aydin's hands rose on reflex and found nothing. No pull in the sand. No answering lift, just dead weight at the ends of his arms and that numb wrongness crawling up his spine.
Okay, so it's out.
His eyes dropped to the street, to grit and loose dune-sand piled against a post. To the demon's crystal ridges glinting with wet shine in torchlight.
Aydin dropped hard, forearms plowing into the grit because his fingers would not close right, and he scooped anyway, scraping skin raw without feeling it. He stepped into it, shoulder twisting, and whipped a wide throw straight at its face and crystal clusters.
"No walls," he rasped, breathless. "Fine. Eyes."
The sand hit damp crystal facets and flash-glassed into abrasive glitter mid-air. A sparkle-cloud of sharp, clinging grit splattered across the ridges and eye-line, turning clean angles into smeared light.
The demon's head jerked, not from pain exactly, but from ruined information, like an engine choking on bad fuel.
Its look-line wobbled.
The forming ripple stuttered, misaligned, teeth trying to resolve in the wrong place.
Khalen lifted his hand.
Then stopped.
He let the jaw half-exist, let the demon keep staring where it had decided to harvest, kept its head committed to the wrong angle.
His voice cut the lane like a blade.
"Now."
Lys fired.
The weapon kicked like a door kicked open by God. Not a boom so much as a violent permission.
The crystal bolt punched out, glowing hard, traveling slow enough that Aydin could see it cross the street, pushing through air like it had weight, like the night itself had to get out of its way.
The demon tried to re-aim, to clear its crystal ridges, to correct its look-line.
Too late.
Half a beat late, because the grit-glass clung and sparkled and lied to its angles.
The bolt touched a cheek-spine crystal cluster and the contact point flared blue-white.
Khalen brought both hands up.
The two-finger flick came first, twice, quick as habit. Then his palms turned inward and he drew the heat tight until the air around his hands warped into a hard lens, light bending like the world was being focused through invisible glass.
The glow under his sleeves went from thread to furnace, contained, compressed.
Fire stopped being flame.
It became a core.
He did not throw at the demon.
He threw at the bolt.
The instant it made contact.
The fireball hit the crystal bolt at the point of impact like a hammer striking a nail already driven into living stone.
Fire met crystal-bolt met embedded crystal.
For half a breath, nothing moved.
Then the demon's spine became a chimney.
The explosion vented upward first, a prismatic geyser ripping into the night, yellow-blue blooming into violent color, like the crystals were burning every spectrum at once. The blast roared straight up as if the body had decided the sky was the only place to put the pressure.
Then the side-burst came.
Meat and crystal threw outward in a ring, not random, not soft. Heavy chunks slapped down the street, carving furrows in sand.
One slammed into the ground a step from Aydin's knee hard enough to sting through numbness.
Shards hammered into posts and walls with wet, cracking impacts. A piece of crystal the size of Aydin's forearm embedded in a beam and kept glowing, humming faintly like it had not gotten the memo that the body was dead.
The phantom jaw collapsed mid-form like a snapped net, teeth fuzzing, then vanishing, leaving only air and terror and the sudden, brutal absence of the thing that had been trying to eat the lane.
The Veil steadied.
Not safe, not healthy, but the whine smoothed into something cleaner, less panicked. The dust halo stopped jittering like a trapped insect.
Silence held for half a breath.
Then the screams came back, different now.
Release-screams. Shaky laughs. Someone sobbing hard enough to hiccup. A voice shouting a name into the smoke.
Aydin dropped to his knees without meaning to. Sand glittered on his sleeves like cheap stars.
His hands were still numb, still wrong, but his lungs pulled air again and that felt like a miracle he did not deserve.
Lys lowered her weapon like her shoulder had turned to stone. She did not look proud.
She looked done, just for a second, the kind of done that comes after you spend something you cannot get back.
Khalen's sleeve thread-glow faded down to ember-dim.
On the temple steps, the wardstone smoked. The crackline stayed lit in dull-white places, spidered and ugly, and the smell that came off it was like hot rock after lightning.
Aydin stared at that glowing damage and understood the simplest truth in the world.
They could not take another blink.
A laugh cracked through the noise.
Not hysteria. Not relief-sobbing.
A real laugh, sharp and breathy, like someone had just finished the worst sprint of their life and could not believe their lungs were still attached.
Khalen did not look like a man who had nearly died.
He looked like a man who had done something hard on purpose.
He turned, said something low to Lys, and she answered without looking at him, just a single sound that carried the shape of "you're unbearable."
Khalen grinned anyway.
He clapped his hands once, fast, like he was sealing a forge shut, then flicked two fingers down toward his boots.
Heat clicked. Sparks snapped at his heels.
For a heartbeat the air around his feet warped into that same hard lens he had used a moment ago, light bending, sand shimmering.
Then the sparks kicked.
Khalen launched.
Not a jump, not a leap, something between a skip and a cannon-shot, propelled by his own fire like the ground had agreed to help him show off.
He sailed over a broken cart and a scatter of crystal shards, coat flaring behind him, and came down in front of Aydin with a clean, ridiculous landing.
Boots hit. Sand puffed.
One knee bent. One hand down.
Like he had practiced it in front of a mirror and decided the world was lucky to witness it.
Aydin stared.
He should have been tired enough to be normal about this.
He was not.
The afterimage of that prismatic geyser still lived behind his eyes, and even his ribs felt like they were humming from the blast.
Back home, heroes were pixels. Here, the air still tasted like burnt color.
Behind Khalen, Lys finally looked up.
Her weapon hung heavy in her hands, shoulder still shaking faintly, and her eyes did that slow roll that only existed to punish men who loved attention.
Therrin stood a few steps back in robes that looked wrong in a street full of grit and blood and cracked stone.
He smiled anyway, small and private, like he had seen this exact kind of nonsense before and accepted it as a fact of nature.
Somewhere deeper under the sand, the breach gave a low, distant rumble, like it was clearing its throat and deciding what to do next.
A ward bell pinged again, thin and tired, while two people dragged a bleeding man toward the temple steps.
Khalen looked down at Aydin like he was taking inventory.
Mostly in one piece.
"Hey," Khalen said.
Not loud. Not a command.
Just a person voice, finally.
Aydin swallowed and tasted sand again. "Hi," he managed, because manners were apparently still running the show somewhere in his brain.
Khalen's mouth twitched.
He offered a hand without thinking, then paused mid-motion, like he had remembered Aydin's hands had been doing strange things and maybe touching was a bad idea.
So he turned it into a fist instead and held it out, waiting.
"I'm Khalen," he said. "You did good back there."
Aydin stared at the fist, then at his own numb hands, then back up at Khalen's face.
"I threw sand," Aydin said, still a little stunned that was even a sentence he could say about his life now.
Khalen's grin widened like that was the best answer he could have asked for.
"Yeah," he said. "Right in its eyes. Perfect."
Lys snorted, finally, a small sound of reluctant approval she would deny under oath.
Therrin's smile deepened.
Khalen held the fist there patiently, like he had all night.
Aydin bumped it with the side of his wrist because his fingers still felt borrowed.
It counted.
Khalen nodded once, satisfied.
Then his gaze flicked over Aydin again, sharper this time. The way he looked at people when he was actually working.
He took in the blank, lost edge under all the jokes, and the way Aydin kept scanning the street like it might change rules mid-breath.
Khalen's expression went amused in a different way.
"You're new here, aren't you?"
Aydin blinked.
He had not said that. He had not introduced himself as anything except a guy with sand in his mouth and bad timing.
"Yes," he said anyway, because lying felt pointless in the presence of someone who could read a battlefield like a book. "How did you know?"
Khalen huffed a quiet laugh.
"It's a small world for us humans," he said. "Small town. Smaller circle. Everyone knows everyone, or they know someone who does."
He glanced past Aydin toward the temple steps, toward the wardstone still smoking, crackline lit dull-white in ugly threads.
"Today," Khalen added, voice turning practical, "we don't have time to figure out whose cousin you are."
He jerked his chin toward Aydin's forearms, where sand had scraped skin raw.
Then toward Aydin's hands, numb and trembling in a way that was not just adrenaline.
"Come on," Khalen said. "Let's get you cleaned up and bandaged before you decide to pass out somewhere dramatic."
Lys made a noise that might have been a laugh if she would allow herself that.
Therrin stepped forward, robes swaying, still smiling.
Aydin looked from one to the other, still trying to process that this was real, that magic existed, that demons existed, that someone could turn fire into a lens and then use it to kick off the ground like a storybook.
Khalen held out his hand again, open this time, not touching, just offering direction.
Aydin took a breath that finally tasted like air instead of panic.
Then he nodded and pushed himself up, wobbling.
"Okay," Aydin said, and his voice came out smaller than he wanted. "Lead the way."