"What matters is that I save this world," I said. "And if I have to go through you to do it, then I'm sorry, but I will."
I meant every word of that apology.
These three weren't the Blue Sun's puppets the same as Sorrin and the other elders were, their eyes were their natural color, they had their own thoughts and their own doubts and their own lives that had brought them to this clearing on this afternoon, and they were about to become obstacles in a battle that was never supposed to be theirs to fight.
But I had learned, across enough loops and enough losses, that the world rarely offered a version of events where everyone walked away intact, and the people who broke themselves trying to find that version usually ended up losing the things that mattered most while they were busy searching for it.
So I held my ground on the grass of the Sacred Ring, ready to do what was necessary.
Before I could make a move, Corwin lifted two fingers and began to write.
The character he formed was small, barely larger than my fist, and it hung there for a breath before the edges of it began to crackle and sharpen with lightning.
Then it shot toward me.
My eyes went wide before I could stop them, because the speed was wrong, it was much faster than I had expected from a Rank 6 calligrapher, and the pressure radiating off it as it closed the distance between us told me that taking it on the chest would collapse my ribs inward on the left side.
I Shockstepped out of there.
The world lurched, the Sacred Ring grass rushed toward me from the wrong angle, and the sound of the character detonating against the earth where I had been standing hit my ears a half second after I had already arrived somewhere else entirely.
The Impact Shock erupted outward from my arrival point in a ring of compressed force that tore through the grass and threw a spray of dark soil into the air.
I had materialized directly in front of Bram, but this time he was ready for me.
“Ironclad Valley”, he whispered as his hand slashed across the air in a broad downward stroke, and the ground in front of him split open and rose in massive compressed metal plates that locked together with a grinding shriek of displaced earth.
The domain that erupted from those plates expanded fast, spreading across the grass in a wave of rising stone walls and metal-plated ground, and my shockwave hit the domain's boundary and flattened against it without penetrating, the force absorbing into the earth walls like water pressing into packed sand.
The domain didn’t stop there, it continued, pressing against my position from every direction and I understood quickly that standing still inside it was going to cost me.
So, I raised my own hand and drew a single line in the air with one finger, channeling blue sun energy through my Cerulean Vein as I pulled the stroke downward, and from that line the Forest of Endless Growth was born.
Trees punched through the earth in every direction, their roots driving under the metal plates of Bram's domain and cracking them upward, trunks splitting the stone walls as they grew through them, canopy spreading fast and thick until the Sacred Ring was suddenly a competition between two landscapes trying to occupy the same space.
It was surprising. I hadn't expected to compete this well against a Rank 5 domain, and for a moment I was almost pleased with myself.
Then I heard the sound.
A single stroke of a brush, and the character "Disperse" formed in the air above my domain, blazing white-blue, and it dropped like a stone.
My entire forest ceased to exist.
Every tree, every root, every branch and canopy and cracked metal plate vanished in a single instant, the blue sun energy dissolving before my Cerulean Vein could even register what had happened. The Sacred Ring was suddenly open again, just grass and churned earth and the two men on the other side of it.
Corwin lowered his hand, satisfied with the technique, and Bram's domain surged forward to fill the empty space. I didn't wait for it to catch me, Blink Step activated, and I reappeared at the far edge of the Sacred Ring, near the treeline, where the domain's reach thinned.
Corwin was already writing again.
Three characters this time, each one detached from his fingers in order and arranged themselves into a horizontal line in the air at chest height, then all three launched simultaneously toward me at angles that covered the space in front of them and to both my sides.
I moved left and the leftmost character adjusted its arc to follow me, I moved right and it adjusted again, and the other two maintained their original vectors so that wherever I stepped there was a character converging on that position from at least one direction.
So, I went up.
Blink Step carried me twelve meters straight overhead, and all three characters curved upward beneath me in a fanning spread that would have caught me perfectly if I hadn't already been moving again.
Shockstep fired as I dove back toward the clearing and sent a directed shockwave ahead of me into the ground that threw up a wall of churned earth between me and the incoming strikes.
Two of the characters detonated against the earth wall and the third curved around it.
The lightning discharge from the detonation hit the Aegis Mark before I could fully clear the blast radius, and the force spun me half around mid-air and I hit the ground on one knee with my teeth clenched.
I quickly got back to my feet, and that was when the domain caught me.
I had not cleared the Ironclad Valley's full reach, I had been so focused on the characters overhead that I had landed without realising that Bram had expanded his domain further than I thought, and the moment my feet touched the earth the metal plates surged.
Two of them rose sharply on either side of me to clamp inward, and a stone column drove up from the ground and struck me square across the back to send me stumbling forward into the metal plates.
They locked around me with a grinding pressure that pinned my arms against my sides and squeezed the air out of my chest in a rush.
I called on Blink Step immediately.
The rune fired, or it tried to fire, but nothing happened.
So I tried Leaf Storm, but what manifested was wrong, the leaves materializing thin and slow.
The metal plates tightened.
"It's over," Bram said, from somewhere behind the wall of compressed earth and iron. There was no gloating in his voice, and I could hear the grief still underneath his words from Isara's death.
"He's right," Corwin said, from the other direction. "Resisting is pointless now. You've run out of room."
I didn’t bother to respond because I was still thinking.
I had heard about the technique that Bram was using from Kal in the previous loop during one of our conversations. It was a specific anti-Skybound domain application that Blue Sun practitioners had developed over centuries of fighting the Red Sun Order, designed to disrupt the clean flow of the red sun energy, to introduce enough resistance that Skybound runes fired sluggishly.
So, what I needed to do was somehow break this formation, but unfortunately, my hands were restrained, I had no way of using the blue sun energy to paint my way out of here. I was just about to give a scream channeled through the lung resonator a try when a roar cut across the clearing.
All four of us looked.
Beric had both hands locked behind Neira’s back in a full bear hug, his feet planted in the torn earth of the clearing, his face pressed into the back of her shoulder, and the white light of the tattoo was burning across his entire body now.
Neira was screaming at him, her voice cracking with fury and fear, her arms trapped against her sides and her Rank 7 cultivation flaring outward in bright blue bursts that should have been more than enough to throw a mortal soldier clear of her, but the power the tattoo was generating was absorbing each burst.
"Let go of me, you insane mortal," she snarled. "You can’t hold me like this, you don't have the cultivation to sustain whatever you're doing, let go and I will make this quick for you."
"Quick doesn't interest me much at this point," Beric said, smiling through bloody teeth. "I've had a long career. I'm comfortable with how it ends."
"Beric," Lady Laelyn said, and she was already moving toward him, crossing the grass quickly. "Beric, no. This isn't the answer."
He turned his head and looked at her, and the white light made his face difficult to read at that distance, but his voice was clear.
"It has been the honor of my life, my lady," he said. "Tell the house I served well. It’s time I returned to your grandmother."