The red glow crawling up Vex's abdomen reached her chest and kept climbing, the lines splitting and branching through the fabric of her clothes as if the brand beneath was rewriting itself in real time.
Vex felt the current of a foreign power flood through the Bloodfather's architecture, a heat that burned every wound shut and lit every nerve ending on fire.
Her palm pressed flat against the ground, fingers spreading, and the push that followed was not the scramble of a beaten woman dragging herself upright.
She cartwheeled backward from the ground in a single fluid motion, one hand planting as her body arced over it with her white ponytail trailing through the air, legs sweeping overhead in a rotation so clean it belonged in a performance hall.
She landed on both feet with her boots cracking the stone beneath them, spine straight, chin level.
Ryonosuke's grin stretched wider.
The transformation finished as she landed.
