In that split instant, Lucid opened his eyes.
The perception from his Chain of Heart flared up immediately, humming through his ribs. Regeneration coursed along his veins, knitting the torn tissue of his forearm back together with a dry, prickly heat. It felt like ants crawling under his skin... which was always a charming sensation in the middle of a harbor brawl.
He shifted his weight on the wet stone, ready to drive his bare heel into the pavement and finish the job.
Then he stopped.
Arthur and Ayame stood directly in front of him, their weapons out and their backs squared against his orange life jacket. Arthur's sword caught the grey coastal light, while Ayame's blood-curved dagger dripped with blood. Neither of them moved an inch toward the white-robed acolyte.
"Wait," Arthur said over his shoulder, his voice stiff with bureaucratic regret.
"We are not supposed to attack."
Lucid blinked through the red mist hovering around his jaw. "We aren't? Could have sworn he just tried to cave our skulls in, Arthur."
"You are sponsored individuals under Her Majesty Queen Elara," the young acolyte called out from the center of his dry, sunny circle. He leaned on his tall brass-tipped staff, a mischievous grin spreading across his pale face.
"Is that not so? Tell me... why exactly is your temper so worn?"
The priest tilted his head, looking like a tutor who had just caught three students cheating on a grammar exam.
"You can be disqualified, you know," the acolyte added smoothly. "The High Church of Ateris files reports directly to the territorial commission. If you as much as even dare to kill one of the devout followers of the high church, your newly crowned sovereign loses her tournament mark for the century."
Lucid sighed.
'Ah. Bureaucracy. Truly the most terrifying Monolith of them all.' He thought bitterly.
Before Arthur could offer a nod or a polite reply, the young acolyte casually waved his staff. He did not recite a verse. He simply flicked the brass ferrule forward like he was swatting a horsefly... and a compressed wall of air descended directly upon Arthur.
The impact hit the square of his chest. Arthur's light armor rattled as the kinetic shove pushed him a great distance backward across the slippery cobblestones, his iron-shod boots leaving twin smears of grey grease in the mud.
Arthur looked up, his blue hair matted over his forehead, and apparently decided that tournament licenses could burn in hell.
He seized the moment.
Ayame moved at the same second. She did not sprint across the puddles or scream a battle cry. She simply lifted her left hand toward the priest and pulled her index finger downward in a slow, graceful arc, as though she were plucking a heavy harp string.
Across the street, the young acolyte stiffened.
His pale eyes widened, his chin jerking upward as if an invisible collar had just tightened around his throat. His limbs locked in place. He stood possessed, caught in a restraining grip that froze his fingers three inches above his staff.
Arthur did not waste the opening. The swordsman closed the distance in two strides, pivoted on his right heel, and brought his sword down in a clean, vertical diagonal aimed right at the priest's shoulder.
Then came the noise.
It was a loud, ringing clang — like a blacksmith's hammer slamming into a church bell at midnight.
A translucent barrier flared to life around the acolyte, covering him from head to toe in a shimmering, egg-shaped dome of pale yellow energy. Arthur's blade bounced off the hard surface, sparking along the curvature.
The after-effect of the cut exploded outward. A gale-force wind ripped through the avenue, blowing wet market canvas into the gutters and sending spray from the puddles flying fifty meters into the air.
Lucid squinted through the gale, his bare toes gripping the wet stone to keep from sliding backward.
Through the mist, he spotted Fennwick. The young noble man was still standing near the edge of the plaza, his face frozen in that wide, weeping smile of artificial devotion.
Lucid considered jogging over there and giving the man a solid backhand across the cheek... maybe that would snap him out of the sermon. But Fennwick was far away from him, and the priest was currently preparing to retaliate.
The young acolyte forced his chin down against Ayame's invisible thread. The veins in his neck bulged, his white robe fluttering inside his yellow eggshell.
He waved his staff a second time.
The clouds above Port Vexis tore open. The concentrated sunlight responded instantly to the movement of his wood, dropping like a solid pillar of heat straight onto the plaza.
Ayame hit the ground immediately.
Her knees instantly buckled, her dark robes collapsing into the grey slush as her single horn shrank back against her skull. Lucid remembered, with a minor pang of annoyance, that her body was not fond of direct sunlight.
Put her in a dark alley and she could murder six guards in five seconds... drop pure, unfiltered noon sunlight on her head, and her internal anatomy basically went on strike.
"Right," Lucid muttered. "My turn."
He stepped past Arthur, his bare feet splashing through the steam where the sunlight met the rain. He didn't bother drawing the Chain of Heart. He raised his right hand, shaping his fingers into the thrusting stance of his Pierced Spine.
"Divine wrath," Lucid said aloud, mocking the priest's cadence.
"Let's see how divine a budget deficit feels."
Alice spoke, "You are not as tough as you seem, my chosen."
His lips curled into a smile.
He reached deep into his ribs, past the regular circulation of his Chain of Heart, down into the dark, heavy residue he had dragged out of the Monolith Mercyros's domain. It was the eighty percent black hole he had absorbed that had been compressed, crushed weight of that little cosmic exchange that still lingered in his pierced spine.
He channelled a single percentage of that density into the long shaft.
A speck of absolute black light, no larger than a grain of harbor sand, formed at the tip of his middle finger. It didn't radiate heat. It didn't glow. It simply sat there, quietly drinking the ambient sunlight around his fist.
Lucid thrust his hand forward and tapped the acolyte's translucent barrier.
The shield did not crack.
It imploded.
The pale yellow dome shattered inward with the sound of a dry vacuum popping, sucking the air out of the street for a fraction of a second before blasting it back out in a shockwave of shattered light.
The young acolyte flew backward like he had been kicked by an ox. He cleared the dry circle, tumbled over the drainage curb, and skidded across the rough stone, his polished staff spinning away into a pile of fish crates.
Lucid lowered his hand. The black grain vanished from his knuckle, leaving his skin cold and numb.
Across the street, the priest was in a bad state.
A very horrible state, actually. His white linen cassock was torn across the ribs, soaked through with dirty harbor water, and his nose was bleeding freely down his chin. He tried to push himself up on one elbow, his amber eyes unfocused as he coughed up a mouthful of grey slush.
Lucid didn't stick around to watch the man crawl. He looked away, spotted Ayame lying flat on the wet stones, and hurried over to her.
She looked rough. Her pale skin was flushed red from the solar glare, her dark robes plastered to her shoulders by the returning rain. She was breathing fast, her teeth clenched together as she tried to push herself up on her forearms.
Arthur trotted over beside him, his sword still out, his blue uniform coat spattered with yellow light residue.
"Is she breathing?" Arthur asked, sounding like a man who had already had an exceedingly long Tuesday.
"She's fine," Lucid said, grabbing Ayame by the back of her coat and hauling her up into a sitting position. "Just got microwaved a little."
"I hate... priests," Ayame rasped, spitting a grey thread of saliva onto the stones.
"Everyone does," Lucid told her. "It's a universal constant..."
Then the air stopped moving, the atmospheric pressure over Port Vexis dropped so hard and so fast that Lucid's ears popped twice. The hairs on his arms stood straight up, the nylon straps of his orange life jacket suddenly feeling like they were wrapped around a lead weight.
Lucid looked up.
They could feel literal judgment descending upon them.
The clouds hadn't closed after the shield broke. Instead, the gap in the grey overcast had widened, and something was coming down through the hole—not a shaft of sunlight, and certainly not rain.
It was a hand.
An ethereal, brilliant white hand the size of a coastal barge, shaped from compressed light and looking sharper along the edges than any blacksmith's sword. It didn't have palm lines or fingernails; it was just a raw, geometric slab of divine wrath falling out of the upper atmosphere, aimed directly at the three of them.