"Back up."
There was no humor in it. No edge of a grin hiding behind the words. Just instruction.
Felicity moved first.
She surged forward in a blur, caught Marcus by the front of his suit before he could process what was happening, and launched upward in the same motion. The ground dropped away beneath them as heat warped the air below, and by the time Marcus turned his head to follow Kael's position, they had already cleared a significant distance.
Elias was gone from where he had been standing.
Dorian had already moved.
They reconvened farther back than Marcus would have expected, the spacing deliberate, practiced, and precise. This was not improvisation. This was something they had done before.
Felicity didn't waste a second.
The first layer of her barrier snapped into place around them, a translucent distortion that bent the incoming heat just enough to keep it from hitting cleanly. She reinforced the sphere immediately, by layering a second barrier over it, and by thickening the exterior until its surface began to hum under pressure. She ensured the structure became something meant to endure rather than deflect.
She planted her stance and braced.
Marcus felt the shift before he understood it.
These weren't measures for safety. These were measures for survival.
Kael rolled his shoulders once.
Then the temperature changed.
It did not rise in a gradual way. It spiked.
The air around him tightened, not shimmering but compressing, as if the space itself had been forced to acknowledge something inside it that did not belong. Heat bled outward in a contained radius, forming an invisible boundary that distorted everything that crossed into it. The nearest golem stepped forward and entered that space—
—and began to melt before it reached him.
Its surface softened first, edges losing definition as the outer layer sagged under temperature it could not disperse. A second step carried more of its mass into the field, and the internal cohesion failed. It slowed without understanding why, its body dragging through resistance that did not exist a moment earlier, before its forward motion simply… stopped.
Kael didn't even look at it.
His suit responded as his internal temperature climbed, vents along the seams flaring open as red flame spilled outward in thin, violent streams. The glow beneath the material deepened, not bright like fire, but dense, like something contained that was pressing outward with intent.
He stepped forward.
The swarm met him.
The first blow landed like a mistake.
A wide hook, thrown with the kind of careless intent that should have missed or been punished, connected with the side of a golem's upper body and carried through it in a violent surge of force and heat, the shock bleeding past the initial contact and into the bodies behind it. The stone didn't simply give way. It peeled apart in glowing layers, the heat soaking through it faster than the mass could compensate.
Kael stepped through it and drove his shoulder into the next one, the contact releasing a compressed wave of superheated air that scythed outward in a wide arc, clipping every golem crowded near him and sending them reeling as their outer layers warped under the thermal stress.
He didn't slow down.
Another strike came in. He met it instead of avoiding it, his forearm crashing into the descending limb and redirecting it just enough to open space for his other hand to drive forward. The hit buried itself for a fraction of a second, heat following the motion inward instead of outward. The flare came late and from inside, and when it did the golem convulsed as though the strike had found the one thing holding its mass together.
From behind the barrier, the heat hit them anyway.
It didn't arrive cleanly. It bled through, filtered and distorted, but still overwhelming. The air inside Felicity's barrier thickened, temperature climbing in a way that made breathing feel heavier with each inhale. Marcus felt it immediately, the suit responding in sharp, reactive bursts as it tried to compensate for an environment it had not been designed to endure.
"…It's this bad even through the barrier?" he asked, not raising his voice, not needing to.
Felicity didn't answer.
Her focus tightened instead.
Another golem tried to close the distance around Kael, stepping into the superheated space with more mass behind it, pushing through the resistance that had slowed the others. It made it closer than the first.
Not close enough.
Kael pivoted into it, a short-range body blow driving into its center with brutal efficiency. The contact released a concussive burst of heat that didn't explode outward so much as collapse inward, forcing the temperature spike directly into the point of impact. The result was immediate. The stone didn't split. It lost fidelity, the density inside it slipping just enough for the body to betray itself. What he struck sagged first, and everything attached to it adjusted too late.
He never broke stride.
Another golem approached from his flank. He didn't turn to face it fully. A quick snap of his fist caught it off guard, tipping its balance just far enough that the heat flooding the space around it turned recovery into impossibility, its own mass dragging it the rest of the way down.
There was no reset between actions, only continuation.
His form looked loose, almost careless, but every strike landed where it mattered most, turning apparent openings into invitations for something worse. He fought like a man who understood exactly how far he could push his body and chose, deliberately, to push further because the cost had not yet caught up to him.
And through all of it, the temperature kept rising.
The air around him no longer simply distorted. It pressed outward, thick enough that the edges of his silhouette blurred where heat overwhelmed clarity. The ground beneath his feet darkened, then glowed faintly, then began to soften in widening circles with each step he took.
Marcus watched it happen and felt something in his understanding shift.
Kael wasn't just stronger. He belonged to a different category of power entirely.
All S-class abilities grew with time, but at level 10 they changed. Not incrementally, not in the way earlier thresholds had expanded output or efficiency. They crossed into something that no longer behaved like a refinement of the original ability. They stopped feeling like abilities and started feeling like laws.
Kael's had become this.
He did not simply produce heat.
He commanded it.
Not as flame or as an extension of his body, but as a fundamental force he could gather, condense, and reshape. The heat bleeding from his strikes was only the most immediate expression of it. What he was actually doing sat beneath that, in the way the air responded to him, in the way the battlefield itself began to change as his output climbed.
He could draw on any source of heat, and if that source did not exist in a usable form, he could force it into one. Stars, reduced to something his hand could hold.
Not sustained, not stable, and not without consequence, but real enough that the distinction stopped mattering the moment he used them.
The guild did not allow that lightly.
Full ability release was restricted for reasons that had very little to do with collateral damage and far too much to do with extinction-scale risk. Kael was not simply dangerous to the enemy when he crossed that threshold. He was dangerous to everything.
Marcus watched the way the others held their positions behind Felicity's barrier and understood something else.
It wasn't just the scale of the power.
It was the way Kael responded to it.
He did not fear it. That was the problem. He enjoyed it.
The heat climbing through his body, the pressure building in his movements, the way the battlefield began to give under him—it didn't restrain him. It fed him. The closer he got to that threshold, the more he leaned into it, like a man who knew exactly how far he could fall and wanted to see what it felt like anyway.
Marcus didn't need anyone to explain what came after. Power that extreme would not leave quietly, and the crash waiting on the other side of it would be just as violent.
Kael stopped moving.
Not because there was nothing left to hit.
Because he had decided something.
He turned slightly, just enough that his voice carried back through the distortion.
"Pay attention, kid."
The words cut clean through the pressure.
"Watch what a max-level S-class can do."
Then he opened his hand.
At first, it looked like nothing.
Just a point where the air bent more sharply than it should have, light compressing toward a center that did not exist a moment earlier. Then the pressure around that point increased, drawing in heat from the space around it, condensing it into something denser, heavier, and far more dangerous than the flames venting from his suit.
The sphere formed slowly, perfect and deeply wrong, small enough to seem negligible and dense enough to make that impression feel absurd.
Marcus didn't understand what he was looking at immediately.
Then the ground beneath Kael reacted.
It didn't crack.
It yielded.
Basalt darkened, then glowed blue-white as it crossed a threshold it could not recover from. The material softened, not from sustained exposure, but from proximity to something that redefined what heat meant in that space. The air around Kael folded inward toward the sphere in his palm, drawn into it, compressed, stripped of any quality that resembled something breathable.
The realization hit a fraction of a second before the fear did.
That wasn't fire.
That was a star. More specifically, a neutron star.
Not in the sense of scale or heat, but in the way it behaved. In the way it existed as a concentrated point of energy so dense that everything around it was forced to respond.
Kael closed his fingers slightly.
The sphere stabilized.
And the world around him began to burn.
A radius formed.
Not marked by flame, but by transformation. Everything within that invisible boundary shifted toward states it had not been meant to reach. Stone softened, then liquefied, then passed beyond even that, slipping toward states it had never been meant to assume. The golems caught inside that space did not fight it. They failed under it, their bodies losing integrity faster than they could compensate, edges collapsing, mass sinking as if gravity itself had changed direction.
Kael stepped forward into them.
Each movement expanded the sphere.
Each step carried that transformation further outward.
He no longer needed to strike. Contact accelerated the process, but proximity alone was enough. Golems within range didn't break apart. They eroded, their forms losing definition as the heat stripped away the conditions that allowed them to hold shape at all.
From behind the barrier, Felicity reacted instantly.
The first reinforcement began to erode, the second began to strain under the added stress, and the third bought them just enough stability to keep the barrier intact.
The surface of the barrier warped under the pressure, light bending along its edges as the heat pressed against it from the outside. Inside, the temperature climbed anyway, filtered but not eliminated. Marcus felt his suit spike in response, systems pushing harder to keep his core temperature within survivable limits.
The air tasted like agony. The heat was consuming what little usable oxygen remained, and Marcus felt the next breath scorch its way into his lungs. His body worked harder for diminishing return, every inhale thinner, drier, and more punishing than the last.
Below, Kael laughed.
Not loudly.
Not wildly.
Just enough for the sound to carry.
He moved deeper into the field, the sphere in his hand growing with him, the radius of destruction expanding as he fed more into it. The ground beneath him transitioned fully, sections of basalt slipping into molten states before pushing further, edges glowing with an intensity that suggested they were approaching something beyond even that.
Half the battlefield vanished from the fight, not because it had been erased, but because it had been transformed into something incapable of rising again.
And Kael stood at the center of it, wrapped in a sphere of impossible heat, moving forward like someone who had been waiting for an excuse.