Gwen adjusted the leather straps of her breastplate, her golden eyes moving from the massive, nine-foot frame of Kaelen to the lean, tattered silhouette of Lucien. The air between them was already thick, vibrating with an unnatural, heavy tension that had nothing to do with the external atmospheric pressure. It was the raw, uncalibrated weight of their competing lineages, coiled like iron springs.
"We are missing the alignment by twelve milliseconds on every rotation, Lucien," Kaelen growled, his deep, baritone voice causing the loose shale near his paws to rattle. He shifted his stance, his newly grown silver-blue left arm rippling with a terrifying kinetic density under his midnight fur. "Your void-mana is too heavy. Every time I try to push the lunar balm into the center, your shadow tries to chew through my knuckles."
