Chapter 32 – Hemarthrosis

Thomas scanned for his next target, the revolver sweeping in a controlled arc, his breathing steady, his mana core thrumming with the deep, resonant hum of a Tier 5 operating at peak saturation. The masked figure was engaging on the right flank—he caught a flash of white linen and the crack of their revolver as they fired twice in rapid succession. Two cultists scrambled for cover. One didn’t make it.

For a brief, electric moment, Thomas felt invincible.

Then his heart stopped.

In the corner of his eye—half-obscured by smoke, half-hidden behind a mound of collapsed plaster—he spotted something plum.

No.

Florence was not behind the bar counter. She was not hiding. She was kneeling in the open, thirty feet from the nearest cover, her dress filthy with dust and blood, her hands buried in the ruined pant leg of a groaning civilian. The man’s thigh was shredded—shrapnel, from the look of it—and Florence had torn a strip from the hem of her own dress and was tying it above the wound with quick, practiced knots. A tourniquet. Her face was pale, her jaw set, and her fingers were working with the steady, deliberate precision of someone who had read every medical text she could get her hands on and was now, for the first time, putting theory into practice on a man who was bleeding to death.

Damn it, Florence.

The scream stayed internal, trapped behind clenched teeth, but it tore through Thomas’s chest with a force that made the explosion feel gentle.

“Behind you,” the wounded civilian gasped.

His eyes were glassy with shock, unfocused, but they had locked onto something over Florence’s shoulder. His hand rose—trembling, weak, the fingers slick with his own blood—and pointed.

Florence turned.

Looming over her was the axe-wielder.

He was enormous. Not tall so much as wide—a slab of a man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with forearms like dock pilings and hands that swallowed the fire axe’s handle whole. The burlap sack over his head was stained dark with sweat, the white globe-and-line symbol distorted by the wet fabric clinging to his skull. He had crossed the debris field in silence, his approach masked by the gunfire and screaming, and now he stood directly behind Florence with the axe raised above his head in a two-handed grip, the blade poised at the apex of its arc.

He was already swinging down.

Thomas reacted.

His body was moving at full sprint, his momentum carrying him on a trajectory perpendicular to Florence—thirty feet away, wrong angle, wrong direction. He tried to pivot. His left foot slammed into the rubble, his mana flooding the joint as he tried to torque his entire body around for the shot. The physics demanded more than his ankle could give. He finally felt it go—not a clean snap but a wrench, the lateral ligament tearing under the rotational force, the joint folding inward at an angle that sent a white-hot lance of agony up his entire leg.

His balance evaporated. His arm jerked as the pain hit his shoulder, the revolver kicking upward at the critical instant.

He pulled the trigger anyway.

The shot went wide. He saw the muzzle flash, saw the round spark off the rubble two feet to the left of the axe-wielder’s hip, saw the cultist not even flinch.

“Florence!“

Her name ripped from his throat as he went down—a raw, desperate sound that didn’t belong to an Inspector or a Tier 5 prodigy or a Senior anything. It belonged to a brother.

The cultists saw him fall.

They did not hesitate. Magical lattices formed instantly—four of them, blooming in the air with the synchronized precision of casters who recognized a wounded animal. Fire. Earth. Earth again. Something that tasted like ozone—lightning, maybe, or a concussive wave.

Thomas gritted his teeth and ripped them apart.

The nullification wave pulsed outward, shredding all four spells simultaneously. The effort cost him—he felt the drain in his core like a hand squeezing his lungs—but the lattices dissolved into nothing. He crashed into the debris, shoulder-first, and rolled through broken glass and splintered wood, his ankle screaming with every rotation.

He didn’t check the injury. He didn’t look down. He scrambled upright on one knee, his left foot dangling uselessly, and swept the revolver toward where Florence had been, his eyes wild, his chest heaving.

Please no. Please no. Please—

He expected a scream. He expected silence. He expected to see his sister on the ground with an axe buried in her and the last good thing in his life extinguished in this miserable ruin.

Instead, he blinked.

Florence was standing upright.

She was shaking—trembling from head to toe, her face white as chalk, her eyes enormous. Dust coated her plum dress and her hair was half-collapsed from its pins, hanging in dark tangles around her face. She looked terrified.

But she was alive.

In her hands, she was gripping the handle of the fire axe.

The cultist’s fire axe.

The axe-wielder was sprawled at her feet, face-down in the rubble, his arms splayed at odd angles. He was not moving. His burlap hood had been knocked sideways by the impact, exposing a thick, red neck and the pale curve of an ear. One of his hands was still twitching—the involuntary spasm of a body whose owner had been rendered abruptly and violently unconscious.

Thomas stared.

The axe was in Florence’s hands. The cultist—the enormous, slab-shouldered cultist who outweighed Florence by at least a hundred pounds—was on the ground. The logical chain of events connecting those two facts refused to assemble in Thomas’s brain. Had she dodged? Had the civilian tripped him? Had she disarmed him?

Florence? His Florence? The girl who cried when she burned a batch of scones?

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The questions dissolved in a flood of relief so powerful it nearly took him under. He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding—a long, shuddering exhale that emptied his lungs completely and left him lightheaded.

He collapsed.

His ankle was finished. The joint had swollen to twice its normal size in the seconds since the ligament tore, the flesh around the boot turning a mottled purple-black that spoke of internal hemorrhaging. He couldn’t put weight on it. He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t run.

He was a sitting duck in the middle of a kill zone.

Thomas dragged himself. Elbows and one good knee, his revolver clenched in his teeth, the taste of gun oil and blood filling his mouth. He hauled his body across six feet of broken glass and shattered porcelain until he reached the overturned oak table that had been nearest to his fall. He pulled himself behind it, pressed his back against the wood, and took stock.

“Crap,” he breathed. “What do I do.”

Mana. Building again.

He felt it—the familiar, nauseating prickle across his skin. More lattices forming, more spells taking shape. He snapped them away with a pulse of nullification, feeling the drain bite deeper this time. His core was not infinite. Every nullification cost energy, and the cultist mages were not stupid.

More mana. Immediately. Almost before the first wave had fully dissipated, a second round of lattices began crystallizing in the air—probing, testing, forcing him to respond.