Luna felt it hit her mid-dodge, a surge of heat that started in her chest and raced through every muscle in her body. She knew Kaiden’s warmth through the bond, the faint glow that had been humming beneath her skin since the match started, but this was something he’d just done on purpose.
The glow exploded into full burn, her muscles tightening with power that hadn’t been there a second ago, her reflexes sharpening until the Brute’s movements went from terrifyingly fast to merely fast.
"Oh," she breathed, lightning crackling brighter along her Stormblade. "Oh, that’s more like it."
Aria felt it too. The moonlight at her fingertips flared from silver to blazing white-gold, and the next crescent she formed was heavier than any she’d built before, dense with power she could feel borrowed from Kaiden through the system.
"Kai just used it," Aria said, her voice tight because stone debris from the Brute’s last missed charge had opened a gash across her arm when the shockwave threw her sideways. "Don’t waste it."
"Yeah, yeah. ’Your’ boyfriend’s lust can’t be wasted, right?"
Aria’s lips tugged upward. "Yes."
Luna zipped to the Brute’s right flank in a blur of crackling light, fast enough that the afterimage lingered where she’d been standing.
Her Stormblade came down on the same white scratch she’d left before, and this time the blade bit through the plating, through the hide beneath, and into muscle.
Dark blood sprayed, and the Brute screamed for the first time, a sound that shook the arena walls.
"THERE we go!" Luna ripped the blade free and drove it back in, lightning flooding the wound. "You bleed after all, you fat fucker!"
Aria pressed the advantage.
Her crescents hit the Brute’s foreleg at the joint where the plating thinned, and this time they didn’t just crack the surface. They sheared through, one after another, anchored in place by Sovereignty’s pinning force, and the joint buckled as the creature’s own weight worked against it.
...
Kaiden leaned forward over the viewing pane, watching Luna pierce the hide that had stopped her cold thirty seconds ago.
It was working. But he was just flooding raw warmth into them, a firehose through the bond with no shape to it.
He reached deeper, past the raw output into the connection itself, and felt them individually for the first time since activating the Stance.
Luna burned like a live wire in his chest, all aggression and violence, her lightning cycling through the bond as sharp pulses against his ribs.
Aria sat heavier, dense and precise.
Where Luna spiked, Aria pressed.
’It flows through what they already are.’
He pushed with purpose.
Speed into Luna. Weight into Aria.
Power with shape to it now, channeled along the paths their abilities had already carved, and the drain behind his sternum deepened as the pane showed them hitting harder than the initial surge had managed.
The turn timer pulsed at his periphery. He reached down and advanced Scarlet one square to hold the center without taking his eyes off the viewing pane.
...
The Brute staggered, one leg giving out, and Luna was already moving up its flank, Stormblade carving a line through the hide that would have been impossible sixty seconds ago.
The creature thrashed blind, and the edge of its tusk grazed Luna’s side as she dodged past its sweep. She’d read the arc and gotten clear of the full swing, but the tusk was longer than her arm and the tip caught fabric and skin before she was fully past.
If she’d been a half second slower the full sweep would have caved in her ribcage.
"Its neck!" Aria shouted, four crescents slamming into the base of its skull in rapid succession, cracking the plating from the outside while Luna drove lightning into the gap from below.
The Brute dropped to both knees with a crash that sent fractures racing across the arena floor, tusks grinding into stone, hindquarters smoking where Luna’s sustained current had cooked the muscle beneath its plates.
It tried to rise, legs buckling, and Luna circled to the back of its skull before it could find its footing.


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