Chapter 24
The medical tent is chaos—bodies on every surface, medics shouting for supplies, a woman screaming somewhere to my left.
I grab a roll of bandages someone dropped and shove it into the hands of a medic running past. She doesn't thank me.
I don't need her to. I just need to be doing something that isn't standing around being useless while a god's territory burns.
A rumble, deep enough to shiver through the ground under my feet.
"Western section's going!" Someone yells it, and suddenly everyone is moving—away from the remaining structures, toward open ground—and I'm moving too because I'm not stupid enough to stand still when buildings are coming down. Self-preservation. The one skill I've actually mastered.
Another rumble. Louder.
I stop. Look back.
There's a structure still standing. Barely. Three stories of fractured stone, and there's movement at the base—a woman on the ground, her leg pinned by a beam that looks heavier than I am. A child clings to her, refusing to move. Small. Maybe five. Face buried in her mother's shoulder.
The building groans.
Everyone can see it's going to collapse. Every person in this square is watching, and the Discord elites are shouting, moving, someone's running for equipment that won't get there in time. The math is obvious. The math is brutal. They're not getting out.
Koshin moves.
He just—moves. One second he's thirty feet away giving orders, the next he's running, and the building is coming down around them and he doesn't stop. No hesitation. No fucking logic. Just a god sprinting toward a collapsing building because apparently self-preservation isn't a skill he's mastered.
He's over the rubble before my brain catches up to my eyes. He drops, covers them with his body—the mother, the child, all of them pressed against the ground beneath him—
The structure collapses.
Everything goes white. Dust and debris and the sound of stone slamming into stone, metal shrieking, and I can't see anything, can't breathe, can't—
…
Rubble. Just rubble, where a building used to be. Where three people used to be.
Where he—
I'm across the square before I decide to move, hands on broken stone, pulling, tearing at debris. Fantastic. Now I'm digging through rubble for the psychotic god who stole me from my buyers. This is what my life has become.
A Discord elite appears beside me, then another and another.
Hands everywhere, digging. They're panicked—actually panicked—these massive soldiers with their weapons and their scars, tearing through stone with their bare hands because their god is under there.
The devotion would be touching if I had time to think about it.
"Here! Over here!"
The mother first. Her leg is broken—I can see the angle of it, wrong—but she's conscious and the child is in her arms, crying but alive, alive, and someone is lifting them out, carrying them toward medical.
I keep digging because he's under there. He's still under there, and my hands won't stop moving.
Stone cuts my palms and I don't feel it. Renan is beside me now, face bloodless beneath the soot, and he looks terrified. Actually terrified. I've seen this man grin at violence and crack jokes about corpses, and right now he looks like he's about to shatter.
"Koshin—"
My hands are shaking.
He's not moving.
He's not—
A cough. Wet and harsh.
He coughs again. Moves. Tries to push himself up and there's blood on his face and his arm isn't working right, but he's conscious. He's alive. He's trying to stand up and keep working.
"Sir—" One of the elites reaches for him.
"I'm fine."
He's not fine. I can see from here that he's not fine—his left arm hangs wrong and there's a gash on his temple dripping blood into his eye and he's swaying.
But sure.
Fine.
Totally fine.
Men and their bullshit.
He tries to take a step. Staggers.
Renan catches him. "You're not fine."
"The woman—"
"Alive. Both of them. Medical has them." Renan's voice sounds like it's being held together with wire. "You need to sit down."
Koshin's shoulders tighten. For a second I think he's going to argue, going to pull free and keep going because stubborn bastards don't stop being stubborn just because their bones are in the wrong places. He doesn't. He lets Renan guide him to a chunk of rubble and sits.
I watch him breathe. In. Out. Blood dripping down his face.
Great. Apparently I give a shit if the psychotic god dies. That's going to be inconvenient.
I turn back to the debris and keep digging because if I stand here watching him bleed, I'm going to have to think about why my chest feels tight, and I refuse to do that. My hands are bleeding now—shallow cuts, nothing serious—and the sting helps. Gives me somewhere to put my attention.
The Discord elites work in silence around me, and I fit myself into the gaps where I can be useful.
I'm not strong enough to move the heavy pieces, but I can clear the smaller stuff, make space for the people who know what they're doing.
Former debt payment, current rubble-hauler.
At least my resume is getting interesting.
Renan joins me after Koshin waves him off. We work side by side without talking until his hand closes on my arm.
"Here." His voice is flat.
Metal in the rubble—not structural. Marked with symbols I don't recognize. He pulls it free and his whole face goes tight, the muscle jumping under his eye. I've seen Renan laugh at a man's throat getting cut. Whatever this is, it's worse.
"What is it?"
He doesn't answer, just reaches deeper and pulls out more—remnants of something, materials that don't belong in a building. His mouth presses thinner with each piece.
"Renan. What is it?"
"Faith-marked." The words come out rough. "These materials, the symbols—this is Faith ritual work."
My gut clenches.
Around us, voices die mid-sentence. Hands freeze on rubble, then reach for weapons instead. I watch it spread—the realization, the fury—and I can read the room well enough to know what this means. Coin didn't do this alone. Faith helped.
Of course they did. Why wouldn't they? Can't have a proper disaster without everyone pitching in. Really brings the community together.
Renan carries the evidence to Koshin and I follow—no reason, just follow—with my hands bleeding and the smoke thick in my lungs.
Koshin looks at the fragments. His face doesn't change, but his eyes do. I've seen him manic. I've seen him hungry. I've never seen him like this. This is worse. This is the quiet before something terrible.
"Faith." Not a question.
"Faith." Renan confirms it. "The ritual remnants were amplifying the blast. Making it worse. This wasn't just an attack—it was a message."
Koshin's teeth press together. Blood drips from his temple. His left arm hangs wrong, clearly broken or dislocated or both, and he's sitting on rubble in the middle of a disaster zone with dust in his hair and nothing behind his eyes.
He stands.
"Sir—" Someone starts.
"Faith dies."
The Discord elites closest to him take a step back. That's what does it—watching grown soldiers flinch from two quiet words. Watching them look at him with something between worship and terror.
"Everyone. Every temple. Every priest. Every believer who signed their name to this. I want them found. I want them brought to me. And I want them dead."
Discord freezes. The elites around us go still, weapons in hand, waiting for the order to move. To strike. To tear Faith apart piece by piece, the way Faith helped tear Discord apart tonight.
I watch him—bleeding, broken, covered in rubble dust and the ash of his own people. Five minutes ago he threw himself over a mother and child without thinking. Covered them with his body. Let a building fall on him so they could live.
Now he's about to burn down a religion.
Both of those things. Same man. Same hour. The hero and the monster, and I can't make them fit together no matter how hard I try. I don't want him to be someone who saves children. It was easier when he was just a dangerous obsessive god. This is—
This is inconvenient.
His eyes find mine across the smoke and hold.
I don't look away. My hands are bloody, my ribs ache from breathing wrong, and I'm tied to a god who saves children and slaughters priests before the dust settles.
He waits. Just for a second. Watching me watch him.
Then he turns to Renan.
"Move."
Discord moves.
I stay where I am. Bleeding. Exhausted. Warm in a way that's probably going to be a problem later.
I follow anyway.