Chapter Twenty-Six #2
It builds. Low at first, a deep vibration that crawls up through the soles of my boots and into my bones, rattling through my spine like it’s trying to knock everything out of alignment.
The air ripples with it, distorting, compressing, the lights overhead flickering hard as the frequency climbs, and then it breaks.
The roar tears through the room.
Layered, massive, and alive.
Hellfire and Holy Light don’t just collide this time, they fuse, twisting together into something violent and controlled, a burning, blinding force that wraps around the sound and feeds it.
The roar isn’t just noise anymore.
It’s a weapon.
And Rhett is holding it, controlling it, and driving it forward.
The first line of rogues takes the hit directly.
There’s no impact, the way there should be, no bodies thrown, no stagger, no chance to react.
The sound hits them and they simply… break apart.
Their forms distort under the pressure, edges breaking down, bodies unraveling into ash, heat, and vapor as the roar passes through them, as if they were never solid to begin with.
Gone.
The wave keeps moving.
Rhett steps forward into it, and with Bennett’s Holy Light guiding him, the roar follows him, bending around him like it’s tied to his spine, sweeping across the room in controlled arcs.
Everywhere it touches, rogues disintegrate, their movements cutting off mid-strike as they’re caught in it, their bodies unable to hold together under the force of something that hits both flesh and whatever animates it.
The sound is everywhere.
It pounds through the floor, the walls, the air, rattling equipment hard enough to send it crashing down around us. Glass explodes outward in sharp bursts, metal groans under stress, the entire lab vibrating like it’s about to come apart at the seams.
I try to stand, but I physically can’t. My knees hit the floor hard as the force of it drives through me, not targeting or meant for me, but too massive to ignore.
It drags at my balance, shoves at my body, my hands slamming down against the concrete to keep myself upright as the roar tears through everything around us.
“Rhett—” Raze calls, but the name barely makes it out, swallowed by the sound.
Even Mordain tries to move, and for the first time, it isn’t smooth, that controlled precision slipping under the weight of it.
The force crashes into him hard enough to shove him back a step. Mordain catches himself quickly, but not quickly enough to hide it. His expression tightens. The arrogance is still there, and so is the confidence, but something else slips in alongside it.
Doubt.
This is something he didn’t fully account for.
The roar builds higher.
Stronger.
The fusion of fire and light burns brighter at its core, feeding it, amplifying it, turning it into something that doesn’t just fill the space, it owns it.
And Rhett keeps walking.
Every step is deliberate.
Every movement dragging that destruction with him, smiting anything in his path with brutal, controlled precision, until the battlefield isn’t a battlefield anymore…
It’s a clearing.
A line drawn in ash and silence where nothing is left standing.
And the sound… it still hasn’t finished.
The roar starts to collapse under its own weight. The pressure that had been crushing the room peels back in violent waves, dragged inward as whatever had broken loose is forced back behind skin and bone.
The hellfire dies first. Not cleanly. It fights. Black-orange flames lash and snap before finally folding inward, collapsing into a mess of unstable sparks.
Bennett’s light lingers a moment longer. White fire crawls across the room in fading pulses before it, too, begins to withdraw—reluctant and stubborn—like it resents being forced back into a cage after tasting freedom.
The sound drops with it, not disappearing all at once, but peeling away piece by piece, each layer of it fading until all that remains is a low, residual vibration that hums through the floor and into bone one last time before it finally dies out completely.
What follows isn’t quiet.
It is absence.
The lab is wrecked. Equipment lies twisted and broken where the wave’s force tore through it, glass ground into fine powder across the floor, blackened paths carved clean through everything that stood in its way.
There’s nothing left moving.
Nothing left to fight.
In the center of it, Rhett stands in hellhound form, exactly where the destruction ended, his body still carrying the tension of it, shoulders set, breath rough and uneven like whatever he just held onto hasn’t fully let him go yet.
Behind him, Bennett slowly lowers his hand, the last trace of light gone without ceremony, leaving nothing behind but the memory of it.
For a long second, neither of them moves.
Rhett turns first, the motion controlled but not entirely steady, like he’s working through the weight of his own body again, as if it doesn’t quite feel the same as it did before.
Bennett is already watching him.
Their eyes meet, and whatever passes between them doesn’t need words to land. There’s no humor in it, no deflection, none of the usual friction that fills the space when they’re standing this close to each other.
Just recognition.
Of what they did.
Of what it took.
Of the fact that neither of them is entirely sure where the line was, and whether they just stepped past it.
Then silence.
Even through the pain, the blood, and the immediate problem of an ancient vampire with a syringe, something about Rhett and Bennett finding their way to each other makes my stomach flutter.
Because Roxy arrives through the wall.
Not the door, the fucking wall.
Her magic hits the blood wards holding the lab together like a crowbar through a spiderweb. I can feel it even from here, a pressure change that pops my ears, and the red lines traced into the concrete seams across the floor and ceiling flare once and gutter out.
Mordain staggers half a step, and in that half step, his hold on the syringe loosens, and his attention fractures.
The explosion from the power grid comes a heartbeat later. Something in the laboratory’s infrastructure gives way with a sound like the earth clearing its throat, the lights strobe and die, replaced by the red emergency wash of backup systems that turn everything dark red.
Equipment ruptures across three workstations at once. Glass blows out in sharp bursts, sparks snapping through the air as circuits fry, the metallic stench of burning wiring hitting hard and fast.
The floor shudders under my boots, a deep, violent jolt that rattles through the structure, throwing balance just enough to matter as the walls vibrate with it, steel frames groaning under the strain.
And Mordain, with the instinct of something ancient and desperate, turns back toward the berserker. Toward his life’s work. Toward the one thing he refuses to let go of, even now, with everything breaking apart around him.
‘This is what I have been waiting for.’
The gap in his defenses opens for a fraction of a second, barely there, the width of a single distracted moment, but it’s enough.
I am already moving.
My body snaps into motion, dhampir instinct taking over in a clean, brutal surge that doesn’t hesitate and doesn’t ask for permission.
The distance between us collapses fast, the world narrowing down to a single line that runs straight through Mordain’s center, everything else falling away under the clarity of it as I commit fully to the strike.
He sees me coming.
Of course, he does.
His head turns just enough for his gaze to lock onto mine, that same cold, calculating precision still intact, still reading the moment as it unfolds, and whatever he sees is enough to pull him out of observation and back into action without the slightest delay.
He moves to meet me, ready, his hand snapping out with the kind of speed that doesn’t belong to anything human, cutting across my path with the clear intent to break my momentum before I can close the final distance.
I twist into the strike instead of away from it, redirecting the force rather than trying to avoid it completely.
The impact glances off my shoulder hard enough to jar through bone but not enough to stop me.
He adjusts immediately, as if the redirection was something he’d already accounted for, his other hand coming in low with lethal precision, angling for my ribs again.
This time, the hit lands harder, solid enough to knock my alignment off by inches that matter, enough to threaten the line I’ve committed to.
For a fraction of a second, I feel the opening slip.
Feel the moment start to tilt back in his favor.
Something tightens around Mordain, a shift in the air sharp enough to raise every instinct I have. I don’t need to look for the source. I know Roxy’s magic when I feel it.
The effect is almost invisible, but I catch it in the way Mordain moves. For the first time since this fight began, there is a flaw in the motion. A hesitation so small, it exists more as instinct than sight, a momentary catch that disrupts the relentless precision he’s been fighting with.
Mordain immediately drives against it, power erupting from him in a violent wave as he tries to crush whatever is interfering with his control.
The effort nearly works.
Nearly.
But a crack has already formed. His timing is no longer perfect, and when you’re fighting at this level, a crack is all it takes.
It buys me a heartbeat.
A heartbeat is enough.
Ruckus layers into it next, not with strength, but with distortion.
The space around Mordain shifts in ways that shouldn’t be possible, angles skewing just enough to disrupt his footing, his balance, the clean recovery of his movements.
It doesn’t stop him—nothing here stops him—but it forces him to compensate, to spend effort correcting what should have been instinctive.
I smirk at Ruckus, giving him a wink as I gain my footing and lunge for Mordain again.