Aster held his eyes for three nerve-wracking seconds, unable to will her body into action, but then he looked away and he locked eyes with Ronan instead. Crassus crouched down then shot out like an arrow, head first, arms at his side. He moved so fast his form blurred and Aster barely had time to register that he had jumped. Ronan on the other hand reacted at once. He roared in defiance and brandished his arm and a blinding light flashed from his hand.

  An invisible force grabbed hold of Crassus midair. He slowed imperceptibly but in contrast to all the times Ronan had stopped the other projectiles, Crassus did not stop. The kinetic energy did appear to siphon away from Crassus through Ronan’s key but there seemed no end to it, Crassus just kept coming. The dust clouds surrounding him blasted away. The ground beneath him quaked and smaller pebbles burst.

  Ronan tried again and a larger shockwave emerged from Crassus. The ground cracked and a large circle split off from the rest of the packed earth and was pushed down several centimeters. Crassus slowed to a crawl and he brought his legs forward and stepped down into the crater Ronan had made for him.

  For a brief moment he did nothing. Ronan staggered and steadied himself against his knees. He breathed hard.

  Then a truly twisted and demented look came over Crassus’s face, like all the rage in the whole world had take refuge within him and now bubbled out. He screamed like a rabid animal and crouched to jump once more. Ronan cursed and brought up his hand before Crassus could take off.

  At the exact moment Crassus jumped, Ronan reached out and forced the kinetic energy away from his movement into the air and ground around him. The earth burst as if struck by a concrete pillar ten paces across. Everything not already flat shattered and compacted in a fraction of a second, three bodies of some unfortunate bandits spurted up like geysers as if they had been passed through a juicepress.

  Finding nowhere else to go, the energy traveled through the connection between Crassus’s jump and Ronan’s key. Aster saw the skin on Ronan’s face ripple as the shockwave of kinetic energy traveled through him to reach the ground and a similar but smaller circle exploded up around Ronan.

  The light emanating from Ronan’s hand dimmed and the very next instant Ronan blasted off backwards, crashing into Aster’s building. As he hit the building another circle, far larger than the other ones, smashed down around Ronan, right onto Aster, like a judgement from god. It flattened the whole building along with the area as the brick structure crumpled like a cardboard box.

  Aster felt like she had been crushed by a landslide from both sides. The whole fight between Ronan and Crassus had taken no more than three seconds. This is insane. Ronan was the strongest fighter she knew, and the main reason she couldn’t have defeated Tejahl’s bandits herself. Stand up, stand up! The panic was impossible to push down now. She groaned as it engulfed her. I don’t want to die! The thought, or perhaps the panic, or maybe both, forced her into action. She stood up, Crassus already knew she was there, no use in pretending.

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  Only she, Crassus and Isaac were still alive. Everyone else was either ripped apart, squished to smush, or buried under a building. Debris lay strewn about everywhere. Dust choked the air. Mutilated corpses scattered the ground and a corridor of destruction stretched out from behind Crassus in through the hole in the wall where he’d made his entrance.

  Crassus made no move. He was a very tall man, with the complexion of a corpse. Now that he was closer, Aster could see from inside his cloak the myriad of identical bronze keys interlocked at their handles to form the chainmail going around Crassus’s body. It hung down well past his stomach. Aster struggled to take in what she was seeing. There must be hundreds of keys in that chainmail. No wonder he’s so strong… and he’s insane.

  She met his eyes. In between all that hair, set against his white and pallid skin two sunken eye sockets sat peering back at her. They gleamed with misery. His eyeballs were misty white and they reflected the carnage around him as if his actions didn’t quite sink in beyond his eyes. He tilted his head and for a second it seemed as if he considered her. In that moment, Aster knew she would die. How could she have been so naive? She’d sealed her fate the moment she’d stepped into this place.

  But she didn’t die—Crassus instead looked towards the other survivor of the group. Isaac lay bunched up against a large piece of concrete, clutching at the ground as if it could save him if he just held on hard enough. By some miracle of fate or through sheer dumb luck, he’d decided to hide behind Ronan when the battle broke out.

  That choice had probably saved his life, as the rest of the bandits lay shattered by the rocks that burst from the boulder. The whites of his eyes bulged and specks of blood coated his skin and clothes. Isaac met the gaze of Crassus, then trembled and made the sounds of a man who bargained with death.

  Crassus stood like a towering cliff, unmoving and overpowering. Until a tremor went through him and his body language melted into that of a quivering, confused mess of a man. He hunched his shoulders and clutched his face in his hands. Aster was unsure as to whether he was trying to gouge his skin out or protect it. His eyes darted from body to body and he moaned each time he spotted a new one as if they were the corpses of his own children.

  His nervous ticks grew more frantic. Aster found it difficult to breathe. This new behaviour disturbed her more than the last. The man was beyond insanity. How could a person go so fast from inhuman rage to… whatever this was? Not one person present had any control of the situation, least of all Crassus. The sensation of a thousand crawling insects itched across her skin.

  The mad ravings reached a crescendo. Something was coming. Aster had no idea what that something would be, but she prepared for another explosion of deranged violence. She drew on the last of her reservoir of feathers from her key out through her skin and fell into a stance which settled her point of gravity lower to the ground.

  Crassus wasn’t even looking at anything in particular anymore, he just wildly shifted between empty points in space as if they were all surrounded by invisible enemies only he could see. He brought his head around so fast he stumbled forward and Isaac whimpered. Crassus stopped at the sound yet another shift went over his mood.

  He held out his hands to Isaac imploringly, almost longingly. Isaac shivered as if he sat in a blizzard and tried to press himself further away from Crassus into the stone behind his back. His skin stretched taught across the features of his face like a thousand year old parchment. Crassus’s mouth opened but only something like the rasping sounds of a man three days lost in a desert came out. He cleared his throat and tried again.

  “Please, I need it, just... please!”

  Aster’s jaw slackened and she completely forgot herself. “You can talk?”