It was amazing how fast you could get to hate someone... and I mean real hate and not disgust.
I did not look towards the sound of Rex’s laughter or the screams that were slowly fading; I already knew that Rex was killing them.
I did not have time to feel or care about what was going on when Commander Rel was in front of us.
And as I came up on one knee, I saw Bari casting Surge at her, even as she had resumed casting another spell above her hand.
He may not have known that I had survived, after all, he had just seen me blasted ten meters by an Adept, and instead of running or pleading for mercy like I know many would do, Bari attacked.
The cast left his staff with the weight Bari’s casts always carried, and it crossed the four meters between him and Commander Rel. The Commander raised her free hand without looking at the cast, and the hand caught the Surge.
Caught.
My eyes widened as I saw that her hand closed around the cast in the air, and the compressed force of Bari’s discipline collapsed inward into her palm, and what had been the heaviest Surge in our cohort became nothing at all.
I could barely figure out how she could catch a wave of force with her hand when she closed her fingers together into a fist and then opened her fist towards Bari.
I do not know what came out. I had no framework for it. What left her opened palm was the same compressed force Bari had cast, returned to him, but more of it, denser, weighted with whatever the Commander had added to it during the absorption.
Bari did not have time to react; he could not even move or make any defense. He did not have time to look at me, which was worse; there was no last look between us, no recognition, no goodbye.
I knew Bari hated fighting, and before this loop, while I did not really dislike combat, I did not pursue it, but I remembered we used to joke that if we were in some of the rare magus battles that happened between continents, we would die together as brothers.
The returned cast hit him on his chest, and then he no longer had one.
There was a hole through him that I could see daylight through, and his staff dropped from his hand.
He fell forward, and my heartbeat paused... my mind stopped counting the events that were happening.
When demons had attacked and killed my friends, there had always been something distant and dispassionate about their actions that gave my mind the mental buffer that it needed to process such a horrifying thing.
Some part of me had been running calculations through every fight since that moment, calculating every variable and understanding how to win... that part of my mind shut down, and the variables stopped mattering.
Bari was on the ground, and he was not breathing, killed by the person who was supposed to protect him... This realization broke me.
I cast Arc Lightning at the configuration she was already building above her other palm that was nearing completion.
Five percent of my Anima Depth, no Surge, single target, the cleanest cast I had ever produced because Marksman at thirty-six was not asking my hands what to do anymore, it was telling them.
The arc found the configuration before it completed and the structure dispersed, the half-built spell coming apart in a flare of blue light, and Commander Rel’s hand closed reflexively because the discipline she had been holding had just been disrupted at the source.
For a fraction of a second, both of her hands were empty, and then Dara screamed as she sent out her cast towards the Commander.
There was something in her voice that I recognized; it was the same pain that was burning a hole through my chest. Dara was not that close to Bari, but there was no way the sight of him dying like this did not affect her soul.
Her cast was a binding lattice that came up between her and the Commander, anchored between her hands, and it was the most complex lattice I had seen her build in any loop.
The lattice was a cage, and she was trying to bind an Adept. It was the bravest thing I had ever seen anyone do.
Commander Rel was wrapped in several layers of the lattice, and she paused before slowly turning towards Dara, whose hands were outstretched and her face was bloodless as she poured all of her Anima into binding the Commander.
Bending her head to the side as if she was observing an interesting specimen, the Commander reached up with both hands and pulled the lattice apart with a sound of breaking glass.
She did it the way a person pulls apart a curtain they had walked into. Her hands went through the structure of Dara’s binding, and the binding came apart along the lines of her hands.
Her right hand, the one that had absorbed Bari’s Surge, closed around the air in front of Dara’s chest.
From the moment I saw her trying to bind the Commander instead of attempting an attack spell, I knew that I had to do something, despite the fact that all I wanted to do was to run up to my friend and see if by some miracle there was still life left inside him.
I knew I was too late when the Commander raised her hand, and my eyes met Dara.
In the previous loop, I had seen hate in her eyes, and it had confused and angered me, but now I saw something else.
Dara’s eyes held no fear; there was just the focused calm of a Threadwork specialist who had decided what she was going to do with the last thing she had to give.
And what she had decided was to look at me, and the look was not panic, it was... a bit of relief and sadness.
I instantly understood that Dara held the Commander, just to give me a bit of time to survive; it did not matter that she died before me, but seeing me live a bit longer was enough to give her happiness.
I did not understand it... I did not want to understand it.
I wanted to ask her why she would feel this way about me when the hand of the Commander finished her motion and closed with an audible clap, and Dara’s chest closed with it.