Colors bled into each other, sharpening her vision beyond the realm of human sight. The creatures were not just writhing masses of shadow; they were threads, tangled corruption, weak points waiting to be unspooled.
She caught hold of one and lashed out with the storm brewing in her.
The creature imploded.
Mak paused mid-battle and whirled to her.
‘Saba?’
His rasp was edged with awe.
She didn’t register his voice.
The fire inside her had ignited, crackling through her veins, filling the air with a charge she could feel between her fingertips.
The nextsachemlunged.
She lifted her hands, willed the inner potency to life, as a glow rippled around her.
The demon stopped, screeching as an unseen energy enveloped it, crushing, pulling, and tearing it apart at the seams.
It didn’t bleed. It just ceased to exist.
The others hesitated. They trembled. She wasn’t done.
The power in her surged, untamed, seeking out its targets.
She closed her eyes, and her sight reached beyond the physical plane, past walls and earth, pulsing with filth beneath the skin of their attackers.
Right to the source of their corruption in an otherworldly dimension.
The atmosphere quivered with an unnatural vibration and glow.
With a ragged inhale, she pushed.
A crack split through reality itself, a distortion of space and pressure that bent the air. A wave of power exploded outward, rushing through the assailants like wildfire.
Thesachemshrieked in agony as they burned from the interior out, their forms dissolving in the raw might she had unleashed.
Silence fell.
The rear deck thrummed as the force inside her retreated.
She exhaled, the energy still thrumming within her. Her hands trembled, not with fear, but with knowing what she had just done.
When she turned, Mak was staring at her, having shifted back to his human form.
His weapon was lowered, his brows arched, lips parted as if searching for words.
‘What infokkin’ hell was that?’ he asked, stepping toward her.
The air still glimmered over her, like embers lingering after a wildfire.
She swallowed hard, her breath uneven.
‘I believe,’ she forced a shaking exhale. ‘That your mark woke up some type of ability inside me.’
Sheathing his firearm, Mak tracked to her, one arm banding around her waist.
