The stage was built in Brimton's central plaza, a wide open space surrounded by the city's tallest buildings on three sides and the Council Hall on the fourth. It was the kind of location chosen for exactly this purpose. High visibility, controlled viewpoints, and enough room to fit the thousands of citizens who'd been demanding answers for the past two days.
The Council had spared nothing on security. Four layered barriers surrounded the stage in concentric rings, each one constructed by a different specialist and reinforced with magji tools designed for exactly this kind of protection. The innermost barrier was built by Brimton's best barrier magjistar, an A-Grade veteran named Holloway whose known across multiple OM branches. The outermost was a wide-radius containment field that would detect any significant mahna fluctuations within fifty meters of the stage.
Between the barriers and the crowd, three full squads of Peacekeepers stood in formation. Thirty bodies in total, armed and authorized for lethal engagement. Mixed among them were six B-Grade magjistars and two A-Grades, the latter being Maren Voss herself and Callum Thresh. The Head of Security and the Head of Peacekeeping weren't just overseeing the operation. They were part of the defense.
Delia Santos stood at the back of the stage with her arms folded. She'd received the records from the magji school that morning. She'd read the statements from community members who'd known both Reid and Baxter. She now knew exactly what Reid Calloway had done and exactly why Baxter Rudd wanted him to suffer. She also knew that none of it mattered right now. Whatever Reid deserved, it wasn't the Council's place to let criminals dispense justice in their streets. That was a problem for after. Right now, the priority was catching the rogue magjistars who'd put five people in the hospital and made Brimton's Peacekeeping force look useless.
The crowd filled the plaza. Hundreds of people. Maybe over a thousand. Humans, Viperians, the furry giants standing at the back where they could see over everyone else, light-people hovering above the crowd in soft clusters. The mood was tense but attentive. They'd come for answers and the Council was finally giving them one.
Reid Calloway walked to the podium.
He looked good. That was the infuriating thing about him, Delia noted. He'd been given fresh clothes, his wounds had been treated by the best healers in the city, and the gash on his forehead had been reduced to a faint line that made him look rugged rather than injured.
"Citizens of Brimton." Reid's voice carried across the plaza, amplified by a sound magji tool embedded in the podium. "I know you're frustrated. I know you're angry. I know that the last two days have disrupted your lives, your businesses, and your sense of safety. And I know you deserve to understand why."
The crowd quieted. Even the angry ones. There was something about Reid's voice.
"My name is Reid Calloway. I'm a B-Grade magjistar born and raised in this city. I've taken cases for Brimton for years. I've fought daemons alongside your Peacekeepers, valedictorian at Brimton Magji High, and built a life here with people I care about." He paused. Let the crowd see him as one of their own. "Two days ago, a man I once knew, a former friend named Baxter Rudd, hired two rogue magjistars to attack the people closest to me."
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
"My girlfriend, Sable Moreau, was attacked at a cafe during brunch. Both of her arms were broken. Her ribs were shattered. Her knee was destroyed. She is in the hospital right now, and the doctors don't know when she'll wake up." Reid's voice cracked on the word "wake." Whether it was real or performed, Delia couldn't tell. "Four more of my friends, Greer Holston, Dante Cross, Pria Vasani, and Lowell Tate, were attacked at the hospital while visiting Sable. All of them are in critical condition."
The murmur became a rumble. Anger, but not directed at the Council anymore. Directed at the faceless threat that had done this.
"These rogue magjistars didn't stop at my friends. When the Peacekeepers responded to protect the people of this city, they were attacked too. Six innocent Peacekeepers were hospitalized in the first encounter. More were injured at the hospital. These criminals don't care who gets hurt. They don't respect our laws, our Peacekeepers, or our way of life. They came to this city to cause harm, and they will continue causing harm until they are stopped."
Reid gripped the podium. Knuckles white. Eyes scanning the crowd.
"Baxter Rudd is a disturbed individual who could not accept the consequences of his own actions. Instead of moving on with his life, he chose violence. He chose to hire dangerous people and unleash them on this city. And I want to be clear about something." Reid leaned into the microphone. "It isn't just me and my friends who are at risk. These people attacked a public cafe. They attacked a hospital. They fought Peacekeepers in the streets. If they are willing to do all of that to get to me, what makes you think they'll stop there? What happens when one of you gets caught in the crossfire? What happens when it's your business, your family, your children?"
The crowd shifted. Parents pulled their kids closer. Business owners exchanged worried glances. The anger that had been directed at the Council for the curfew was now flowing toward the unseen threat that justified it.
Reid had them. Delia could see it in the way the crowd's body language changed. They weren't angry at the Council anymore. They were scared. And scared people wanted protection, not transparency.
"I didn't ask for this," Reid said, and his voice dropped to something quieter, more intimate. It made a thousand people feel like he was speaking only to them. "I didn't want any of this. But I'm standing here today because the Council of Brimton asked me to, and because you deserve to know the truth. Your Council is doing everything in its power to find these criminals and bring them to justice. The curfew, the checkpoints, the increased Peacekeeper presence, all of it exists to protect you. To protect all of us."
He stepped back from the podium. The crowd responded with applause. Not thunderous, but genuine. The sound of people who felt like they finally understood what was happening and were grateful someone had the courage to tell them.
Maren allowed herself a small nod from her position near the stage. Callum's posture relaxed a fraction. Even the Peacekeepers in formation seemed to stand a little taller. The event was working. The public was on their side again. The bait was set, the security was airtight, and if the rogue magjistars were foolish enough to show themselves at a fortified public event surrounded by thirty Peacekeepers and two A-Grade Council members, they would be crushed.
And then a crack split the air above the plaza like thunder from a cloudless sky. Every head in the crowd tilted upward. Every Peacekeeper's eyes went to the sky. The sound wasn't an explosion. It was the sound of something moving so fast that the air itself broke apart trying to get out of the way.
A figure fell from the sky like a meteor.
It hit the outermost barrier first. The containment field that was designed to detect mahna fluctuations and alert the security team to incoming threats detonated on contact, the entire structure shattering into fragments of mahna that rained down on the crowd like broken glass. The figure didn't slow.
The second barrier went next. This one was stronger, thicker, built to absorb impact and redistribute force. It held for a fraction of a second. Long enough for the crowd to see the shape inside the barrier's light, a small body wreathed in white mahna so dense it looked solid, a panda mask staring down at them through the barrier's failing surface. Then the barrier cracked and the figure punched through it with a fist that trailed light like a comet's tail.
The third barrier shattered before the figure reached it. The shockwave from the second barrier's destruction cascaded into the third and overwhelmed it. Holloway, the A-Grade barrier specialist who hadn't had his work broken in fifteen years, watched his creation collapse with an expression that started as disbelief and ended somewhere closer to horror.
The fourth barrier, the innermost one, the last line of defense between the stage and whatever was falling out of the sky, held the longest. Two full seconds. In those two seconds, every Peacekeeper in formation turned their weapons upward. Maren's mahna flared. Callum drew his weapon. Spells were charged and aimed and ready.
The fourth barrier exploded.
The figure landed on the stage.
The impact crater spread outward from the point of contact, splintering the wooden platform in every direction. The podium where Reid had been standing a moment ago was obliterated. Sound equipment shattered. The stage supports groaned and buckled. A cloud of dust and debris erupted upward, momentarily obscuring everything.
When it cleared, the crowd saw her.
Five feet tall. Panda mask covering her entire head. Dark skin stretched over muscles that pulsed and shifted with every breath, veins glowing faintly white beneath the surface. The boxing gloves on her hands were alive, both hound heads snarling with jaws open, drool sizzling where it hit the ruined stage.
Reid was under her.
She'd landed directly on him. One hand was around his throat, Cody's jaws locked around his neck with the same mahna-draining grip that had drained Sable. Reid's gravity magji flared in desperation, trying to push her off, trying to increase the weight of the air above her, trying anything. His mahna drained out of him like water from a cracked glass. The gravity fluctuations weakened, stuttered, and died.
Max drove into Reid's gut.
Reid weakly wheezed, the sound forced out of him by the impact. Blood erupted from his mouth in a spray that painted the outside of the panda mask. Max pulled back and hit him again. Same spot. Harder. Reid's body convulsed. His hands clawed at Cody's jaws around his throat, fingers scraping uselessly against teeth that didn't care about fingers.
Max hit him a third time. A fourth. Each blow produced a wet crunching sound that the sound magji tools, now scattered across the destroyed stage in pieces, mercifully could not amplify. Reid's body bucked with each impact. His eyes rolled. Blood poured from his mouth in a steady stream.
The crowd was screaming. Stampeding. Thousands of people trying to get away from the plaza in every direction, trampling barriers and pushing past Peacekeepers who were trying to maintain order while simultaneously responding to the attack on the stage.
"ALL UNITS CONVERGE! PROTECT THE TARGET!" Maren's voice cut through the chaos.
The Peacekeepers moved. Thirty of them plus the six B-Grades plus Maren and Callum. Spells fired from every direction. Bolts of compressed mahna, blades of wind, lances of ice, waves of fire. The air around the stage became a storm of magji attacks all aimed at the small figure crouched over Reid's broken body.
Zoey stood up.
The first wave of spells hit her Overdraft aura and dissolved. The mahna that comprised the attacks met the mahna radiating from her body and simply ceased to exist, overpowered by a density that most of the casters had never encountered. A few of the stronger spells, the ones from the B-Grades, made it through the passive aura and struck her body. She felt them. Pinpricks. Annoyances. Nothing that warranted acknowledgment.
Maren Voss closed the distance from the left. The Head of Security was an A-Grade for a reason. Her magji was metal manipulation, and the air around her screamed as dozens of metallic fragments, pulled from the destroyed stage, the barriers, the equipment, ripped free and formed into a swirling storm of razor-sharp projectiles. She hurled them at Zoey in a concentrated volley that would have shredded a lesser magjistar into pieces.
Zoey swatted the volley aside with Max. Incredibly rapid punches that allowed the hound head to open its jaws and catch the bulk of the metal storm in its teeth, crushing the fragments into pieces that it spat out to the side. The remaining shards left nonconsequential cuts on Zoey's body.
Maren's eyes widened.
Callum came from the right. His magji was kinetic force, the ability to amplify the impact of any physical strike to several times its normal power. He swung his weapon, a mahna-reinforced war hammer, at Zoey's head with a blow that could crack a building's foundation.
Zoey ducked. The hammer passed over her head close enough to disturb her braids. She came up inside Callum's reach and drove Cody into his ribs. The hound head's jaws bit into his side, and Callum felt his mahna begin draining out of him.
Zoey tightened Cody's grip on his side and swung Max into his face. Callum launched backward off the stage and crashed into the fleeing crowd, knocking over a dozen people before coming to a stop against the base of a building.
Maren attacked again. More metal. A larger storm this time, pulling from the surrounding buildings themselves, tearing pipes and railings and fixtures free. The cloud of metal that descended on Zoey was ten times the size of the first volley.
Zoey burst through it with several more cuts on her body, protecting vital areas like her eyes and heart.
She was inside Maren's guard before the metal storm could redirect. Max hit Maren in the stomach. Cody clamped down on her forearm. Maren screamed as the teeth bit through flesh and bone along with draining her mahna. Her metal storm collapsed, hundreds of fragments clattering to the ground around them like metallic rain. Zoey headbutted her with the panda mask. The mask reinforced by her mahna connected with Maren's forehead and the Head of Security dropped.
The B-Grades converged next. Six of them, coming from multiple angles, coordinating their attacks the way experienced magjistars were supposed to. One created barriers to restrict Zoey's movement. Another laid down suppressive fire with explosive mahna bolts. A third tried to bind her legs with earth magji, pulling the ground itself up around her ankles.
Zoey ripped her feet free and charged the barrier caster first. He held for two punches. The third sent him flying. She spun and caught the earth magji user with a backhand from Cody that knocked him out before he hit the ground. The explosive specialist managed one more volley before Zoey closed the distance and drove Max into his chest plate hard enough to dent it inward.
Three B-Grades down in under ten seconds.
The remaining three hesitated. Which was the wrong move. Zoey didn't wait for them to decide. She hit the nearest one with a combination that started with a body shot from Max and ended with an uppercut from Cody that lifted him off his feet. The fifth tried to run. Zoey caught him by the back of his uniform and slammed him into the stage floor. The sixth, to his credit, screamed and charged her with a magji-enhanced sword aimed at her neck.
Zoey caught the blade between Cody's teeth. The hound head bit down and the sword snapped in half. She hit the sixth B-Grade once in the jaw. He spun and fell.
The regular Peacekeepers had stopped firing. Some of them were backing away. Others had simply frozen, their weapons lowered, their faces carrying the specific expression of people who had just realized that everything they'd been told about the security being sufficient was a lie.
Zoey stood in the center of the destroyed stage. Reid was at her feet, unconscious, bleeding from the mouth, his mahna completely gone. Around her lay the ruins of four barriers, six B-Grade magjistars, two A-Grade Council members, and the shattered remains of a podium.
Max and Cody snarled at the remaining Peacekeepers, daring them to try something. The white mahna aura pulsed with each breath, steady and thick and suffocating.
The remaining Peacekeepers, the ones still standing, the ones who hadn't run or frozen, looked at each other. There were maybe fifteen of them left in fighting condition. They were trained professionals. They had weapons. They had magji. They had numbers.
They also had eyes.
They'd watched an A-Grade's metal storm get swatted aside. They'd watched another A-Grade get disarmed with his own hammer. They'd watched six B-Grades get dismantled in the time it took to draw a full breath. Whatever this woman was, she wasn't something that fifteen regular Peacekeepers could handle. She wasn't something that Brimton could handle.
They came at her anyway.
The people they'd sworn to protect were still in the plaza, still running, still screaming, and the thing standing on that stage was between them and the oath they'd taken.
'Say what you want about Brimton's Peacekeepers. They aren't pussies.' Inner Zoey laughed.
The first one reached her and threw a spell point-blank. Zoey sidestepped and hit him in the gut. He was lifted off his feet before dropping. The second swung a staff. She caught it, broke it over her knee, and tossed the halves to knock two more Peacekeepers off their feet. The fourth and fifth came together, one high and one low. She ducked the high attack, jumped the low sweep, and hit both of them in the same motion, Max to the left and Cody to the right.
They kept coming. She kept putting them down. Just enough force to remove them from the fight and move to the next one. It was almost gentle by her standards. These people weren't her enemies. They were just in the way.
When the last Peacekeeper fell, Zoey walked toward the edge of the stage. Tiffany was waiting below, polar bear mask on, greatsword resting on her shoulder. She'd been handling the few Peacekeepers who'd tried to flank the stage from the sides. They were scattered around her in various states of unconsciousness.
"That was so amazing…" Tiffany's eyes shifted into hearts as she admired Zoey.
Zoey jumped off the stage.
Somewhere in the back of the plaza, watching from behind a barrier that had gone up to protect the fleeing civilians, Delia Santos stood very still. She'd seen the whole thing. From the moment the sky cracked to the moment the last Peacekeeper fell. She'd seen two A-Grade Council members, the strongest magjistars in Brimton, get swatted aside like children.
She didn't move. She didn't give orders. She just watched as the panda and the polar bear walked away from the plaza, and she thought a single, quiet thought.
'We were never going to be enough…'