Suddenly, a group of powerful strangers stepped into existence as though the world had torn open and spat them out.
One second there was nothing but empty space, and the next there were six of them standing in a loose arc, solid and undeniable, like they had always been there and the world had just been slow to catch up.
Each one possessed an aura that matched Benjamin's own in depth and density, the kind of force that could reshape a battlefield or shatter a mountain if nobody stopped it.
But still, even as that pressure settled over the area, a small certainty stayed rooted deep in the chest, steady and unshaken: Benjamin would hold them.
He would match their strength long enough for my work to begin. The lairs of evil still stood, and those lairs needed to be torn down to their foundations before the day was over.
Somehow the locations of those lairs were already there in the mind, mapped as clearly as if they had been walked a hundred times before.
