Thomas turned back to the room.

  The pain was gone. Not entirely—the joint still throbbed with a deep, structural ache that told him the ligament was very much destroyed—but the blinding, white-hot agony that had been paralyzing his leg had been replaced by something manageable. Something he could work with. Florence's intervention had drained the hemorrhage, reduced the swelling enough that the joint could bear partial weight without collapsing. He wasn't running any sprints, but he could stand. He could aim. He could fight.

  And the odds had shifted while he'd been down.

  Thomas extended his senses outward, reading the room the way a sailor reads the wind. The ambient mana had changed. During the brief medical intervention, thirty seconds, maybe forty, the oppressive churn of overlapping spell-lattices had thinned. The relay that had been grinding his core down was stuttering. Where four distinct casters had been rotating in disciplined sequence, Thomas now counted three. One of the sources had gone silent. Not dormant—silent. The kind of silence that meant a mage had stopped casting because a mage had stopped breathing.

  His tablecloth-wearing friend had not been idle.

  Thomas gritted his teeth, planted his good foot, and hauled himself upright. His left ankle protested, a hot, grinding complaint that radiated up his shin, but it held. Florence's healing had bought him weight-bearing capacity, if not comfort. He'd take it.

  He peered over the edge of the overturned oak table.

  The dining room of the Lacquered Swan looked like the aftermath of a siege painting. Smoke hung in lazy, drifting curtains. Small fires crackled in the wreckage, fed by splintered furniture and shredded curtain fabric. The chandelier lay in the center of the floor like a fallen crown, its iron arms bent at grotesque angles.

  Thomas counted.

  Eleven cultists had entered the breach. Two he had dropped in the opening salvo—the first headshot and the priest. One had been killed through the table when the idiot announced Thomas's affinity to the room. The pot-bellied man with the sawed-off was dead courtesy of his masked ally. One more had been dropped on the right flank by the same shooter. Florence had put the axe-wielder on the floor unconscious. A seventh was folded against the far wall, fresh. Shot mid-flank while Thomas was down. The stranger's work.

  Seven down.

  Four remained. Two of them were on the ground, the man with the shattered shoulder and the rifleman he'd shot in the thigh during his aerial stunt. They were writhing in the rubble, their burlap hoods soaked dark with sweat and blood, their hands still moving in the jerky, compulsive patterns of mages who refused to stop casting. The lattices they produced were weak, malformed, sputtering things, barely coherent fire-seeds and trembling earth-shifts that a stiff breeze could have disrupted. But they were still trying. Still feeding the relay with whatever dregs of mana their failing bodies could produce.

  Fanatics.

  The other two were standing. Both had their backs to Thomas.

  That was the detail that mattered. Both surviving cultists, one with a repeating rifle, the other with a revolver in each hand, had repositioned to face the far side of the ruin, where the masked figure in the tablecloth was apparently causing enough problems to demand their full attention. They were crouched behind a mound of collapsed plaster, firing in short, controlled bursts toward the right flank, completely focused on the stranger who had been dismantling their operation from the shadows.

  They had forgotten about Thomas.

  Mistake.

  Thomas settled his revolver on the edge of the overturned table, using the mahogany as a rest to steady his aim. He lined up on the nearer of the two, the one with the rifle, currently racking the bolt for another shot.

  He fired.

  The report was flat and precise, swallowed almost immediately by the acoustics of the gutted room. The round crossed thirty feet of smoke-filled air and struck the cultist between the shoulder blades.

  The man's reaction was instantaneous—reflexive and, Thomas had to admit, impressive. Even as the impact drove him forward, his hands were already moving, mana surging through shattered concentration. A slab of compacted stone erupted from the rubble in front of him, angling backward to intercept the trajectory.

  It was a good instinct. Fast. Well-drilled. The kind of emergency ward that might have saved his life against a conventional shooter.

  Thomas flicked his wrist.

  The stone slab dissolved. The mana holding it together simply ceased, the compacted earth losing cohesion and cascading to the floor in a shower of gravel and dust. The bullet, which had already passed through the man's torso before the wall even began to form, continued on its merry way into the far wall.

  The cultist dropped.

  Thomas shook his head, a grim, involuntary motion. They always tried. Every geomancer, every pyromancer, every caster who had ever faced a Nullifier tried to cast their way out of it. As if the solution to having your magic erased was to produce more magic for erasure. It was like trying to bail out a sinking boat by pouring in more water.

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  The last standing cultist saw his partner collapse and something behind that burlap hood broke.

  The discipline went first—the drilled coordination, the rehearsed formations, the professional calm that had carried them through the breach. It all shattered in the span of a heartbeat, replaced by something raw, animal, and infinitely more dangerous. The man spun away from his cover, abandoning the engagement with the masked figure entirely. He wasn't aiming at Thomas. He wasn't aiming at the stranger.

  He was aiming at the civilians.

  Both revolvers swung toward the cluster of survivors huddled behind the fallen chandelier, a knot of dust-covered, bleeding people who had been cowering in the wreckage since the first explosion. A woman clutching a child. An elderly man with blood streaming down his temple. The young waiter who had somehow survived the initial barrage, his white shirt soaked crimson, propped against the ironwork with glassy eyes.

  "Die!" the cultist screamed, the word tearing through the burlap in a spray of saliva and desperation. "Just die! All of you! Every last—"

  BLAM.

  The masked figure materialized from the smoke on the right flank. One shot. Clean, economical, punching through the cultist's side just below the ribs.

  The man staggered. His knees buckled, but he didn't fall, the adrenaline and whatever cocktail of fanaticism was coursing through his veins kept him upright for one more second. One revolver had clattered to the rubble when he lurched, but the other was still in his grip. The barrel was still pointed at the huddle of survivors, wavering but close enough.

  Thomas adjusted his aim two degrees.

  BANG.

  The round entered the burlap hood above the left ear. The cultist's head snapped sideways with a force that twisted his entire body, and he was dead before the rotation finished, collapsing in a loose, boneless heap, the revolver clattering from fingers that had already forgotten how to grip.

  Silence.

  It descended on the ruins of the Lacquered Swan like a physical weight. Not the comfortable quiet of a room at rest, but the ringing, pressurized absence of noise that follows catastrophic violence. The small fires crackled. Somewhere in the wreckage, a gas pipe hissed its slow, steady leak. The survivors were not screaming anymore. They had passed beyond screaming into the numb, trembling stillness of people who were not yet sure they were alive.

  Thomas stood up.

  His ankle hurt. The joint was stiff, grinding with every step, and the tissue around the boot was still discolored, but the swelling had not returned. Florence's intervention had halted the hemorrhage, and while the ligament was still torn, the joint was functional enough to bear weight in a limping, ugly gait that would have made his physical training instructor weep. He could walk. He could not run. He could not pivot. But he could walk, and right now, walking was enough.

  He stepped out from behind the overturned table, his revolver held low at his side, and scanned the ruin.

  The masked figure emerged from the far side of the dining room at the same time. They moved with the careful, measured gait of someone checking corners, head on a swivel, weapon up, clearing each pocket of shadow before advancing. The tablecloth had shifted during the fighting, pulled loose at one shoulder to reveal the dark fabric of the clothes beneath, but the featureless metal mask remained firmly in place, catching the firelight in flat, silver planes.

  They met in the center of the dining room, standing on either side of the fallen chandelier like two people who had arrived at the same crossroads from opposite directions.

  Thomas opened his mouth.

  A lattice crystallized to his left.

  He snapped his head toward the source. The shoulder-wound cultist, the one he'd shot during the aerial pass, was lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, his face gray beneath the burlap, his lips moving in rapid, voiceless incantation. The spell he was building was crude, barely coherent, a stuttering fire-seed that pulsed like a dying ember, but it was aimed at the cluster of survivors. Even dying, even bleeding out with a shattered clavicle, the man was still casting.

  Thomas crushed it. The nullification pulse rolled outward, collapsing the lattice into nothing.

  The fire-seed flickered out. And immediately, the second downed cultist, the rifleman with the ruined thigh, began weaving his own spell from ten feet away. Earth this time, a trembling vibration in the floor that spoke of a spike or a sinkhole forming beneath the chandelier where the survivors were sheltering.

  Thomas nullified that one too. The vibration died.

  The shoulder-wound started again.

  Thomas let out a sharp breath through his teeth.

  "Give it up," Thomas said, his voice carrying across the rubble with the flat, exasperated authority of a man who had reached the absolute limit of his patience. "You're bleeding out. Both of you. You've got minutes, maybe less. Stop casting and I'll get you medical attention. There are still people in this building who can help you."

  The shoulder-wound cultist's response was to spit blood onto the rubble and begin weaving a third lattice, faster this time, his glazed eyes burning with the fixed, white-hot intensity of a man who had made peace with dying and simply wanted to take as many people with him as possible.

  Thomas raised his revolver.

  He didn't want to do this. They were wounded, prone, functionally helpless. Shooting a man who couldn't stand was not the same as shooting a man who was trying to kill you, even if the distinction was technical at best. His training was clear. A mage who refused to surrender was a mage who remained a threat, and a threat was neutralized, not negotiated with. But pulling the trigger on two bleeding men while they lay in the dirt felt like something that would follow him home.

  He hesitated.

  A hand tugged at the back of his trench coat.

  "Thomas, let me—I can help them, I think I can stop their bleeding."

  "Floren—" He turned, the word half-formed, his expression caught between disbelief and exasperation.

  BLAM. BLAM.

  The masked figure walked past both of them with the unhurried stride of someone crossing a room to close a window. Two steps. Two shots. Each one placed with mechanical precision, the first into the shoulder-wound cultist's temple, the second into the rifleman's forehead. The lattices died mid-formation, the mana dissipating into the air like smoke from a snuffed candle.

  The figure holstered the revolver in a smooth, practiced motion. Left hand, cross-draw, the kind of muscle memory that came from either extensive training or very recent, very intense practice. They turned back to Thomas and offered a single, curt nod.

  The gesture was clean. Professional. It said: Done.

  Thomas stared at the two fresh corpses, then back at the mask. He let out a low, appreciative whistle, the sound slipping out before his professional discretion could catch it.

  "Well," Thomas said, and the hard, tactical edge in his voice softened by a degree. Not friendly, exactly, but the register of a man who recognized a competent ally and was recalibrating accordingly. "You've got a hell of a bedside manner."