The pack was scattered but not finished. There were seven remaining, reorganizing faster than he’d expected, the corruption in them apparently included something that processed threat and adapted to it.
Three broke toward the civilians still moving across the open ground between the fence and the central building, a group of maybe fifteen people, some of them carrying children, none of them moving fast enough.
Valeria reached them first.
He saw it happen from twenty meters away and it wasn’t something he had a clean framework for. She came into the first wolf from the side at a speed that made the animal’s attempt to turn toward her completely irrelevant, got both hands into the scruff of its neck, and used its own momentum to redirect it face-first into the ground with enough force that the impact sent a visible shudder through the earth.
The second one lunged at her and she stepped inside the arc of it, took the weight of the animal against her shoulder without buckling, and hit it three times in the ribcage in rapid succession. Short, and precise, each impact carrying the specific quality of force that knew exactly where to go.
The lightning crawling through the wolf’s fur discharged against her skin and did nothing. She dropped the animal and was already moving to the third before the second had finished falling.
No hesitation between them. No recovery pause.
Lucius pulled his attention back to his own half of the problem.
Four wolves had regrouped on his side, circling around him, reading him the way the fifth blessed warrior had read him on the road, looking for when he makes a move, looking for the opening.
He watched them move and recognized the pattern and decided not to give them time to find what they were looking for.
He went at the nearest one directly, no solar output, just closed distance fast and low, getting inside the animal’s strike radius before it could fully react.
Up close the corruption was visible on its skin, the lightning threading through the fur in constant motion, the eyes that wrong pale color.
He hit it once behind the ear with enough solar energy concentrated into the point of contact that the corrupted divine energy in the animal simply stopped.
The wolf dropped and stayed down.
The remaining three came at once.
He took one strike he hadn’t covered, a glancing hit across his left arm that left lightning burn crawling across the skin. He hit back with a focused burst, not Blazing Sun, just directed solar output at close range, and the wolf that had got hit went down.
The other two he drove apart with a second partial Blazing Sun, smaller this time, more controlled, targeted in a smaller field rather than expansive, it cost less and the scatter was enough.
He ran down the first before it recovered and finished it, and turned to the last one.
Seraphine was at the center of the open ground between the fence and the building.
She had her hands raised and her eyes closed and her face was doing the thing it did when she was pulling from her core carefully, measuring every draw against what she had left.
The corrupted divine energy came out of her differently than it usually did, not as ability, not as an attack or a projection. She was shaping it into something different, building it outward from her position in a barrier that curved around the group of civilians clustered behind her.
It was thin. He could see that from here, the barrier translucent and flickering slightly at the edges, the way a flame flickers when the wind finds it. Her core was running on too little to make it solid.
But it held.
Two wolves hit it from different angles in quick succession, both of them drawn to the divine energy signature the barrier was throwing off, both of them bouncing back when they made contact. The barrier shuddered both times and Seraphine’s jaw tightened, but she held it.
A third came at the civilians from a gap she hadn’t covered on the right side. One of the village guards stepped into it, put himself between the wolf and the people behind him, took a hit across his arm that knocked him sideways. He kept his feet and pushed back, buying Seraphine the two seconds she needed to extend the barrier to cover the gap.
She held it until the last wolf on the field went down.
Then she let it go and her hands dropped to her sides and she stood with her breathing doing the deliberate measured thing for a long moment before she looked up.
Lucius stood in the middle of what had been the eastern perimeter and looked at the valley around him.
Eleven wolves. All down. The two that Blazing Sun had driven toward the fence line were there, still, not moving.
The village guards were regrouping at the breach, the ones still standing. The civilians were coming out from behind where Seraphine’s barrier had been, some of them looking at the downed wolves, some of them looking at the three strangers who had come down the ridge and into their disaster without stopping to introduce themselves.
A child somewhere behind the central building was still crying, the sound carrying thin and clear across the newly quiet valley.
Valeria was standing in the middle of her half of the field, entirely unmarked, looking at nothing in particular with her arms loose at her sides. The lightning that had discharged off the wolves into her skin had left no visible trace.
Seraphine was still standing where she’d held the barrier, her hands at her sides now, her face composed and giving nothing away. But she was pale in the specific way she got when her core had been pushed past what was comfortable, and her breathing was still working harder than the exertion warranted.
He looked at the village around them. The broken fencing and the smoke still rising from two structures on the northern side and the guards staring at him and the civilians staring at him and the child somewhere still crying.
They’d saved most of them.
Most.