The demon lord's free hand finished building.
I moved.
The distance closed fast, the mana sword up, the angle calculated to reach him before the working released, the same calculation I had run in the previous exchange with the additional information of what happened when I didn't reach him in time.
He snapped his fingers.
The children appeared between us.
All five. Torra at the center, Maya beside him, Jenna and Sia and Nico arranged in the space that had been empty a half second ago, the artifacts at their collars burning at maximum output, their faces showing the particular expression of children who had been frightened for a long time and were now somewhere new without understanding how they got there.
I changed direction.
The physics of what I had been doing did not accommodate the change gracefully. I was moving at full commitment toward a point that now had children in it and the only available option was to redirect all of that into a direction that didn't have children in it, which was the wall to my left.
I hit it.
The wall expressed its opinion of this at volume. The stone gave way in a section three meters wide, the impact moving through the structure in a shockwave that brought down part of the ceiling above it, the dust and debris filling the space I had just been occupying.
I came out of the wall.
The children were back in the lower palace.
The demon lord was where he had been before the snap, the working in his free hand building again, his expression the expression he had worn when he was watching something he found entertaining.
"You won't hit me." He said. "Not while they exist."
I looked at him across the ruined throne room.
He released the working downward.
I moved for him.
He snapped his fingers.
I hit the opposite wall.
The opposite wall had less to give than the first one had. The section that gave way was larger. I came through it into the antechamber beyond the throne room and pushed back through the gap into the throne room without stopping, the dust still moving in the air around the new opening.
The children were back below.
The artifacts flared.
The demon lord looked at me standing in the gap between the throne room and the antechamber, the two walls I had produced with my own momentum, the ceiling shedding debris steadily from the combined structural damage.
He tilted his head.
"How many times." He said. "Before you stop coming."
I looked at him.
At the working building in his free hand.
At the floor crack from the previous downward strike, the light from the artifacts below it dimmer than it had been when the fight started.
At the space between us where the children kept appearing.
He released the working.
I went for him.
He snapped his fingers.
I changed direction into the south wall.
The south wall failed more completely than the previous two. The section that came down was not a section. It was the wall, most of it, the stone falling outward into the palace garden below, opening the throne room to the outside on that side, the afternoon light and the smoke from the outer palace grounds coming in through the new absence where the wall had been.
I stood in the rubble.
The demon lord was standing on the far side of the throne room with the throne behind him and the open south wall to his right and the working in his free hand already building toward its next peak and his expression was the expression that had been on his face since the fight started.
Pleasant. Engaged. The expression of something that had found the afternoon productive.
Torra's face was in my memory.
Not from the floor below. From three years of him appearing at my elbow when I was checking barrier nodes, from him holding the crib piece still while I worked the joint, from him pressing a glittering stone into my palm and saying look, Brother Leigh, sparkles.
From him sitting beside me at the Sequoia tree and telling me I didn't have to be a hero.
I just had to be Leigh.
The demon lord's working reached its peak.
I looked at him.
I stopped.
Not the movement. The management. The habitual, permanent, eight-years-installed management of what I was that had been running continuously since I was twelve years old and had survived everything including three years of farming.
I let it go.
What came out was not the aura that had been traveling ahead of me since the border. That had been the managed version, the contained output of something that was still making choices about what to release and what to hold.
This was what was underneath it.
The throne room understood the difference immediately.
The remaining ceiling came down. Not in sections. All of it, simultaneously, the structural load that had been managing the cumulative damage from the fight finding the new ambient mana pressure and making the only decision available to it.
The walls followed.
The palace followed.
Not slowly. Not in the way buildings came down when they were demolished deliberately. In the way they came down when the force acting on them was not a targeted strike but a presence, a change in the fundamental conditions of the space they were occupying, the mana density reaching a level that the mortar and the stone and the foundations and the engineering of three generations of Medalline's imperial architects had not been designed to exist in.
The demon units throughout the palace didn't have time to register what was happening to them.
They were simply not there.
The pleasant expression on the demon lord's face changed.
Not to fear.
To the recognition of someone who has been running a calculation and has just received a variable that makes the calculation's output unrecognizable.
He looked at what the throne room had become, which was an open space, the palace around it having expressed its limitations and come to its conclusions, the walls and the ceiling and the floors above absent, the late afternoon sky visible in every direction from where he was standing.
He looked at me.
I was standing in the rubble of the throne room floor.
The mana sword was gone. I had stopped holding the construction because holding the construction required the part of my attention that was currently occupied with something else.
Both hands at my sides.
Nothing visible in the air around me.
But the ground between us was cracked in a pattern that radiated outward from where I was standing the way cracks radiated from an impact point, and the cracks were still spreading, moving outward through the rubble and into what remained of the palace foundation and continuing into the ground beyond it.
The demon lord looked at the cracks.
At the absent walls.
At the sky where the ceiling had been.
At the five necklaces whose light was now visible from above, the barrier function still running in the lower palace below the exposed rubble, five artifacts holding in the space that had been underground and was now simply the lowest point of the ruin.
He looked back at me.
For the first time since the throne room doors had been open and he had been sitting on the throne with one leg over the armrest and the pleasant expression of something that had been waiting for the interesting part of the play.
He was not making that expression now.