I saw Lung fire out the long gouts of flame that pierced through the sky, illuminating the scant clouds above and turning them orange. He placed them all in Goddess’s vicinity, and she used her telekinesis to scatter the flame. The fires didn’t go out, instead licking through the heavy smoke in the air like slow motion explosions.

Lung was keeping the air aflame using his pyrokinesis.

In the moment that she turned to the nearby building, her focus wasn’t on Lung. He was still in action, leaping to a steel beam that had pierced the ground, his weight making it sink until it came to rest against a nearby fence. The burning smoke above swelled, the beams connecting again.

“Goddess!” I shouted. “Get away!”

Too far away to be heard. Rain hurled a scythe, and it sliced through the beam, tracing a silver line. Lung sprung from the beam, and the force of the movement made it sever.

While airborne, he slashed with one hand, flames at his fingertips, and fire moved in a similar pattern a dozen feet below and behind him. The movement of the fire connected one of the columns of fire he’d made near Goddess to a nearby patch of purple flame. It ignited, and Lung leaped back as the purple swept up the columns of fire, toward Goddess. She didn’t react in time, and the three expanding columns of fire grew to the point there was no space between them.

Lung’s landing in a spot of clearing was a heavy one. With the landing, the forces that were gathering the fire of the columns together began to dissipate. The purple fire had nothing to burn, so it went out too. I saw Goddess flying away from the point the growing columns had converged, on fire and not moving in straight lines.

My first impulse was that I had to help her. I thought of master–stranger protocols, but the only thing to cross my mind was that I still needed to stop Lung.

Lung marched through knee-high fire, grabbing one of his wrists, hauling on it. His shoulder came apart almost as if he’d torn it partially off, a gap visible in the flesh over where ball met socket. Spikes and scales spilled out, stabbing through flesh and filling the gap, layering the surrounding area. Rain’s silver blades curved through the air before hitting rubble, beams, and ground—by my vantage point, I could see that he was firing blind. One came within ten feet of Lung, and I saw Lung change course, striding into flames taller than he was. Disappearing into the fire, where he had cover.

There was something colder in him than I’d seen in any of our past encounters. The feral edge was still there, but the Lung I’d known wouldn’t have ducked into the flame to—