She brought the brand on her hand down like a hammer. Black chains, fused by demonic power, formed a collar in midair and dropped for my neck. If it set, the next thought I had would belong to Arakhel.
I raised my own circles, not to throw power, but to set the room's baseline. "The field is fair," I said, and nine rings of blue light expanded from me, not as a wall, but as a change in the air itself. It wasn't a Radiant's domain. It was a simple statement of rules: equal friction, honest weight, no stolen endings.
The demonic collar hit the edge of the field and stalled, like an engine taking bad fuel.
