Simon approached the crumpled body of the knight, mind still racing from what he'd seen.

  He had witnessed great expenditures of energy before; he'd had a front row seat to Phoenix's ascendency, after all, and had been uncomfortably nearby when that masked woman had practically punched a hole in the city trying to stop it from happening.

  But the fight he'd just witnessed made everything he knew about Fields look downright rudimentary. These two men, one visibly elderly and the other weighed down by a clumsy half-suit of armor, had danced through the air like vengeful gods. They'd both casually flexed their power in ways that struck him as completely illogical, antithetical to the baseline rules he'd deduced about how these abilities were supposed to work.

  The monk, especially, clearly had access to a whole slew of tricks and stunts, the actual mechanics of which Simon could scarcely even guess at. That final penetration of the knight's seemingly ironclad Field, how in the world had he accomplished that? Why was it that he'd been seemingly on the edge of death at the start of the fight, and then suddenly untouchable for the rest? What had changed?

  And then there was the knight himself. Simon's senses were growing more acute even by the day, and watching the downed man as he lay, limp and gently breathing, in the street, it was obvious to him that something was off about the armor he wore. The Field surrounding him was patchwork, incongruous, a Frankenstein amalgamation of different vibes and energies, and these disparities seemed to map roughly to the man's arms and gear.

  Warily, Simon approached, creeping out from behind the crumbling home he'd been crouched behind. Wind was whipping up, an unnaturally icy and vicious gale that seemed to scream around the edges of the toppled structures and downed power lines littering the streets. He let the flames surrounding his head inch farther down his body, to guard against the chill.

  There was a burnt, charnel odor to the air that had been eating away at Simon a little, triggering some latent germaphobia that he'd thought he'd left behind in his youth. Every once in a while he caught a glimpse of a blackened, slumped shape propped against the steering wheel of a smashed car or canting, half-dangling from a window frame, and his eyes glazed over, anxious not to fixate on the images. Simon was far from sensitive to violence, but the magnitude of what had happened today was too much for him to broach comprehending, and, instinctively, he avoided the task to preserve focus. Too much to learn right now, anyway.

  He crouched above the knight's body. The man, hair cut in an anachronistic bowl, face dotted with stubble, looked more like a history museum's wax prop than a once-living man. His breastplate, dented and grubby, concealed his breathing, his skin was deathly pale. The only sign of life the knight's body betrayed was a near-imperceptible wobbling of his lip, as if muttering in a fitful sleep.

  At this distance, Simon was even more aware of the man's crowded, disjointed Field. In many other circumstances he would have been tempted to pry that bit of fascinating trivia apart, but he had something much more promising that demanded his attention:

  The knight could heal himself.

  Simon bent over him, extended a finger, and, tensed to retreat at any sign of waking, jetted a small tongue of superheated air toward the exposed skin on the man's arm. The flesh there was hairless and pink, a border drawn where, moments ago, the limb had been bisected at the elbow.

  Simon grunted with the exertion. He urged his little flame hotter and hotter, flexing the boundaries of his seemingly limitless capacity to generate heat, and it still wasn't penetrating. Even unconscious, the knight's defenses were unbelievable. It was nearly a minute before Simon had poured enough energy into the small flame to mark the man's skin, at which point the air around him had become so hot that the asphalt beneath his feet was sagging, growing tarry and smooth.

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  Simon watched with wide, hungry eyes as the man's flesh knit itself together almost as soon as it was burned. The blisters formed, popped, and were subsumed almost instantly, the Field surrounding the wound crackling, so briefly, with an odd, alien quality as it did. Simon moved his makeshift super-blowtorch to a different part of the man's arm, drew more designs in his flesh, and watched.

  That alien energy surged to the knight's skin again, flashing around his wound like an aurora. There was an otherworldly, inexpressible tinge to this energy. The closest analogy his whirring brain could conjure to describe it was that witnessing whatever was healing the knight felt like catching a glimpse of a color that shouldn't exist.

  The energy was there, it was making an impact on the world around him, but Simon couldn't even begin to understand where it was coming from, or what it was composed of, or how it worked. This wasn't kinetic energy, with its bland, blunt quality, or radiation, with its sickly, creeping inertia, or electricity, with its jagged, spidery aftertaste. This energy was transfixing, multidimensional, both impossibly complicated and flatly elemental, like the spiral pattern of a seashell, or the fractals drawn by veins and capillaries. Every other form of energy Simon had seem coming from a Field had struck him as fundamental, basic, artificial. This felt different. Whatever this was, it was natural, vital. Other energies were spontaneous, tools to be used. This was ancient, and had a mind of its own.

  Simon realized the bounty that lay before him: if he could just manage to finish this man off before he recovered, if he could pour enough energy into his body to burn him to death, he would inherit this power. He would be rocketed instantly from his current state to the position of, potentially, the most powerful man in the world. He would finally reach the greatness he had increasingly become confident was his birthright: a confirmation that he was undeniably greater than every other person in existence. A step above. Superior

  Tantalized almost to the point of tearing up, Simon nearly failed to notice the knight's body shift as he began to rouse from his healing coma. Simon barely had time to flinch away, to dart hastily to one foot and prime his Field against kinetics, before the knight cracked open an eye and, with a grunt of displeasure, flick a single finger in his direction.

  The wave of force that hit Simon sent him careening several city blocks away. He had no time to right himself, to try and control his velocity or trajectory. He managed a single lucid thought as he flew through the reeking air: that he had been hit too hard, and was moving too fast, and that there was a very real possibility that when he came to a stop, the collision would be enough to kill him, or maim him, or worse. He could only hope that whatever he crashed into would hit his arms or legs first, and not his head.

  And then that collision came.

  The moment of impact was too chaotic for Simon to consciously witness. He experienced it instead as a blank space, a border of brief amnesia separating his flight through the air, and the excruciating pain now screaming at him from every nerve in his back.

  He was half-buried under stone rubble. Above him, swimming in blood-tinged vision, spun the blurred ceiling of what looked like a church.

  His back was broken. That was obvious. It felt as if every one of his vertebrae had been individually replaced with a red-hot coal. There was a lump rising in his throat that threatened to choke him from within, an unbearable pressure emanating from his chest, suffocating and total. He opened his mouth to scream, and all that he produced was a single, limp exhalation, near-silent.

  Beneath the rubble, his hands twitched, clawlike, fingernails grinding raw against stones. The muscles in his back and core coiled and shuddered protested, cut free from their moorings, each of their twitches pulling his ruined spine further out of place.

  Simon, hot tears of agony in his eyes, experienced a few moments of wishing for death, before the pain and defeat ignited into fury. Fury at the knight for doing this to him. Fury at Phoenix for sending him on this fool's errand. Fury at whoever had decided to put a fucking stone chapel here in his way. Fury at the masked thugs who had tried and failed to kill him in his home. Fury at Father for fleeing the city and leaving him to die alone in its hollowed-out, irradiated shell.

  And, as Simon's fury tended to, it metastasized into singular, white-hot focus.

  The image of the impossible energy the knight had used to heal himself flashed before his eyes, impeccably clear, as if he'd burned the sight into the core of his brain.

  Even as his limbs grew numb and the color leached from his vision, even as a black tunnel of unconsciousness encroached on the edges of his mind, Simon grasped, so briefly, the truth of the nature of that energy. He saw it for what it was, realized where it came from, and intuited how to manipulate it, all in one moment of almost transcendental epiphany.

  It was enough.

  Vital, surging, dancing, living energy sprung from some unknown place in Simon's being and raced along his spine, his ribs, his hips. The tissues composing his intestines and liver surged with it, his blood coursed with it, his torn and ruined skin shone with it, and, with a series of violent jerks and shudders, his body began to knit itself back together.

  Within a minute, Simon was healed.

  Then he passed out.