Immune

Immune
She couldn’t say exactly where it was coming from, just that it was near. Aside from that, what concerned her most was why Rangiora had seen to make her think Isorai might not come back. 
Come back from where?
She scanned over the children. The knights, dressed down and scattered at careful intervals, moved around the park through the streets without drawing attention.
For nearly an hour, nothing happened at all, despite the presence of that scent getting closer and closer.
Isorai kept her attention split between the girls’ new friends. One of them was explaining an elaborate game to Asha involving the climbing structure's various levels representing different kingdoms. 
The scent got stronger right around the time Asha had decided she was going to conquer the highest level. She let out a battle cry worthy of any Moongrove descendant and charged up the slide, rallying a pair of girls with her.
The rot slipped through the air, and it was all the warning she’d get. There was nothing subtle about it. The Blighted was coming in fast and from multiple directions at once. The air grew heavy and rank with it, mingled with animal musk. 
Lots of Blighted shifters moving at speed were converging on the park. If the knights hadn't noticed them, they would notice them very quickly if they had any decent training. Blighted weren’t known for subtlety.
"Celari," Isorai said, already turning.
Celari had gone stiff. She held the baby tighter against her chest. The first shifter broke from the treeline at the park's eastern edge, already mid-transformation, and the screaming started almost immediately after. Civilians scattered in every direction as more shapes emerged from concealment, fast and wrong and entirely without concern for who else was in the park.
Parents grabbed their children quickly as Isorai charged forward.
"Get the girls!"
Celari was already sprinting toward the climbing structure where Rangiora and Asha had frozen, staring at the chaos erupting across the grass. Isorai's spear formed in her hand before she had finished turning. She met the first wave head-on, putting herself directly between the advancing shifters and the path Celari was taking toward the girls.
The fight that followed was fast and brutal. Blood splattered, dark with corruption and cloying. People shrieked and ran; the knights directed them away, but the waves of half-liquid, vicious bodies just kept coming. 
These were nothing like the men she’d killed the other day. They weren’t even trying to conceal that they were compromised. Desperate. 
The Southern Council was getting desperate. 
A knight went down nearby, blood bright against the grass, and a cold spike of fury cut through her. 
“Get the civilians and the injured out of the area if you don’t have combat experience!”
A few knights seemed to listen, but the panic had spread outward with no order. Civilians fleeing toward the streets, not seeing the Blighted following or coming toward them. 
Asha screamed her name as Celari got her by the hand. 
“Ran’!” Celari cried.
Her heart lurched as she found Rangiora, struggling against one of the Blighted, screaming in panic as his features melted into a horrifying black maw. The wrongness in the air sharpened as more of them continued to flood into the park. 
“Go, Celari! I’ve got Rangiora.”
Celari scooped Asha against her free hip and jumped, shifting mid-air. Asha squealed as Celari clutched her and the infant in her claws and took off.
Isorai reared back, throwing her spear and ripping through the creature that held Rangiora. It shot through the creature just as Isorai reached her. She snatched Rangiora from the ground as a wolf barreled into her. She twisted with it, driving her elbow into its skull and feeling it yelp and fall back. More shifters were coming now, most of them weren’t so corrupted that they lost form. 
She fought through the first wave, keeping Rangiora tucked against her chest, cutting through the wolves as they came. 
She cut through the last of them and turned to leap into the air when the pinch of a dart landed in her thigh. 
The small, sharp pain was followed almost immediately by something colder spreading from the point of impact, and she recognized the sensation with mounting horror. 
She knew this drug. 
She didn’t have a lot of time before she was helpless. It was the one Malrik had used on her as a child, the formula designed specifically to suppress her power.
Her legs gave out.
She went down to one knee, the spear flickering and failing in her hand, her vision narrowing at the edges as the drug worked through her system with brutal speed. The fighting continued around her, the knights shouted orders, and a wolf snarled close enough that she should have been able to respond, but she found that she couldn't.
Rangiora’s scream echoed through her, blotting out all sense of time and place.
Her terror shrieked through her, breaking open the gates to a power Isorai had only tapped into once.
The drug sank, burned away in the rush of overwhelming strength and immunity as another alter surfaced, unknown and unspeaking, from within the darkness, throwing off the weight of the drug.
Isorai's body followed the swell and unfolding of power and unleashed it in a wave of violence that scattered the nearest wolf in pieces. 
She felt more than saw the wolves and the Blight. She darted toward the nearest Blighted figure and did not bother with the spear. She tore into it with her hands.
She fed on the corruption directly, taking it in so it could go nowhere but to fuel her fury. 
She turned to the next one and the next until the wolves that had been pressing the knights realized that they weren’t winning the way they had been moments before. 
Isorai ripped through their ranks.
Fire burned in her wake, scorching the blood from the streets. 
It spread across the ground and onto the streets, sinking into the invisible channels of the city. The old lattice work that ran through the capital's foundations, the same network Ruhkaal and Xaruh had lit weeks ago with the purifying fire, came alive in flashes of gold and white.
The lines reached further than the courtyard.
They followed the capital's old defensive network outward, finding the seams of the network and restoring the bridge that had been built into Vuldra's protective lattice and left dormant. The light moved south along that bridge, threading through the earth in the direction of the Grove, connecting the capital's barrier to the Grove’s protection. 
It pulsed once, deep and resonant.
The remaining wolves broke and ran, but Isorai sent a wall of fire after them, burning them to ash and breaking harmlessly over the running citizens on the street.
Rangiora trembled in her arms. Slowly, Isorai came back to herself as the fire raged on. 
She swayed on her feet.
The knights reached her before she fully fell, catching her, and she shook the haze off as feeling slowly returned to her. 
Rangiora trembled. “Is it over?”
“It’s over,” she whispered. 
At least, it was for now.