Memories of the Fall

There are two things you should never mix in the same storage environment, when dealing with large scale teleport arrays designed to go through multiple dimensional spaces. Unconstrained Spatial Condensate and Star Loci Crystals. People assume that time is quite linear, but really, to paraphrase the real experts in this field, when considered from a more non-linear, less subjective viewpoint, it’s more of a huge amorphous ball of wibbly wobbly stuff that can be very unpredictable and very suggestible when it wants to be.

To this end, Unconstrained Spatial Condensate, or the liquefied space of the star ocean is also another such material of dubious causal integrity. As, for that matter is the energy focused within the heart of a Star Loci Crystal which is usually used to constrain dimensional anchors. Because time exists everywhere, except in very special circumstances, injudiciously combining the two latter materials in the presence of the former in an ad-hoc way almost always leads to what most experts would now call an ‘Anomalous Temporal Event’. These can vary from something as harmless as a bunch of morons from the future appearing to try to tell you how to make better long bows, to people trying all kinds of chicanery with your expensive teleport gate involving looping paradoxes and inadvisable genetic experiments with their own ancestors. In short, If you are ever caught storing the two in the same place, we will hunt you down and we will make you regret your life choices in ways you will never forget.

I’ll reiterate, even though I opened this lecture with this point. More chaos has been caused over the years by accidental ‘Anomalous Temporal Events’ relating to Greater Teleport gates than any other single source besides those muthafucking candles and Wish scrolls.

This, incidentally, is also why blue telephone boxes and the opening of takeaways on inauspicious days of the lunar calendar in odd numbered years are outlawed in 123 of 129 extant powers in our lands. The remaining six either don’t believe in the colour blue, live on a moon that doesn’t have its own moon, have no concept of non-linear time, or are an eldritch spore plague. Making them statistically unlikely, or functionally incapable of being responsible for, or party to, any such events. Also nobody has ever managed to work out a way to make the Eldritch Spore Plague sign binding legal documents, but that is a topic for another lecture.

From orienteering lecture series on Teleportation Gates. Final year students at the Academy of Unified Magic’s of Amaltharia.

~By Maria Renhallan.

~ Lin Ling – Scriptorium Warehouse ~

Everything distorted. Weird colours bled from every surface as bizarre fog tendrils in colours no sane reality should ever have to experience swirled around her. Staring at the crystal that contained the black water melting in the ruins of a pot of Yang Blood and the spilt water from the pond, Lin Ling was gripped with one absolute certainty.

As last thoughts went, her fractured voices all agreed, it was quite a keeper.

-Monkeyshit. I’ve killed everyone.

She tried to scramble back, but the world moved impossibly. The ground warped and twisted under her as she moved, throwing her off balance. Han Shu was turning in horror to look between her and Juni. The strange warping space flowed around him and somehow didn’t touch him at all?

-We told you! That {Sword} is fate-thrashed scary, the voices chorused in a way that would have been comedic in any other circumstance.

The eyes of the abomination standing in the middle of the room blurred weirdly and suddenly she was…

*Tccccchk*

*Ssspffffffp*

*Fssssssssssss*

*Tink*

Its gaze left her to focus on the ruins of her pack. The luss cloth had finally given up under the sustained corrosion of the pot of blood and whatever terrifying properties the water from the pool had. The grey crystal, the source of the deeply wrong coloured mist as it dissolved, had finally succumbed completely. The moment was truly frozen as every set of eyes in the place watched, apparently powerless to stop it, as black fractures extended creepily out from it, flowing across the floor, up the walls, across...

*Tink* *Tink* *Tink*

The mist cracked. Impossibly.

The sound was somewhere between cooling rock and breaking ice. Patterns swirled out of nihility beyond the cracks. Her consciousness screamed. Juni was screaming, holding her face. She could see the older girl’s eyes bleeding blood and… condensed qi as her ocular meridians exsanguinated themselves impossibly-

To call it pain, was to undersell it as her own vision cracked apart. The creature in the middle of the room was also cracking apart, as was the space around Han Shu…

-Even though he was holding onto the sword?

The world peeled away before her eyes, revealing impossible geometries that defied logic. Shadow and light in colours never meant to be witnessed by mortal eyes, which also started to break apart under the endless chasms splintering through the mist.

Everything wavered like a mirage.

She got a look at Juni’s blind, horrified face fading into nothingness even as she was aware of Han Shu stumbling backwards as it consumed everything. At the last, all she was left with was the horrified, enraged, empathic scream of the abomination in the middle of the room.

[WHAT!]

[~IMPOSSIBLE!?!]

[SO LUCK…]

[IS Fate/DOOM?]

~ Kun Juni – ??? ~

The final words assailed her even as the uncoloured mist and black cracks consumed her entire world.

Searing, devouring white pain flowed through her body like a fog.

She hit the ground, far harder than a dead person had any right to, Juni thought brokenly.

Her whole world was white.

-It’s not really an improvement over yin-water-darkness death.

-Or dark eldritch death.

-Or Di Ji death.

-How do we even know that name?

-Uh… some of us was locked away before Di Ji ever caught up to us.

-Oh.

-Uhh?

-It’s not that hard, clearly, the Lizards are scarier than Di Ji.

-Oh.

-Do you remember what he did?

-We remember what he didn’t get a chance to do.

-Good enough.

-Now, what say we not fall apart like a piece of snagged fabric?

-Ah. Hum... Yes.

-Agreed.

-Definitely.

-What if this is all something else the Sar’Katush...?

-Shut up.

-Shut it.

-Not the time.

…

Reality reasserted itself, improbably, with the sound of shouting, explosions, cursing and a lot of pain.

“ARE YOU OKAY, GIRL!”

Instinct told her to exhale before inhaling somehow. Mist seared her lungs in ways that were totally implausible as her body somehow rejected it.

“Sweet mother of mercy, she’s actually inhaled nascent Thaumic corrosion…. Get over here, O’Brian! O’Brian? Where the hell is he?” a male voice yelled.

Now able to breathe, she gasped and tried to open her eyes, only to see… impossible things. A shadow reached out of the void to try to. She shut them again, and the shadow kept descending towards her.

-You have no face any more, an anguished voice whispered in her mind.

-We have no cohesive mind any more either, a much less helpful voice added.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

Her mantra rallied vainly from the very important task of keeping her alive in all kinds of ways to make regenerating much of her face a bit more of a priority. Somehow, instinctually she managed to make it a bit more focused on her body in the process.

“Shit! Her condition’s really bad. O’Brian! O’Brian… Raleen, give me—” it was the same male voice that has just asked if she was okay.

“—What the fuck is going on out there!” a woman’s, somehow distorted, voice yelled from nearby.

“BY GOD! There’s another—!” someone else screamed and was cut off with some very unpleasant sounds.

“Ineom, Inaris, Potentis Toro”

The warm, resonating words sank into her mind and made her whole body itch like she was in a slightly too warm bath.

“Another damn scroll… Raleen give me one of yours,” the male voice snarled.

“One healing scroll coming right up! Sir Edward...” a voice, a woman’s voice in fact, dimly entered her shadow world.

“Overcast!” the man’s voice hissed as the darkness that was reaching out across some impossible chasm finally arrived.

“Ineom, INARIS, Potentis ToRO”

Colour flooded into her world as the warmth flooded through her body like a tsunami. Her mantra devoured the qi and started to do recovery on a scale she wouldn’t have believed possible.

“Well damn, she has awakened the words in her heart,” a woman’s voice from nearby said sounding shocked.

Unfortunately, with the healing came real pain. It also did little for the fragmented state of her mind. All she had to work with right now were tattered scraps of understanding as she tried to piece back together the last few minutes. To distract herself from the unspeakable pain, she focused on that.

-The Sar’Katush, yep that happened.

-The voice in my head I had thought was…

-Yep that happened, a sad part of her acknowledged.

-Lin Ling’s blood pot dissolved a… the dark water crystal and something else…

-She took water from the pool even though I said not to, she realised.

-Dissolved the grey crystal as well, then it broke and everything went weird.

-How are we not dead? One way or the other.

Another tremor hit the ground she was definitely certain she was now lying on. “SHIT they are un-stacking the arrays, we can’t hold them any longer!” another female voice cut in. “What the fuck happened?”

“I dunno, there was an anomaly, and we have these three,” a male voice from nearby answered.

Another scream from nearby made her blood chill, the finality of it.

“There is something else in these mists! What the fuck are these!?! Summoned mutate Kobolds or demons or something?” someone else yelled nearby.

“….HOW!” the first female voice snarled from somewhere distant.

“I don’t know, they must have come with these three, they seem to have blind teleported, or used a shifting orb?” another female voice said.

“Ah, that might explain why they arrived here, lucky they didn’t arrive into the Star Pool in the Void Hall.” Another male voice, cut in.

“Doesn’t explain what they are, though?” another distant voice yelled as a familiar pop and crack of lightning entered her ears.

“DON’T USE FUCKING LIGHTNING IN THIS PLACE YOU IDIOTS!” the very agitated woman screamed with anger somewhere nearby.

“You’re late, O’Brian,” the male voice who had asked her if she was okay snapped from beside her. “Are you done yet, Halla!?!”

“Sorry Edward, there were demons in the corridor. Sar lizards of all the damn things, more appearing out of the…”

“There are what in the corridor?” the woman, Halla hissed, her voice somehow carrying weirdly.

How she wished she could see properly.

“You let us worry about them, you keep on with that.” Sir Edward said.

“It’s not like we can sabotage this thing in mere minutes!?!” Halla snapped back.

“It’s not like we HAVE more than minutes!” someone else yelled from nearby.

“Shit!” Halla’s voice became tense from nearby. “It seems you're right, it’s been further destabilised by whatever the hell brought these three… and apparently the elder spawn outside the Hall Wards here.”

“THEN LESS FUCKING TALKING YOU THREE AND GET THAT SET! WE ARE ON THE CLOCK!” Sir Edward roared.

His voice sounded vaguely muted, she realised as she coaxed her mantra around for another pass. The condition of her body was not good. And that wasn’t even getting started on her consciousness.

There was another pulse of warmth that flowed through her body, and suddenly her eyes blurred into focus. She was able to see the floor. Someone rolled her over, rather roughly and she was looking at two faces and the ceiling beyond them.

-Ah, it’s the constellation room, a part of her acknowledged.

Above her, she could see the twisting form of the orrery, the intact orrery, its pieces shifting in strange arcs and permutations that made her vision twist and…

“Shit… cover her eyes, she’s getting Auric Shock from looking at the orrery.” A voice nearby said.

A hand covered her eyes and the woozy feeling vanished.

Groaning, she tried to move and found that that was a terrible mistake. Her body felt like it was held together with prayers and more prayers. Given her mantra and that warmth was all that there was between her and death right now, perhaps that was right.

She was aware of movement somehow, and then the hand was removed.

“Easy young woman… easy… where have you come from?” the man kneeling next to her asked.

She tried to take in his appearance. Her eyes were still adjusting, it seemed, but he was dressed in the most garish top and tight trousers. Over it, he had pulled on a breastplate and some other bits of armour. In terms of appearance, she realised she couldn’t place his age. Certainly, he was youthful-looking, if gaunt, with close-cropped hair and a very severe moustache. However, something about his eyes made him seem very old, as if he had seen far too much.

“… Where…?” she managed to ask in Easten...

It was hard to know why she picked Easten. Perhaps it was just because all the writing had been in it?

“Wow, your dialect is really odd. Are you a new student from the border?” the other person kneeling beside her, the woman, said.

Focusing on her, the woman, who she assumed was called Raleen, wore something between armour and a robe. A dull grey breastplate with symbols graven on it that had quite a few nasty scratches on it. A shield was slung on her back and a short straight sword. Her brown hair was very short and looked a bit frizzy as if it had been singed?

“I… I’m— I don’t know how I got here,” she decided abruptly that vague honesty was probably the best course.

“Ah…” possibly ‘Raleen’ frowned. “Shift distortion?”

“It doesn’t explain what happened….” Sir Edward muttered, definitely frowning at her now.

She tried to put her thoughts in order. There was nothing to be gained by lying, probably.

“There was an orb…we were attacked by… the lizards... Sar’Katush… the orb it had black water in it? With stars… it fell in some corrosive blood… there were some flat grey crystals that went all bubbly and then the orb caught on… fire? And melted? Uh….. There was some huge Sar’Katush that told me it was going to make us an offering… and then… a lot of black cracks and some strange mist that was a really weird colour and uh… then…”

She trailed off as the two looked at her as if she was some strange alien creature that just fell out of the sky…

“You... you…” the woman tried to find words for a second. “Is it even possible to survive that kind of thing at her circle?” the woman Raleen asked weakly

“Hey. We got company, another of the weird four arm kobold jobs.” A voice yelled over.

“They aren't Kobolds, they are...” Sir Edward sighed and stood up.

She had a terrible sense of… wrongness and desperately floundered down. Her body failed to move as a shadow descended out of nowhere straight at her as if the others here didn’t even exist for it.

-YOU CANNOT FLEE YOUR DESTINY!

The words flattened her to the floor as everything slowed to a stop. The descending shadow became the adult lizard…. Except… it looked like it had been flayed. Its flesh was bubbling, one arm was petrified, and most of its robe had been burnt away. Its middle eye was bleeding multi-coloured blood.

“Whe—” Raleen had half turned as it arrived.

“Oh fuck off back to Carcasson, Elder Thing.” Sir Edward snarled.

Black cracks appeared around his body even as he spoke. She watched, frozen in the monochrome world as he somehow turned in the shut out space and kicked the three-metre lizard in the side. Sending it sprawling.

The moment collapsed and she could breathe again.

“—re the fuck did that come from!” Raleen screamed completing her jump back.

[RAGE] [FURY] [DEVOUR] [BE RUINED]

The large Sar’Katush surged to its feet even as she became aware of the rest of the room. The last remnants of the white mist had receded, revealing figures fighting dozens of the smaller ones. Sir Edward waved his hand and a long thin sword appeared in his hand. Strange runes glimmered down its length as he took two steps and somehow arrived right before it.

What transpired next, though, had to be the strangest and shortest duel she had ever witnessed she was fairly sure.

The Sar’Katush blurred in at least three different directions as its arms struck from a dozen angles at once. Sir Edward stepped forward twice and his arm and sword blurred. All the abomination’s attacks hit thin air and four arms fell to the floor.

[FURY] [PAIN] [DEVOUR] [SUFFERING]

Its empathic sending made her vision blur and nearby robed figures, who were still scrambling to adapt, groan or curse.

In response, Sir Edward reached out and a twelve symbol seal-like thing swirled all around him. A jagged bolt of green-gold lightning slashed through the creature, impaling it to the wall and taking out a pillar in the process.

-Uhhhh… there was a melted hole there before, a part of her mind gibbered faintly.

A shadow within the creature, or maybe its own shadow, clawed feebly at the golden-green lightning even as it dissolved away into some other place and the body of the adult Sar’Katush crumbled into green sparks and became a pile of smoking dust against the wall.

A second arc of lightning raked the air above her, incinerating several more of the smaller lizards who had been leaping from the shadows of the upper gallery towards the ground floor. The caster of this second arc, a blonde woman wearing dull grey armour over a white dress or robe, then dragged the extant lightning like a whip across the room, clearing out the remaining pockets of combat.

It was almost anticlimactic really after the trouble they had caused.

“Fucking Elder Thing? Did they actually summon those things? It seems there are no depths to which those robber barons will not sink...” The blonde woman scowled.

“You’re done, Halla?” Sir Edward said.

“Yes.” she nodded. “It’s not perfect, but it will rob them of this at least.”

“Good.” Sir Edward grunted. “Then we go now. Right NOW in fact. We are overstaying as it is, and what’s going on below concerns me greatly.”

“Where are…?” she managed to ask, blearily looking around as Raleen helped her to her feet.

“Your friends?” she asked, “The boy is surprisingly okay, the girl is…”

She turned her head to see a young man barely older than her helping a stunned Han Shu to his feet. Lin Ling was being tended to by a red-bearded man in a blue and green robe. She looked in a very bad way.

Halla glanced at her, then turned to look at the Lin Ling and Han Shu. “Odd I don’t recognise any of these three.”

The woman’s gaze finally lighted on the sword in Han Shu’s hand.

Narrowing her eyes dangerously she asked. “How did you come by one of those, boy?”

“…?” Han Shu looked at the woman, Halla, groggily. “Erm… I found the sword below... it saved me from… erm… some strange teleporting spider things that wanted to eat everything…”

“WHAT?” Sir Edward turned on the spot to stare at Han Shu, while most of the other eyes in the room were suddenly affixed on them.

She caught worried whispers... “The attack has reached that deep?”

“Are they after it?”

“Don’t say that…”

“If that seal is breached we’re all fucked.”

“It can’t be them, right?”

“Yeah, has to be some other shadow beast… that’s acting…?”

There was another series of dull quakes in the distance, and the whole room seemed to tremble.

“We're out of time,” Sir Edward scowled. “They are nearly done de-stacking the barrier.”

Raleen, the woman who was helping her, nodded curtly. “Sir Kalten, I’ll stay with her.”

“Very well,” he nodded, ignoring Halla’s still narrowed gaze. “You two... bring the other girl… Lad, can you use that sword—?”

Han Shu winced and nodded.

“—then you’re with us…”

“Wait…” she realised it was her own voice that has spoken. “Give me a weapon as well, I can also fight…”

He looked at her, dubiously. “You sure, young Lady?”

Self-examining, she realised that the disparate parts of her psyche had reached a very base conclusion. They wanted to hit things… break things… until the pain went away. As such, they had actually managed to exert enough influence in that direction to become the dominant part of her for a split second and ask for a weapon.

Another part was also annoyed that they thought Han Shu was the one with martial talent… he wasn’t the one from a pre-eminent clan with two decades experience and a father who was an exceptionally talented Martial Cultivator.

“It’s Kun Juni,” she felt compelled to say, as much to reassert her own primacy in her mind as anything else.

-Not that ‘Young Lady’ was discourteous, one part of her mused.

-Nobody has called you Young Lady Kun in a long time, another said wistfully.

-We are handling this all very well, another self-examined a bit unhelpfully.

The last thing she needed to focus on now was ‘how she was handling things’, followed by...

-Is this even real though? a rather shocked shard whimpered right on cue.

“Ah. They are from the Martial Pagoda. Exchange students from the ‘Ten Songs’ I’ll bet with a weird given name like Kun,” one of the armoured men nearby chipped in as they made their way towards the exit of the courtyard.

“Uhhhh… Hodge, her given name is Juni, not Kun,” someone else helpfully interceded on her behalf.

“They even have their names back to front? Is there no end to how fucking weird that lot are?” another voice grumbled from behind her.

“They are barely in the first circle though!” someone else added.

On behalf of their past prospects, she felt somewhat compelled to speak up, having no idea what kind of realm the ‘first circle’ even was.

“Ahh... We were sealed by… I dunno... Some youth… he was able to fight against the suppression somehow...” Juni supplied... “He did something to us and it dispersed all our qi.”

“Enough yakking,” Halla snapped, pushing past their group to get to the front. “Edward, Tribune’s Raleen, Hodge, Kessler; you're all with me. The team holding the upper access just went dark.”

“They are inside the complex then,” Sir Edward grimaced, following along after her. “We lingered too long.”

She had no idea who ‘they’ were either, but now really didn’t seem like an opportune time to ask. Up ahead, Halla was checking if things were sealed off and dismantled. Other teams were exiting rooms she remembered being blocked off in the corridor from this complex and sealing them shut behind them.

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see a young woman with dark skin, like someone from the south-east of the Easten Continent, in plain half-plate armour had jogged up beside her.

“You can use it?” she asked perfunctorily, passing her a sword staff.

Blinking in surprise, she took it and hefted the weight. It was excellently balanced, even if the style was a bit weird compared to the standard ones used by the Martial Bureau’s Elite squads.

“Yes… I stab things with it,” she managed, as she hunted for whatever memories she had of practising with them.

The Kun Clan had several forms for them, but they were a soldier’s weapon, like the sabre or the spear. Nobles tended towards Great Bows or Jian.

“Good enough,” the woman said, eyeing her checking the balance. “Your group looks like you have been through shit down below. Your companion is seriously badly injured. And her mind is a mess. What on earth did you encounter down there?”

-And how can we understand them so clearly when they are certainly speaking more than Easten, another part of her mind added. Somewhat against the flow of the moment.

“I… uh, we got stranded in the dark and then there was the teleport accident. Before that we were being attacked by those lizard things,” she replied, keeping things vaguely truthful as she could.

“Umm… I do have a question though?” she said after a moment as the other woman nodded and made to move on.

“Yes?” she said.

“How... Can I understand you all so well..? My knowledge of the common language here is a bit patchy…”

The woman looked at her oddly.

-Ah, fates, I bet that was something weird we should know, she groaned inwardly.

Before the other woman could comment though both of them were distracted by their progress stopping.

“OKAY! Single Order, Evocati to the front!” Sir Edward was yelling.

“They are already in the complex. When we pass out of the hall ward, it will be straight into combat. They won’t be expecting us. The other group is holding ground ten paces further up,” he shouted.

She stepped to the side as the woman and others made their way forward, unslinging what appeared to be crossbow like weapons from their backs.

“Vanguards follow them with the battlemages. Give no quarter. We take no prisoners from these traitorous scum!”

“SIR!”

“Auxiliaries to the rear, filter through immediately to the Hall Wardens Bulwark. Anyone not confident in their fast casting or their footwork or without a Phase Halo go with them,” Halla added.

She had no time to wonder what a 'Phase Halo' might be because the youth who was helping her said helpfully. “That’s us, Miss Jun, we’ll let the professionals do their thing.”

“Okay! GO!” Someone roared from the front.

A wave of blue light swept across them as she was led forwards with Han Shu and a bunch of other robed men and women into the main hall and into… well, Hell.

Stepping through the shimmering veil at the end of the corridor, the heat and noise of battle was suddenly right in her face. The two groups who had gone first were tearing brutally into the back of a large group of armoured men and women who had been in the hall.

She watched one of them turn, only for their head and a large part of their upper body to vanish in a flash of light as something from one of the crossbows hit them, and then vanish three people behind them, sending limbs everywhere. Raleen smashed another one down, stomping on their head and crushing a helmet flat. The space around Sir Edward was like a haze of drifting limbs. Anything within ten paces of him was already dead.

A scream beside her shook her out of the moment of stunned appraisal as one of the robed figures was bisected by something nobody had seen. With a curse, the two others beside her turned to see the attackers, a group of five in similar-looking armour and robes, but emblazoned with a golden sun and cross symbol advancing on them. However, before anyone could do anything, space fluctuated and three of them were turned into red mist and tatters. The others turned to flee, only to be hit by a sheet of multi-coloured fire and turned into butterflies and a pile of loam from one of the robed figures.

Stumbling back, part of her was, she realised, finding the time to match the battle damage from their last trip through these halls with what was going on here… the scores in the floor, the damage to the carvings, the places where fire had somehow melted things almost like two scenes overlaying each other.

Her helper grabbed her arm and dragged her towards the transfer corridor. It took her a moment in the confusion to realise there were now eight exits to this place, rather than the seven from before. Out of that exit, on the far end of the hexagonal hall, a dozen very heavily armoured figures had appeared. With a coordinated roar, they all surged forward, pushing with their shields even as the crossbow soldiers opened up on them in return. Projectiles hit and bent shields as armoured elites covered the distance in a blink of an eye, cutting down defenders that they had rolled over like they were a crop harvest.

The leader of that group, identified by his much more ornate armour and lack of a shield, pointed his sword at Halla as he roared. “EVERKIND BITCH, I WILL CAPTURE YOU THIS DAY AND DELIVER YOU UP TO THE YOUNG PRINCE AS CHATTEL!”

The words made her vision blur even as she registered the soul attack and desperately pushed her mantra to help her ward it off. Two of those beside her collapsed frothing at the mouth, grabbed by their companions as the distance of a matter of a few metres to the corridor and safety suddenly seemed like a gaping chasm.

-Space is going weird, they are… one of the voices in her head mumbled.

Belatedly she registered that space was, indeed, going weird. They were running forward, but not actually covering any distance.

Halla didn’t bother to reply to the man’s taunt. Turning, she simply walked through the line of armoured elites as if they weren’t there. Those she passed through twisted very oddly and remained frozen in the air. Her palm landed on his breastplate even as he swung his sword at her. The whole moment was uncommonly strange to her, because it felt like she was compelled to watch Halla sink her hand into the metal and rip it away with a single motion. The man staggered back, revealing himself to be a she.

One of the armoured figures behind shouted.

“BY THE POWER OF THE THRONE WE COMPEL THEE”

A wall of light seemed to block off the hall and the remaining armoured elites all fell back, casting their shields aside and holding their swords up, blade flat in front to them, before also uttering a terrible cry.

“TRUE AND MERCIFUL LORD! —THY WORLD!”

Juni felt all the strength fall from her limbs, the qi in her melting away as surely as when the youth had sealed her up. Others around her were also stumbling and falling. Even the elite guards were suffering somehow under the strange shout.

“Motherfucking jobbers!” Raleen had appeared beside them, she realised.

She gasped as warmth flowed from the woman’s hand that had landed on her back, returning motion to her limbs and releasing whatever it was that had been pressuring her qi to the point where even her mantra couldn’t do a thing with it. Even so, the scattered damage to her mind was clearly catching up to her at last, because she was no longer able to…

“Come on.” she was caught even as she stumbled dragged with the others towards the transfer chamber.

~ Han Shu – Battlefield Anomaly ~

Stumbling along behind Juni, Han Shu found he was still struggling to get a firm purchase on what in the fates was actually going on here. All his instinct wanted to say that this wasn’t real. That they were all dead in the mist and this was some strange phantasmal way of rationalising his death.

-Except…

He stared at the sword. It was resolutely sword-like.

The attack of the terrifying lizard creatures was… he flinched as someone else got exploded nearby.

-Almost wish I was getting voices, part of him sobbed.

The sword sent another dull pulse of warmth through his hand.

That was another thing he wasn’t sure how to process, or whether he had imagined it.

It had been almost hot to touch in the white mists… and for the briefest moment then he was sure he had seen the woman with hair like starfire.

In that same instant, when the mist closed over him, he had also, somehow seen… another place. A mausoleum, with six altars, each one of which had held the shadow of weapons – swords, a spear, even a bow and a chakram. The oppression that came from them had in that brief moment made him feel like his brain was pulled out of his skull while his sapience was being stretched apart like he was on a rack.

-And yet still I have no psyche break…Is it because of you? Or the Ancestral Talisman? He wondered, staring at the sword in his hand.

Halla had also seemingly recognised it, or something like it.

That had nearly given him a heart attack. Her gaze hadn’t been hungry, or greedy. Rather, it had been… pensive, in a way that made him feel like she was staring right through him, reading him like a book. That she didn’t seem to have found what she sought was clear to both of them, and that terrified another part of him—

He ducked as another scatter of exploding bolts arched across the hall. The battle between Halla and the woman in armour was reaching its zenith, both sides retreating in the face of the pair's brutal combat. Halla clearly had the upper hand, having crushed two attempts by the armoured figures to do their strange qi sapping shout. Unfortunately, Halla wasn’t able to force her opponent back and more troops were coming through that other entrance that definitely hadn’t been there when they came through here before.

“You god damned bastards! I’m going to fucking burn your lineages into last week!”

There was a furious shout from the far side of the room and a group of six people, led by a bearded man in a shabby pointy hat and faintly smoking grey robe stalked out of the entrance that led to the room with the strange pool and the tree. The robe he wore was weirdly eye-catching for all that it was a bit threadbare, embroidered rather haphazardly with stylized shooting stars in a dozen colours. Those following behind him were all hooded in similar grey robes, carried long Jian-like swords and wore masks stylized to look like grinning, wide eyed, bearded old men.

The attackers recoiled at the new arrivals. Armoured figures suddenly scrambled to get out of the way, where before they had been trying to skirt around the edges of the duel in the middle of the room.

“Have you managed to break through yet!” someone yelled behind him.

“Fuck off, this is a Great Circle Force Cage they are using, unless—”

The old man reached some fixed point and stood there, while the retreating soldiers all stopped suddenly and started to look much more laid back. Their retreat had been faked, it seemed.

“Watch it.” someone behind him shoved him down as a scything line of blue light that looked like dripping molten metal sliced a pillar to their left in two and left a disturbing afterimage on the wall where it had caught an…

“What… just...”

“Doomfyre, boy,” The armoured man next to him grunted, seeing his shock. “Burns you right outta the world. Some bad shit.”

The bearded old man just threw back his head and laughed. Sweeping up his staff, made of some kind of scorched wood, he just roared. Sparks filled the air as he smashed the staff into the ground. Black cracks spidered everywhere, tracing impossible geometries around the room. Strange, familiar mists blurred for a moment and then everything warped. The sense of the world flowing towards the woman who was fighting Halla vanished abruptly.

The intent that pressed down on the room, originating from the bearded old man in his pointy hat, made his hair stand on end—

The old man raised his staff and something lashed out… the sword went warm in his hand even as he saw Juni stumble drunkenly nearby. He had the faint impression of some fearful force rolling around the room. The woman, Raleen, helped her up, grimacing.

“Is she okay?” he asked, scrambling over to grab her other arm and help the woman carry Juni towards the now accessible tunnel towards the transfer chamber.

“I thought she was, but her mind is badly compromised, even if her spirit is remarkably unyielding.” Raleen grimaced. “In any event, we need to get out of here. Arch Magister Tolleund and the Void Brothers are going to turn those heretical freaks into shishkebabs.”

“What happened to her, anyway?” Raleen grunted they made their way into the tunnel, gesturing towards Juni.

“We were… attacked by those creatures. She had a run-in with one before… I thought she was okay…” he trailed off.

He had thought she was okay. She had seemed okay. Compared to Lin Ling, who was clearly working through a bunch of demons.

“I… we… just wanted to get out of the darkness below… so I didn’t question…”

Raleen gave him a weird look and turned back to look at Juni, and the nearby Lin Ling who was being carried over the shoulder of one of the robed scholars while the bearded mage, O’Brian he thought, did something to her.

“What darkness below.”

“We were teleported into some caverns, scattered by… a,” he paused, wondering how to go about explaining.

-Should he even explain? Was this an anomaly? Clearly it was, but this seemed far too real.

“Something, explosions on the surface disturbed the caverns, and we were scattered into the deep places below the mountains. There… I— that’s how we encountered the lizards before.”

“I see,” Raleen said, looking at him pensively.

“Magus O’Brian, when you’re done with that one, have a look at this one, would you. See if you can tide her over until they can get some proper help.”

“You think I am made of mana, Decapitare?” the old man huffed from where he was using some art on Lin Ling.

“No, but there’s other weirdness going on here,” Raleen grunted, shooting him another glance that made him squirm.

“I’m… f-fine,” Juni gasped, from where she was leaning against the wall, supporting herself with the Sword Staff.

“You are clearly not fine,” he snapped, more abruptly than he had intended as his concern over their condition and his frustration at both of them just being obfuscating spilled over. “I don’t know what really happened to the two of you, neither of you will say anything, and both of you are nearly walking corpses at this point.”

“While it is true that I am walking on sheer… bloody… mindedness,” Juni grimaced. “You don’t get to tell me I’m not fine.”

“Then who the fates does? Lin Ling stabbed me with a torch over a misplaced word, and you appear to have been walking along pretending to be a functional person but I’ve known you long enough to see the cracks in you now that you could walk a horse and carriage through.”

Juni closed her eyes for a second and exhaled. "Well maybe if I’d found a fate-thrashed magical sword in a tower and some old cultivation ghost, our shit might have turned out differently, but I didn't, and it is what it is, so you don't get to tell me I'm not fine. Not today.”

-She has a point you know, and you know it, a dark voice in his head. His own self-doubt and guilt muttered.

-This rot has to stop, another added.

-Yep, all this came because you made a single bad attempt at alleviating some tension, and now it's eating up everything.

"Ahhh... Look I..." he was about to apologise when he was cut off.

“As amusing as this little drama is,” Raleen scowled, "it’s not helping thi—"

All of them, clustered in the hall, turned as a spatial fluctuation split the air and dozens of armoured figures poured out, chanting in a strange language that wasn’t seemingly covered by whatever was making them able to be understood.

The sword grew warm in his hand, and the weakness that was trying to invade his limbs was neutralized by its warmth.

“FORM LINE!” Raleen yelled to the two dozen or so survivors clustered across the hall.

Juni shot him a glower that promised that this wasn’t over, even as Raleen casually drew her shield and pulled Juni after her.

-You’re an idiot, you know that. A voice in his head pointed out.

“Yes, I know,” he sighed and muttered under his breath “I also don’t want us all to die down here, and the way this is going…”

“Names Samuel, Samuel Teller lad,” the old soldier in heavy armour who had spoken to him before, said. “You stick with me and you’ll make it through this mess we all landed in.”

“Thanks…” he managed to say, as Teller stepped past him and surveyed the corridor ahead of them with a dark look.

The mustachio'd old soldier slammed his sword against his shield as he shouted loudly.

“ARMS OF VALOR”

Strange qi flowed out of the surroundings, covering all of them as the massing soldiers in the corridor ahead of them started to advance.

~ Kun Juni – Battlefield Anomaly ~

Juni felt the energy from the old soldier’s shout wash the remaining weakness out of her limbs. The jolt of invigorating energy was like being plunged into a cold, refreshing bath. Ahead of her, Raleen was advancing forward. The first armoured figure that reached them literally exploded into meat chunks as she swiped it casually out of the way. A second lost their head without the woman even looking as she stepped sideways to avoid a stabbing spear.

The ferocity was… well, she had no time to dwell on it as an armoured figure surged forward to attack her. Instinctively, she pushed out her perception and dodged. The sword scythed past her, missing her by a hair's breath. The intent within it rasping harshly against her skin and leaving a bloody track across her shoulder.

-The suppression is still here, a thought marvelled.

-But it’s not the same kind of suppression? Another more confused one muddled.

-Also, Han Shu needs to go take a fate-thrashed hike, a few parts of her consciousness added.

-Not the time.

Really, she was glad that the suppression was still here, she realised. She had been uncertain when that old cultivator did what had looked remarkably like what had just happened in the mists of the warehouse. The figure who attacked her was clearly surprised she had evaded its initial attack. Grimly it pressed for a second attack.

She was torn for a few agonising moments.

-Spear art, sword art or sword staff art?

Instinct answered for her and she executed what she was most familiar with, the first move of the Kun family’s own sword art.

{Kun Divides the Waters}

It bit deep into her qi, and there was a moment of distortion as she struck forward with a rising strike. The armoured figure dodged back, but the physical attack wasn’t what was dangerous. The aftershock of the martial intent passed through it and bisected her attacker’s upper torso. With a backhanded swipe, she slashed its throat open, not looking at the bulging eyes behind the visor.

To her right, she saw Han Shu, following the old soldier who had introduced himself as Samuel Teller, miraculously avoid what should have been a critical hit while the sword he was carrying flowed sideways and took the attacker’s arm off like it was cutting paper.

-Han Shu was never that good with swords.

-Nope, never that good with swords, another part of her added.

-His family has links to the Military Authority, but the only art I’ve ever known him to excel at was spears, even though he fancied himself not terrible with swords, another muttered.

Afforded a moment to catch her breath, she watched as he found himself facing another. That sword form he was using wasn’t even the Han family one… it was almost like...

-Like the sword is wielding him, a voice murmured.

That weapon was definitely an ancient, powerful artefact in its own right. She had thought it an Immortal Weapon, but no Immortal Weapon was capable of that while having no aura at all.

-Dao weapon? Another disjointed part of her memory suggested.

-What are the odds of that, are you trying to make me more annoyed with him, she shot back at that part of her psyche.

-What if he is just as broken as we are… and doesn’t know it, another voice pondered?

-Yes, that sword is clearly not normal, who is to say it’s not also something...

-The woman Halla knew or recognised something like it?

-Who is to say that she isn’t also evil or something?

-They didn’t kill us?

-But people are trying to kill them?

She wasn’t sure where to go with that line of reasoning, the context of this combat was already so far adrift from her frame of reality that she didn’t even know where to start.

-That said, asking them why we are fighting is likely not a good idea.

-No it probably wasn’t, she agreed.

-Also, why are you happily talking to us like this? another bit asked.

-Because it doesn’t fate-thrashed matter, another part of her giggled.

-Yep, either we are dead, dying or lost, or we are insane, either way, it is what it is.

-Or maybe this is just another way for the thing that claimed the Sar’Katush to claim us? A small voice whispered.

-That… was bothering her, she had to admit.

Her moment of calm passed as two much more lightly armoured figures made it through the running line ahead of them. Both of them immediately went after her, which was just typical really. Her instinct was that they were at the peak of Golden Core, so definitely suppressed.

Exhaling, she picked one and went straight for them. Never sit on the back foot. That was what her brother and uncle had both drilled into her. Sit back and you die, sit back and people surround you. Pick your targets, put other people out of position. More than four will rarely attack you at once.

{Kun Overturns the Waves}

This time she used a spear art. Her qi flowed through her body and through the sword staff. Her opponent made to deflect the strike, barely succeeding in making the thrust glance off the fabric… ah, it had metal plates underneath it. The way metal hit metal suggested they were the same material as the blade of her weapon.

Their companion spun in from the side and she spun with them, matching their movement. There was something cathartic about it. Instinct and muscle memory washing away any indecision she might have. Weirdly, the fate-thrashed lizards had finally put to bed a certain worry.

-Accursed Valash, they had called the female Sar’Katush. The hatred in the thing's tone had felt very real.

She let her mantra flow, augmenting her movement as the three of them swirled on the spot.

{Kun Rises to Heaven}

Her qi plummeted as she found the opening in the moment and executed the pinnacle technique from the Kun family's Sword Art. The rising strike swept out. Low underneath her opponents rising guard as they prepared to slash at her. They screamed as her blade severed their arm at the shoulder.

{Kun Splits the Waves}

The descending strike bit deep between the gaps in the plates of their armour and opened them up from neck to groin even as she spun back, wincing as the other one's sword strike caught her side. The weapon sliced through her meagre qi armour and nearly took a part of her floating rib with it. If she were mortal, it would be a nasty wound, but the mantra was already knitting it back together, repelling the faint energy that was trying to permeate the wound.

The counterstrike was with the butt of the sword staff, into their diaphragm, making them grunt and dodge backwards. She half exchanged her position again, turning to face them only to find two more coming for—

The flash of light and the explosion made her vision go wobbly even as the heat blistered her skin. In the aftermath, she caught a faint distortion in the air courtesy of her much-neglected qi perception and had the presence of mind to roll away as an invisible blade scythed across half the hall. Righting herself, she saw that her three attackers were now a ruined mess on the ground along with a few more. In the corridor, a large slab of the ceiling had also been brought down at some point. One of the robed scholars to her right, who looked drained in the dim light, was lowering their hands.

The last one still wasn’t dead, she realised with a start as they rose and started towards her. But even as she moved forward herself, she heard an exclamation from behind her, and that armoured figure also exploded in a very unpleasant manner. Their torso twisted in on itself while their limbs and head scattered across the hall, the sight making her stomach clench involuntarily. She glanced behind her and saw one of the two, a youth who had been helping support Lin Ling lowering his arm.

He grinned and said. “Not bad girl, you can certainly handle yourself, but warn us if more get around, okay?”

Shaking her head, she admonished herself. They were right, she should have yelled out or something, rather than just going straight for them.

“Okay.” She said giving him a thumbs up.

Taking stock, she again found herself with a moment’s breathing space in what was now a rather fractured melee. Two more pulses of breaking space rippled in the distance up the corridor, suggesting more arrivals.

Behind them, there was a dull *boom*—

Shaking her head, she pushed herself up off the ground, tasting salt in her mouth.

-That hurt, a part of her complained on her behalf.

“You don’t say,” she rasped under her breath.

Looking around, it seemed everyone, attacker and defender alike, bar Raleen, O’Brian and the two who were carrying Lin Ling had been thrown to the ground. A moment later an armoured body came from behind them, carried on a lance of golden lightning and hit a column with enough force to melt a human-shaped hole through half of it.

-Huh, so that’s how that got formed, a part of her mind observed weakly.

The figure, now stuck on the next column, thrashed and screamed, dissolving into motes of light even as it tried to pull out the golden spear that had impaled it.

Staggering to her feet, she realised she had been sheltered from the worst of the shockwave by the fallen slab from the roof, making her one of the first to rise. Immediately she threw herself down again and rolled. Her instincts were validated when half the rock slab vanished in a blur of blue fire that passed half a metre over her head. Off on the other side of the corridor, someone swore and a strange serpent of green lightning shot off down a wall into the distance.

Raleen turned and swung her matt grey shield, deflecting another beam of blue-green molten metal into a wall. Still shaking from her near-miss with annihilation she watched from her momentary refuge as the woman swatted away another two charging attackers so hard they hit the far wall like rotten fruit, gristle and blood seeping out and running down the wall as they twitched faintly.

Others were on their feet now. The ones around Lin Ling did something. A moment later, a rippling barrier of twelve interlocking circles appeared in a bubble around that group. The flickering shadows from another explosion behind them drew her attention to an armoured figure nearby that was pushing itself up. One of the attackers. Without thinking about it too hard, she slammed the blade of the spear staff into the gap between their armour and helmet and levered sideways.

-You killed more people today than you have in the last five years, a part of her muttered sadly.

-I don’t even know if this is real or not, she thought.

-Does that make it right?

-What are you, Buddhist? She shot back archly.

-I’m just saying that our emotional state is badly warped, proper judgement is…

“Is for later, not dying is for now,” she snapped.

That said, her psyche wasn’t wrong. She disliked killing people. She had only killed… 26 people… ever — 23 of them bandits. As for the others…

-Well, kill is a loose term.

-Let die, on the other hand.

-By accident.

-And it was their fault.

-The Ha clan didn’t see it that way.

-Not the time, a chorus of more coherent voices hissed.

“An admirable sentiment, lass,” Teller said, arriving beside her and helping her up. “You handle that well for a neophyte from up above. Normally they like swords.”

“My family has some arts...” she said, noting the implication.

-These people don’t seem like cultivators, other parts of her agreed.

-They are using qi though,

-But these styles, this manner, the terms… are all off.

-Who is to say what the world was like an aeonspan ago, though? another part of her pointed out.

“It’s a good art, pointed, not flashy. Seen too many family arts that are flashy and get people dead,” Teller nodded.

“How are we doing, Lady Raleen,” the old man said, leading them forward.

Raleen, who had just stabbed another misfortunate person on the ground, grimaced. “Oh, Commander, well…”

Her response was cut off by having to turn and deflect something out of the air. The columns on either side of the hall splintered like trees hit by dozens of axes. Her skin flushed at the damage dealt. That would have turned all of them into chopped meat.

Han Shu fell in beside her...

“… Sorry about before,” he said quietly.

She looked at him sideways. His face was pale and shaking. She tried to think if he had ever killed anyone. Probably he had offed a few bandits over the years, but that was maybe the height of it. His family was part of the Han clan, who had a lot of links to the Military Authority.

“We all have our problems,” she said sourly.

“Yeah… I… sorry,” he sighed.

“For what?” She scowled, it was hard to pin down why the apology annoyed her, specifically, but it definitely did. “You think we need your pity?”

“Uhhhh?” clearly her shortness perturbed him a bit.

She resisted the urge to turn to face him. Advice from her brother spooled through her head. Really, he was from a civilian family, despite the Military Authority links. He also wasn’t from the ‘nobility’ which was also why he was adrift in the context of their circumstances, as well-meaning as he was.

-It’s been a while since you viewed things like that, parts of her psyche said appreciatively.

“Whatever tool keeps me going, I’ll use it,” she thought, then sighed because she had spoken that out loud.

He gave her a long look, before just sighing and saying. “I… see.”

“Cute ‘I See’, but don’t lie to me, even if you mean well by it. You don’t see,” she shook her head. “Because you haven’t experienced the same world we have.”

“Anyway, now isn’t the time for this conversation. Unless you wanna own responsibility for leading us out of here. Otherwise, stop trying to work out what you did or didn’t do wrong and just focus on not dying.”

“…”

She cut off his reply with a wave of her hand as their now much smaller groups hit the next wave of arrivals, following in the wake of Commander Teller, Lady Raleen and two of the robed scholars who were raking the periphery of the corridor with fire and lightning to push back the attackers.

“…Okay,” he nodded. “But I still feel compelled to ask… what the fates even is all this?”

“You ask me? But who in the name of the child-stealing fate am I meant to ask… them?” she muttered.

“When you put it like that...” he nodded, then signed unobtrusively. “Is all this because of that broken crystal?”

-Probably, and because Lin Ling went behind my back and took a pot of that water. I still don’t know if I should thank her or beat her for that, she thought.

“Whatever it was, we are still alive, that’s what counts,” she hissed under her breath.

“I guess…” he sighed.

She nearly stabbed him for that, right there.

“Don’t you start, Lin Ling was bad enough.”

-Perhaps this was somewhat inevitable. We just don’t work as big teams like this, part of her sighed.

-What a stupid weakness to have run out, she could only agree as she parsed the battle ahead of them for any emergent threats.

The only high ranked ‘teams’ of people who worked together in a stable fashion were Arai and Sana, and the Mu Siblings, Kalis tended to train lower-ranked groups, Han Shu worked alone, Lin Ling tended to work with Arai and Sana, while she worked in a more senior capacity with Old Ling. Most of the missions, other than recovery ones or some larger missions that they undertook, were either solo, or leading squads of lower-ranked herb hunters. An unfortunate by-product of having such a small pool of expertise to draw off. So they socialised together, did missions together, but never in this kind of prolonged, enforced isolation.

-It is only our training and professionalism that has gotten us this far as it is, another thought muttered.

-Can you imagine the Ha mob making it this far? Another said with a bit more venom.

-Yeah, a less courteous voice added.

-Half of them died in the fate-thrashed valleys.

“HERETICS! MAY GOD JUDGE YOU FOR YOUR SINS IN DEATH!”

The yell distracted them both from their thoughts as another two figures managed to charge past on the opposite side.

It took her a moment to realise that they were coming from behind, not in front.

-How had they?

Belatedly she saw the dying shimmers of a teleportation in her qi perception, even as a figure barrelled out of the darkness behind them to strike at her with a two-handed axe. She dodged using her movement art, hissing under her breath as her attacker easily followed her motion, adjusting his attack into a hooking downward strike at her forearms.

To avoid the following down strike, she actually pirouetted in mid-air and executed her family’s 4th sword art from the basic style.

{Kun Skips on the Pond}

The strikes caught the axe, punting it up even as she lunged in with a knee. Before her strike could smash into him, her attacker was suddenly surrounded by a translucent barrier. She gritted her teeth and pushed more qi through her already tortured meridian channels. Knee and shield connected, and she winced at the sensation of grinding bone. By far the more surprised person was her attacker, who was thrown backwards several paces…

“Qi!?! You’re one of those false heaven heretics!”

Burying her surprise, she smartly danced back two steps and swept low with the staff end of her weapon, swapping for the first time into one of the Military Bureau’s Spear forms. The abrupt transition in style caught her attacker off guard. He tried to step over her strike and cut down with the axe, but she was already inside his striking range, cutting off his downward stroke and forcing him to retreat or risk being tripped or impaled in the face.

-Axes are dangerous to fight against, but even more dangerous to wield sometimes.

Her older brother’s advice regarding sparring matches from over a decade ago resurfaced in her memories as she spun with his attempted avoidance.

Matching his movement as best she could, she infused qi directly into the weapon, trusting to its apparently superior materials to survive the strain of the move.

{Double Dragon, Sundering Surge}

The world around her slowed as the mnemonic combined with her mantra to guide her body through the requisite motions. Her opponent was caught out by the sudden burst of speed and chose to retreat rather than press. The dragon’s claw strike with the sword blade missed, but the tail strike crunched into his leg, making him scream. Stepping in, she put her hand on the flat of the blade and guided it round directly. Her strike bit deep into his arm, slicing up it, opening it from wrist to shoulder, through the elbow, leaving it hanging almost severed.

As he stumbled back, lashing out at her with a wild single-handed strike, she struck inside both his legs with the staff part, vaulting over it and twisting past him to land low, at his open side. His fatal mistake was to try to turn the short route to reach her, allowing her to slice back and sever his leading leg entirely and finish with a lunging strike through his dantian. The axe hilt crunched into her shoulder, making the bones creak. But it was a small price to pay. The discharge of the art erupted out of her body, blasting him back off the blade into the wall where he slumped down even as the axe clattered to the side.

The art had nearly emptied out her dantian and put a serious strain on her meridians. The fallout from the shockwaves of qi had, she noted, claimed three more attackers nearby, who were bleeding out with perplexed looks on their faces. Falling back towards Raleen, she ate a qi replenishment pill and winced. That had been on reflex, they were not as...

The full effect of the qi swirled through her, replenishing what was spent in a heartbeat.

“What the actual fates?” she exclaimed out loud.

That had been a Golden Core grade pill, she had expected it to replenish maybe a third, but she was actually slightly overburdened.

-That’s not it, a part of her noted.

Blinking, she realised what her body was telling her. She wasn’t... Hadn’t been suppressed in the darkness, but something was different. There was darkness here, but it wasn’t…

-Really now you want to listen to that part of you? Another part of her muttered.

-The nature of the darkness has changed. It’s not divisive and gloomy, it’s… enveloping and…

She paused and considered the darkness properly, for the first time. It really wasn’t divisive and gloomy. Instead, it was like a dark embrace, in this subterranean heat it was somewhat stifling actually, but it wasn’t oppressive in the same way. And it also wasn’t suppressive in quite the same way. Impossible as that should have been?

Now that she had another moment of calm, watching the flow of the fight around her, she realised another thing that had been lingering in the back of her mind. Her capacity was… That sword art form before was her family's, but the spear art she had just used was a golden core grade technique. It should have cleaned her out completely, yet she had already been suffering from meridian shock and had depleted qi before ever attempting it. Her physical foundation had soared. That was the only way to describe it.

-Now you notice? Part of her sounded exasperated.

-You just chained a dozen quasi golden core moves, a golden core spear art, qi perception and your movement art twice and you’re only NOW running out of qi? After all this? Are you a Cultivation Idiot?

When her psyche arranged it for her like that, she had to concede that she was being a bit of a cultivation idiot. Her capacity had, if not doubled, certainly increased by an improbable amount. The purity of her qi, which she had basically been ignoring before landing in this place due to the darkness and circumstances, was also improved somehow?

-Because of what Valash did to my mantra?

In fact, regarding that…

She arrived back beside the group as she considered her own mental state with a bit of a frown. She was experiencing voices, but they weren’t really ‘voices’. On the one hand, they didn’t have that same strangely cohesive tone that the entity had manufactured, but they weren’t quite the scattered gibbering insanity that they originally seemed.

‘Devoted, Path, Lotus, Body, Bestowal’

Activating her mantra, she watched how it interacted with her psyche and hissed in shock as Lotus and Bestowal melded Path, Body and Devoted to do something utterly inexplicable and pull her mental state back together again. It was like the mental equivalent of how Physical Cultivation could recover crippling meridian damage with the right stimulus in a matter of minutes. In the 30 minutes they had been in this place, or so she reckoned, over a third of the ‘damage’ her own ‘cage’ had done to her psyche was repaired. The rest, while it looked bad, and she was still hearing voices and stray thoughts, was also slowly pulling back together.

She was still marvelling at that, as she noticed that Han Shu was limping badly. It seemed that the weird abilities of that sword hadn’t managed to carry him through that totally unscathed. Without comment, she swiped out a healing herb and tossed it to him. He crunched it down raw, wincing as he did so.

“Uhhhh?” one of the soldiers beside them eyed him rather dubiously. “Did you just eat a Magus Grade Mana Grass raw?”

“Desperate times…” she grimaced, grabbing another one and tearing a leaf off for herself.

Normally eating a leaf of a Water Jasmine raw, even a juvenile one like this that was only a six-star rather than an eight-star grade herb, was a somewhat bad idea. But right now, in their current situation, she would take delayed qi poisoning over the step promotion to the qi density of her blood.

“Isn’t that a bit hard-core, even for you Heaven's Path types?” another said appraisingly.

“Dead tomorrow is tomorrow's problem, life today is tomorrow's hope,” she quoted one of the military mottos her brother had kept onto.

“Aye… a wise sentiment,” Teller nodded.

“Even so, that’s gonna be some fierce mana poisoning,” one of the soldiers muttered. “Better to use one of these instead.”

He passed her a reddish coloured potion in a tempered glass vial. Appraising it dubiously, she tested it with her qi and hissed in shock. The vitality of the qi in it was something else. Even more remarkable was how docile it was. She took a sip and felt some of the damage to her body melt away almost immediately.

“Thanks” she nodded…

“Enough yakking, the lot behind are catching up,” Teller scowled.

Leaning around the pillar, she took in the scene in both directions. Ahead of them Raleen and several robed figures, mages they seemed to be called, were busy attacking a crude barrier across the hall, blocking their progress. Behind them, the raging battle in the hexagonal room was still audible and periodically visible as discharges of qi so pure that they made the hair on her arms stand on end just looking at them.

Right on cue, there was another howl of tearing space in the corridor behind them and another large group of soldiers appeared directly in the corridor between their two groups. One of the new arrivals, dressed in a red robe with white and gold trim, took a look around then raised their arms and chanted.

“HEED MY COMMAND, SPIRITS OF THE UNJUSTLY SLAIN, THAT YOU MIGHT BE REDEEMED IN SERVICE TO OUR GLORIOUS LORD! IT IS ONLY THROUGH HIS MERCY THAT ALL MAY BE SAVED."

"~Arise!~”

Two other robed figures beside him raised their hands and spewed a torrent of fire and lightning across the hall towards the far side where the six figures within the shifting circle of barriers, including the still comatose Lin Ling were sheltering.

She was just about to draw attention to the threat of a second group flanking in the shadows, wondering where they had emerged from when something grasped her leg. Looking down she saw the disembodied form of a soldier who was very dead now held her ankle in a vice-like grip, its other arm grasping for a nearby weapon.

“Oh. Nameless blessed little lunatics. They are using heretical Soul Arts?” She hissed even as she infused as much qi into her other foot as she dared and stomped on the helmeted head of the thing.

The sensation of bending metal and cracking bone beneath her foot made her wince. Unfortunately, it didn’t let go, so she stabbed the arm instead, severing it directly. Her qi perception sphere, which she had now started using properly once again warned her of the incoming attack from another risen corpse even before she turned to face it. Rather than bother cutting it, she just kicked it in the chest, sending it pin-wheeling away through several others that had just stood. Their strength was good, but their agility was shit. She could see their use though as hundreds of corpses started to rise all along the hall behind them. They would really snare everything up.

“Well, it was about time,” Teller just sighed. “If they hadn’t done it, our boys on the other side would have soon.”

As she watched, he swapped his sword for a hammer which had several strange glimmering runes on the head.

“We go across to the others?” she asked.

“Aye, better we cluster up now. Use their barrier,” Teller nodded. “Let the tribune and the vanguards do their thing unmolest-“

There was a scream and one of the robed figures in the new arrivals was suddenly pulled back down the hall, his body torn apart into meaty bits as he went. The group behind half turned as four grey-robed, masked figures armed with great swords tore through the risen dead like they were reaping corn and ploughed into the new arrivals without a care in the world. Moments later Sir Edward had arrived behind them, followed by Halla and the old man in the comet robe.

All of them looked bloody and tattered. Sir Edward was missing an arm, Halla looked like she had rolled in a blood pit, while the old man in the comet robe had lost the top of his pointy hat and all the sleeves of his robe somewhere along the way. The combat around them was, to her qi enhanced vision, just searing tides of energy flowing back and forth between blurred strikes. Even the old man was fighting hand to hand, smashing back armoured figures who moved with unnatural speed, trying to overwhelm them. She could see bits of qi flickering in the techniques they were using, but the level of all the combatants so far exceeded her realm that even knowing everyone was probably suppressed to the equivalent of Golden Core, it was impossible to follow. Even amid the suppression, their power was horrifying.

“Right,” Teller said briskly. “Enough break, let’s get across there and help our lads.”

She cut down another animated corpse as they started to make their way across the hall and found her next opponent still alive. Such was the unexpected nature of their meeting that she barely dodged their opening stab and then felt a chill at her side as their retraction did cut somehow.

“Fates cursed bastard,” She hissed out and spun away, sweeping up with the blade of the spear staff to force them away.

To her left she saw one of their own fall, a youth barely older than Lin Ling, in a scholar's robe and light armour. He screamed in rage even as tears ran down his face, determined to take the armoured figure that had tackled him down and run him through with him into the next life. She moved to try to help only for one of the other soldiers, the one who had given her the potion, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her back, pulling them both down.

She was about to curse him, when another attacker arrived, scrambling through the corpses, stabbing the youth in the heart. The one who had dealt the lethal blow initially, to her sudden horror, turned translucent—

Groaning as bits of everything rained down around them, she patted the arm of the man who had saved her and gave him an apologetic smile. He nodded understanding, accepting her apology.

-So... they could self-detonate!?! her thoughts hissed in shock.

That was something only a Golden Core or higher cultivator can do. Looking around, she saw that Han Shu was also okay, as was the group behind the shield. Their group, on the other hand, was now stranded in the middle of the hall amid a…

-Oh monkey shit.

She circulated her mantra and threw herself for the nearest bit of cover as corpses too damaged to do anything other than crawl all started to turn translucent.

~ Han Shu – Battlefield Anomaly ~

Han Shu had a moment of confusion as he watched Juni throw herself frantically towards the columns where Lin Ling was being protected before he caught the subtly glowing corpses all over the floor—

The blast from the dozens of explosions picked up and tossed him into the wall with enough force to break a rather awkward number of bones in his body. A cruel reminder, part of him pointed out, that only a day earlier his cultivation base had been decimated. Desperately he called on his mantra to stabilize his body even as hands clawed at his body.

The corpses that had all been tossed this way and that were already rising again, propelled by whatever art had been affected by the robed cultivator leading the group behind them. He kicked one away and hissed in pain as something bit his arm. Scrambling up, he groaned as the corpse next to him, a pale-skinned man in armour of ‘their’ side snarled at him around a mouthful of his own arm. His mantra was already healing the wound as he punched the corpse.

It staggered back even as two more surged up behind him. He tried to swing the sword, then realised that a third one had grasped his arm and was smothering his mobility. Two more were trying to swarm Teller nearby, while others of their scattered group were now also being mobbed and dragged down—

Half a corpse smashed into the one beside him, sending it rolling away, snarling.

The source of the torso turned out to be Juni, who had thrown it away when it tried to claw her.

Nodding in thanks, he kicked another one away—

Two more armoured figures tackled him from behind and he staggered backwards, trying to smash them into the nearest pillar to dislodge them…

Lashing out with the sword, trying to keep the space around him clear, he actually decapitated a third that had been trying to flank him. It collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut and didn’t rise again. That the sword was able to kill them outright with any kind of normally mortal wound was just another mystery about it he didn’t have time to unpick right now, because despite the sword doing far more than its reasonable share, if he couldn’t swing it, it wasn’t any good!

Instinctively he reached for his movement art and cursed, that would be the death of him in a different way. His cultivation was too low now to use almost all of the handful of arts he had. Martial intent was something that required a certain proximity to Golden Core to use, and his qi reserves were wholly co-opted by his mantra towards keeping him alive right now.

A corpse screamed and he kicked it in the face. Inexplicably the scream didn’t stop until one of the other figures hit it with an art that was a jet of gold fire scattered from their hands that turned it to sparks. The others were all staggering except for Teller and Juni, who both seemed as unhindered by it as he was. Teller made sense, his realm seemed high. His own immunity was likely the sword again. It had been able to nullify all the lizard creatures’ strange shouts as well.

-Really, Juni had been right. It was enough right now that they focus on simply not dying, he remonstrated with himself.

The corpses screamed a second time. One of the cultivators in the group behind them waved his hands and a circle of light appeared with eight golden orbs floating above the attacking group.

“Oh for fuck's sakes.” Teller groaned, darting for a column. “Lad get under cover this is gonna be—”

He never found out what Teller was going to say because the eight orbs spat eight bolts of golden light apiece that screamed down the hall with a mind-twisting whistling in their general direction, curving ominously…

“WOULD SOMEONE KILL ME THAT ACCURSED DEACON!?!”

Raleen turned from attacking the barrier ahead. Her furious exclamation met the incoming art and shattered it into golden sparks. The momentum of the attackers behind them who had been advancing under the cover of the risen corpses and the art collapsed. A few collapsed outright, and many more spat blood or dropped to their knees.

Even as the echoes of her exclamation faded, every corpse within 40 metres of them started to glow white.

“~AO HUUT!~”

Raleen stomped on the ground. The shockwave made the whole corridor shudder. Every corpse within visible range blurred into red mist, turning the floor into a sea of blood, guts, bone dust and more blood.

"~Spirits of the unjustly persecuted!~"

"~~Arise!~~”

In response, the presumed Deacon gave another extolling shout. This time the floor wavered weirdly, and he would have sworn he saw shadowy forms writhing in the air for a few moments as they dropped into the mess of gore. A moment later, in a single fluid motion, all the corpses rose again, painted red in the blood of their past selves.

~ Kun Juni – Battlefield Anomaly ~

Her ears still ringing, Juni tried hard not to think about how she must currently look, half-covered in corpse gore. The stench of blood in the subterranean heat was now very high up on the list of things she never wanted to experience again. The newly risen corpses were all mobbing towards Raleen at least, which gave her a moment to focus on the source of the trouble. The cultivator identified as Deacon, who was raising them.

She had just gotten her storage talisman out and was looking at what she had to work with when another corpse barrelled into her from the side. They rolled over twice before she managed to disentangle herself without getting bitten. She had seen what happened to Han Shu, and while part of her had taken a tiny bit of delight in that, it had been swiftly silenced. There was such a thing as being too petty, and now her mind was in a marginally better place she could see somewhat from his perspective why he was… unhappy. Not to mention having him die here would weigh on her conscience horribly, and she was still marginally fond of his older brother for all that that had fallen through on their part years ago. That would make for a very awkward conversation if she ever got out of here, having to explain to the Han family how she left him to die because he had failed to read a mood nobody had ever given him the tools to parse.

Twisting away from the woman who was attacking her, she realised, with a jolt of horror, that it was the woman who had given her the spare sword staff. For a brief moment, she entertained a hope that she might actually be alive, and this was some horrible moment of confusion. Then she saw the nasty twist in her neck and the sightless eyes staring back at her and felt her heart sink even as she skipped backwards and cursed. She was saved from having to do something unpleasant by the youth who had saved her before. He had staggered up nearby and seeing her attacker, lunged for the corpse, slapping a hand onto its back. A second later the unfortunate woman dissolved into a cloud of greenish fire.

“Fucking heretics and their so-called holy arts,” the youth spat.

“Thanks…” she said, her voice quavering a bit.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s a sad end. Jessa was…” the young man sighed and looked around, shaking his head.

-So her name was Jessa, a part of her muttered.

She had never even known the woman’s name, which was sad on a whole other level, really.

The determination to do something about this mess just solidified further in her mind now. Scanning through her storage talisman, she found what she needed. A ‘Heaven's Blaze Pine Cone’, still with all its seeds in it. Looking around the pillar, she ducked forward, keeping as low as she could and using her mantra to suppress her qi signature as best she could.

The youth behind her said something, which was lost in the cacophony of battle, but made no effort to stop her. Ahead of her, she found another small group of their forces, a few of the scholars and several more soldiers trading ranged arts with the edge of the large swarm of people surrounding the Deacon. Beyond that, the retreating line was advancing in their direction, but there was now another shimmering barrier splitting them off from this group. Both Halla and Edward were busy attacking it with their weapons.

Finally, she found the other thing she needed to go with the 'Heaven’s Blaze Pine' and a 'Sky Shatter Fruit' – a 'Moon Stealing Jasmine Root'.

All three were spectacularly unstable in their own ways for harvested spirit herbs when considered outside their natural mediums. When combined together in an appropriately inauspicious way…?

“Move quicker” she yelled at the group ahead of her... “I dunno how this is going to go, but it’s probably not going to be pretty!”

Nodding at her, they disengaged and pulled back past her. One of the large group of attackers pointed in her direction and a robed figure raised their hand. She shoved the two nine-star herbs, with the heaven’s blaze pine cone, in a pot with a bit of Lin Ling’s Yang Blood and hurled it vaguely in the direction of the mob. The closed, reinforced jar bounced a few times but otherwise escaped notice as she scrambled back to avoid several orbs of gold and blue fire that were tumbling towards her.

Hauling herself up, she counted under her breath as she scrambled back.

“1...2…3...4...5...6...7 —?”

“…”

“—8?”

Glancing back, she saw one of the robed figures had noticed the jar and swept it up into the air.

-Oh. Part of her shuddered, wondering if they might have some means—

She hit the ground almost back where she had started, groaning amid a slick of burning blood icck.

-Yep, unstable herbs go boom.

Her intuition there had been right, even if took a few seconds longer than expected. Behind her, the spatial distortion from the sky shatter fruit was still twisting in the air. For the damage dealt, there was remarkably little physical damage to the hall itself. A testament to its craftsmanship. The same could not be said for the unfortunate group and the Deacon. The flickering spatial crack that now existed where the robed figures had been standing had several scattering rings of ghostly shadows trapped on its outer edge – figures cast through dimensions never meant to exist.

-Such a waste of two quasi-Golden Immortal herbs though…

-Money means nothing if you’re not alive, part of her said sagaciously.

“What the hell was that?” Raleen, who had also taken cover behind a column, looked a bit shaken. “What did you throw at them?”

“Erm…” she winced. “A tree cone, something called ‘Heaven’s Blazing Yang Pine’, along with a fruit of a particularly obnoxious spirit tree called ‘Sky Splitting Aluc’ and a root of a ‘Moon Stealing Jasmine’ as the catalyst for extra oomph.”

“Never heard of any of those… but good work, Juni!” the woman said with a rare smile.

Looking around she yelled. “Everyone still with us?”

A chorus of mostly yesses and a few maybes came back. Their attackers were shaken, though. The explosion also seemed to have done for both barriers locking them in this place. Probably because of the distorting aftershocks of the sky splitting fruit. She found herself running after Raleen and Teller as they started to lead the advance down the hall towards the transfer chamber once more.

Behind her, a voice rang out. Something about it made her movement grow sluggish even as she used her mantra to resist the presumed soul attack.

~Heretics! You dare defy the gift of our lord’s mercy!~

~Heaven's Judgement~

“Oh. fuck. off—”

Whatever Raleen had been intending as a curse was cut off as she blurred back behind them, charging down the multi-coloured lightning bolt that was punching down the hall towards them. Even so, it turned half a dozen of their number into glowing motes of light before it was blocked on her shield. A shield she rapidly discarded as it turned bright red and started to melt like hot glass.

The scattered bolts that came along with it spidered everywhere. Unable to do anything to evade them, she could only scream as they ripped holes through her arms as she tried to shield herself from the worst of the blast with a crude attempt at qi armour. Fortunately, her agony was short-lived as all the lightning bolts were sucked away into a swirling mass conjured by the robed figures who had been projecting the shield to protect many of the researchers. The shield itself was now gone, presumably destroyed by the—

Her ears rang as black lightning from their side met another bolt of multi-coloured lightning from up the hall. There were screams and curses from behind. Abruptly there was a shocking absence of space, and then Lady Halla strode through. She grasped the ‘Deacon’, who was somehow miraculously still alive, and apparently the source of the multi-coloured lightning, through the neck. Her hand gripped his spine and she just… kept... walking, dragging his ruined body after her like it was an afterthought.

A moment later, the old man in the comet robe appeared in a crack of light. He had lost his staff and sword now, and his robes were badly burned. His left arm smoked unpleasantly, and she fancied she could see bone visible. Sir Edward appeared out of the gloom with two of the grey robed men a moment later. He was also heavily burnt and his armour looked rather warped. He was also missing an arm. A different one to the one he had been before as well. A severed head with a disbelieving expression, still in its ornate plumed helmet, was hung from his belt.

The grasping of the Deacon in such a manner finished up the battle there within moments. The few survivors of that group all exploded into puddles of gore as the old man waved his arms angrily in their direction. As for the others, anyone that was still fighting them in the hall died to the absence of space that radiated out from Lady Halla as she strode down the hall towards them, her bloody sword resting over her shoulder. That strange empty field around her tore limbs, severed heads, warped and distorted bodies and left fleeing forms as smeared afterimages in the air, tearing at anything they touched that wasn’t friendly to them.

She stared at the Deacon as Lady Halla walked past them with barely a glance to see that any of them were okay. He was feebly trying to grasp at her hand, blood flowing out of his eyes.

“Hush brat.” Halla sneered at him, even though he didn’t appear to be speaking… audibly, anyway. “You think I care what your evil teacher will do when he learns of your fate?”

After that, it took a mere two minutes to make it to the transfer chamber itself. Their numbers had dwindled from almost a hundred to no more than two dozen, which was terrifying in its own right.

Glancing around, Halla grimaced. “The wards are still holding here. Get us out of here, and I can trigger the failsafe. Arch Magister Tolleund, it seems we will not have time to do this the clean way, can you take us to the upper halls?”

“I can Lady Everkind,” the old man in the comet robe said with a weary nod.

“RIGHT” her voice rang around the room... “Everyone get on the platform. Lie down flat unless you’re confident in your stomach!”

Juni walked up onto the platform and lay down, most of the others she noticed did as well, or sat.

To her surprise, she saw that Lin Ling was now conscious and being helped by one of the robed scholars. The younger girl staggered over to slump down next to her, looking… very confused, and a bit lost.

She was going to ask –are you okay? But that would be stupid in the context, so instead, she asked.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I just had my head taken apart and put back together again.” Lin Ling groaned.

“What the fates is this anyway?” the younger girl breathed hard. “I… how did… we get here... I feel like I’ve been stuck in some kind of horrible fog of… something for days…”

Carefully, she examined Lin Ling in the shimmering light that now illuminated the chamber from the great columns circling it. While she did look a bit less battered, and most of her burns were gone other than some faint discolouration that spoke of newly grown skin, the younger woman looked aged. Haggard, even.

“They healed you?”

“Y-yeah…” Lin Ling pointed over to the older robed man with a beard who was kneeling and talking to another robed scholar quietly.

“Grand Magus O’Brian? He called himself… said I had suffered some really nasty mental trauma and had my soul searched...and my soul partially puppeted” she trailed off looking very distant…

She winced, that was quite the list. Any one of those should probably have done for a normal cultivator. It was a testament to Lin Ling’s own determination as much as her physical cultivation that she hadn’t become a drooling imbecile twice over.

“I... He said he used two spells on me, ‘Greater Restoration’ and ‘Unclouded Mind’….”

She trailed off as Arch Magister Tolleund clapped his hands loudly to get everyone’s attention.

“All right, everyone!” the old man called out. “Brace for unfettered teleportation in 'Three'…' Two'...”

In the instant, before they were about to teleport, she felt something grip her and all three of them were hauled up. Gasping she saw Lady Halla reaching out a hand towards them. They floated up and drifted towards the edge of the chamber towards where she stood, and towards the edge of the now dimly glowing array.

-Nonononono, part of her sobbed…

-There was no way this could be happening.

Other parts of her were suddenly having similar reactions. Lin Ling was just staring in horror while Han Shu, who was closest to Halla, was gasping in her grip, blood dribbling from his mouth.

“Halla?... What are you doing?” Sir Edward said with a frown.

“Those three aren't from the Moon Dream Pagoda” Lady Halla Everkind replied in a clipped tone. “I just sent Mortal Moon Song their descriptions and all the pagoda’s new arrivals are accounted for. None of them were either in Undergrove or in the Deep workings in the last week, let alone today, in the middle of this mess.”

“So…?” Sir Edward said with a deepening frown.

“So they are suspicious, and I’m not taking them up. The odds of them being involved in this whole mess are far too great.”

“I find that unlikely Lady Everkind,” Grand Magus O’Brian spoke, “The girl I healed had severe mental damage, and her memories while fractured and obscure…”

“I hardly need justify this to you, Grand Magus – or are you going to claim your title as deputy director outranks me, the 4th Imperial Princess?” Halla said dryly.

“I...” the old man looked abashed and stepped back.

Her stomach dropped even further as she struggled against the grip as they drifted towards the edge of the platform. Even her mantra wasn’t responding. It was as if she was entirely mortal under whatever suppression Halla had put on them.

“Furthermore… they have no aura signature associated with the school and are dressed like thieves to boot. It’s also suspicious that they arrived right as the wards weakened as well. Not to mention they have unstable 'Star Loci Auram' on them.”

“In fact…” Halla reached out and snared their packs. The various books that had been recovered by them, the slabs, the remaining grey crystals and a few other accoutrements of the teleport repair kit hung in the air.

The atmosphere on the array went stony as over a dozen accusatory eyes landed on them. Only Sir Edward and Lady Raleen along with a few others like Teller looked perturbed. The judgement in the rest of the eyes was clear. People had died getting out, and in the process, lives might have been wasted on thieves? Or similar…

-Oh no, no— no… other parts of her were now starting to come unstuck.

She closed her eyes and tried to focus on not having a psyche break within a psyche break.

-Maybe it really isn’t real, a hopeful voice, her own thankfully, muttered in her head.

“These are all relating to the teleport formation…” she sneered. “Anyway…Do you buy that stupidity about Arachnida Spawn this boy was babbling? That just makes it more suspicious. I find it more likely they were an advance group sent to hit the lower reaches that connect this complex to the main access points into the Undergrove.”

“But they are all Heaven's Path cultivators…” Raleen pointed out, “there is no way anyone from that side… would work with…”

“None of them are more than Qi Containment at best. All of them are Blood Promise experts,” Halla said dryly. “It’s easy to fake, and would simply cast more doubt on our current alliances if it were to get out.”

“That’s true,” one of the soldiers muttered. “And there would certainly be rogue elements in Moon Wheel Court or the Ranshan Tower that wouldn’t side with us.”

“Not to mention… there is no reason for them to have those books if they meant anything honest here…” one of the senior scholars scowled.

“So they stay,” Halla said decisively.

Sir Edward, however, seemed unconvinced. “Even if they were involved somehow, it’s better to take them up top to the other Arch Magisters?”

“Envoy Keltan has a point, Princess,” Arch Magister Tolleund said. “They are not even in the first circle… there is no way they could do anything to one of the Grand Transport Circles ‘just’ with a few instruction manuals… Not to mention Sar’Katush appeared out of that collapse that spawned these three? That merits deeper investigation… if the seals down there are that far gone?”

“Nobody at their realm survives a star pool attuned loci collapse. They’re not that simple... and before we know what is going on up there, and why we are getting stormed by the Sworn Swords of Golden Mercy among other elite forces from the Holy Empire, I am not going to invite a bunch of potential cuckoos into the nest” She said flatly. “I have final say anyway, even if I have to pull rank on the rest of you…”

{But I can survive such a loci collapse… Halla Everkind}

The gentle, ethereal voice that whispered through the room sank, swept through her like a cool breeze. There was a strange hitch and their motion through the air stopped directly. Everyone else was suddenly unable to move as all three of them dropped back onto the teleportation circle. She gasped for breath and then gasped again as something… a cool energy somehow washed away all the fear and uncertainty she had previously been feeling.

Looking up, she saw Halla, hand half-frozen, reaching for the weapon at her back.

In fact, everyone on the platform was frozen in shock at the words that sank through their minds like cool refreshing mist on a warm summer’s day.

The crystals and the books dropped to the ground with a clatter and thud.

“How… can...” Halla managed to force out, veins standing out on her forehead as she strained against whatever force the strange voice was using to restrain her.

“D…d-daughter?” the old Arch Magister’s face turned deathly pale, as did Sir Edward’s.

“Halla, for god’s sake shut up!” Sir Edward, who was visibly sweating, hissed.

“You could have—” Halla’s reply was lost amid peals of faint ethereal laughter that filled up the space.

“—One...” echoed, improbably in the air.

There was a ripple, and the teleport took effect. Juni felt that her stomach had just been ripped out of her body somehow as space twisted in a way that nature never intended… she thought she saw a faint effervescence of white mist creeping around the flickering twisting kaleidoscopic nightmare trying to bore a hole in her very being, then she hit a floor hard enough to make every bone in her body rattle for what felt like the fifth time in as many minutes.