Ah, fuck. I really hope this doesn’t hurt.

Val, come back down here, but come down in between the two of us so he can’t tell which is which! I need a bit more mana; I’m almost completely out.

Alex stood, overlapping with his mirage in Rylan’s vision, as his companion came down between the two of them before returning to the original’s shoulders. Rylan was still a distance away, though he seemed to be getting impatient with the lack of movement from Alex.

As quickly as he could, Alex explained the plan to Val.

He took a single deep breath, despite the intentional effort it took to do so, and then both Alexs stepped away from each other, then back in line and away from each other again. Without another glance at himself or the waiting Rylan, he took off at a sprint. He pumped his legs and his arms, willing them to move as fast as they could. Despite the panic he was feeling, he could hear the corrupted giant in pursuit.

The warded barrier shimmered ahead, and he saw where the draining spell circle still hung.

Alex glanced over his shoulder and adjusted the blue cloak to see, somehow maintaining his speed despite the backward look. Rylan was gaining ground with his unnaturally long strides, fueled by his Strength stat.

Where they’d started stood another Alex, moving with jerky movements and trying to follow after the pair. Even though they were more fluid and controlled than they had once been, the arms were still raised unnaturally fast and at slight angles in the joints.

Come on, move more naturally. He’s got to take the bait.

Alex thought in frustration as he put everything on the gamble. Rylan bellowed as he followed toward the warded barrier.

Alex let out a sigh and wondered what the best way to proceed would be.

Keep moving toward the barrier? Or make a stand?

Alex slowed his pace and pivoted while lifting his jian into a defensive stance. He realized in the final moments, as the Tyrant closed the distance, that he greatly wished his friends were there to fight by his side.

Rylan closed the distance in a few heartbeats. His massive fist cocked back, and a feral grin was on his face as he pushed off with a final leap toward Alex’s much smaller frame.

Alex looked on and set his jaw, determined to come out on top. He took in as much of the warrior’s posture and trajectory as possible, noting where he’d land and where his weight would be distributed.

Taking a small step back, Alex turned to the side, prepared to meet the clash head-on with the jian, and dig his heels in. Only to have his foot meet with several broken fragments of a scattered box from earlier in the fight. He cursed out loud as his footing slipped, and he fell to one knee.

Rylan landed and, seeing Alex no longer ready to meet the blow head-on, kept his fist held back as he smiled down over him. “Your tricks are so pathetic. At least at New Year’s, you were willing to fight me.” The look of pure triumph and gloating glory grated on Alex’s every nerve.

So, he decided to take it from him.

Without warning, Alex lifted his hand. In full confidence, he pointed it at Rylan and smiled as his middle finger slowly rose. The look of sheer confusion and anger that crossed Rylan’s face made it all worth it.

At the same time, Rylan sent his large right arm hurdling forward, and his fist was aimed directly at Alex’s head. Time seemed to slow as Rylan committed to his attack, his weight driving forward.

The fist connected with nothing but air as Alex dissolved into a small shower of blue motes.

In that fraction of a second, what had appeared to be a poorly controlled illusion dropped all pretense of unnatural movement. With practiced speed, this Alex—the real Alex—activated his movement skill to close the distance and lashed out with his jian in a stabbing lunge that had been repeated hundreds of times in practice and combat since his time in the spider caves.

The blade slipped between Rylan’s shoulder blades with a sickening sound of metal piercing flesh and scraping bone.

Alex’s second consciousness snapped fully back into his body, where his hand still gripped the jian buried in Rylan’s back.

Rylan’s forward momentum stumbled to a halt, and his body trembled. He tried to turn and look over his shoulder but couldn't. “You…” he gasped, disbelief widening his eyes.

Alex twisted the blade, as Eura had taught him, to ensure the wound was fatal. "You were so sure you knew my skills," Alex said with a steady voice, though in reality, he felt like the hammering and drumming sound in his head would threaten to make him pass out. "But I'm sure that's what happened with the elves, too. You keep thinking you're in control because you have all of this power." He yanked the blade out in a spray of dark blood.

The reactionary strike from Rylan was telegraphed, however, and Alex easily used the movement from Willow Branch Sways to duck under it, slide his rear foot around in a wide arc, and slash out with his sword as the two of them spun around the other.

Rylan’s form fell to the ground without the support of his leg on the heavier side, and he yelled out once more in pain. He coughed, causing more blood to leak from his mouth. "The elves," Rylan said in a wet, gurgling tone. "They didn't tell me…I didn’t mean…I thought—"

"They used you," Alex cut in. "Just like you tried to use and manipulate everyone else." There was so much more that Alex wanted to say, to explain, and to just rub in the spoiled, delusional man's face. But as he saw the rune on Rylan's cheek flicker and pulse with an erratic light, he knew he should end things fully.

“Wait. Please, help me…” Rylan’s arrogance finally shattered, and he looked up at Alex. He clutched at his chest with a deformed hand, and tears welled in his eyes. “I can still be useful… I can tell you about them. I don’t— don’t want to die.” The last part of the sentence was thrust out, and despite everything, Alex felt his heart clench.

Alex looked down at Rylan and gave a final, clean thrust at an angle, through the gap between his collarbone and shoulder. The blade slid through with less resistance than expected and easily punched into the chest cavity. He removed the blade and stood over Rylan. He was surprised that triumph didn’t fill him after a hard-won fight, and was worried to note that no pity or remorse filled him either. Instead, he felt a grim sort of satisfaction that the constant threat and scheming bully was dead.

A familiar swarm of warm blue motes of light floated up from the body on the ground and hung still for a moment. As Alex watched them, breathing heavily, the entire world seemed quiet. The motes rushed into his chest, and a sensation washed over him as golden motes joined the blue ones in a small snowstorm of energy around his body.

The ward barrier around them flickered as its creator’s life ebbed away, and the magical energy disappeared. It faded from existence with little fanfare, and Alex realized that the world was anything but quiet and still. He could hear screams and shouts from a short distance away and recognized the sounds of combat.

Prick! We won!

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“Yeah,” Alex said, unsure of how to feel at his young companion’s mirrored sense of satisfaction at the Tyrant’s death. He wiped his blade clean before returning it to his spatial pouch.

With the barrier gone, he could see the small, pitched battle unfolding near the rift. The ritual continued, and the Rift pulsed with ominous energy as insane levels of mana gathered around it. Somewhere in the chaos, he knew that Jonathan and the elite teams were fighting to stop the large-scale ritual magic.

My magic.

“Val, can you see them?” he asked, shielding his left eye from the amassing mana.

Valtherion launched from his shoulder and flared his wings as he gained altitude.

Fighting with point-ears here.

His companion banked ahead and to the left, directly toward the center of the camp.

Alex activated his [Feather Step] ability and moved out of the area where he and Rylan had been fighting and closed the distance on the ongoing battle. He skidded to a halt and looked down at the lines of the ritual that spread from the Rift and spiraled out into different directions of the encampment.

The ritual sprawled across a clearing that had been made around the Rift, and as he approached, the air grew even thicker with mana. It was more concentrated than he’d ever felt before, and the energy made his skin prickle. He had to squint his left eye from the sheer, overwhelming amount of color.

From a closer vantage point, he could see how the lines channeled energy toward the tear in reality. The Rift itself had grown in size, and he forced himself to focus on what he could do rather than gawk at the portal.

Scattered around the space to the left and right of the portal, both elite teams fought pairs of sun elves. The flash of mana and skills signaled hard-fought battles against the mages.

Closer to the Rift, Jonathan’s team fought against two sun elves of their own. But the elves weren’t the composed, elegant mages that Alex had seen in his home a few days before. They were frenzied and had erratic motions that reminded him of Rylan’s enhanced form. Their tan skin marred with a similar purple rune, though both were etched into their brow rather than their cheek.

One elf wielded twin curved blades that seemed to flow and leave lines of golden light in their wake. The other manipulated the air itself to send cutting waves toward Jonathan’s team from a range.

From his distance, Alex could see Jonathan’s team moving with amazing coordination. Damien and Martin engaged the blade wielder, alternating between offense and defense. Teresa maintained a perimeter and watched for a signal from Jon or Greg. The latter of which stood back, his eyes glowing white as he coordinated their movements through his speech ability. Leila darted between both conflicts, reminding Alex of Olivia’s darting attacks and opportunistic fighting style.

At the center of it all stood Jonathan. Unlike his team’s coordinated dance, Jon fought with a controlled fury, and each strike that landed on one of the elven barriers landed with immense force. His eyes were clear and focused, and he communicated almost constantly with his team, which Alex found a bit surprising as he’d seemed like a quieter individual.

Alex continued to close the distance and stood near Greg, unsure where to join and help in the fight. Greg was the only one at a range, while the others were all within melee range, making casting spells much harder.

“Alex!” Jonathan called. There was a pause as he deflected a wave of energy with a skill and then called out to his team, who shifted their positions. “They left these ones back while the others retreated into the Rift. They activated those marks on their face and went berserk to buy time for the rest to escape!”

Alex squinted and looked at the Rift. “They’re retreating into the Rift? I thought they were trying to break it open?”

Jonathan grunted as he blocked another strike from the elf, and it seemed like that had changed his mind. He raised his voice above all the chaos and yelled, “Greg, fill him in. Team! Bravo Protocol. Now.”

His team responded instantly, disengaging from opponents and returning to predetermined positions. The coordinated retreat happened so smoothly that Alex knew it was a drill that must have been practiced countless times.

Greg’s voice seemed to appear from directly next to Alex, and while they were already close enough to talk to one another in normal tones, his voice sounded as if he were speaking at a normal volume in a quiet library. “That’s the thing. We believe that they’re positioning themselves to pour out when it breaks open. Only sacrificing a few while ensuring an army waits on the other side. Instead of 50 of them fighting to the death here, they leave a handful behind to buy time, and when it breaks, they’re ready to emerge with the advantage of numbers.”

The strategy made sense to Alex, and he felt his stomach drop at the realization of what they faced. They were stopping not just the ritual but an invasion force.

As the space around Jonathan cleared, Alex witnessed a transformation that raised both of his eyebrows. The man’s body tensed, and his muscles bulged beneath his tactical gear. A red glow began to appear in his eyes, intensifying as the rest of the process continued. Veins across his arms and neck pulsed briefly with the same red light.

With a roar that seemed to shake the air, Jonathan held both of his axes out to his side. Alex could swear that the red in his eyes had turned into something fueled by magic or skill and left a small trail of red energy behind them wherever he moved through the smoke.

He charged forward with a reckless abandon that matched the elves’ own. The first elf barely had time to raise its blades before Jonathan was upon it and delivered such a powerful downward strike that it shattered one of its curved swords and sent the elf flying backward into the side of a tent. It seemed like the tent fell in slow motion as the berserker moved on to his next target.

The second elf was more prepared and had time to raise one of their strong, warded barriers around himself before sending a torrent of mana-infused wind at Jon. To Alex’s shock, the large man simply pushed through it, and each cut and injury that he sustained healed almost as quickly as it formed. The healing was so fast that Alex looked quickly at Jon’s team to confirm that none of them were casting healing spells on him.

Alex watched as Jonathan closed the distance in seconds and attempted to grab the elf, though his hand was met with resistance from the barrier. Frustrated, the elf hissed at Jonathan, and the human just yelled back at him in mirrored frustration. Alex saw the mana begin to charge up around the elf, but Jon gave it no time to cast more magic.

With his mana spreading out around him, Jonathan attempted two more grabs at the elf before simply barreling into him and knocking him over.

Once prone, the berserker began repeatedly smashing at the barrier, uncaring of its resistance. Alex watched slack-jawed as he hit it hard enough to have one of his hatchets break, only to throw it away with contempt and begin beating on it with his bare hands.

Greg pulled Alex’s attention away from the scene, though. “We’ll watch Jon’s back. You need to figure out how to stop this thing.”

“Shit,” Alex said as he recognized he’d been wasting precious seconds watching the fight. He looked down at his feet and traced the white lines on the ground. “How do I even stop this?”

He said the words to himself, but Greg must have heard him with his skill. “How should I know? You’re the mage, right?”

Alex grunted in response and waved at him to end the skill while kneeling at the edge of the nearest lines of the pattern. Careful not to touch any of the lines, he used his Heavenly Eye to watch the flows of mana. He tested a thread of mana to interfere with the energy, but the threads simply slid away from the ritual lines as though they were a slick, oily substance.

Interested, Alex lowered himself closer to the ground and saw that the lines were not merely surface level. Instead, they seemed to be carved into the earth and then filled with some sort of liquid metal to fill in the lines.

“Maelis,” Alex muttered, “what the hell am I looking at here?”

“How am I supposed to know, kid? I don’t know anything about this magic. Show me a rune, and I might be able to help.”

“Fuck.” Alex looked around, assessing what he could of the layout that he’d seen and studied from their vantage point. He knew enough about rituals to find a spot that might be safe to break open and allow mana to leak from their funnel to the Rift.

He knew it couldn’t be broken at just any point, so he moved quickly back into the encampment toward the outer edge of the ritual. He found the location he’d been looking for, between two catalyst nodes, where one of the back ends of a triangle touched the outer ring of the structure, and removed a dagger from his pouch. He got down on his hands and knees in the dirt near the spot he wanted to focus on and started with the point of the blade.

Nothing seemed to affect the metallic substance that the elves used to lay the foundations of the ritual. He attempted to scrape, slash, and cut at the white lines. Even flipping the dagger around and bashing it with the pommel of the weapon, it continued to operate as normal.

An enormous pulse of energy flooded the area, and Alex looked up at the Rift. Just in front of it, Jonathan broke through the elf’s shield but didn’t stop his pounding. Past the brutal scene, Alex saw the Rift greedily absorbing all of the mana it was being fed. He activated his Heavenly eye and checked its readout to see if anything had changed or if there was any indicator that it was close to breaking.

He’d only scanned a handful of Rifts upon entering, as it was something that the Guild kept constant track of. But seeing that there wasn’t a change at all in what was shown between the current Rift state and a normal readout, he cursed in frustration.

The Rift pulsed again, and Alex jumped back from the line he stood nearest to. The white lines that made up the ritual’s circle began to glow and produce a radiating heat that pulsed in time with the mana fluctuations.

A magical fire started at the center of the rift and sped along the ritual lines as if on a railing. It reminded him of watching a wick on an explosive being set off, how the flame would burn hot and fast and travel along the predetermined line of the fuse. The difference here was that the flame was hot enough that he needed to take a second step back, and it didn’t go out where it traveled. It spiraled out through the entire pattern until it met with the catalyst nodes at the outer edges of the circle.

“Oh hell,” Alex said as he watched with wide eyes.