"Wait!"

Chenchen opted not to wait. Her hands were now covered with some kind of gauntlets, too small and light to be strictly armor. Their exact purpose became clear when Chenchen swung her arm much faster than anyone present could track. A clang sounded, and by the time anyone's eyes could focus, Tauncy was crumpling to the ground, a hand-sized dent in the side of his skull.

Bhul opened his mouth up to scream, and Ashe closed it for him so hard Marco could hear his neck break when his head whipped back.

Just like that, like magic, the paralysis cleared. Marco shoved himself to his feet just in time to catch Chenchen, who was falling once more.

"That buff did something. Cleared my head, for just a moment. How did you know it would?" she asked.

"Honestly?" Marco gave her an apologetic smile. "I didn't. I hoped you'd make me strong enough to break free."

"Well, so long as it worked." Ashe allowed Marco to set her back in her place behind her stand. "I'd go with you, but I'm guessing you can't spam that buff."

"No. It might not even work closer to Quill."

"Then that's that," she said. "Just do one thing for me."

"Yeah?" Marco patted her shoulder as she started to drift off. She had spent whatever energy she had left on that one big blitz. "Name it."

"Stop sneaking around. Just go straight through. If those people out there are anything like I was, they won't know it's you. Just don't draw any more attention to yourself than you need to, bash through, and make it happen."

Marco nodded. Looking from team member to team member, he found none of them seemed to have a problem with that idea. Brushing the dust off his clothes, he slapped each of them on the back in turn as they turned back towards the direct route to Quill's. With any luck, they'd get there soon.

—

“Aethe?” A couple minutes later, Marco and his crew were lost in a sea of illusions. He looked to his archer, who had been examining the area with her eyes that saw more the entire time. “Where are we headed?”

“There’s no way to tell for sure, but I think the power gets stronger that way.” She pointed in a direction that looked the same as any other direction, a sort of fractal town that kept going forever, repeating on itself again and again in a way that defied normal navigation. “I’m able to see through these illusions just the slightest bit, but it’s harder that way.”

Marco looked inside himself to the temple and system-driven parts. Since he had met Quill, there had always been a faint awareness that he was out there, a rival who held a power much like Marco’s and who he was supposed to come to terms with in one way or another. In the direction that Aethe pointed out, that feeling got stronger. It wasn’t absolute confirmation, but it was as good of a guess as he’d have.

They moved on. Every now and again the illusion around them would shift, and a bearish warrior or glowing magic user would burst out of nowhere almost on top of them. The first few were problems that could be avoided in the sense that they were after other people, or else not so far gone that they’d pause their attacks against Marco and his crew.

The third or fourth took some additional convincing in the form of a lightning shock from Elisa, some arrow fire from Aethe, and a skull-rattling, unconsciousness-producing thwack from Riv. It didn’t kill the person, probably, but Marco still winced as they crumpled. There was no time to stop and verify they were okay, nor any sense that they’d be safe to do it. They hustled on until the next threat found them.

The next problem was a robed mage none of them recognized. Marco got to him first as he burst through the illusory veil around them, stabbing and shooting before the mage could do much with the crackling, purple power they were generating in his hands. For some reason, the rapier and bullets slid off like they had hit a slick of oil over a diamond, doing nothing.

“He’s shielded, Marco!” Elisa’s electricity hit and curled around the mage harmlessly. “You can’t get through that!”

“Then how do we hurt him?”

“Time,” Elisa said. “We have to wear him down.” She ducked behind Riv as some of the power flicked out, almost driving the Sturdy to his knees. “But he’s stronger than us. It’s a bad matchup.”

“Then we run!” Marco yelled. “We keep going!”

He didn’t have time to figure out if that was even a good idea before Riv glowed gold, swinging his club from high above his head to low, then onward into the mage. It wasn’t enough to break the shield, but apparently whatever method of protection the magic user was generating for himself wasn’t all-powerful at stopping conventional physics. The club picked him up, shield and all, as the wizard disappeared into the illusion, rocketing away from them like a comet.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Riv took a deep breath and steadied himself. “Twenty percent. I can’t do that many more times, Marco. We need to move.”

That was, somehow, the last of the major threats they faced before everything just stopped. Marco had to assume that they had cleared the town proper at some point and that was the reason that they no longer ran into over-leveled, over-powered and temporarily insane threats that could have crushed them. He couldn’t even tell if they were traveling slower, as he assumed they were on the hills outside of town, because he simply couldn’t tell from the surroundings how far they were traveling over a given period of time.

He followed the buzzing in his soul and Aethe’s vague confirmation of it. They might be getting themselves hopelessly lost, but if they were, there was nothing any of them could do about it. Outside of burning his buff, there was no chance of anything changing until they got where they were going, and even then he didn’t know how it would change even if the system swore it would.

And then, like magic, it did. Between one step and the next, the illusion was gone, replaced with a normal view of a normal cabin, a small shack in the middle of a grassy area.

“We must have gotten outside of the zone of effect,” Marco said. “This isn’t anything I’ve seen before.”

“No,” Aethe said. “We are still in the illusion. It just changed.”

“How do you know?”

“Because.” Aethe gripped her bow so hard Marco thought it might crack as the door opened and a tall elf man stepped out. “This is my home. That is my father.”

“What?”

“That is my father. That is how he looked before… no.” Aethe’s head went to the side, where a group of near-identical elf men were approaching. In the center of them was another man, taller and stronger than the rest, judging by his appearance. “No.”

“You can’t be serious. Aethe, what happened here? Is it…”

“It’s not dangerous. It’s just not a good memory.”

The men reached her father and began talking. Her father nodded along as the commander of the troop said something none of them could hear, and her father’s face dropped.

“My mother was already gone. The time an elf child has with their parents is limited anyway. He was supposed to have more of it.”

“So this is a painful memory.” Marco let his hand wrap around his sword. “Should we… I don’t know. Fight them?”

Aethe shook her head. “It wouldn’t help. What happened happened. Quill can’t change that. Not in a way that matters.”

The scene shifted slightly. It was later in the day now, and the sun was brighter. The troop was at rest when the door to the shack opened once again and Aethe’s father emerged in the same military gear the group had worn. A small child, no older than five or six, followed after him.

Her father knelt and said a few words to her, then joined the group. With no delay, they started heading away from the cabin.

“This is what he wanted to hurt me with. Right herem” she said. “Which one do you think my father is?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” All the people in the group looked the same to Marco now. “I lost track.”

“So did I, back then. It was the last I ever saw of him and I didn’t even know which one he was.”

There was a flash of movement in that moment. Everyone was so wrapped up in the scene there almost wasn’t time to react as a claw extended out of the fabric of their illusory reality, aimed straight at Aethe’s neck. She dodged with a look on her face that Marco couldn’t quite interpret before shooting a single, unaimed arrow into the open space in front of her. There was a grunt as the claw flashed back out of their view and the scene changed.

This time, it was a small thatched-hut village, one inhabited entirely by small man-like creatures except for the resident of a single stick-and-rope cage that contained a frightened, Sturdy-looking man. Marco was surprised by how young Riv looked in that moment.

“Oh, hah,” Riv said. “Of course he picked this for me.”

Aethe tilted her head at the sight of Riv in a cage. “This is a traumatic memory?”

“I mean, it wasn’t nice,” Riv said. “It’s just that it looks worse than it is. This is where I met Marco and Elisa. It was the worst moment of my life, though it’s just that my life was pretty boring outside of that. Is that really the worst you could find, Quill?”

It apparently was. When the claw flashed out again, it was aimed at Elisa but blocked by the combined efforts of all four of them. Riv moved forward after the claw, swinging his club again and again but making no contact with anything. Apparently Quill had fled pretty quickly after his technique failed to do anything to Riv.

“See, you idiot? You can’t just keep trying the same thing.”

Riv laughed, his face distorting a bit as he did, like someone had touched the surface of a bucket of water and marred a reflection. The scene froze around Marco as his friends froze with it and then broke entirely.

Marco found himself standing in the burning wreckage of Quillton, surrounded by blood, battle, fire, and corpses. Three of those corpses were familiar. Riv’s throat had been cut, it seemed, while Elisa had been killed by something unknown that left only a small splotch of blood on her stomach. That they were dead was unquestionable. There was no looking as they did without that being true.

Aethe was the worst of it. She was almost unrecognizable. Whatever force had hit her when Marco was in the thrall of the illusion had left hardly a single bone unbroken. Marco felt a wave of nausea almost empty his stomach as he looked down at his friends, bringing his sword up as if he could stab the sight of it away. He was watching his friends be fooled the whole time, not resisting in the slightest as this happened to them. And now it was too late.

It was the fact that he had his sword up and a desperate hunch that saved him. He wheeled around, stabbing almost exactly behind him just as the claw emerged from illusion again, catching Quill far before he was ready and pulling in a pained scream that seemed like it came from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

And then, in a blink, his friends were with him again, just outside of Quill's mansion. Within a small territory surrounding the property, everything was normal. Just outside of that, their universe was bordered with a black nothingness that seemed to block all light and sound.