The sky kept filling.
The thousands of fluttering pages did not stop at one figure. Flanking the central giant on both sides, more shapes were folding themselves into existence, pulling from the endless swarm of books still churning overhead.
More towering figures, each one distinct and enormous, their origami frames locking into places.
They darkened the sky as they rose, blotting out what little light remained above the rooftops until the street below sat in a deep papery shadow.
"Bumblebee, Megatron, yada yada yada." Zelaine's excitement from a moment ago had curdled into something considerably grimmer.
She looked up at the fleet assembling above them and said, "I would genuinely rather hand my ass to a goblin than deal with these papers."
Then they moved.
All of them at once, a single synchronized advance, descending toward the street in a stuttering low-frame motion like something rendered at the wrong speed, every joint and fold and layered surface vibrating as they came.
The sound of it was immense, millions of paper edges catching the air simultaneously, a dry sawing roar that pressed against the chest from the inside.
The weight of the shadow they cast deepened as they closed the distance.
Zelaine planted her feet, her hoodie sleeves snapping back in the wind churned up by the descending mass, the cyclone still burning in her palm and feeling considerably less impressive than it had sixty seconds ago.
She glanced sideways at Mavine.
"Mavine baby, if you have got any main character hidden powers in there somewhere, now would be a really fucking good time."
The battle between the paper transformers and zelaine had started and was at a crucial moment.
It had been almost an hour since the battle began. The paper transformers unleashed paper bullets and missiles towards them.
Zelaine, dragging mavine along, dodged and took shelter momentarily inside the buildings, occasionally striking the gigantic origamis with large cubes.
The cubes were strong enough to decapitate a small robot. However, the larger ones were more sturdy and dangerous.
They unleashed tons of more missiles towards the buildings, forcing Zelaine to step out from her hiding spots.
Mavine had stopped trying to contribute to any of this. She stayed close, moved when pulled, and surrendered the rest entirely to Zelaine.
Seeing them close to itself, one of the middle-sized robots stomped its feet towards them. Zelaine hurriedly set up a defensive barrier made of piling cubes.
"Aaaaaaargh!"
She groaned, having no choice but to endure multiple stomps until she dashed and shot a powerful laser-like shot from one of the cubes.
Zelaine was a genius specializing in one of the two most powerful yaicraft. One of them is crystal and heat.
Simply put, she was adept in yaicraft related to crystals, and by creating constant friction inside those cubes, she could muster an insane amount of heat.
She was at Ascension 2 and at the 5th stage of it too. She had modified her yaicraft to suit her needs and was very powerful.
The laser of heat she shot pierced the figure, and the paper burnt away almost completely. Still, there were more than tens of middle-sized paper robots and three large robots left—which, of course, didn't include the largest of them that looked exactly like Optimus Prime.
There was a slim chance of victory.
A scene played in Zelaine's mind.
It was sometime after she began her training under Atiya's foster mom.
"You have two specialties, that are both rare. So tell me which you want to code first. Crystals or Chronokinesis," she had asked young Zelaine about a hundred and twenty-nine years ago.
"Which is cooler and has more aura?" Zelaine asked with excitement that time.
"Chronokinesis is more complicated and really not suitable for combat, leaning more towards support, and cubes are suitable for combat. But I suggest you code chronokinesis first as it is manipulation of time. Although probably no more than 3 people had achieved 4th Ascension in chronokinesis, you... let me be honest. You are the greatest genius I have seen. You can do it."
"Isn't time manipulation a sin?"
"It's fine unless you are Julius the Wizard King. Probably you don't have the ambition to take over the constellation. Anyway, even if you did, heh, that would be an interesting tale."
"Okay, then let's start."
The time manipulation she learned and became adept in was more about cause and effects. She specialized in the erasure of cause and placing the effect directly, given some condition was met.
As for the yaicraft, similar to Atiya, she had to rely heavily on coding formulas to circuits.
Zelaine never preferred to use her time-related powers other than some extremely powerful but small-scale skills like rewinding a specific part of the body to heal it and recovering yai energy faster by accelerating it.
Right now, too, she had not lost much of her yai power due to her second yaicraft. The yai energy spent to use her crystal yaicraft was huge, however, her recovery rate was also extremely fast.
Zelaine shot a few more lasers to the middle-sized paper transformers and luckily one more of them bit the dust.
'Fuck it, my recovery rate isn't helping at all. I can't continue for more than twenty minutes. Fuck, I need to get out of here... I need to leave that baggage. But if I escape without that baggage.....'
Zelaine thought to herself, her eyes rolling furiously, searching for any kind of opportunity.
She looked over at Mavine, who was still struggling to even watch properly, looking completely out of place in a war against giant origami robots.
If she was going to survive this, she either had to use a sinful level of time manipulation or find a way to make that baggage carry its own weight.
She had many things to consider. Although the enemy had numbers, they were still weak, and Zelaine could defeat them in ten minutes if she used her strongest attacks. However, that would deplete her Yai, and her accelerating recovery would not be able to handle the sudden drain.
Furthermore, the enemies appeared out of fluttering pages and were mostly orchestrated by a Yai user. Unless that orchestrator was eliminated, victory could not be guaranteed.
So what was she supposed to do? To her, life was most precious; she decided the best course of action was to flee. However, the other problems still lingered with her future plans.
Then a voice came from above.
"Vampy! Is that really you!"
Zelaine turned toward it. Rooftop of the building to her left, a figure standing at the edge against the dark sky.
She stared.
The shock arrived first and the happiness came in right behind it, both of them hitting at the same time in a way that left her expression doing several things at once.
"...Cale."
The name came out quietly, barely above the noise of the battle around them.
****
They stood in front of the last engraving for a moment, both of them looking at it without speaking. Then they moved on.
The revelations carved into the walls of the ancient mine had given Atiya a great deal to turn over. The truth he had been assembling piece by piece for a long time was finally more complete than fragmented, but complete was not the same as whole.
Every answer had added at least one question he did not have yet.
His doubt kept returning to the same point. The Ascension 3 yai user who had coded the curse.
For a skill of that scale and permanence to hold continuously, the coder had to remain within the vicinity of the village.
Had to have remained within it for the entire duration. Centuries, possibly longer.
Which meant he had never left.
Atiya turned that over quietly as they walked, the lamplight moving ahead of them down the sloping passage.
If the coder had never left then there was only one place he could be. Somewhere beneath the mountain. Somewhere like here.
'The survivor,' he thought. 'What if it is him.'
It would make the shelter make sense. It would explain the letter. What it did not explain was the animosity, the decision to destroy an entire village over a humiliation and then stay within reach of it for centuries, coding himself into the consequence of his own act.
'It does not add up.'
He turned to ask Leishna what she thought.
She had two fingers pressed to her lips, eyes straight ahead, the lamp held perfectly still.
Atiya closed his mouth.
'Come to think of it she has been completely silent for a while.'
He had been talking to himself.
'Something is behind us.'
He could not have been more right.
A low sound rolled up the passage from somewhere in the dark at their backs, deep and resonant, the kind of sound that the body registers before the ears fully process it.
Guuuurr.
Neither of them moved.
Something lurched out of the dark behind them and Atiya moved before he had fully processed what it was, snatching Leishna sideways with one arm and summoning both the portal and Sajibu in the same motion.
The staff came to his hand solid and familiar.
Yai beasts had their own hierarchy, the same way humans did, though humans had simplified it down to a clean classification system. S at the top, then A, B, C, D in descending order of strength and influence.
Knowing where a beast sat in that system mattered. It determined everything about how you approached it.
Atiya had no idea what class the thing in front of him was.
What he did know was that the sight of it had genuinely unsettled him for a full second, which did not happen often.
"Why is there a miniature T-Rex with wings and fur down here."
It was exactly that. A compact dinosaur-shaped body covered in dense fur, two broad wings folded against its back, forearms ending in thick clawed hands. It filled the passage from wall to wall and its eyes caught the lamplight and held it.
It lurched forward again, shrieking, maw angling directly toward him.
Atiya tilted his body clear and swung. Sajibu caught one of its fingers on the way past and sliced clean through it. The beast's speed was considerable and it sidestepped the follow through with a fluidity that something its size should have had problem atleast in theory, creating a brief gap between them.
Atiya took it. He stepped back fast, put distance between them, and positioned a portal near the creature and a second one close to himself.
'Tremetus would finish this quickly but it would take a chunk of yai with it. Repeated slicing is safer on reserves.' He tracked the beast as it reset itself in the passage. 'But its shrieking is going to pull every other thing in this cave down on us.'
He had not finished the thought when a yai circle bloomed at the creature's mouth.
A vault of flame discharged toward him.
'Thanks.'
He shifted the near portal into the path of the flame a fraction of a second before it arrived. The fire passed through, crossed the linked space between the two portals, and emerged from the one positioned beside the dinosaur's left side. It caught the creature's left hand directly.
SCREEEEECH.
The shriek tore down the passage in both directions, bouncing off the rock walls and coming back amplified.
Atiya stood in the ringing silence after it and looked at the beast and looked at the darkness behind it and thought about everything else that lived in this mountain and had ears.
*I am so screwed.*
"You said you had an apparatus that repels yai beasts."
Atiya did not take his eyes off the wounded dinosaur as he said it.
From somewhere back up the passage, beyond the curve where the dark swallowed the path, came the sound of movement. Multiple sources. Getting closer.
Leishna ignored his question entirely.
"Bravo," she said pleasantly. "We are going to die."
They came around the bend a moment later. Not more dinosaurs. What emerged from the dark was worse in a different way, shapes that did not correspond to anything in Atiya's memory and his memory covered a century of the world Inteja had raised him in.
Limbs arranged in configurations that made no biological sense. Proportions that the eye kept trying to correct and failing. Things that moved in ways that suggested the rules applying to them were not quite the same rules applying to everything else.
He looked at them and looked at the passage ahead and looked at Leishna.
"We have to go deeper," she said.
He had absolutely no desire to go deeper but had no fucking other choice.