Aninke stood at stage 7 of Ascension 1, as did most of his family members present.
He was adept in lightning yaicraft and carried a skillset that had proven decisive in every engagement this territory had thrown at him before that day. The paper giants were a different matter entirely and he knew it, which sat poorly with him given everything his family name represented.
He had been raised on the Ezhaloch legacy. Loyalty to the king, protection of their territory, a lineage that had never once stepped back from its duty regardless of the cost.
Strength was not simply something he admired, it was the framework through which he understood the world and his place in it. Which made standing in front of something he could not easily overcome a particular kind of uncomfortable.
He had noticed the unknown woman some time before he had the opportunity to act on it. She had been holding the street alone, fending off attacks with a composure and output that had no business belonging to someone operating without backup in these conditions.
He was genuinely shocked by it. He filed the admiration away immediately. There was duty to attend to and the two things were not compatible right now.
He summoned a lance of condensed electricity, threading Ezhaloch yai through the shaft until the charge built to a level that made the air around it crackle, and threw it at the largest obstacle in the street.
It was intercepted cleanly. The giant's hand reshaped mid-air and swept the lance aside without what appeared to be any particular effort.
Aninke was already preparing the next sequence of attacks when movement caught his eye. The woman was running toward him, ascending a staircase of stacked crystal cubes, closing the distance fast.
Then a missile caught the cubes beneath her feet and the whole structure came apart and she dropped.
He moved to jump after her.
But he soon stopped.
It was because she did not need it.
From the ground she crushed something in her palm and every cube she had deployed across the street began to dissolve and spin, merging into a single roaring cyclone of flame that rose to match the height of the paper giant and moved toward it with a momentum that made the air warp around it.
Aninke stood where he was and watched it go.
The fire tornado met the paper giant and the heat it threw off was enough to ionize the air around the impact point, the atmosphere itself crackling and shifting at the edges of the flame column. Aninke watched from where he stood, genuinely stunned by the scale of it.
Then something else happened that stunned him more.
The tornado vanished mid-path. Not dissipated, not intercepted. Simply gone from where it had been, and then present, instantaneously, directly against the giant's chest, the full mass of it arriving without having crossed the intervening space at all.
"Did it just teleport."
He said it to no one in particular. The question was mostly for himself, his mind working to categorize what he had just witnessed. Teleporting an attack of that magnitude with that precision required a spatial yaicraft user of considerable level. Looking at her, that did not fit. Whatever she was using, it was not that. It was something else entirely, something he did not have a clean name for.
Above the street, Cale had not been idle.
"I cannot just let you hog the spotlight by yourself, can I."
He floated in the air above the battlefield, yai surging visibly around him, building into something with weight and structure.
"Oh, chain that binds the evils. Unbind the fate of thee." He extended his hand. "Chainez: Entarlya."
Chains manifested in the air above him, dozens of them, coiling and converging and wrapping around each other until they had formed a single enormous lance crackling with concentrated yai. It launched toward the paper Optimus Prime with the kind of velocity that left a visible trail in the air behind it and struck the giant in the same region Zelaine's tornado had already compromised.
Cale dropped from the air and landed beside Mavine on the ground below, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Mavine was watching the battlefield with wide eyes, her hands loose at her sides, the awe sitting plainly on her face.
*Are they really humans,* she thought.
Up where he had been floating, Cale had already worked out what Zelaine had done.
*Zelaine's reserves must be nearly empty after that.* He turned it over as he landed, fitting the pieces together. *What she did was combine both yaicrafts simultaneously. She melted every cube she could produce in that moment, the internal friction converting directly into heat output, generating a tornado of actual flame rather than yai-approximated fire. Enormous output. Enormous cost.*
*But that alone would not have landed. A mass that large moving through open air at normal speed gives the target time to react, time to reshape, time to intercept. She knew that.*
*So she used the other one.*
The erasure of cause to place the effect directly. Her time yaicraft, applied not to herself but to the attack itself. The instant the tornado left her hand she erased the cause of its travel, the path, the time it required to cross the distance, all of it removed.
The effect remained. The flame whirlpool simply existed at the giant's chest, arriving without having moved there, leaving it no interval in which to react or transform.
The yai cost of the erasure itself was not the problem. The problem was the stored time she had been accumulating for future use. She had spent almost all of it in that single application.
Cale exhaled slowly.
*Perfectly combined. Still as troublesome as ever.*
The paper giant's spark core was swallowed by Ascension 2 heat and the smell hit immediately, ozone and burning ink spreading thick across the street, the kind of smell that got into the back of the throat and stayed there.
The giant blazed.
In its final moments it flailed, vast and indiscriminate, razor edged paper limbs sweeping through the air around it in wide arcs, catching anything within reach.
Everyone on the street moved. Nobody was slow enough to get caught.
One would have thought that was the end of it.
Cale pointed upward.
The great book was still there. It had always been there, motionless above everything, dwarfing even the tallest of the paper robots the way a building dwarfs the things moving at its base.
Its pages had been tearing themselves out in rapid succession since the battle turned, sheet after massive sheet peeling away and dropping into the air below.
But the pages were not falling.
They were vanishing. Disappearing before they reached the street, dissolving mid-air, and with each one that went the yai signature of the book thinned, bleeding out into the atmosphere in slow steady increments that both Zelaine and Cale could feel without having to look directly at it.
"The pages are disappearing on their own," Zelaine said.
She watched it quietly, arms loose at her sides, her breathing still working to catch up with the last twenty minutes of her life. The relief was real. She did not let it be the only thing.
The perpetrator was still out there somewhere. Someone had built all of this, had orchestrated the book and the fleet and the timing of it, and that person had not shown themselves once during the entire engagement.
Which meant they had either fled the moment things turned or they were still present and waiting on something she had not identified yet.
And the town. Where were its residents. The streets had been empty since before the battle started, which was its own kind of answer and not a comfortable one.
She had no clean conclusions. Only questions that would need to wait.
The great book came apart in silence, its final pages dissolving into nothing, its yai signature releasing into the air in one last slow exhale and then gone entirely.
The eerie quiet of the town settled back over the street like it had never left, broken only by the sounds of the Ezhaloch reinforcements moving through the aftermath around them.
Zelaine turned to find Cale.
She had a great deal to ask him.
****
Pain and exhaustion had stopped registering. There was no space for either. Every second spent deliberating was a second the distance between them and Fredo's group shortened, and that was simply a fact he could not afford to ignore.
They ran deeper.
The walls on either side were dense with symbols again, more intricate than anything he had seen further back, the kind of markings that under any other circumstances would have demanded he stop and look properly. He did not spare them a glance.
"How is there snow on the ground down here."
It was accumulating in the crevices of the stone floor, thin and pale, sitting undisturbed in a place that had no business being cold enough to produce it. The hollow mountain doing something the hollow mountain had no explanation for. He filed it away and kept running.
His right hand held the lamp. His left held Leishna's hand. He put everything else into his legs.
"Run straight for about a mile," Leishna said, slightly breathless beside him. "There is an exit point at the end."
Atiya followed the direction without question.
The passage maintained a width that fit them both without forcing single file, which was something. Fredo's group would have to manage the same corridor with considerably more bodies, which would slow them.
That was the optimistic reading. The less optimistic reading accounted for the possibility that the village had a speedster among them, in which case the width of the passage was irrelevant entirely.
Atiya was Ascension 2 stage 5. His speed was not something most opponents could casually match. He held onto that.
The real threat was not the villagers closing from behind.
The real threat was something stopping them from the front.
The lamplight reached further ahead and found eyes.
A horde of yai beasts filled the passage, packed close together, every set of eyes fixed on the light and the two figures holding it. The hunger in their gaze was immediate and specific and left no room for interpretation.
Atiya looked at them.
He looked at the lamp in his hand.
He looked at Leishna.
What was he supposed to do. Nothing except fight.
Atiya released Leishna's hand and summoned his three portals, Sajibu coming to his grip in the same motion, the staff solid and familiar despite everything his body was currently running on.
"Tremetus."
He swung. The construct manifested as a ring of magenta light that widened and flattened into a disc in the same instant, travelling the width of the passage cleanly, and the horde split.
Every body in the front line divided at the midsection, ichor spreading dark and immediate across the snow dusted floor, the cold turning the smell of it sharp and metallic in the enclosed space.
Fourteen percent of yai had been consumed gone from his reservoir for that skill.
Neither of them looked at what they had left behind. They stepped through and kept moving, feet finding purchase on the slick floor, the lamplight swinging ahead of them into the dark.
Half a mile more. Roughly. The exit point Leishna had described was close enough now to be a real thing rather than a direction.
About a mile behind them, the villagers had found the passage.
"Footprints here, fresh ones. No doubt about it. They came this way."
The one who said it was already sprinting, part of a leading group of three speedsters pulling well ahead of the larger body of roughly a hundred following behind them. The corridor gave the speedsters room to work and they were using it.
"You two push ahead," the older one among them commanded, eyes forward. "Intercept them before they reach the end."
The two peeled off without a word, accelerating, the gap between them and their quarry beginning to close in earnest.