She screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night, the sound tearing through the quiet office and presumably reaching every room in the building.
In truth she had been at it for two days straight.
The mathematics itself was not the impossible part. The two second time limit was, because sustaining that pace of processing for two unbroken hours would literally fry a normal person's brain, so she had crafted focus crystals that extended peak concentration across a full day and used them as fuel for each attempt.
Even for her the pressure had been immense. She had failed eighteen times, and because the accuracy percentage only displayed at the very end of each two hour block she had no way of knowing whether she was on track until it was already over.
Eighteen times she had sat through two hours of relentless equations and received the result only at the end, and eighteen times it had not been enough.
Thirty six hours of pure mental agony before the nineteenth attempt finally cleared the mark.
Thirty eight hours total.
The moment the enactment complete notification dissolved from the surface of the circuit the adrenaline dropped out of her all at once, cleanly and completely, like a switch thrown.
Zelaine hit the bed and did not arrange herself or bothered to pull the blanket at all, just went down and stayed down, falling into deep sleep.
From her bed through the window she could see the sky outside, ashen and watercolor gray, the kind of morning that had no strong opinions about itself.
She had been asleep for fifteen hours straight.
Her stomach woke her up properly, a growl came in complaint, reminding her that she had missed two full days of food.
For someone who ate ten men's worth in a single sitting this was something disastrous.
She had biscuits as snacks.
It was past nine. She grabbed the packets without sitting up fully, tore them open by feel, and began eating with barely eyes open.
Thirty packets gone in five minutes while she stared at the gray rectangle of sky through the window.
She followed them with fifteen cans of beer, which reduced her hunger from unbearable to merely present.
Her gaze found the stack of cup noodles.
She summoned her cube, positioned a large container above it, poured in ten five liter jars of water, set the cube to heat, and waited for it to boil while yawning with her whole body.
Only then did she look at her phone.
'Messages, miissed calls. Mostly from Cale.'
*Crap, I forgot about that.*
She also had a reply Cale telling her he got a reply from Aninke Ezhaloch, responding to the message he had sent him during the salon investigation. She noted it and set the phone down as the water came to a boil.
*Eat first, think later.*
She made the noodles and ate them while watching videos on her phone and did not think about anything in particular for a while.
When she finally emerged from her room she had not brushed her teeth in two days and was aware of it, so she was going to brush.
She shuffled into the living area.
Aninke Ezhaloch was sitting on the sofa talking to the other Odd Jobs members, he look comfortable and in eased as if he visited regularly.
"Back among the living after being mummified," Cale said, taking in her appearance. "You should take better care of yourself, Zelaine."
*What is he doing here,* she thought, glancing at Aninke.
"Hello everyone, lovely to see you all well," she said, her face carrying the expression of someone whose mind was already somewhere else entirely.
The Precognition skill was sitting under her skin like something impatient, and she wanted to test it as soon as the taste of two day old biscuits was no longer her primary sensory experience. She walked past the sofa, past Aninke Ezhaloch, and straight into the washroom without breaking stride.
Aninke watched her go.
The silence in the room developed a particular quality.
*Did she just walk past an Ezhaloch,* he thought, sitting very still on the sofa, *to brush her teeth.'
****
Kallar loomed in the snowy air against a backdrop of swirling embers, sun browned skin stretched over a lean muscular torso left bare above ornate flame licked armor that guarded his waist and hips with blade like protrusions.
A curtain of blood red hair framed a face set with narrow yellow glowing eyes, echoing the draconic silhouette etched into the golden halo behind him.
"Why are you back."
Fredo asked it with all kinds of things moving through him at once, and fear was the one prevailing evry emotions among them.
"There are countless reasons," Kallar said, "but one reason compelled me above the others."
A blazing arrow of flame shot from his direction, fast and direct, cutting straight toward Atiya.
"Spare me!"
The chain binding him severed instead, the links burning away cleanly, and Atiya found himself free on the altar stone, staring up at the sky with his wrists suddenly loose.
The murmur moved through the gathered villagers immediately.
"Don't tell me that human is an ally of the old chief."
"It cannot be."
Atiya stayed where he was and ran it through quickly. Something had been agreed upon inside the egg, inside Kallar's rebirth vessel, that much he had assumed.
But Kallar was not a man who wpuld honored agreements out of principle. He prefered to used them instead.
There were no generoisty to the promise of freedom he offered.
'Is he looking for entertainment, does he want me to amuse him, or is there something specific he wants from me.'
He looked up at Kallar floating above the altar, crimson fabrics drifting in the mountain wind.
He looked up at Kallar floating above the altar, crimson fabrics drifting in the mountain wind.
'Hoh, there indeed is something I have that he wants.'
Loud shrieks and roars tore through the air from every direction simultaneously.
Everyone present understood what it meant. The barrier was down and the yai beasts had come in, dozens of them closing on the village from the mountain beyond, the sounds overlapping into a continuous wall of noise.
"How did they get in so fast."
Kallar descended from above, levitating down to ground level, unhurried, eyes moving across the chaos without settling on any of it.
"You obtained a human body," Atiya said. "Though your race was already humanoid to begin with."
"I have fully transformed and leveled up a stage in the process." Kallar's smile did not shift. "But boy, I have a proposal for you right now."
Atiya knew what was coming. He listened anyway to confirm it.
"Give me that staff you were wielding in the cave and I will escort you out of the forbidden zone myself, not a scratch on you."
Above them Fredo had been paralyzed by the poison, his body refusing every command he sent it, and the other priests dared not approach Kallar directly. They turned to the only problem they could address, the yai beast horde closing fast from the mountain perimeter.
Atiya stood in the middle of it all and thought for a moment.
*Cut the crap, you will kill me the instant I hand over Sajibu.*
"My whole life I have been controlled," he said. "Even this personality of mine was fabricated, shaped by a skill my foster mother created and applied to me."
Kallar's attention shifted slightly. A skill involving personality manipulation was niche and dangerous and not something most people encountered.
"So?" His smile stayed where it was.
"I was just a shell, a hollow boy lost in a vast foreign world, and she forced me into the shape of the man called Atiya. Unlike most people, I do not hate being controlled."
He brushed the dust from his shoulder.
"So today too I am willing to be controlled, yes, I surrender myself to someone else's will."
Kallar's smile widened.
"You made a great choice. Now summon that weapon."
"However," Atiya said, "the one I am surrendering to is not you."
He turned toward the pole where Leishna was still bound and walked to her directly, stopping in front of her and looking up at her face.
"Please save me. I know you want something from me and I will do anything you want because I have to survive and I have to get home."
Leishna, who had been quiet through all of it, smiled wider than he had ever seen from her.
Kallar stared.
"What do you think you are doing." Something between disbelief and genuine offense crossed his face. "That girl is a thousand times worse than me, I pale in comparison to her!"
Vaults of flame balls launched at the speed of sound, closing the distance in fractions of a second, aimed at both of them.
Then in those same fractions of a second numerous silver swords appeared and sliced through every flame ball cleanly, the impacts scattering across the altar stone without reaching either of them.
A voice rang out.
"I accept."
It belonged to Leishna.
The swords sliced through her chains too.
In the next second Leishna's height grew, a slow unmistakable shift upward, and silver light enveloped her, pouring across her form and pulling it into something new.
The light dissolved.
She drifted in a vortex of shimmering light, clad in robes of pristine bone white silk that moved like liquid glass around her. Her hair, pale platinum, billowed as though caught in a wind that touched nothing else, framing a face of porcelain stillness, eyes holding the cold clarity of a winter dawn.
Jagged crystalline blades circled her form, shards of light forged into steel, pulsing with a steady ethereal brilliance. She rose into the air above the altar, less a creature of flesh than a living star, beautiful and distant and sharp enough to cut the air itself.
"You—"
Kallar fired again, multiple shots, fast and direct.
Every single one was sliced apart by freshly summoned silver swords before they reached her.
Leishna settled herself onto one of the hovering blades as though it were a seat, easy and unhurried, the posture of someone who had nowhere pressing to be.
"Kallar, oh my, the problematic child." Her voice had changed, carrying something older underneath it now. "I invested a great deal in you and did not want to kill you so easily, but that boy is special, so I am sorry, you have to die here and right now."
Kallar stared at her.
"What."
Atiya stared at her too, from the altar stone, trying to work out what exactly he had just agreed to surrender himself to.
The situation was working in his favor for the moment. That was all he had.
"Then I will simply kill the demonness first," Kallar said, his voice settling back into something flat and decided.
"Judgetia Ellasmara."
Two enormous orbs of lava materialized in the air, the heat radiating off them immediately, intense enough to melt the snow on the ground below despite the distance, the falling snow above evaporating before it reached them.
Atiya looked at the orbs and looked at Leishna and looked at the space between them.
'I am not getting caught in the middle of this.'
He ran.