Vail stood in the corner of the meditation chamber across from Karaa’s corpse and the Selenwrights that carefully approached with soulstone swords raised.

First thing first; he would free his friend’s soul from this moon. Punishment for the murderers would come only when he was sure the world beneath his feet couldn’t consume the life-force that remained in Karaa’s body.

With a breath, soulworks weaved into existence around him. They wavered before locking into place, saving Vail from the lingering scent of decay and many forms of warfare humanity had utilised in the past few millennia. While his ancestors had remained impartial to war, Vail’s inherited memories showed they weren’t ignorant of the horrors of men… so neither was he.

It was unlikely the people of this age knew of those horrid methods, but one could never be too careful.

Vail brought his fingers to his lips. The death-mark was already spiralling up past his knuckles, but his soulstone ring remained untouched for now. A slight breath warmed his fingertips. Soul energy sat upon the skin, waiting to be woven into something useful.

Vail teleported. The group of Selenwrights spun, falling back to back with their neighbour. It was a show of intense training and coordination that they could react so rapidly, but Vail did not care about them. Not yet.

He appeared before Karaa’s kneeling form and pressed his fingers against the air before her. The tips found resistance, as if a sheet of glass stood between Vail and his friend’s corpse. His hand pulled back, and a glowing rune lingered.

Twice more Vail teleported. Twice more, he left visible soulworks frozen in the air. The Selenwrights tried to react, to charge him down before he could finish whatever he was doing, but they were too late.

As Vail reappeared back across the room, both the runes and his friend ignited. A pillar of fire shot from floor to ceiling, incinerating everything within the bounds of the soulworks. Vail watched, head bowed with hands tilted upward to encourage the soul to leave this entrapping world, as his friend’s body burned.

He would not let this moon consume her soul. Best her soul wander the endless expanse of the universe than be broken down and used to fuel this lifeless rock’s unachievable desires.

It only took five seconds to burn every remaining molecule, freeing the soul that clung to them. Once Karaa was truly gone, the blaze extinguished. Despite the heat and power behind the inferno, not even soot remained. Vail’s command over his soulworks was too good to allow anything to remain, nor for the flame to burn anything besides what he intended.

Now appeased that his fellow Academic will not suffer in death, Vail turned to her murderers. Two, including their leader, were rushing him, while the others fanned out through the room. Each in pairs. It was clear they were adjusting to his frequent teleportation.

To any lesser dimensional weaver, their tactics might have proven effective. With twelve full longswords of soulstone, the thread was warped in all sorts of ways. But Vail was the authority on all things dimensional. He had expanded the field by such bounds only a few of his predecessors could compare.

Where an amateur Academic might find that soulstone blade piercing their heart with an attempt to teleport, Vail could dance around the weapons as long as he knew they were there. And so he did.

Craul swung the heavy blade with two hands, but it only hit empty air and the soulwork lying in wait. As Vail reappeared behind the man and his partner, a sound like shattered glass told him that his attempt to glue the weapon in midair had failed. The soulstone blade had simply crashed through the rune.

Craul’s partner swung at Vail, and he had no choice but to teleport again. Vail didn’t trust his soulworks to withstand an impact from the heretical weapons, and never in his athleticism to dodge physically.

One of the soulworks wrapping his body let him know of the position of each soul around him. That also meant the soulstones nearly blinded him, but it kept him from teleporting within range of another swing, as he quickly found they were attempting: whenever one was near landing a strike, the other Selenwrights moved to swing at empty air. They targeted the areas with the most space between small groups, knowing that was the most likely place Vail would run.

It was… unnerving that they were this effective.

But Vail still had two goals before he left. First, he would punish these Selenwrights for the death of his friend — without sacrificing his oaths — and second, he would destroy this facility. It was an unfortunate reality, but it was better to destroy Karaa’s creations than let them fall into the hands of the people. Especially with these Selenwrights already having proven their lack of respect for the old ways.

So as Vail danced around deadly blades, he spread the breath of his soul into the men and women trying to hasten his end. He started with Craul. The man’s throat had been almost entirely replaced with an implant that enhanced one’s voice. Perfect for a leader. As Vial’s soul energy pressed deeper through the man’s body, he found other points of outrage.

The man’s body was a patchwork of equipment. Alloy bones, fire-resistant skin, an entirely replaced musculature system, a neurotoxin producer, a nervous system isolator… so many more installations than Vail expected. They had to have desecrated not one, but an entire fleet of colony ships to get such varying equipment. Did he not care that he was barely even human anymore? Less than ten percent of his body contained molecules that could hold his soul. He was so close to a disentanglement disaster. Did he not fear the damage he will cause once he loses himself?

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Did he even understand?

“Never take on any more augmentations,” Vail found himself warning. “If there’s any of your old flesh in storage, do whatever you can to reintegrate it. Even if it’s rotting. Disentanglement has destroyed nations.”

As Vail’s soul energy spread into the bodies of the rest of the Selenwrights, he felt a growing despair. None were quite as bad as Craul, but they were close. On average, only twenty percent original body remained for a soul to latch.

“Speak lies in death, sinner,” Craul grunted as he swung his sword again.

Vail wanted more than anything to end this problem before it sprouted, but again, he would never break his oaths. If Craul or any of the other Selenwrights underwent disentanglement, they would become killing machines that deserved to be ended, but until then, they held a soul. Until then, there was still a chance for redemption.

It was a horrible decision to be faced with. Vail knew it would be almost impossible for Craul to fix himself before he lost his sense of self and began the slaughter. He knew there would be so many deaths, especially now that so much past knowledge was lost from the minds of men, and yet Vail refused to kill him.

But he could disable their tech.

It was unreasonably difficult to manipulate soulworks inside another body while there was so much soulstone around. The only real counter Vail had to work around the effect of those swords, was to empower his creations with so much soul energy they couldn’t fail. Vail grasped the first implant and disabled its operation.

Craul’s battle-cry cut off mid-scream.

There would be no reactivating that piece. Vail had cursed it with a soulwork that left it unable to function as intended. Any inspection would show all components in working order, yet it would never operate. Only a full replacement would fix it. If the surgeon attempted to only replace a section, the curse would ruin that too.

Vail felt a self-satisfied smirk cross his face as the Selenwright panicked and grasped at his throat. It took him a touch too long to realise that he felt no pain, and by the time he’d raised his sword again, he found it far heavier than it was a second ago.

All across the room, the Selenwright grew sluggish. Completely disregarding the soulstone ring on his finger, Vail burnt through his soul to disable sections of augmented muscle. They were now slower, lost the ability to produce toxin — which they’d been pumping through the room since they’d arrived — and lost the impressive coordination they’d shown until then. But they could still wield their blades. The soulstone longswords still swung at Vail with every teleport.

In a dozen seconds, everything would be over. Vail would disable everything besides their ability to walk and eat, and they would no longer be a threat even if they fell to disentanglement. It was all going just as it should, considering the amount he had sacrificed to keep people safe.

Until it wasn’t.

Agony ripped through Vail’s hand. He looked down just in time to watch the death mark spreading through the soulstone in his ring. Its glistening clear colour fell away to the black void of death. Vail yanked at the ring, and sent it flying, but it was too late; the soulstone was already gone.

The death mark had spread almost to his fingertips, and now that he was looking, had also spread over and around his shoulders, leaving him sleeveless. A small dot of black hovered over Vail’s index finger. It was not connected to his hand, but it moved when he did. There wasn’t much left of the ring that Vail had tossed away — a mere semicircle of metal — but the soulstone was gone; replaced by a scar that floated the exact distance the stone had in his ring.

Vail teleported away from the sluggish swing of a blade, only to watch as the black tendrils of his curse spread to his chest. Death accelerated with each passing moment the fight continued. Vail only needed an instant to realise that he could not continue as he had.

As a future was no longer a possibility for Vail, he had willfully expended that which he never otherwise would have to overcome the masses of soulstone and save these Selenwrights’ families. But the soul energy he had consumed was also that which delayed the death mark. If he continued, then he would fail to pass on his knowledge.

If he could just disarm one. If Vail could take the sword from a single Selenwright, he could use the soulstone to empower a soulwork strong enough to collapse the research facility. It was already too late to fully disable the tech lining their bodies, but Vail could still keep Karaa’s legacy out of their hands.

There was no point trying to lasso their weapons with dimensional thread; the soulstone would not allow such teleportation. Instead, he looped the string around a chunk of alloy wall from the breach. It took a bit of finesse — well, a lot of finesse — but Vail imbued the piece of rubble with momentum.

When the next sword struck for his neck, the alloy appeared in its path and flung it clear from the Selenwright’s hands.

The blade skidded across the smooth floor before clattering against the wall. Neither had the blade struck Vail, nor did the chunk of alloy injure the Selenwrights hands.

Vail appeared over the mass of soulstone, thankful that this would finally be over. An Academic of Vail’s calibre could do anything with this much of the substance. The instant he picked it up, he would disable each of the implants in the Selenwrights and instigate a self destruct soulwork through the facility. A completely non-lethal self destruct sequence. The walls and experiments would melt into nothing but an unusable, stabilised sludge, while anyone within would remain untouched.

Only, the moment Vail bent down and touched his fingers to the blade, they burnt with worse agony than when his ring fell prey to the death mark. Vail watched with horror as the black scar spread up the final stretch of his fingers and engulfed them whole. He’d intentionally attempted to touch the weapon with only his fingertips, where there was no death, and yet this still happened.

Trying again, he placed his foot over the blade. But immediately, the cursed roots shot down the side of his chest, racing to carve through his body and reach soulstone.

Vail snapped his foot away, but the damage had already been done. His tattered jacket now fluttered to one side, revealing the asymmetric scars as they branched from his shoulders and down his chest. On his left side, the marks had already reached as far down as his waist.

He could no longer use soulstone. That alone was a blow that almost crushed him. It was something that was so ingrained through everything he had worked for and how he lived, that it was impossible to imagine a life without it. Soul energy was everything. And now, the only safe, moral supply was beyond him.

Vail glanced up at the Selenwrights as they charged him down once more. He could no longer save their families. He could no longer keep Karaa’s work out of the hands that would abuse it.

Failure was a common experience with the number of experiments Vail had enacted through his life, but this was different. He could see how the actions of those before him would doom both their close relatives in the short term, and all of humanity in the long term, and yet he couldn’t succeed where he needed to.

These Selenwright were the murderers of his friend, yet he did not wish death upon them or their kin. Vail had failed what would have been easy only a day ago.

Craul swung his sword, mouth open in a snarl but unable to scream. Vail took one last glance through the room at his failures before he disappeared.

He teleported far away, abandoning the lake city to almost certain disaster at the hands of a disentanglement event.

Vail had never felt so defeated.