Elwin looked upon them with utter dispassion.
Lucian didn’t spare a moment with his words.
“I didn’t eliminate you as we entered the city, because Robert and Khan would have interfered. But now that your squadra is all alone, I can defeat and maim you here before you find the staff.”
“Has this been your plan all along?” Elwin parried, disgusted. “You want to injure us, and then maim the rest of those still exploring, so your team would be the only one to win?”
“What else would my plan be? The challenge stated that the first squadra to emerge with the staff would be victorious. There were no other rules, so I have made mine. Now that no unwanted eyeball is on us, now that no professor is in witness of us, I can do whatever I want with you and tell them that your injuries, no, disappearance, was an unfortunate accident.”
Elwin shielded his kismets. “Try us, you baked weasel.”
Immediately Lucian’s three launched a barrage of frosted ice upon them, drawn up from the running stream next to the river-road. Mirai tried to raise a column of basalt, but could not do it in time; Isaac was quick to blow the projectiles away with air, covering for her as the Eagle Watcher.
“Mirai, what’s wrong?” hollered Katherine, ready to conjure a fireball.
“I can’t wield it as fast,” she whispered hurriedly. “It’s basalt. It’s got too complex of a melody for me to use it deftly.”
And just then, Katherine’s Quan nudged her arm to the frying pan dangling from her own rucksack.
“Not a problem,” Katherine replied, kicking a jet of fire in Claudia’s direction, pulling out her frying pan. “You can wield this though, right? It’s just cast iron throughout. Only a single melody.”
A sly smile draped over Mirai’s face. “I sure can. Elwin, can you defend us with your –”
Even before she could finish her sentence Elwin had drawn up the water around him into a palisade of glaciers. As kismets, their thoughts were in one rhythm.
Lucian was trying to melt away Elwin’s defenses, but with its mass he needed a full three seconds, and Katherine was throwing so many boulettes of fire at him that he couldn’t get a direct line of sight without being singed.
The kismets were evenly matched against Lucian’s esteemed squadra. The crystal cavern shook around them, dust and pebbles whittling from the ceiling with each moment of impact.
Claudia bellowed over the commotion.
“Cassius, move your airy bottom over there to shield Lucian, hurry! Rayo, get behind –”
Before she knew it, she was hit by a frying pan in the face, and knocked unconscious.
“A square shot!” chuckled Katherine, jabbing Mirai’s shoulder. “Well done.”
“Claudia!” exclaimed the purple-haired boy, turning to look at Mirai and her outstretched hand. “You traitorous work of Heian trash –”
Before he could finish, he was hit in the elbow by another frying pan, this time pulled out from Elwin’s backpack. Cassius groaned, massaging his arm to soothe the shock of its impact.
The frying pan returned to Mirai’s palm like a boomerang.
“I think I’m getting the hang of this!” she cheered, jolly at what she could do with metal.
MAHA DAMN IT! Lucian seethed. Elwin and his team were mousing their way again with sly tricks. For what reason did Elwin want to win this tournament so much?
Just as the thought passed in his head, the glint of a small gap between the crystals caught his eye upon the ceiling. There was a giant cluster hanging by a thin root just above Elwin and his friends; a well-placed projectile would break it off and impale all of his enemies, like a chandelier falling to its doom.
Behind a small pillar of ice Lucian bunched up a ball of frost as densely as he could, and pelted it towards the ceiling. The bundled mass of crystals shook and dangled like knives about to fall, about to break loose, and the entire cavern began to churn around them.
“ARE YOU MAD?! YOU WANT TO BRING DOWN THE –” hollered Elwin, but it was too late. Lucian had placed another shot, and before the kismets could react, five massive, jagged crystals were coming down upon them all.
“WATCH OUT!” screamed Mirai, as she tackled Elwin to the side and fell with him to the stream beyond the falling crystals; Isaac did the same for Katherine, falling this time on the basalt. And with the contact of nearly a hundred tons of crystal the entire ceiling began to tear loose, and down rained metamorphosized boulders like meteorites. Lucian managed to drag Claudia and Cassius just out of the way and back into the passageway from whence they came; he made a crooked smile as he turned and fled with his mates in tow, certain the kismets were no more.
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Astinel’s staff would be his to claim, and with it, he and his little sister would be free.
Elwin and Mirai awoke, clutching their heads, glancing around their surroundings. A mountainous pile of impassable rubble partitioned that once-cavern into three haphazard chambers. Katherine and Isaac were nowhere to be seen.
“NO! KATHERINE! ISAAC!” Mirai shrieked, straining her veins to wield loose the collapsed rocks that had piled upon them all. But their melodies were too complex, their demands too heavy; unlike the alleia of metal and mostly sedimentary rocks with which they practiced upon the surface, the rocks here and below were mixed in with a multitude of Atomions that she could not yet easily wield, let alone Elwin. If Professor William was present, he could have parted the rubble aside; but all her effort with her Quan blazing could not make it so.
“Relax, hold on. They can’t be buried in there. They shouldn’t be. Let me check,” assured Elwin, sweat upon his brow, wishing his words to be true, as he closed his eye and felt for the instinctive threads of ORI around him stretching in golden weaves. Through his Asha he saw through the shapes of the rubble, several tens of yards thick, and barely made out a movement of the shapes of two figures beyond it, one more radiant than the other. Though he could not see their distinct forms, he knew with his heart that it was his friends; Katherine and Isaac were safe, albeit separated from himself and Mirai.
“They’re alive. They’re safe like us. I see them,” he sputtered, collapsing to the stream next to him.
Mirai looked at him, relieved but despondent.
“Oh, thank the FOUNDERS they are okay...”
No one spoke for a good minute or two.
“But what must we do now? Return to the surface and ask the professors for rescue?”
“No,” commented Elwin, shooting a lightheaded glance around the buried chambers. “The passageway from where we came looks blocked as well. But if I remember correctly, there was a road leading southeast where Katherine and Isaac should have been. Do you recall it too?”
She thought hard for a moment, and nodded. “I do.”
“At any rate, I think all these passages are connected, because that’s how Lucian and his mates used to find us. We’re going to unite with Katherine and Isaac first, and push to the staff after. They’re going to do the same thing. They’re our friends.”
Mirai nodded, confident with his decision.
“Sounds like a plan.”
They helped each other up, ready to brave the dark roads once again.
* * *
“Elwin... why does Lucian despise you so much?”
“Hmm?” Elwin looked to Mirai, soft shadows of both figures dancing on the walls behind them. The roads they walked had led to a great, endless labyrinth of zig-zagging chambers, the walls polished and smooth, with remains of red draperies and cloth mothed to near-oblivion.
“I don’t really know...” he replied solemnly, his head drooping in his gait. “He never told me why. The first day I met him was when I’d just turned ten. It was fall. Our teacher told us that there was a new classmate, and it was him; he was a bit awkward at first, but people soon came to like him. He was the best out of all of us with his Maht. Lucian and I weren’t exactly friends... but we weren’t enemies either.”
Mirai listened quietly with studious intent.
“I can’t recall that moment well, but... about a week after he arrived, someone started talking about my father during lunch.”
“Your father? Carl Eramir?”
“Yeah. One of the boys named Gilliam. He started slandering my father, and boasted how his own dad wrote an article that got published in the newspaper. It was an article criticizing my father’s expedition, with many details that were completely made up.”
“...”
“So I went over and told Gilliam not to slander my father like that. I tried to say to him that my father gave his life for a worthy cause – he passed away in service of expanding our knowledge about the world. Why should anyone deride him for that, right?”
“Right.”
“Lucian wasn’t even there to begin with. But in the afternoon, news must’ve gotten into his ears, because he confronted me alone, asking whether I was really his son – the son of Carl Eramir. I proudly said yes without hesitation, and demanded to know why. He didn’t answer me, and just walked away. But from that day on, everyone in school knew I was the son of Carl Eramir, and for that, they shunned me for it. I was always the butt of everything unsavory, and Lucian was the one who led them. And I couldn’t defend myself either. Words would just come out wrong, and even if I said them right, my classmates would just twist them to accuse me of something I didn’t do.”
“That sounds terribly unfair...” Mirai empathized, putting a hand to his shoulder. Elwin didn’t brush it away as he normally would have done.
“At any rate, I wasn’t interested or talented in any of the playground politics, as my little brother Andre calls nowadays,” Elwin continued. “I’m glad that he is far better than me at navigating people. I wouldn’t want my brother to experience what I did.”
“...”
“Eventually, Lucian and the others started picking on my missing eye. He started calling me a pirate who robs and steals from others, who claims other people’s lives... who lures innocent people into graverobbing schemes, just like my father. And the MAHA forbid if I ever lost in gym... Lucian would single-me out in tagball when I was in the other team because he knew I couldn’t see well, and if I was in his team and we somehow lost because of me, he would gang up on me with his friends and beat me up after school, force off my eyewrap and rip it to shreds so I had to walk home with people on the streets looking at me like I was a monster. Why? What did I ever do to him? Why do I have to be the one to shoulder the sins that the world made-up? Was it so hard to just leave a boy like me alone?”
Mirai listened quietly on.
“It wouldn’t have filled me with as much anguish as it did if Lucian was facing a problem of his own, like poor grades, or poor health, because then it could explain why he abused me – people sometimes need a target to take out their anger and dissatisfaction with themselves, after all. Though I hate that this is how some people are, there would be a concrete reason as to why he hated me, why he did the things he did, and I could tell myself that my suffering was not for nothing. But Lucian had everything. He had stellar grades not just in regular subjects but also in gym and also for trials of his Maht. He had everything he could ever want, and was followed around by everyone at school. There was no reason for him to go out of his way to pick on me, no reason to push me down to raise himself up when he was already at the pinnacle. And that’s the way it’s always been. So much for his name, which would have been beautiful...”
“What about his name?”
“‘Lucian’ means ‘Born of Light.’”