Snap! Went the demon’s fingers, and Cas felt time slow.

A firestorm exploded into existence, shot forward from the demon’s fingers, slamming into the atmosphere.

Flame, compressed and hot, speared forward. Air, sluggish and inertia-ridden, stood in its way, and the two elements mixed together in a chaotic pattern, spreading out into a screaming cone of deadly heat.

It was an object of intricate complexity, an incandescent balance of several forces. And all of those forces – heat, force, ambient pressure – were minutely controlled, tuned so the cone would expand just enough to engulf both Cas and Sara’s bodies when it reached them.

Currently only half-way to their location, and only half the size it would need to be, the flame crawled through the air at a snail’s pace.

It was slow. Cas realized. No, she quickly updated, noticing the demon’s still snapping fingers bouncing against the base of its thumb.

The whole world had frozen in time. The cloth walls of the palanquin warped against the shockwave, which was only now reaching them. The priestess was beginning to flinch back from the explosive stream.

Even sound seemed to move at half-speed; the screeching firestorm had modulated itself into an earthy rumble.

Wait a minute… Cas realized.

She was having a Matrix moment.

Cas pulled vividly at her mental archive of 90’s action sequences – remembering vividly when Neo did the limbo underneath the stream of bullets, and all the assorted slow-motion action shots of the Matrix series.

Obviously, her Aura boost must be responsible for this, she concluded. Strangely, it didn’t feel any different than usual.

Cas’s new mind – normally quick and currently speeding – wasn’t distracted for long by the novelty; soon, a dozen, more serious, thoughts were competing for her attention.

For instance, Cas remembered the demon had flared its Aura shortly before attacking.

The outside world had gone quiet when it did that. Probably a silence spell over the entire tent. So, help was unlikely.

Her very next thought was about Sara, and it was full of worry.

Sara was a higher level than Cas. In fact, she was a higher level than the demon. But that was little comfort.

Levels were just an abstracted number her status sheet assigned to people. To this day, Cas wasn’t sure what they represented, but it obviously wasn't strength.

And Sara was more support oriented, as far as Cas had seen. She had telepathy, a silence spell, a flame blast, and very little in the form of defences if her showing against the hyenas was anything to go by.

All the facts ran together at once for Cas. And, in a split second, she made up her mind: she would shield Sara with her body.

It was an easy decision to make. No matter her level, Sara was only human, and humans generally didn’t survive firestorms. Cas, on the other hand…

Cas looked at the approaching flame with some discomfort.

She'd survived worse.

Forcing every ounce of effort out of her body, Cas drove her leg down, expecting her body to move in Matrix time, surprised when she instead shot off to the side at blinding speeds.

The invisible wall stood in her way like a brick building. Cas felt her body ringing as she crashed back from her impact.

Cas had given everything to that lunge, and she was paying for it now. She heard the grind of shifting bones as her skull set itself back into place, she felt a thick dribble of blood running over the pristinely healed skin of her forehead, running down the side of her nose.

“Cas!” Sara’s horrified voice came. “What has gotten into you!”

Shaking her head, Cas looked over at Sara, who gave her a series of confused expressions in real time.

She then looked back over her shoulder at the firestorm, which was still moving in slow motion.

“Its, its,” Cas pointed at the sluggish blast. “It’s still moving slowly,” holding desperately to the obvious.

“Obviously?” Sara explained. “That is the point of the spell.”

“I thought I was having a Matrix moment!” Cas fritzed, gesturing angrily at the outside world. “What’s the heck!”

“Matrix? What do mathematical functions have to do with this?”

“You can slow down time!?” Cas demanded, trying very hard to sound more confused than Sara looked, and consequently winning the competition.

“I can slow down time,” Sara nodded. “I can speed it up, too, which is what I’m doing inside this bubble.”

The shockwave from the explosion washed over their position like a water wave, and it kicked up a burst of sand on the outside. From it, Cas was able to deduce the tall figure of an invisible bubble that capped over them.

“How much?” Cas asked, immediately feeling stupid for the question. Judging by the apparent speed of sound outside, they were obviously being sped up by-

“A couple thousand times,” Sara answered.

– way too fast, Cas concluded, turning back to look at the flame front, which seemed almost frozen in place.

“But,” Cas said, pointing back at her previous thoughts somehow, “but, the hyenas. How could you-”

“Look, I understand this is a lot to take in, but can we address your questions after we survive this demon attack?” Sara presented the option gently.

Cas shook her head. “Ok, fine. So, this bubble we’re in is running several thousand times faster than the outside, right?”

“It is.” Sara answered the question with the back of her mind. Currently, her attention was grabbed by the Pattern Square in her hand. Her eyes ran back and forth in a calculating manner as she ran Aura through the object. “Also,” Sara added, “keep your Aura percolated. This bubble affects the space inside of it, so it’ll break if you show a hostile Aura. It doesn't matter if you’re not touching the walls.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Noted.” Cas said, looking dangerously at the corpse of the sand angler which lay curled across the sand. It twitched slightly, and Cas pulled her dagger:

“Don’t bother,” Sara interrupted her. “It’s dead.”

“How can you be sure?” Cas demanded. “I mean,” she gestured back at the approaching flame front, “stakes are kind of high right now.”

“Does it have an Aura?” Sara asked rhetorically.

“No.” Cas didn’t even need to look.

“Then it’s dead.”

Sara’s answer was short, most of her attention devoted to the Pattern Square in her hand.

Several minutes passed in silence before Cas’s Aura-boost paged new ideas into her mind.

Valiantly, Cas managed to keep these thoughts to herself, but the longer she did this the more nervous she felt.

Eventually, she abandoned her vow of silence and turned to Sara.

“If we’re running so much faster than the outside, couldn’t we just throw stuff at them?” she asked, feeling her throat dry as she suggested the solution. “Whatever we throw is going to be travelling faster than sound by the time it reaches the outside world, and we could throw hundreds of things in the time it would take them to blink.”

“It’s not that kind of time-bubble, Cas,” Sara rapped a spare set of knuckles against the invisible wall. She hardly looked away from her Pattern Square as she answered.

“Oh,” Cas said, dejected before a new idea sparked in place of the last. “Wait, if the bubble is solid, wouldn’t it protect us from the fire?”

“Normally, yes.” Sara paused, tripping over an unrelated thought as her Pattern Square told her something.

“Yes, but…?” Cas goaded, sensing the caveat..

“... just… just look closer at the spell,” Sara advised, too invested in the Pattern Square to bother with a better explanation.

Cas complied.

It was a little closer, now, and a little bigger. The demon’s torso was completely hidden behind it.

Cas had grown used to seeing Aura through solid objects. So she found it strange when the flame obscured her ability.

“She’s running her Aura through the flames,” Cas noted. "That's why it's blocking her outline."

“That’s right,” Sara put away her Pattern Square. “And do you remember how we had to keep the Sand Angler from touching the silence spell?”

“Yeah,” Cas nodded. “It would've destroyed the silence spell with its Aura.”

“Exactly,” Sara smiled proudly. “No spell survives a hostile Aura.”

“I take it the demon’s Aura is hostile, too?”

Sara scoffed. “It certainly isn’t friendly. Trust me, the moment even the tip of that flame touches this spell, our bubble is going to pop, and when that happens-”

“We’re cooked,” Cas finished for her, gripping her spearhead tighter. “Couldn’t you have made this bubble a little wider?” she complained, feeling suddenly trapped. “We could’ve dodged to the side if you had.”

Cas could feel her emotions intensely. The warping lens of her Aura-boost turned everything up a thousand fold. It also provided her with bravado enough to pretend otherwise.

Despite this, Cas found herself unable to replicate the sheer disinterest Sara showed.

“You don’t seem too worried,” Cas noticed.

Sara let out a polite laugh. “I’m a lady that can control time, darling; there are very few things in the world that worry me, much less a novice demon magician.”

Cas chewed at her lip, idly noting the new habit. “The world went quiet earlier, I think she cast a silence spell over the tent.”

Sara nodded. “It’s jamming my psychic links, too. Clever little bug.”

“What if I go outside and touch the silence spell with my Aura?” Cas offered.

“That would break the spell,” Sara considered, “but this is a refugee camp, remember? The army camp is a mile away. I’m certain someone will die before they notice and send anyone.”

Outside, the demon’s eyes were rounding up into a surprised expression. Apparently, it had just noticed their time bubble.

“What if…” Cas wracked her brains, looking for an easy way out “-- what if you created overlapping time bubbles and we used them to run away?”

“Again, not that kind of time bubble,” Sara knocked again at the solid walls. “I can’t overlap them.”

“Can you move them?” Cas hopped on her toes, trying anything to burn off the flurry of energy that came with her aura boost. She’d been standing still for far too long.

“No.”

“What if you just made a really long one from here to camp?”

“It wouldn’t last.” Sara cut down. “Besides, we’d have to leave one bubble before creating a new one. The demon would attack us when we tried.”

Cas cursed. “Then what’s the point of this stupid spell? To watch our death in high definition?”

“We’re not going to die,” Sara said with a stern reproval. “And the point of this spell is to give us time – a valuable commodity, you know. It’s obvious this ambush was preplanned. It’s only fair that we get time to plan our counterarguments.” Sara smiled a sporting smile filled with malice.

“Do you have any spells that could let us escape?” Cas asked, grasping.

The word ‘escape’ drew a look of surprise from Sara’s eyes. “My, you certainly seem shy about this fight.”

Indignant, Cas let out a huff, crossing her arms. “I’m not looking to get into avoidable fights.”

Sara smiled, poking Cas with the expression. “Ohhhhh? And this from the girl that ran straight at a Regalia surrounded by a monster cloud?”

Cas tightened the cross of her arms and looked aside. She spoke with stiff formality: “My experiences in the monster cloud have given me a new outlook on life.” She shivered a bit at the horrid memory. “Besides. I don’t see the point of fighting this thing by ourselves when there’s an entire army out there. Don’t you have any spell that could-”

Sara laughed in her face.

Cas blinked at the gesture.

It was an honest laugh, one which belied the mean-spirited timing of the thing.

“What’s so funny?”

Sara, pocketing her Pattern Square, rose up from her hunched posture. “Oh, nothing; you just reminded me of my first magic lesson.”

Cas raised an eyebrow. “And what was that?”

Still trailing a laugh, Sara morphed her posture into a parody of her rough-necked fencing tutor. “Sara,” she began, morphing her brows into a serious expression and speaking with a deeper voice. “You’ll learn to believe this one day, but magic can’t solve any of your problems. If you want a demon killed, you’ll have to hack it in the face repeatedly with a sword.”

“Uh, huh…” Cas rolled her tongue in a questioning manner. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means leave the magic to me,” Sara explained. “You focus on the ‘stabbing it in the face’ part of the equation,, or Matrix as you seem to prefer. Do you still have your blade?”

Sighing, Cas pulled into view the warped and half-melted body of her spear-head, which seemed wholly inadequate in the face of the magical fire-storms abound.

“You really don’t have any spells?” Cas asked, tired.

Sara shrugged apologetically. “It’s Aura would destroy all my spells, I’m afraid. Like my tutor said, magic doesn’t solve problems.”

Cas made a disgusted noise. “Really? It seems to be solving every problem our demon friend has. If magic is so useless, why can’t we just destroy her fire spell with our Auras, huh? Or would that just be too convenient?”

Sara looked at Cas with the horrified face of someone trying to teach their parents how to send an email. “Oh my God, you really don't know how magic works,” she said, face paling.

Equally frustrated, Cas knocked a bored hand against the wall of the time bubble. “Well, we have all the time In the world for you to explain, don’t we?”

Sara was quick to retort. “Not all the time. We have an hour, at most, but, to answer your question briefly: we can't dispel the ‘fire spell’ because it's not a fire spell. Look.”

Sara pointed at the flame blast, and Cas followed her hand.

There, at the back of the parade, waves of heat – like those Cas had so often seen rising in the desert, flowed in concentric circles into the source of the explosion.

And looking aside, Cas saw, at the edges of the palanquin, where dew, fog, and even flakes of ice were forming. In fact, the whole interior of the palanquin was freezing, as ice crawled along every surface.

“A heat pump,” Cas realized. “She’s concentrating all the heat in- oh,” she stopped her narration with a horrible realization: “It's a natural fire.”

“Exactly,” Sara confirmed. “Even if we destroy the spell, all that would do is stop the ‘heat pump’ as you called it. The fire – being natural – would remain, and when that happens –.”

“We’re still cooked,” Cas finished, again, gravely.

“Exactly,” Sara nodded proudly at her impromptu students' understanding.

“Anything we can do?”

Sara shrugged. “I can cast ‘unmake’. That should dissipate the flame.”

“Great!” Cas cheered.

“But…” Sara continued.

“But?” Cas followed, a sinking feeling in her gut.

“Let’s save that as a backup option,” Sara decided.

Cas blinked twice. “You can’t be serious.”

Spoiled on stolen time, Sara turned to Cas with a flourish. “I mean, we still have an hour, at least, until this bubble is destroyed. The whole point of this spell is to give us time to think, and I think we can come up with at least one plan that’s better and less reactive than that, don’t you?”

Cas, fighting her instinct for immediate action, accepted the strange reality where she could have a full conversation in the middle of enemy attack, and caught Sara’s point.

She noticed, also, that Sara’s smile had turned devious.

“What did you have in mind?” Cas, at last, ventured to ask.