Jace and Satch zig-zagged through aisles of shelves labeled with words that neither of them took time to read. Spotlights shined over each row of shelves, levitating in place with nothingness expanding beyond them overhead. Specks of dust drifted lazily in and out of the light's paths, seeming to teleport from one light ray to the next.

The boys looked for hiding spots but all they found were more shelves, all stocked with items too small to hide behind. An exit would have been great too, but the room seemed endless. its size twisted all logic.

This room might have been a bad call, but there was no turning back now.

A certain word written across a shelf caught Jace’s eye.

“Wait a second,” he said, jogging backward.

“Did you find a hiding place?” Satch whispered.

“No, but something that could come in handy.”

Jace stood in front of a huge stretch of shelves labeled ‘mana extracts'. Lining it were vials of shifting, milky lights, each with distinct colors, some with blends of a few. The individual vials were labeled with a color and a range of numbers. Jace was hoping mana was some simple energy source, but apparently, it was more complex than that.

“We don’t have time to be curious, we need to hide.”

“But what if that doesn’t work?” Jace countered, grabbing a random vial filled with swirling blue and green. He held it up to the light, tumbling it gently. The colors mixed together to create a deep teal, but separated to their original hues, each having its own distinct kind of sparkle. “We should at least have some sort of backup plan to protect ourselves.”

“You saw that guy blow up the worm monster, right?”

“Couldn’t miss it.”

“You think you can fight them?”

“I’m not an idiot, Satch. I would just rather have a few tricks up my sleeve than quit early and be helpless.”

Jace knew he wouldn’t have time to inspect the vials further with how antsy Satch was, so he figured it would be better to take some along for now. That was when Jace realized his jumpsuit had no pockets.

“Satch, give me your shirt.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Jace said, sliding off his own.

He lay his shirt on the floor and scooped hand fulls of vials, placing them on the center of the shirt then pulled up the four corners and tied it shut. He lifted the makeshift sac, vials clinking.

Satch was jogging in place as Jace hoisted his shirt bag over his shoulder.

“Done? Okay, let’s go.” Satch said while running off.

As Jace followed, the vials clinked like a beacon. Cursing under his breath, he clutched the bundle to his chest instead, keeping it tight and silent as he ran. He didn’t have any idea how to use the mana though. Did he drink it? The insides of the vials looked somewhat like liquids but also like smoke at the same time. And even if he did find a way to restore his mana, what would he do with it?

Could he make lightning strike or make whips rip out of the floor? Even if he could, he had no idea how. Truthfully, he wasn’t entirely sure how he made Big n’ Spikey in the first place. He remembered imagining the construction and intention of it down to the finest details, but then the door at the back of his mind swung open on its own and poured what he hoped was mana into the structure to give it its form. When he had tried to open that door deliberately, it only opened a crack, showing him that weird grid of options.

Soon the fear of being lost was added to their growing pile of problems. They ran until their lungs burned with fatigue, but still caught no sign of a single wall other than the one they started from. And even that wall was hardly visible anymore. The two finally stopped to catch their breath near shelves full of little weaved sacks, each were tied at the top with a tag attached. Jace panted, glancing at a label reading ‘memory seeds.’ The words reminded him of something he overheard during the conversation between Cornelius and the General before things got violent. Jace didn’t bother thinking over it long though, memories and seeds didn’t fit with each other in any way that seemed meaningful to him. He picked one up and shook it. Sure enough, it rattled with the sounds of seeds. They didn’t seem like anything special, but the tag on the bag was odd. It read out a person's name and a date range. Was it meant to be given to someone? If so then sorry. Jace slid it into his makeshift shirt-bag. If he didn’t know what it was, he figured it was worth investigating later.

“Do you remember which way we came from?” Satch asked.

The two had been weaving through aisles completely at random, in hopes to confuse anyone chasing them. That plan may have backfired.

“Nope,” Jace said as he sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled out a vial.

“That doesn't mean it's time to relax.”

“It doesn’t mean it's time to freak out either.”

All the running had calmed Jace down a bit, it felt like he didn’t have the energy to be nervous. But apparently, Satch had enough nervous energy to run for infinity. The guy seemed to be entirely made of nervous energy. But freaking out wasn’t going to help their situation, making a plan would.

“Okay fine, we should figure out a plan,” Satch said as if in Jace’s head. He sat down too but stood up to pace a second after.

“I have an idea. But I need to figure out how this mana works first.”

Jace may have said that, but it wasn’t entirely true. He had no real ideas. Some rough hopes and wishes, but nothing concrete. Still, he figured the only way to make new ideas would be to gain new information. Maybe if he understood a bit about this mana stuff, he’d get an idea. Could he make a hiding place?

Satch said nothing, turning his focus to the rest of the vast room, likely listening for any signs of pursuit. He was back to scratching his arms. For some reason that reminded Jace about how badly his own arms stung, how bad all of him stung. He looked down at his bare torso for a moment to see thin red lines with trails and smears of blood covering him. Before any self-pity could take effect though, the thought of the others hanging limply by their necks… He shook his head as if to fling the memory out of his ears.

He returned his focus to the vial, turning it top over bottom, watching the blue and green milky smoke shift in ways that completely ignored the motion. He stopped it, facing the cork up. Looking at it wasn't going to do much. There was only one way to really find out what to do with it. Jace bit the cork and pulled it free with a hollow thum sound.

A slightly bittersweet and smooth scent reached his nostrils and a sensation similar to hunger flared in his mind, like the hunger for food or the thirst for water. The door at the back of his mind seemed to rumble with desire. He hadn’t even realized how he was positively starving… not in his stomach but... in his head?

It caught Satch's attention too, his nostrils flaring as he looked at the dense mist lazily rising from the vial.

Jace lifted it closer, craving more of the scent. And he got a lot more of it.

A tendril of the blue color mist was sucked up his nose. It felt smooth yet still shocked him with its volume as it entered his lungs, causing him to cough. He covered his mouth, holding the vial away to not blow the mist out into the air.

Satch gave him a harsh whisper to be quiet, and Jace waved him away, doing his best to contain the coughing.

While fighting the coughing down he felt a subtle sensation of calmness fall over him.

Satch tried to lean over the vial for a sniff but Jace pulled it back to his chest, successfully holding his remaining coughs back.

“Just a second,” Jace said.

He wanted to experience a bit more of this mana stuff in the right way. He took a few deep breaths, preparing for more of the mist. Once his breathing was steady again he inhaled slowly through his nose, sucking up a tendril of greenish mist. It felt as though he were breathing in water, but he fought the natural reaction to cough as best he could, holding his mouth shut while his chest convulsed. The green mist carried a bitter scent, but with it came a slight feeling of liveliness. It didn’t make him want to move around, but to embrace the moment, a blissful sensation of energized peace. The feeling drifted over him like a breeze as he exhaled.

He let out a few subtle coughs, the door at the back of his mind stilled, as if something contained behind it was satiated. “Well that was nice,” Jace said, a sense of calm serenity still lingering.

Over two-thirds of the swirling mist was still in the vial and Jace offered it up to the eager yet suspicious Satch.

“Have a sniff, maybe even you could chill out a second,” Jace said.

Satch carefully took the vial. He eyed it for a moment but finally breathed in lines of blue and green both, sending him into an instant coughing fit.

Jace mocked Satch’s ‘be quiet’ face and Satch pulled his shirt over his face while he tried to steady his breathing.

Jace leaned back with hands on the floor, visualizing the door at the back of his mind. This time, he strolled wistfully up some imaginary stairs to get to it. He knocked on it and the eye slit opened up. Once again, a grid spread over his imagined vision with only a few of the many slots filled with icons. He flicked a thumbs up to the door before opening his eyes. The real world returned but the grid remained stamped over it in thin half-transparent light. With a swirl and press of his mental finger, he selected the one icon he believed he accidentally pressed amidst the panic of being eaten by the worm monster. It was an icon of three overlapping shapes, a triangle, circle, and square with the letter ‘C’ in the center.

The grid washed away and millions of subtle sparks of light formed a series of text.

Opening Casting App…

Running training wheels window…

The text was gone in an instant, replaced with a heads-up display of symbols down the right side of his vision that he couldn’t make sense of at all. One of the only things he could see that was familiar was the bar in the top left of his sight that said ‘Artima’ and 0/20 under it. Okay, so mana didn't automatically make that Artima stuff. But he knew he remembered one of the texts saying that he could convert mana into Artima. But how?

He tried to look over the symbols along the right side of his peripheral vision, which was incredibly strange to do. When he tried to look at them, they just moved as his eyes did, always staying in the outskirts of his vision. To finally observe them, he ended up staring blankly forward, stretching his focus to his peripherals.

The sound of crashing metal and breaking glass snapped him out of it.

The noise started from far away but got louder with incredible speed, like an approaching bullet train. Then it was on them. Rows of shelves crashed over each other like dominos, exploding into pieces from the force. Both Jace and Satch jumped out of the way in the nick of time.

They scrambled back to their feet, Jace clutched his shirt-bag of vials while the sound of collapsing shelves continued into the distance. What kind of absurd force could cause that amount of destruction?

Another wave of crashing noises started near the origin of the first and Jace feared that he knew what that meant.

The two boys bolted, barely escaping the next row of crashing shelves. Metal frames collided with enough force to fire their contents over the floor like shrapnel rain. The chaos continued knocking down shelves to the point of a distant echo.

The boys were now exposed in an aisle. And they saw the figure of a man in the distance with glittering gold on his person.

Gravity bared down on them.

***

Cornelius Dillo was held in the tender care of Marcy, one of his animated statues chiseled from a white marble speckled with quartz. She cradled him under a look of motherly concern, which was fitting considering the statue was made from his mother’s memory. How fortunate he was that she hadn’t been destroyed among the others. Although it did pain him to see her look at him with such worry on her glistening wrinkles.

“Come now, mother, don’t look at me that way. You’ve seen me in much worse states than this,” he said before stifling a cough, blood sputtering his lips.

Her wrinkles only creased further in a deeper frown.

The screen of the storeroom was hovering in front of him, the sounds of crashing shelves emanating from it. The boys just had to start sniffing mana and get themselves found so quickly. With how expansive the west storeroom was, he had hoped that they would have made it at least twenty more minutes before being found. But no, these two had quite the affinity for trouble.

Cornelius was going to have to do something. And fast. It would have been nice to have had time to treat the hole in his gut first but life wasn’t often so considerate.

His mother carried him in front of the wall mural displaying the war between the kingdom's militaries and the demons of the Periphery. The mural was not only designed as a glorious piece of art to remind him of the conflict still present in the world, it was also a special gate. Cornelius had become an incredibly wealthy man over his twelve years in Third Military, but nothing had drained that wealth as much as the gates hidden in that wonderfully deceptive piece of art.

It was designed with a hidden door leading to the deeper chambers of the manor where he had created the trials for the promising children, but even that was a distraction from the art’s true secret. Each side of the mural had a gate painted on it, large archways that the demons and battlemages emerged from. These gates were large enough to be the size of an average doorway. His mother’s statue brought him over to the side of the battlemage’s gate after he pointed to it. Once close enough to touch it, he reached out with his mind, like an imaginary limb stretching out from his Halo to press gently against the center of the gate. Its inside shimmered at the recognition of his mind’s touch, then requested for his desired location.

He focused his attention on the room displayed on the single screen in front of him. Then he sighed.

If Artideus were watching him, he would surely believe that Cornelius was trying to get himself killed.

He nodded his head towards the shimmering gate, but his mother’s statue hesitated, her grip over him shaking. He nodded again with more emphasis.

“Come on, unless you’d prefer me to bleed out right here.”

Her chiseled face scrunched in pain, but she conceded, the two of them disappearing through the gate like a wall of shimmering jelly.