Nash Refraction Emerald was currently learning exactly how hard it was to evade someone effectively a full realm of cultivation above him.

It had been perhaps six or seven minutes so far, sprinting the whole while. He had already crossed a river, gone through several buildings, and dipped in and out of basements.

By now, a mortal would be wheezing, and even Nash was feeling winded from the exertion, physical and Aetheric both.

He didn't truly know Longstep Beryl's level of cultivation, even though the old man had administered to him and taught him since he was a child. Nash could only remember the old rumors passed around by the Emerald Estate's servants; they whispered how Beryl was technically in the Fourth Calcification, but had fallen to around the peak of the Third from old age and injuries older than Nash, all of those injuries sustained in the Wolf Country's war for independence.

Nash didn't, however, need to know Beryl's exact cultivation to know that he was at a severe disadvantage in this search.

Going by cultivation level alone, Beryl would be faster than him, more perceptive than him, quicker even in thought when he truly exerted himself.

Additionally, Nash had a passing familiarity with the cultivation techniques of every Emerald branch family (the ones that were left after the war, at least) and he knew that Beryl's (and his family, though there weren't many of them left) had focused on using the Aether to collapse and lengthen distance. Additionally, Beryl used the same Greater Luminiferous Vision technique as Nash did, and thus it would take quite a distance or a large crowd (preferably both) to actually lose the old man.

Effectively, that meant that Nash was running from someone who knew him well, had massive amounts of resources at his disposal, was stronger and faster in nearly every conceivable way, and could quite literally reduce the distance between them with a snap of his fingers.

Nash had only three saving graces in this situation, the factors that made him think it was even possible for him to escape in the first place.

First of all, Beryl was old and injured; his hobbling gait was no affectation, as he could not move quickly outside of a short burst without the assistance of collapsing distance, and his age did no favors for his cultivation. That, at least, narrowed the gap between Nash and him from entirely insurmountable to just barely possible.

Second, Nash had expected this, already having scoped out some of the basic floor plans of the buildings around him; it wouldn't be much, but he knew where he was going, had a plan, and had knowledge of which buildings had basements and whether they were busy this time of day.

Third, Beryl's cultivation techniques were Aether intensive and only allowed him to reduce or expand the distance between him and a target; he couldn't pass through solid objects.

He could bend those rules, pushing himself through tiny gaps or pulling things through them by shaping space, but couldn't actually go through anything solid any more than any other cultivator of his level could, which generally took the form of removing that barrier.

Nash had no such limitation, and planned on exploiting it.

Indeed, he was exploiting it even now, jumping slightly as his path was about to intersect with a chicken wire fence, dipping into the Aether and going through the obstacle.

He hung a right, ducking under a low-hanging wire to conserve at least some of his lums, and ran through the parking lot until he was aligned with a certain parking spot in the lot of the large apartment building he was currently outside of. He shuffled slightly from side to side and turned his head, suddenly meeting Beryl's eyes through the chicken-wire fence.

Beryl was breathing heavily and his white, thinning hair was shining with sweat, a first in all of the years Nash had known him.

When Beryl's eyes met his, they narrowed angrily as Longstep rose up his hand and began a massive twisting of the Aether, reaching out for Nash; Nash only narrowly avoided being grabbed, bringing the entire upper part of his body into the Aether. He could only hope that as Beryl's attempt to snatch him completed, his reserves would be too depleted to attack again immediately.

As soon as his torso returned from the Aether, Nash took off running, heading for the side of the apartment tower.

He sprinted as fast as he could with his Second Calcification body and a backpack weighing him down, throwing himself into a massive leap and dematerializing his entire body just before he splattered against the side.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds, he thought, counting off each one with all the precision he could muster. Four. Four and three quarters, he thought, bringing his body back into reality and immediately slamming hard into the side of the elevator shaft.

"Too late," he muttered out between the grunts of pain, his one hand grabbed onto a ledge where the elevator would attach to the stationary door in order to disgorge the passengers within.

Nash swung his other arm up and clambered onto the ledge, which was just barely enough for him to get his legs on and rest slightly, more groans coming out as he felt the full extent of his bruises.

No broken bones, thankfully, he thought, scanning the dark expanse of the elevator shaft up and down; if he squinted, his enhanced eyes could barely manage to see where it ended, bottoming out below the last door which presumably led to the lowest level of the basement.

Why aren't there any ladders? Why didn't I check before this whether there were ladders? Cursing his previous decisions, he looked closer at the mechanism for the door and attempted to open it. Where's the emergency release for this thing?

He briefly considered just going straight through the door, but then he heard something. A distant rumbling was getting closer to him and he glanced up, spotting an elevator going down.

He watched cautiously, getting ready to dip out of the way if it got too close, before it stopped a few floors above him, beginning to engage the mechanism of the door it had stopped at. Nash didn't waste any time; he began jumping and climbing his way up,

Hopefully, Beryl loses sight of my channels once I'm in the crowd.

With a final jump, Nash dipped into the Aether, materializing his head and his arms back into reality as soon as he was decently sure they had cleared through the floor of the elevator. "Don't mind me," he said, pushing on the floor of the elevator and progressively bringing more of his body from the Aether into it until he was entirely within it, laid out on the ground.

After a few seconds of rest, (well-deserved, in his opinion) he stood up and exited the elevator to the confused stares of those who were presumably the occupants of the apartment. "Does anyone mind telling me what floor we are on? Emerging from floors messes with my sense of direction," Nash said, aggressively brushing the dust off of every garment of clothing he was wearing, to little success.

One of them recovered more quickly than the others - a woman in the early years of being middle aged who gave the aura of simply being done with all the nonsense of the world - and spoke. "The third floor," she said, unimpressed. "Do you do it often enough that that's a problem?"

He pulsed his Aetheric sight. No cultivators. I'll need to find another way - onto plan B, then.

"Not that often," Nash said, nodding at the woman, "But more than you would expect. Good day, then."

He turned around and dipped his upper body into the Aether again, stepping back into the elevator, leaning through the elevator box to enter the shaft once more.

This entrance went more smoothly then his first one had, and soon he had jumped down off the wall, hanging on the door to the second floor. So this should be the second floor, he thought, letting go of the ledge and letting himself fall down, counting the floors he fell past before grabbing onto one specific ledge.

Then the first basement level should be right here. Using the position of the elevator to check one last time before entering, he decided to go for it.

The empty space where his hand had been before dipping into the Aether reached blindly through the door. On the other side, it returned to reality as the rest of his body entered the Aether, pulling the rest of him through.

The place into which he emerged was dark, dusty, and nearly unused. It was a storage room, only a single path carved out from the elevator through the hallway; rusted folding chairs, old plastic tables and cabinets full of who-knows-what were piled high on every space not strictly required for one to traverse the cleared path.

That path, like a canyon of clear tile cutting through the cliff walls of hoarded junk, ran from the elevator to the many rooms studding the side of the hallway like recessed pits in the dusty, ancient furniture. Nash took the singular path through the storage area and snagged a disposable cloth cleaning rag from a particularly old cabinet, both poorly-fitted doors swinging freely.

The rag was dusty but still clean, and Nash shook it out, tying it around his face as he stopped in front of the furthest door.

I'll have to risk it, he thought, his fingers tapping at his thigh. The old plans showed that this was built nearly on top of the old subway, and this side of the building will be the closest.

He breathed as deeply and slowly as he could through the makeshift mask (mostly to minimize inhaling too much dust) and took another leap, going into the Aether and through the end of the hallway.

Once again, he was floating through nothingness, a drifter in a sea bereft of gravity, holding his breath as he counted in his head, his eyes seeing nothing except for vibrations in the medium where light left ripples and the faraway channels of other cultivators, the root-like structures appearing like clumps of vegetation floating in the deep, weightless reaches of a dark sea.

He emerged in the dark, tucking himself into a roll to bleed off the speed of his leap. His skin prickled as it slid across the old concrete, and he could feel the shrapnel-scars on his neck twinge as the skin just below them was stretched from his slide.

He came to his feet, adjusting the cloth tied around his face, and stared around him.

It was dark, of course, as abandoned subway tunnels tended to be, and Nash could hear some scurrying at the edge of his hearing - rats, or worse.

According to urban legend, mundane animals weren't the only kind of beasts that called this place home.

Nash pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight, sliding the widget around until he could just barely see in the dark with his Second Calcification vision.

The cone of light coming from the phone flashlight drew to attention the sheer amount of dust in the air, drifting slowly, kicked up from where it had rested by his landing and standing. Eddies of dust whirled and wafted through the air, drifting in and out of the cone of light that brought them into such sharp relief until it glinted off on the rails of the subway track, strewn with rotten wood kicked out of its proper place by unknown forces and abandoned long enough that the paint and treatment was no longer enough to protect it from rot.

He remembered a cousin from a branch family, considered nearly too uncouth to be let near him as a child, who had told him the legend of these tunnels; their construction nearly finished before the war broke out, becoming a host for battles and secret bases, a bunker for loyalists and rebels alike, but never actually used for their intended purpose. Wherever the entrances poked up to the surface, they were sealed up by the government, labeled as unsafe, filled in like cavities in the teeth of some massive mouth.

Another similar to cavities, Nash noticed, was the palpable feeling of rot. According to the ghost story he had been told by that cousin as a child, these tunnels were haunted by all those who had died in them, many of them cultivators.

According to that story, their Aether, still stuck to their Sternum Etchings, had rotted with the rest of them; abandoned, just like the tunnels.

It was common knowledge was that, if enough Aether of the same type was gathered in a single place, a treasure or even a being was born. The story went on to ask one chilling question, one that had kept Nash up that night when a much younger version of himself had been asked; if that process could birth treasures, why couldn't it birth horrors?

That story went on to describe a variety of horrible deaths one could meet down here, but the more he thought about them the less terrifying they became.

Sure, Nash didn't want to be torn limb-from-limb or eaten whole, but those things didn't seem possible in a place like this.

Those were things that happened in stories, in interesting and terrifying places; stepping into a place where that had happened should have had the hairs on your neck stand up, should have your heart beating out of your chest like a jackhammer trying to breach a ceiling, should have you checking every corner for things that shouldn't be able to exist but that were inexplicably there. But here? No.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Here, it just felt empty and sad.

It was unsettling, sure, but so, so empty. There was little reprieve from the rot; little formations of stones or rotted wood sticking out of the ground or leaning against the rusting metal rails like crooked teeth poking out of a corpse's mouth here and there, or the scurry of some creature adapted to the subterranean environment in the piles of trash.

There was nothing here, not anymore; perhaps these tunnels were splattered in blood once, but by now even that had dried and rotted away with time, leaving only stains, the banal, forgotten remains of a war long gone.

Nash stopped his contemplation - he needed to get moving before Beryl figured out where he was. He paced along the old tracks, every so often using his Aether-sight to check for any threats, using his eyes without it to similarly scan for a specific place in the dilapidated subway.

He walked for perhaps half an hour in that place, though now that he was solely focused on covering distance his strides were unnaturally long and loping, his Second Calcification strength and endurance allowing him to consistently walk at a speed perhaps more similar to a mortal's jog.

Eventually, Nash reached the platform he had been looking for. It was marked by a fading sign on the far wall and the color of the lines of paint drawn on the floor, the old paint flaking off to such a degree that most of the original position of the lines had to be inferred from what remained.

Heaving himself onto the actual platform and out of the tunnel, he went to one corner and stared at a faded map of the subway, heavy with graffiti and other manners of defacement.

Old wartime slogans his father and Beryl may have belted out in these very tunnels, hearts carved with the names of lovers likely dead and gone by now, and every staple of graffiti, though missing some of the more recent developments; drawings, crude in both skill and subject, were scattered across the map, covering up much of the information that was probably useful to someone at some point, or at least intended to be.

A piece of paper, tacked to the map with a piece of duct tape, caught his interest; waterlogged and stained as it was, it was by far the newest thing in the platform, looking only a few days old.

Delicately, Nash knelt on the ground to get a better look. It was an advertisement flyer, unsurprisingly, but what it was advertising was much more interesting.

The piece of printer paper was advertising an underground martial arts tournament; a makeshift arena built in another platform of the subway, places to bet for spectators, payouts for the winner of a match. Open to all.

Perfect.

He took a picture and turned away, going towards the exit. He shoved his cloth face mask into a pocket as soon as he came up to it; It was barred, of course, but it wasn't like that was a problem for him.

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Beryl consulted the GPS readout of the device in his hand, sitting in the back of a taxi.

With how dissimilar to a map it was, it had taken some time for him to figure out how to use it, but by now he could figure out what he needed as long as he didn't touch anything important.

"Turn a left," he said to the cabbie, following the small red dot traveling through buildings. Seemingly, it was heading to an old subway entrance, one that brought back some bad memories for Beryl.

It had been quite obvious where he was after seeing him going through several buildings, each on a familiar path to Beryl, at least after he had checked to make sure he wasn't above ground beforehand - it wasn't as if it was out of the question with Nash.

He had been somewhat surprised that the GPS tracker he had planted worked underground through the dirt and concrete between Nash and him, though he didn't quite understand how the technology worked in the first place.

It took a few more minutes weaving through the traffic of the city for the cabbie to reach the old subway entrance, bringing out conflicting emotions for Beryl; while he was thankful for the short reprieve, the prospect of missing Nash's exit from the tunnels grew more likely every second he dawdled, something he could not afford.

Beryl's thoughts turned once again on how to best utilize the tracker. He had managed to plant the small device on Nash's backpack just before he had jumped through the wall into the apartment; adjusting the position of an object that small was, of course, easier than snagging Nash himself.

Beryl had intended on using the reduced distance to grab Nash and force the boy, physically weaker than himself, into a grapple but had been blindsided by Nash's quick reaction to dip the entirety of his body from his hips up into the Aether. Luckily for Beryl, his Aether wasn't entirely wasted; he had managed to snag the hooked end of the tracker onto the outside of the backpack, where the very bottom edge had barely remained in the physical world.

He was still not sure how Nash had learned how to use the Emerald arts so quickly and fluidly - Beryl hadn't taught him, at least not to that level. Had he been hiding that prowess the entire time?

If so, this may not have been the teenage rebellion Beryl initially thought it was, but a longer pattern, a more planned runaway.

Could he have anticipated the attack on the Majestic Cloud Sect? Even now, that investigation was ongoing - how could Nash have known about it?

Beryl's brow furrowed as he stepped out of the taxi onto the sidewalk, handing the driver a wad of bills he did not bother to count. "I trust that's enough?" he asked, closing his door. "Stay around here. I may need your assistance again."

Trepidation was visible on the chauffeur's face, but he nodded. He rolled down his window and shifted gears, but left the engine on.

His expression lifted when he actually got to the task of counting out the bills and performed a short risk-benefit analysis that started and ended with Wow. That's a lot of money.

Seconds turned to minutes, the old man standing in front of the old barricaded subway entrance in an odd fighting stance that brought much of the weight off of his bad leg.

From the old entrance, covered in graffiti and caution tape and chains secured with locks, fingertips emerged.

They scrabbled around, floating unconnected to a hand until that too slowly emerged, pulling the rest of the body through the barricade. Nash emerald smiled enigmatically towards Beryl. "Am I that predictable?" he asked, falling into a fighting stance of my own. "Alright, Senior. You know it, I know it; from this close, I have no chance at running. Let us fight."

"Child," Beryl sighed, curling his fingers into fists. "Why must you be so stubborn? You know your father will be displeased, and I am honor-bound to disclose your actions to him."

"Longstep, sir, I have grown more over the past few weeks than I had over the whole year under my Father's hand," Nash said, parts of his body disappearing and reappearing at seemingly random; cubical portions of his flesh, like a boolean applied to a 3D model to cut out a perfect cube, simply disappeared, the tiling pattern of the technique evident in the sharp lines the cubes fell upon, disregarding the actual curvature of Nash's body. "I cannot stay sheltered in the estate, wasting most of my time acting as a game piece, a way for Father to show that he approves of an ally's actions. That life led me to nothing but stagnation."

"You have a duty to your family," Beryl said, eyeing Nash carefully - the technique, while obviously Emerald in nature, was no obvious application of the orthodox methods taught to Nash, many of them personally by Beryl.

It wasn't unthinkable that the Senator had taught him something personally that Beryl had no knowledge of, but given the Senator's general preoccupation and the way Nash was talking right now... "What is that technique? Did the Patriarch teach that to you?"

"Ah, duty? That would be a better discussion over tea, not in the here and now, though I'll leave you this to consider - do I owe my duty to the clan, or do I owe my duty to what the Patriarch thinks the clan should be?" Nash stepped forward, shucking off his backpack and throwing it to the side.

"On the technique, I beg that you forgive me; I can tell you little, given our current circumstances. One thing that it is not, however, is from the Patriarch."

The fight began in earnest.

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Good. He hasn't called my bluff.

Nash weaved, trying to avoid the flurry of punches crashing against his body from an unnaturally far distance, struggling hard to keep whatever ones he could not dodge on his arms instead of his head or his gut.

That was many of them as he tried to advance, to reduce the advantage Beryl had at this range, though the flurry of strikes was more cautious than Nash had initially feared. Nash doubted his father had stipulated for him to come back unharmed - they had rather expensive doctors on retainer - but Beryl's own hangups, whether they were about Nash himself or the odd "technique" he was using, were proving useful enough in their own right.

The current "technique" he was using was unproven, uncemented, not a full channel or even a branch channel set aside to use it.

Sure, it was based off of an old tale he found in the Emerald Historical Annals while spectacularly bored years ago, but it didn't even count as a technique. It was a simple, entirely manual application of his normal Dimensional Phasing Art, used to 'flicker' random portions of his body into the Aether. It took an exorbitant amount of Aether, it didn't really do much other than deny certain targets to Beryl, and it took just as much mental concentration diverted to it as it did Aether.

But what it did do was intimidate.

Whether it was actually useful or not was secondary to that goal. The intimidation allowed Nash to get close enough to begin to throw a punch, stepping in for a powerful uppercut heading directly for Beryl's chin, just about to -

The Aether twisted.

For the fractions of a second in which Nash's fist would have collided with Beryl's head, the distance between them suddenly increased; his fist, previously on track to hit him square in the jaw, was not forced off course. The course was just suddenly somewhere else, picked up and moved so that it was simply disconnected from whatever destination it previously had. As soon as Nash's fist passed where Beryl's head used to be, the Aether untwisted, snapping both of them into their previous positions.

Nash was off balance, wide open, and still recovering from the punch he had intended to end the fight.

Beryl had none of those disadvantages.

The old man threw a powerful left cross straight into Nash's undefended side, hitting just below the liver. Nash swayed from the pain and the nausea, breathing heavily to try and force air into his windless lungs.

Before he managed to recover, a jab with all the speed of a highly trained combatant at the Third Calcification flew out, clocking Nash in the head and forcing him back, his vision darkening.

He forced himself back into an approximation of a fighting stance as well as he could, and immediately had to dodge once again.

This time, the attack came not as a punch but as a grab that he narrowly managed to lean out of the way of before he dived into Beryl, his arms outstretched to pull his opponent's legs out from under him.

Once again, his attack failed to reach Beryl, and he was rewarded by a hammerfist between his shoulder blades, the sheer force of the blow driving him to the pavement.

Catching himself on his forearms, he narrowly managed to roll out of the way of a kick - probably only because it came from Beryl's injured leg, flicking out slowly and ponderously for a cultivator of his level. However, even a weak strike from Beryl could hurt him enough to take him out of the fight.

Nash sprang to his feet, likely only managing the endeavor because Beryl allowed it. Beryl spoke, somewhat contemptuously. "Young Master, are you done yet?"

He stepped forward, the Aether twisting to make the step take him immediately next to Nash, where he grabbed the younger man's shirt and wrapped it around his shirt. "Show me this tremendous growth you said you experienced - I'm sure it was impressive against the thugs and gutter rats, but it is nothing for someone of the Emerald's stature. Give up on this foolish endeavor and return quietly."

Good. He's close enough.

He had hoped to win before now, to hurt the old man enough for him to run away, but that plan had failed.

However, with this position, Nash had a plan. It was desperate, and even if it worked it would leave him near completely drained, but if it did...

It could be his only chance to win here.

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Beryl kept his face from showing the exhaustion and surprise he felt, grabbing Nash by the shirt and pulling him closer.

Nash seemed to be more pliable after the beating he had received, and a good thing too - Beryl was unsure of how much longer he could sustain this pace.

Since when has he been this strong? he thought to himself, thankful for the short reprieve that the grapple brought, as both of them considered their options. Hopefully, Nash would make it easier on him and see reason - at a distance this close, he had the advantage in the grapple, but forcing any of Nash's strikes out of reach would be difficult.

He remembered training with Nash fairly recently, a scant few months ago, mere weeks before the attack at the Majestic Cloud Sect.

He had remembered how Nash had sparred against the assortment of foes provided for him, all from the surviving branch families of the Emerald clan. Some had been selected for being of similar prowess to Nash, some because they would force him to shore up his weaknesses, and some to remind certain families of their proper place.

Nash's sparring had been decent; technically correct, highly athletic, taking down opponents one after another, back to back. However, there had been an uncertainty to his aggression, a stiffness to his movements that was not present now.

Now, Nash was as aggressive as his comparatively poor mobility allowed, blocking and dodging attacks to such a degree that it seemed that his body, even in the Second Calcification, was nearly unable to keep up with the speed and precision of his planned movements.

Even with the difference in cultivation, Beryl was having difficulty landing strikes that would hurt without actually killing him outright, and even when he did, Nash seemed to shrug it off much more quickly than should have been possible for a cultivator of his level.

"Well?" Beryl asked, concealing the shooting pains that his old injury sent through his leg. "Are you going to see reason?"

"If going with you could be called seeing reason," Nash said, "Consider me blind."

Beryl was forced onto the back foot as Nash pushed forward, grabbing him as tightly to his body as he could, vying for control of the grapple.

One of his hands went to the hand Beryl had on his shirt, attempting to twist it into a wrist lock of some type. Beryl managed to slip that out of Nash's grasp, but failed to stop Nash from barrelling into him with all of his advantages weight and youthful strength. If it was that alone, then Beryl's superior cultivation would have made him more than strong enough to resist, but Nash had leverage, his positioning promising to send both of them to the ground as Beryl's injured knee gave out of him.

Desperately, Beryl increased the distance between him and the ground, trying to do the same between him and Nash.

They fell the short drop for several seconds, both of them entirely leaving the ground for all that time, yet to collide with the pavement that was in reality only a few inches below their shoes. Beryl's attempt to create distance from Nash had more mixed success - with the actual grasp he had on some of Beryl's clothing, the hooking of his feet behind Beryl's, and the general contact between them, Beryl couldn't actually increase the distance between him and Nash except for certain parts of his body, which did little.

He let that lengthening fall, returning him and Nash to normal relative distance between each other even as they fell down the inch-height drop. Beryl began to maneuver midair, twisting and going for an underhook, swinging his lesser weight around to try and force Nash under him before he landed.

Suddenly, Nash stopped struggling, and an odd feeling enveloped them both. Beryl could feel himself moving in some direction, inverting on himself, moving not on x or y or z or some combination of those axes but somewhere different entirely. Beryl could feel the connection his Aether had with the distance around him slip, before it suddenly attached to something else - not matter, or the things underpinning it, the distance that it all operated on.

Beryl opened his eyes and saw nothing but the Aether, floating in a sea. Outside of him and Nash, it was bereft of anything but the vibrations of light and the far-away channels of other cultivators.

Nash brought his leg up frantically and kicked out; in his surprise, Beryl let go, flying 'up' and away, not that there was any reference for those directions here.

He could barely see Nash's smile as he winked away, back into the physical world. His sudden lack of presence was partially replaced by a section of concrete, crudely in the shape of his legs, up to the knee for one and up to the ankle for another.

For a few terrifying seconds, Beryl drifted aimlessly through the sea of Aether, no gravity to hold him down nor solid hold to grab onto. He could feel the air drifting away from him, and knew that it was possible that he would suffocate before he met any other solid object in the endless expanse.

Then, he returned, and he fell.

He was high up in the air when he came back into the physical world, dizzy and disorientated in more ways than one as his cultivation struggled to reconnect with the world of matter and distance. When he fell, he did so ungracefully, sent crashing down to the pavement with only reflex allowing him to blunt the blow of the hard concrete.

When he came to his senses, standing up on his shaking legs and bruised body, Nash was nowhere to be seen. He reached into his pocket, and his heart fell upon seeing the tracking device; it was broken.