image [https://imgur.com/KsHtWxx.jpg]

Since there wasn’t much more in this room to look at, it was time to move onto the next area. But the beauty of the seafloor captivated us enough to take one good long glance out the big window

There was something serene about gazing out at the ocean life from behind this glass, like this was some aquarium view only a handful of people would ever get to see. It couldn't beat actually swimming amongst the wildlife though, which I was lucky enough to do.

"They say outer space and the deep ocean aren't very different places," Yamin commented. "Both are frontiers man has yet to conquer."

"And none of you ever should," Mella said. "Let those mysterious places fuel your dreams, lest you abuse more of this universe."

Nature was a special place, and humanity was in a prime position to safeguard it. At one point, my ancestors were responsible for protecting it, but we’ve been gone a long time. All that was left of their work were these great big towers.

“Not to kill the mood,” Uncle spoke up, “but let’s get going. There’s still an intruder that we need to deal with.”

“Right,” I agreed. “The wasps flew through that door, so let's follow them.”

They were on a set course to clear out a path for us to the next gravity lift room. They did a heck of a job dealing with the enemies still around, since I was only detecting a few straggler pirates scattered around and hiding in different rooms. Indena was more than generous enough to share a little magic fire with them.

~☆☆☆~

Seeing as there wasn’t much resistance left in the tower after the wasps swarmed it, we met back up with the ones who were following us and went up the next few gravity lifts with ease.

The advance team regrouped with us too, so we had a decent swarm of wasps. A lot of them looked like they’d taken a beating, some missing arms or bits of armour, but those were easy to repair. Yellow static rippled across the surface of their bodies, meaning their shields were still functional though. Lucky for us, they were ready for another round or two.

Our group was rushing down the final hallway before the beam chamber. Running at full speed, we just had a few dozen meters to cover, then a set of stairs would be our last obstacle.

The walls were covered in laser scoring, clearly a harsh battle took place here. It wasn’t like there hadn't been signs of battle in other areas, but it wasn’t until we hit this part that I was seeing damaged wasp pieces. But they were just fighting pirates still, right? It seemed like they had an easy time taking them out anywhere else.

-WARNING! DARKNESS DETECTED!-

“What the!?” I stopped, motioning for everyone to stop as well. “Darkness!”

Shadows from all over the hallway collected together into pools of dark energy.

The pirates raised up from these pools, sporting glowing red eyes and an aura of shadow. Their features were even more ghastly, like they’d been warped and changed to be more grinching.

Only demons dealt with darkness. Which means that demons were involved in this somehow!

“Me and me crew can't let you lads and lassies pass here.” Ghostbeard spoke in a reverberated tone. “Now I reckon it's time wer’ shown’ yee’ how we really fight!” he shouted, raising up a black and red blade in one hand and his gun in the other.

He took aim at Indena, but Uncle was quick to intercept his first bullet.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Ghostbeard fired off three more bullets without reloading!

Uncle's energy blade deflected all of them, but the bullets that he blocked were still whirling through the air, homing right back for him.

Indena used her fire magic to send walls of flame out and stop the bullets.

“Heat seeking bullets! That’s a new trick!” Indena commented.

“He heh…” Ghostbeard gurgled out a chuckle. “With these new powers, I be livin’ a dream. I can do anything I want!”

Ghostbeard fired off more bullets, these ones glowing red and shrouded in dark energy. But Mella reached out with her mana powers to catch the bullets like before.

WOOV!

The bullets went right through her mana trap! Uncle and Indena had to dodge out of the way. Their quick maneuvers were met with the blades of some very speedy pirates.

“What happened?” I whined, taking cover behind a door frame. “Why didn’t you catch the mana bullets like before?”

“They are no longer simple spirits, they are corrupted by darkness. I cannot manipulate that.”

Well this sucks! Looks like we needed to use stardust to attack them now. That's the only thing that can destroy darkness.

Ghostbeard was at least twice as strong, and triple as fast as before. It took the full focus of both Uncle, Indena and Marek just to hold back him and his crew. Some of the wasps joined in too, but a few caught the wrong end of a sword and came crashing down in a desperate kamikaze attack.

BOOM!

In the mess, Mella and I were cut off from the rest.

“Go!” Uncle ordered me. “Take the remaining wasps and stop the intruder!”

“Okay!” I shouted back, tugging Mella to the stairs leading to the beam chamber. Five wasps followed us in.

We made it to the chamber, but nobody was here. At a first glance everything seemed normal, but then I took a good look around…

There were red pentagrams drawn all around the doom and floors. It almost looked exactly like what I’d seen back in Elysium when Janus summoned that demon. He was part of an organization known as the Family of Sai.

“This demonic craft…” Mella swiped her finger over one of the pentagrams, getting red ink on her hand. “I had no idea we were dealing with something like this.”

“These guys are evil. They want to make the world dark forever so demons can take over!” I told her.

Mella looked at me with an unreadably blank stare, then pulled her hat over her face.

She stood for a moment. Whenever her hat was down, she was thinking hard about something…

Her hat shot up with a non-existent wind, almost flying off her head. Her eyes were in a wide shock.

“Why did I not see this before!?”

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Mella began running to the chamber door, but it slammed shut. Red lights on it glared down on us.

That door shouldn't have locked! I tried to interface with it, but it wasn’t responding.

Mella put her hands over it, like she'd done with the front door. It was magically sealed.

“Curses!” She kicked the door.

“What’s wrong, Mella?” I ran up next to her. “What’s wrong!?”

She was so flustered. We weren’t exactly stuck in the room, since there were other exits. So something else was going on.

“We fools! Brining the Evil One with us like this...we handed her over on a silver platter!”

This had to do with Yamin? But what about her?

Mella leapt back, charging up an energy ball and shooting it at the door.

BOOM!

But nothing happened. The Ferronium alloy wasn’t going to budge that easy.

“There’s no choice. We have to stop whomever is leading this madness.” She turned to me. “He is above us, how do we get to him?”

“Uh…uuh…” I’m not sure I was keeping up with her!

I accessed the security systems, and she was right about the intruder being above us. From here there weren’t any paths leading to the roof. But we had an option available.

Normally, stepping into a hyper-concentrated stream of mana was a death wish, but since I had access to the tower's systems, I could manipulate the beam to act more like a gravity lift that would take us to the roof.

Mella was all for it, ready to do whatever it took to reach the top.

Worry crept into me as I considered how I was going to manipulate the mana beam. If I messed this up, she’d be atomized. It might even burn me too, but I was made of indestructible metal, not flesh.

Before I even had a chance to change the settings, Mella took initiative and used her own magic to change up the mana stream to our liking. Being a mana witch does have its perks, I guess.

We stepped into the mana beam. Both of us and our contingent of wasps slowly levitated upwards toward the roof, where this mysterious enemy awaited us.

~☆☆☆~

Just when we hit the outside, I used my wings to force myself out of the makeshift gravity lift. Mella manipulated the mana to do something similar.

Thunder crackled above us. Terrible storm clouds had turned the sky black as night, only illuminated by red bolts of lightning.

There were piles of lead gathered around the tower roof inside of big red circles and pentagrams. Fire was rising up from the drawn circles. The lead was slowly melting down, glowing a bit on the edges.

A man with a stylishly trimmed red cloak was standing on part of a raised metal floor, very patiently awaiting us. He wore a smiling theater mask.

His arms spread out, showcasing the things he’d done here as if it were meant to be entertaining.

“Welcome,” he announced. “My awaited audience! The show is about to begin, and you’ll be the first to witness it.”

He had a radio voice, very easy to listen to, booming with charisma. But that made him seem all the more twisted.

“Cease this at once!” Mella shouted. “If you continue to tamper with the natural world, I will be forced to eradicate you!”

He cupped his hands together and let out a cheer of satisfaction.

“YES! That’s the script I was looking for! Please, keep to your role for the final performance.”

This guy must have been in theater club growing up, because he sure was dramatic.

A bio scan of him showed he was human, but he reeked of dark energy. If Janus was any contribution, he probably had a corrupted crystal heart in his chest too. That made him very dangerous.

“Do you wanna’ blot out the sun too, just like your friend, Janus?!” I interrogated.

“Janus…you know that fellow?” He put a hand up to the chin of his mask. The theater mask magically changed from happy to sad. “What became of him, is he alright?”

He had a genuine concern in his voice, so he definitely knew who he was.

“Answer my question first!” I ordered.

“Oh my! We’re already improvising. Very well,” he chuckled, his mask returning to happiness. “Blotting out the sun is quite the oversimplification of our dream. In our vision, the sun masks the true nature of man, covering it with light. But snuff out that light, and then we’ll see the darkness that truly rules the motivations of man.”

That was almost exactly what Janus told me before.

“Oh!” he cheered. “Speaking of which, we have a celebrity in our midst! No, the star of the show has taken the spotlight! Yes, the voices of the stage hands confirm it.”

He sounded nuts! Was he talking about me? Janus recognized I was different almost right away.

“Are you talking about me?” I asked, keeping an angry look on my face.

“Hardly anyone knows you. You may be the heroine of the show, but no star.” He shook his head. “No. Another is backstage, preparing for her role.”

“You couldn’t possibly be referring to the Evil One, could you?” Mella grit her teeth and took an offensive stance.

“I prefer to call her, the Free Spirited One, personally. But a rose by any other name is just as sweet.”

He was looking for Yamin, and whatever vendetta Mella had against her was part of this. Did we mess up by bringing her here? How could we have known that they were even looking for her? Maybe he didn’t know she was here until just now.

Mella looked at me, anger lighting up her eyes a rich purple colour.

“This is why I told you, we must kill the Evil One before she takes root!”

“I can’t let you kill Yamin!” I shouted back. “That goes against my commandments!”

“Fool!” Mella shouted, clenching up her face with conflict. “Ordinances must be followed...you are lawful, after all. But even so, our enemy is before us.”

“What a show!” The masked man clapped his hands. “Brava! Good show! Conflicts arise among the heroes, but they pause their dispute to focus on the main threat. I couldn’t have written a better script.”

His theatrical speak was really getting on my nerves. He probably had a mustache under that mask that he was tempted to twirl whenever he spoke.

“Forget that!” I said to him. “Why did you have these pirates get all this lead?”

“And what are your plans for the Evil One?” Mella added.

It took the theater man a few moments to think his answer over, but he snapped his fingers when he had something.

“Those pirates are mere projections of the past. Echoes of history that I puppeteer back to life. All I needed to do was tell them all this lead could be made into gold, and they did the rest. A rather greedy bunch of nitwits. Were they entertaining?”

Echoes of history? So, I guess they weren’t technically ghosts after all.

“Mella, what does that mean?”

“I am unsure,” she said. “Something about it seems familiar to me.”

I was thinking that too. She had the power to bring dead animals back to life, but spiritually, not physically. That’s how she can use animals to fight for her. But I don’t think she can do that to humans. Maybe this guy’s magic was in a similar vein as hers.

“Fret not!” he announced. “All will be explained, in the second act,” he chuckled. “Assuming you all survive through the script.”

“What about the Evil One?” Mella reminded him.

“Oh, yes. Do you think I want to spoil the end of the show for you? Ha Ha! Never. But, I’d love to hear your theories.”

With how vague Mella’s descriptions were of this Evil One thing she kept bringing up, she didn’t know much about it either. On behalf of the spirits she followed, they told her that she needed to stop this evil being, or bad things would happen.

I didn’t want to say anything about that out loud though, or else our enemy would probably take advantage of our ignorance.

Speaking of ignorance, I didn’t even know this guy’s name. “Who are you?”

“You may refer to me as. The Actor,” he waved. “It is my one dream in life to entertain all humanity with truth and justice.”

Justice? Yeah right! What sort of justice is blotting out the sun? He was a bad guy, through and through. We needed to stop him before he destroyed the world with his weird theatrical games.

“Now, why don’t we skip to the climax, my dear heroin?”

His hands raised up, glowing with bright red energy. He then stretched them out as far as he could, and all the pentagrams around the floor lit up.

“By the power of Lord Belphegor, I command you, spirits of Hell, to rise in the name of your prince!”

Elongated bodies of darkness, like very tall and slender soldiers, rose up from the pentagrams. At their core was a red light, beating with evil energy.

In front of The Actor, a massive shell peeked out from one of the circled star shapes. A beast-like demon prowled out from the floor, sporting the head of a lion, six bear-like legs, and a big shell on its back. It also had a really long tail.

“Now, let the show begin! Do make this an entertaining end to the first act, would you?”

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