The two returned to their second battlefront to encounter absolute pandemonium. Everything might have originally appeared balanced, but the conflict on this side had quickly shifted in their enemy’s favour.
Axln brought Lyun over to a seating area, having shifted directly into the citadel after bringing them both directly into the air. The whole thing had been almost a demonstration of strength, using her chaotic potential to simply carry the weakened woman and then jump the distance. Mheridz had passed her more than a few concerned glances then too, but by then she was already out of the room. She headed to the rift mechanism, finding Luna currently trying to process repairs on it. Well, that was quite unfortunate, but she could still handle rifts on her own. Committing her own potential to the cause, she rifted out back to the ground below. She arrived to witness a demonstration depicting the depths pandemonium had befallen, even the colossal having stumbled on an unsettled stone foundation, to then slip into an area that just happened to be molten at the time, the entire weapon sinking into a bog of liquid stone. Several destroyers around her had their weapons spontaneously fail, the unit then suddenly detonating from the intensity of elements within. As she took a step forward, she suddenly slipped to her back, the ground below her having at some point frozen into a slick surface. A chaotic fiend rushed to confront her, so she turned her own weapon upon it.. one which had happened to be without ammunition at the time. That startled her, finding the thing’s shard had been lost at some point during their encounters.
「There are a vast number of disturbances here, the flow of probability has been outright decimated by chaos.」 So they really were suddenly as unlucky as they looked. Axln was outright forced to simply consume her opponent with her chaotic arm, not having the chance to weigh the options still available to her. Logically, she would have every option.. but logic didn’t mean shit against the laws of chance on this side. Things could go wrong just because things could go wrong, without any degree of rational cause. No wonder their foe had opted to that path, it even felt as primitively chaotic as they were. 「At its core, probability is the law of chaos, effectively being randomization itself. Chance is then one of the few chaotic factors present with all principles, as a result of being exposed to temporal chaos.」 That possibly explained why things were going so poorly even more. Axln herself felt like she might not directly have been affected, but the impact of her actions would be then influenced. That too was easy to explain, her chaotic nature making her far more resilient to factors of chaos. It still might not even be enough, she wasn’t exactly made of chaos herself, the direct part of her feeling unaffected wasn’t even her physical self.. that would still be vulnerable. The only part of her which was safe was her chaotic aspects. Everything else of her, or anything from everything else on this side, well.. nothing else was quite so lucky.
Axln started coughing suddenly, having all too suddenly simply gotten sick in the unfamiliar environment.. even with protection from her power gear which would have worked against that. Of course, over-exposure to the void, something that can make people ill.. it really was quite unfortunate that such had so suddenly occurred. It was also unfortunate that they actually didn’t know anyone especially skilled at healing. Axln retailored the effects of her power gear to cause a direct healing effect.. but her concentration broke mid-way in a coughing fit. During this distraction, she remained unaware of the threats around her, one of the fiends lashing out while she wasn’t paying attention. Axln went flying by the wave force itself, slamming hard into a rock in the process. Axln felt herself drain in the impact, and not just from her breath. Looking down, she discovered that the rock she had flown into happened to have a protruding part, which had sliced right into her leg. She collapsed to the ground, caught between struggling to catch her breath while struggling to even stand. Her foe however had no interest in providing the opportunity for either. It wasn’t even an especially powerful fiend, actually one of the weakest, and yet that was suddenly enough. No one else was faring any better either.
「Attempting to alter matters of chance that are directly at play here. There is quite a lot going on, so this is going to take a bit of a chaotic surge. Not everything can be addressed either, it would be a surge of chaos beyond that form’s compatible limits.」Axln suddenly slipped and tumbled, the result causing her to evade the next strike from the fiend. This also brought her right up to it, allowing her to at least drain it directly with her chaotic hand. With a bit of effort, she managed to get her attempts at healing back in order, but the results remained much slower than she might have liked. She also felt a bit hazy, like everything about her was far more distant than she would have normally assumed. Her hand meanwhile was the most vivid part of her, a blazing black void. She instinctively knew.. this was a sign that her chaotic saturation had gone suddenly a lot higher. She was caught in a flow of chaos, the only thing keeping her safe from the ravages of misfortune.. and it wasn’t even a perfect shield. Worse, it opened her to new problems, the chaos around her flowing through her trying to impress its will upon her. Of course, if she wanted protection, she just needed more chaos, that would solve everything, right? Certainly, being of chaos, she would be invincible right now.
Except.. it wouldn’t be worth it. Not only was the price too much to ask, that didn’t help all of her friends suffering right now. It was a stroke of misfortune which brought her a keen insight upon this concept, almost as an inverted blessing. For in that moment of self-conflict, the siege-mantle of the academy crashed against the moon with a thundering boom. Much like always, this got her attention.. and even sent a spiral of dread through her.. but not because of her fear of such sounds. Her foremost concern was how bad such a crash had gotten, especially for people who remained unprotected against the current climes of misfortune. In a spiral of darkness not completely the design of her gift, she was at the crash site. Still struggling to wash away the rising whirls of chaos, she tried to survey her surroundings, her circlet’s vision failing to provide it’s normal support. There were visibly a good number of casualties on this craft, most of them fatal. Her senses failing her, she felt a guiding pull in directions she couldn’t explain. She found several of the people important to her, all wounded, some dying. Ezhyrae was wounded, unconscious, but otherwise stable. Xwyhr.. her sister.. even Jhez.. those two were in a pool of their blood with serious injuries.. and with none of them conscious. No one was conscious, only Axln.
She knew she needed to save the people important to her, to make sure they made it safely. She also knew that they couldn’t count on healing instrumentation in this situation, not with how much that stuff was simply failing. Her only option was a chaotic solution, she would have to find a way to apply chaos to fix this danger. 「Your saturation levels of chaos are already dangerous, immersing yourself in more of the temporal …」 Axln caught wind of the idea right away, she was suddenly picking up some of Lyun’s worst. A sacrificial resolution, as even she was unable to think rationally. Possibly their greatest fortune, Lyun wasn’t here.. certainly that would have been worse. Actually.. Axln wasn’t so confident at that, Lyun might have gotten creative here, something Axln herself still lacked. She believed such simply because it was safe to assume that misfortune was the guiding principle here. It implied a solution might exist, but not right now. Fortunately, time was something she had ample supply of. Setting the entire crash site into a sphere of suspended time, making use of the saturation of chaos present as fuel for the time suspension, she made her way outside to consider her options. Of course, she was then leashed to the site.. both so that she could sustain it and so that she could defend it. Everyone inside was absolutely vulnerable to the chaos around them now.
Looking around outside, she found circumstances had gotten worse. The citadel’s main weapon had stopped mid firing, suspended in time. Of course, her time suspension was leashed to both her and Lyun together, and Lyun was currently on the citadel. Everything was constantly growing worse and worse, no matter what she tried to do about it. She could almost audibly hear the chaos around her tormenting her and taunting her for her weaknesses. However, it was still a lonely concept, her greatest weakness was not that she didn’t have power, her greatest weakness was that she was alone. She was the only one with power, except Lyun of course.. but Lyun was currently unconscious. Alone, she was bound and helpless, unable to be in many places at once. Chaos still implored on her, that joining its cause would give her an infinity of numbers, to never be left so helplessly abandoned. Even so, she resisted, determined to find her own path. Chaos however mocked her, saying that her dependence on principles has left her chained. She knew that she was so bound, that principles of time and space were things she could do very little about.
Actually, that was wrong, wasn’t it.
“The chaos here is getting annoying. Like it doesn’t understand how potent true chaos actually is.” 「There are none here who are hearing you.. and it is as if your words were directed to your own chaos. Isn’t that…?」 “.. crazy and stupid, probably. Just think of it as a good portion of principled hype. So, shall we move to true chaos?” 「What may be the plan?」 “Right now, we seem stuck because of rules like time and space being sort of in the way. Chaos might invite the idea to outright break the rules, but that’s such a boring solution, right? Wouldn’t it be more fun to.. bend the rules instead? Mix chaotic time manipulation with principled shadow elemental space distortions, transpose both time and space at once. The logic makes sense.. but also seems impossible. A bunch of logical jumps that simply can’t be logically explained, with a lot between that stands more theoretical than sensical. After all, I can suspend time, and shadow elements can be used to link multiple areas at once. If those are both known facts, there is grounds to assume I could rift a chaotic presence in multiple locations at once, and then make use of my own rift to suspend a presence of myself there at a time. As I can assert dominance over my own chaos, it means I could actively move in each area.. but with time suspended, I’m overstepping my presence and total reach in duplicity. Other chaos couldn’t do this, because they couldn’t make use of my own principled rift. I would be in each area, so I could sustain a presence in many areas, so I could suspend time in each area, so I could be in each area. No matter what, there is a glaring fault of a paradox, the one thing I couldn’t figure out. But.. I don’t have to, do I? Technically, wouldn’t true chaos apply logic in a way that wouldn’t be logical?” The greatest reason Axln was saying everything was because she was getting a headache just thinking about it all. Having some of it outside of her head felt like it helped.
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「There is no grounds for chaotic certainty either, with so much dependence on principles and logic, but this idea is tantamount to a display of immersive true chaos. At its simplest, all you need is to have a presence that you shouldn’t have, so that you may have it. Such wouldn’t even need to be chaotically sustained, because its own principles sustain it. However, it will require suspending time in enough areas to ensure continuity, which is going to take a lot. Ah, but such usage is not taxing on that form, and would offer ample ways to simply waste chaotics. The largest tax may be on your own concentration, as you follow events on multiple forms across multiple timelinks to do multiple things together. Sustaining the principles of shadow will also be taxing, both as the principle demands and in the fact that chance will attempt to sabotage it. What you do so divided will prove even additionally taxing.」
Axln could understand such concerns, considering how much stamina would be consumed in sustaining shadow links that break down the distance between multiple areas so that she could share a presence in all of them, while acting beyond the constraints of time itself. Quite notably, without all of this ambient chaos, she couldn’t dare to have hoped to pull such a thing off. It also means she would never get to do this again. However, it did not mean she hadn’t trained for this sort of split focus for many Sidera.. building a complicated script for a swarm of nanites actively responding in real time. With her dust adrenaline boost surging through her, she should be able to keep up with everything.. at a mental level at least. What this would do to her physically is something that would remain to be seen. But at least there wasn’t a worry about the chances of things going wrong.. she was about to defy all probability anyway, doing the absolute impossible.
She set a rift off towards the area near the citadel, moving herself there while time suspending herself where she was. The rift reacted, but stopped because of the time interference. However, as the rift would consider her at the location she specified, that same area stopped time too. Committing herself to the chaos, she willed herself to both be receptive to the rift, going over there, but still be suspended to where she was at present. Then she applied the shadow of her gift to collapse the rift into a space collapse, preventing her passage through the rift but sustaining a link between both locations. She then allowed herself to move.. but at this point she was logically in two places at once.. with time not registering yet so leaving her in an uncertain location until time resumed. Chaos fulfilled this uncertainty, as she walked within her own time collapse, free to move while reality tried to reassert itself.
Of course, it was still disorienting, realizing Axln could see two different sights at the same time. Trying to move her two selves independently took a bit of trial and error, her misfortunes there not helping her in the least. The fact that stuff felt extra hazy wasn’t helping either. However, of all the chaos she could be using, her own natural style was by far the most comfortable, so the haze began to clear away slightly. The haze however was replaced by a sudden dizzy spell, a fiend having caught her off guard while she adjusted. All too suddenly, that same fiend found itself in another rifted time bubble, Axln getting up in time to see herself draining that fiend away too. Of course, except for her abuse of time-frozen shadows, she wasn’t capable of using either her gift or her instruments like this at all. This implied every foe she defeated was chaos she took in, requiring her to spend more in time suspended bubbles, which also required her to work with more self-duplication. She quickly lost count of how many Axlns she happened to be working with, devoting her attention more to what each was doing instead. She knew she needed more of a plan, because things would simply grow out of control at this rate. Fortunately, there had then become more of her to look for solutions now too. However, this was still not enough, she knew that she would have to reach out to others for support in trying to resolve the many ongoing problems. With the academy time suspended and Lyun unconscious, there was only one person left Axln could turn to.. one who could even confront her in a sphere of time suspension. Making use of suspended time already in the citadel, she completed another rift link inside and established yet another presence.
“Trying to establish command over our forces is really difficult when everything is in suspended time. Then again, absolutely nothing was working right just before that either.” “Our enemy is making use of a strand of chaos to manipulate probability. That’s having pretty much everything fail on us. Ezhyrae has crashed too, the situation there is outright critical. I’ve suspended time there so that there would be an opportunity to save people with the right resources, but…” “Wait, how are you suspending time there when you’re here?” “I’m there too.. uh, it’s complicated. Do we have anything that could heal everyone?” “Everything here is failing, even if time was back to normal. Jhez is at least fine, because I’m still here. I couldn’t be here if either of my parents were lost, right? My recommendation would be to travel back in time and…” “Surrendering isn’t an answer.” Mheridz was already making Axln regret this decision, already starting on the girl’s favourite solution for everything. Axln needed practical solutions, not just the same old stupid ones.
“Hey, I mean you could just travel back and fix this, right? I would be glad to fix things for you, but aren’t you denying your own abilities by not even doing that for yourself?” “By surrendering, I don’t even mean just to you. Leaving this timeline, giving up on it, surrendering to it.. that’s not an answer. Things could simply get worse.” “Worse than..?” “.. as you said, Jhez is still alive. In another timeline, we may not be so lucky.” “Lucky? I thought that was completely at the whim of our enemy, luck.” “Maybe, but it isn’t as if they know principled matters very well, such may simply be an oversight. Besides, if I hadn’t shown up chaotically as I did, they would probably be dead by now. I’m keeping things in check by giving us the time to find an actual working solution.” Mheridz was still concerned at how much this version of Axln seemed to fear her own ability to leap through time. Considering how much time manipulation was ongoing right now, that itself seemed pretty irrational to her. Her mother had never held such reservations, capable of always predicting her own future by constantly having already seen it. Being constantly prepared, it was one thing she endlessly admired in her mother, aspiring to at least shine with even a fragment of such potential. After going back through time, she had even gotten to live like her mother, already aware of the future. Both had changed.. her own awareness of the future and this Axln’s willingness to reverse it. Even so, such matters of time manipulation didn’t stop either of them from being prepared, it just got in the way of it.
“The citadel is outfitted with some of the greatest state-of-the-art marvels anyone has ever seen, such as a shielding that prevents people from rifting here.. which I expect failed too by chance. The rift room used to be an outright laboratory, and the room where you discovered hidden instruments on the day of your book heist was supposedly another secret laboratory. That lab was supposedly outfitted with a vast number of super advanced survival equipment made well before its time. Luna would know where such is as well, getting victims there and treated would work.. in normal circumstances. Such obviously can’t be done while time is suspended, and can’t be trusted while chance stands against us. Restore both, and I’ll do what is needed to make sure as many are saved as possible.” Mheridz might not be able to predict the future anymore, but she still had a vast study of history. She knew the legends the citadel had been capable of producing, of the places she had been shown when she was younger. She had even needed to visit her mother and Lyun in the very same room, at a time when both had been quite seriously injured in one of their many excursions. But it did not help that the place was an absolute maze, with distinct locations impossible to find without a proper guide. Such would be even more impossible when chance itself worked against them.
This was unfortunately the extent of Mheridz’s knowledge of their situation, simply left in reservation to the principles that could help them. When it came to matters of chaos itself, she remained woefully ignorant and without any useful information that could turn their luck around.