It was midnight in the dead of winter, and a chill wind hissed through barren trees. A light snow had fallen earlier that day, and in the clearing where Oliver stood looking down at the prone woman, an inch of white powder still lay over the ground, covered with tracks remaining from the setup of the camp.

There was a brief pause as Oliver processed the fact that, impossibly, she was still alive, then he sprang backwards, calling out at the same time.

"Gideon! She's still up."

From the door to the wagon, Gideon whipped around, face contorting into an 'o' of surprise.

The woman moved quickly, springing to her feet, but she was swaying, head moving back and forth as if she were drunk or dizzy. Oliver couldn't imagine what she was experiencing.

But after only a heartbeat or two she locked onto him and took first one faltering step, then another, and another, growing rapidly steadier as she advanced on him.

He fell back as she moved forward, her speed increasing as her augmented body recovered from the effects of the carbon monoxide poisoning.

Then she sprang for him; he'd been waiting for it, saw her ankle twist at the last second, and sprang to the side. It wouldn't have been enough, except for the fact that he'd just been spending mana on the anti-gravity spell that powered the bullets, sending his weight into a bullet that he'd dropped beneath him. It was driven into the ground with a crack as his leap carried him much further to the side and out of reach of her arms.

She adjusted rapidly, but he was out of range, and instead he brushed his hand against her arm as she whipped by, flipping the target of the spell from himself to her as he came into physical contact with her shoulder.

Was that how the spell had been meant to be used? Absolutely not. Did it work? Well enough!

But in the brief seconds before it kicked in fully, she pivoted faster than any human had a right to and came in with a mean right hook that would have probably taken a normal person's head off if it landed.

It hit Oliver in the jaw, triggered the failsafe runes that they'd painted onto his skull, and stopped cold, the momentum of her fist dissipating instantly.

Oliver felt nothing physically, only saw a precipitous drop in mana as the temporary anti-velocity ward painted onto his cheek activated. It was a sequence of runes that they'd developed for the range, to prevent the walls from being utterly destroyed by their latest tactics practice, and he'd nearly immediately seen the potential. He was a living artifact, at least until the paint cracked a little and the runes lost their coherency. It worked better on armor, but they didn't have armor.

The woman's face showed a complete lack of comprehension at what had just happened, and then her feet left the ground as the antigravity spell finally took hold. She began to waving her arms helplessly like a beetle upended as she drifted upwards with no visible cause for her ascent.

"The ring is still bound," called Oliver to Gideon as he approached.

Gideon nodded, rounding the fire.

"Fools! I am far advanced down the Way of Grigor," the woman shouted angrily, as she began to lazily rotate in midair, legs drifting out to one side and her hair drifting towards the ground as if she was in zero gravity. Which, technically, she was. "Once you cowardly spellmongers run out of mana and this casting ends, I will tear you limb from limb!" She didn't seem to care that her lungs held no oxygen.

"And she's triggered one of the secret contingincies," said Oliver, ignoring the woman's raving.

Gideon nodded again.

After seeing that his imprecations had no effect, the armored woman stopped her helpless wiggling and instead went for something at her belt. At the same moment, Gideon got to her, reached up and grabbed her leg, his spacial storage ring glinting in the firelight as he reached up. The captain vanished with a slight popping sound, and there was silence in the clearing once more.

"It's still a vacuum in there?" asked Oliver into the sudden silence.

"As near enough as makes no difference," said Gideon.

"How long?"

"Not long now. She's already slowing down."

"Let me know when it's time."

With that, Oliver went over to the wagon, shuddering despite himself as he picked his way past the wreckage of the door. Even knowing what he'd see didn't make it any better.

As he approached, the firelight cast a faint and unsteady illumination over what lay within. Six figures sat in the darkness, clothed in white sacks, pale and shivering in the sudden light, staring blindly ahead. With their hair grown out and their skeletal figures, it was nearly impossible to tell man from woman. Oliver found himself grateful for the poor visibility.

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He went up to the first figure, placed his hand on one clammy shoulder, shook them softly. No response. They were frigid to the touch, just sitting there staring ahead into the near-darkness with no reaction whatsoever.

Gideon came up behind, silently, and Oliver flinched when he realized he stood behind him.

"This is what we're fighting against," Gideon said. "This is why we can't afford to take any chances."

For a moment, Oliver couldn't find the words to respond. He'd heard stories of human trafficking, but to see it in person, and in such a way, knowing that they were looking on dead people walking, it blocked his throat.

"What now?" he asked after a pause.

"Now, we siphon the mana, as much as we can hold. It's time for the rest of the team to come in. It's time for phase three of the plan." Gideon sounded relatively unphased. He'd seen it before. Every time they raided a caravan for mana.

Oliver nodded. "Go ahead."

Gideon nodded, then re-cast his communication spell and said something that Oliver couldn't hear, despite being only feet from him.

After a moment, he nodded to himself and turned to Oliver.

"Our turn. Pick one of these poor sods and start draining his mana, like I showed you."

It was straightforward enough. Since these people had been made into mana slaves and possessed no wills of their own, their mana was simply there. There was no need for them to will it to another. Instead, Oliver formed a tendril of mana, scrunching his eyebrows as he extruded it from his hand and across the small gap to the body of the person he'd chosen -- he couldn't quite bring himself to touch them -- and connecting to their aura.

Once the strand of mana had made contact, it acted something like a conduit, the mana flowing from a place of greater concentration to the place of lesser concencentration -- his aura. He could sense the moment the stream of mana began, a pressure bearing down on his own magic, a sensation with no close physical analogue.

About halfway through this process Oliver became dimly aware of the rest of the team's arrival as chose their own targets and began the process of siphoning their mana.

It was a process of middling speed, but soon enough he'd drawn enough mana that it was dissipating from him faster than he was accumulating it; he could actually feel it, rolling off of him like steam evaporating above a field in summer. And before him, the mana slave's aura had been depleted; if before it had reminded him of an over-full tick, now it was a deflated one. Altogether unpleasant, in either state.

He turned away when he was done and stepped outside, breathing through his nose once more after exiting the wagon. His mana was at 156% of his max capacity. For him, that was some 1329.3 mana-days' worth: enough to do some real damage, used properly.

Some ten minutes later, amidst the silent trees, the other members of their conspiracy trooped back out into the clearing, Tallahassee looking as unshaken as ever, while Graves kept glancing around the clearing, eyes always on the move. Sung was back at home, as always. He was not an active participant in their missions.

Gideon emerged last, moving across the fire. It had been about fifteen minutes since he'd moved the woman into the void that they'd created inside of his spacial storage ring in anticipation of such a problem.

Oliver checked his log, cursing himself for having not thought of it earlier. There was still no notification for her death. That tracked with his theory, though; that the system was drawing from his own perceptions, augmented by what it could perceive through mana and other senses that he might not be fully conscious of yet.

"What's the deal? Is she dead?" he asked Gideon as Gideon knelt down beside the fire, placing his ring near the ground.

"Looks like it," he grunted. "But be prepared, just in case."

Oliver nodded to Tallahassee, who was looking on in interest. "There's a melee fighter in there, a tough one. I knocked her out with about a minutes' worth of pure carbon monoxide, and she should have absolutely been dead, but she was still walking and talking after the fact. So we stuck her in the vacuum."

It had been Oliver's idea, after seeing the way that Gideon could move things in and out of his ring at will. There apparently had been some atmosphere within the ring -- there had to be, to avoid damage to the items stored within -- but upon focusing and reconceptualizing all of the air molecules as a single item at Oliver's suggestion Gideon had managed to remove even them, leaving only a true vacuum behind: the perfect cage for a supernaturally strong being. Or any being, really.

The fact that this was possible was one half of the reason their plan for bypassing the security of the Crucible called for a second spacial storage ring.

"Prepare the railgun, just to be safe," said Gideon to Tallahassee. She nodded and reached into the pack at her back. The rest of them took a few steps back to avoid getting hit with chunks of mana-reinforced physical practicioner as she withdrew a metal rod from her pack the approximate width and height of a can of soda. It was solid steel, and expensive. It would be propelled by a different spell, one that conjured magnetic fields rather than making use of gravity.

For his own part, Oliver readied the anti-gravity spell again. Gideon confirmed with them all, then caused the body of the woman to reappear again and leapt back immediately.

At the same moment Oliver leaned in and brushed a finger against her arm, casting his gravity spell again. He winced at the mana drain as he stepped back, but it was better safe than sorry. Her body drifted upwards into the air unmoving, black and blue all over, with bloodshot eyes and covered in a thick layer of rime, frost covering her visible skin.

There was a tense pause during which nobody moved much at all except the body slowly drifting upwards.

Oliver checked his log again; finally it showed that she had died. But had been was no burst of mana this time; either it had all gone into the ring, or the bodies of physical practicioners contained little free mana. They waited for another couple of minutes, eyes fixed on the corpse. Then, slowly, Oliver approached, keeping hold of the spell holding away from any kind of leverage on the ground.

He reached up, withdrew the ring from her hand. It was cold, very cold. No strand of mana trailed from it, meaning that the artifact was now unbound. He tucked it into his pocket, and nodded to the rest of them.

"Alright, that's it. Let's go."

With that, they set off into the trees. Oliver was the last to leave the clearing, canceling the spell as he stepped out of the light. The woman's body fell to the ground as he departed, leaving the conscious prisoners behind and the guards unconscious in the woods around them. With any luck, the guards would awaken before too much longer -- the armor would keep them warm until then -- and see the mana slaves to safety. They would likely turn around and head back to Velia to raise the alarm.

Of course, Oliver, Gideon, and the rest of the Earthers would be long gone by then.