Tala and Rane had his recovery down to a routine by this point.

True, none of the three sessions had been exactly like any of the others, but they still had commonalities, and they’d been able to figure out what worked to bolster up the various aspects of Rane.

His physical recovery after this third session was miraculous, especially considering there was essentially no external magic involved. His mind, however, his mindset, and his thinking were… less than good.

Tala and Rane took to running every day, and Master Nadro spoke to Rane as much as he could, which was less than anyone involved would prefer.

Unfortunately, the Hallowed man was in high demand.

He did help Rane as he could, but Rane was hardly the only person in need of counsel and a listening ear.

Therefore, Tala ended up trying to fill the role, trying to be a listening ear to Rane, and a calm presence for him to lean on.

In retrospect, that might have been part of Master Nadro’s intention, but if so, he never gave any indication.

-If he is the only healer, most will fall. If he can help those who care for those who are hurting to step forward and help, though? Then, we have a chance.-

There was some wisdom in that, and Tala decided it was as likely true as it was not.

Even so, they ended up doing things to distract Rane more often than talking.

Rane did seem to do best when moving, when doing something. It almost seemed like basically anything would be enough to keep his mind occupied, to let his soul continue to settle.

And his soul needed time to settle and recover.

While his gate was not cracked to Tala’s threefold sight, it was… distorted somehow.

She couldn’t explain it or describe it in any useful fashion.

Physically, it was still perfectly fine—if something so esoteric as a gate between existence and the afterlife could be discussed in physical terms—but there was a twisting, a warping to it that was hard to put into words.

It felt strained to her perception, like it was on the edge of simply… ceasing to be.

She didn’t have to be a genius to realize that whatever form that took, it would mean Rane’s death.

So, Tala did her best to keep Rane’s mind occupied at every turn, but that didn’t seem to make things better.

Finally, when she confessed her frustrations to her unit-mates, it was Master Girt—somewhat obviously—who provided her with the needed insight.

Rane needed to go through what had happened in order to get past it.

Tala needed to let Rane dig deeper. She had to let him think on what had occurred while he had support with him.

The distractions could be good for the moment—they might even be required at times—but there needed to be times of deep reflection as well.

Tala had to change her approach if Rane was to recover, let alone ever fully Refine.

These were the thoughts dominating her mind as she and Rane came back from their latest loop outside of Alefast.

As fate would have it, there was another caravan about to enter into the city.

Tala sighed, slowing beside Rane. “Let’s wait for them to get inside.”

She didn’t want to be unkind again, and it wouldn’t hurt her to wait.

Besides, she needed to talk with Rane. “Hey, Rane?”

Rane had bent over, briefly gripping his knees and breathing heavily, but even as she addressed him, he was straightening, putting his hands on the back of his head and allowing his chest and lungs to expand more fully. As he was doing this, he glanced her way, his breath already slowing. “Yeah?”

-Um… Tala?-

Tala sighed internally. Can’t you see I’m busy?

“Are you doing okay?” She spoke neutrally, not letting on how closely she would be paying attention to his answer.

-Tala, this is important.-

What is it, Alat? She almost growled at Alat internally but held herself back.

-There’s no caravan scheduled for arrival at this time.-

Tala’s focus immediately snapped to the caravan.

Her threefold sight initially saw absolutely nothing wrong.

She could see inside the wagons, and they looked right.

There weren’t any expanded spaces that she could see, but they weren’t required for a caravan, just… standard to the point that she hadn’t ever heard of a caravan without one before.

The people looked right—they looked human—down to the level of their skeletons and organs. Though, it was hard for Tala to truly examine them from this distance.

Clearly the city guards thought so too, because the portcullises were actively being lifted to allow the caravan to come inside.

Then, she realized something. “The caravan workers don’t have gates.”

Rane hadn’t responded to her, yet, but he had opened his mouth to do so. When she mentioned the lack of gates, a frown crossed his face, and he seemed to change what he’d been going to say, “Tala, I didn’t think that’s something you’d fixate on. Who cares if one or more of the guards don’t have a gate?”

She shook her head. “No, Rane. None of them have gates, not even the ‘Mages’ that I can see.”

That got his attention, and he straightened, hand drifting to Force’s hilt hanging at his belt in what was clearly an unconscious motion.

Tala was more focused on the caravan however. What is going on?

She felt a subtle magical aura pulsing outward from… something, tap tap, tapping against her will, mind, and magic.

She forced her perspective to focus stone- and starward, and only then did she see the distortion of illusory magic wrapped around… something that underpinned the entire caravan, hanging stoneward of superficial.

Tala took a step forward. “What are you?”

Her iron expanded stoneward until it reached the layer upon which whatever that thing was had hidden itself.

She then forced her aura forward along that strata, bringing iron spikes along within it.

The whole caravan seemed to stutter, the oxen and guards freezing in place, midstep.

Then, her aura slammed against resistance.

It was another’s area of control, and it didn’t budge in the slightest as she tried to force her authority forward.

The nearest caravan guard spun toward her, eyes locking on her.

He cocked back his arm and threw his knife.

It was a ludicrous motion.

Rane and Tala were nearly two hundred yards away from the man, but something told Tala not to laugh.

On instinct, she leapt forward, between the man and Rane.

An instant later, the knife cut through her aura, carrying with it the same power that had resisted her attempts to investigate.

Alat! Signal an attack!

That’s all that Tala had time to state, even at the insane speeds that she and Alat could usually communicate.

The knife’s blade struck her directly in the sternum, and despite an immense amount of force and magics that were specifically designed for piercing and cutting, it failed to penetrate her defenses.

If she had been a more normally defended Archon the weapon would likely have easily blown straight through her.

Without thought, she allowed all her iron to anchor herself in place, increasing her inertia to the point that even a siege engine’s payload would have had a hard time knocking her back.

A knife simply didn’t have the mass to transfer sufficient energy to move her, but this knife was just a superficial extension of something far, far more massive.

When it failed to pierce her, the knife morphed into an odd sort of tangling tendril, and the beast now had an anchor on her.

The tendril had wrapped all the way around her, creating a very difficult to remove anchor.

Behind her, she had just enough time to hear Rane gasp.

She saw him in her threefold sight, eyes wide.

Rane, who was still recovering.

Rane, who was uninscribed.

Rane, who was out here because of her.

Rust…. Tell him to run, Alat.

-I’ll try, but I doubt he’ll check his Archive connection in a situation like this.-

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Tala opened her mouth to deliver the message herself, but an instant later, she was torn out of the superficial, dragged stoneward and toward the so-far-impenetrable lump of… something.

Rust you. Her resolve hardened; her mind focused; and she set to work.

Her elk leathers acted almost on their own—likely at Alat’s direction—and iron and white steel flowed over her, taking on the increasingly familiar configuration of interconnected layers of defense.

As she reached the layer of existence on the level of her opponent, she dumped extra power into her defenses, while wrapping the tendril in her iron.

She also canceled her own effective gravity so she wouldn’t drop away.

The extension of the creature squelched under the pressure of her exertion despite the magic that was in it actively attempting to reshape it and create a more permanent anchor.

As the bit of monster was pulverized, that removed the hostile hold on her and left her floating eye to eye with…

Honestly, she didn’t have words for what she was seeing.

Back on the superficial, her threefold sight let her see Rane drawing Force and beginning a charge forward.

Foolish man, you were meant to run away!

-Maybe, but you know that’s not who he is, Tala. What about Rane makes you think that he would see you attacked and not respond with any means at his disposal?-

Tala felt a smile pull at her face even as her chest finished healing and she focused on the horror before her.

Her previous experiences finally gave her context to what was before her.

That’s a syphon?

-That was going to be my guess, yeah.-

It seems like a powerful one. That didn’t track with what she knew of them. They didn’t tend to gain great power until they’d been in a human city for a long while.

They also didn’t tend to leave after they were established.

Still, its magical weight had to be at least equivalent to her own.

True, its larger size gave it an edge in that department. So, it could still be less dense than her, but that hardly mattered.

Even as she watched, eyes began to form across the being that was still shielded from her magesight.

Yeah, that’s a syphon.

-And you’re alone, outside city defenses.-

In its home turf, Tala added seriously.

All those factors likely contributed toward its ability to block her detection.

This was fighting a tiger in the woods instead of one that had escaped a menagerie.

Even so, Tala didn’t hesitate.

Flow snicked into her hand even as she dumped power into amplifying her effective gravity toward the syphon.

A mouth opened upon the creature, oriented directly between her and its center of gravity.

Either it sensed what she was doing, or it just made a fortuitous choice of location.

Well, fortuitous for it.

It didn’t matter though.

Tala was a Defender, and she had a job to do.

Let’s get this done.

Her gravity amplification was shifting her in the right direction, but it wasn’t moving her fast enough yet, and it would send her straight into the beast’s waiting maw when she did get up to speed.

Well… I do have all this iron.

With a thought, she allowed the iron’s mass to come into play once again. Then, with a solid tendril still linked to her, she had it extend backward and to the side, pushing against her.

Now, Tala was heavy for a person—especially for the slip of a girl that she appeared to be—but even at double her apparent mass, she was greatly outweighed by her literal ton of iron.

Thus, as the iron shifted marginally, Tala rocketed away on a thin pillar of compressed—basically solid—metal dust.

She moved many times as far as the iron did in order for her collective center of mass to stay in the same location, a location that was still being pulled toward the waiting syphon’s mouth.

In for a copper.

She wove white steel through her tether, forming the whole into the interwoven hex plates—that were designed to distribute force if attacked—in a mimicry of her armor.

She then effected the most complex aspect mirror that she had ever attempted.

She took Flow’s durability—its magics to distribute any impact throughout its entire structure—and mirrored that throughout her iron.

It wouldn’t help the integrity like it did for Flow. After all, the natural state of the iron—for the most part—was dust. Instead, it would simply add another layer of redistribution and redirection.

She should be able to turn a large portion of any strike against herself—or her iron—into heat, dispersed throughout all of her metal.

The aspect mirror was made greatly easier by the mere fact that the iron was already a part of Flow, merged more closely with the weapon’s magics than it was to anything else, even though the sword was soulbound to her.

Her preparations finished just in time.

A tentacle of the foul creature struck at her across the distance between them, elongating and morphing into a massive, inhuman hand with chitinous claws, the edges radiating a cutting power that seemed to spring from nowhere.

Tala countered blades with blade, and the expanse of the stoneward emptiness rang with the sound of the clash.

The syphon hadn’t held back, either instinctively—or literally—sensing the threat that Tala posed.

Tala might have been in trouble if she had simply tried to block the attack.

But she didn’t try to block, nor did she try to sever the attacking limb.

Instead, she thrust Flow into the side of the claw even as it impacted her, Flow causing the chitin to resonate loudly.

Then, in the brief moment where she had an essentially immovable anchor, she heaved.

Her iron shot toward her at incredible speed.

The force of the pull jerked against the syphon’s questing tentacle, pulling it and elongating it even further out from the beast, causing the syphon to squeal in indignation and rage.

The sound was odd.

There wasn’t precisely air stoneward of superficial, but there seemed to be something that was a sufficient medium to carry sound.

Tala used the creature’s moment of confusion and disorientation to strike.

She pulled Flow free of where she’d wedged it, pushing power into it to transform it into a void-sword.

Then, thrusting herself forward with the tendril of woven iron and white steel, she shot up the overextended limb, Flow carving a channel of total devastation through the syphon.

She pushed until the iron behind her seemed to almost stop in place. At that moment, Flow transformed into a glaive just as Tala slammed it into the great beast’s main body.

Back on the superficial, Rane was still nearly a hundred feet from the closest ‘guard,’ but he was picking up speed, and he had Force out and ready to strike.

She had almost no time.

Fool of a man. But she felt her small smile grow. Don’t die on me.

She transformed the metal across the bottoms of her feet into long, thin spikes that immediately sunk into the syphon’s flesh.

She then bent the metal outward, creating anchors. She relished the symmetry of doing something so similar to the beast’s opening move.

But where it had failed, she succeeded with malice.

Her chest was fully healed from the minor bruise the impact had caused of course, but there was still a ghost of an injury, pulling at her mind. A memory of pain removed unnaturally quickly.

The syphon tried to work every angle to weaken her.

It failed.

She shoved that away, focusing on the battle.

With her new purchase, she dragged her iron toward her once again.

At the same time she slashed glaive-Flow across the massive, bulbous, magical creature in huge, sweeping arcs.

At the superficial, everyone in the ‘caravan’ was screaming, the wagons beginning to melt.

Things were going quite well.

Seven tentacles struck at Tala in a chaotic sequence.

She cut the first in half, ducked beneath the second, deflected the third with a sweep of her left arm, and tilted her torso backward to help dissipate the force from the fourth.

Her armor took the blow as designed, cracking in a thousand places to disperse the incoming force. Her aspect mirroring caused the entirety of her protection to heat dozens of degrees, even while the thin layers of active armor were still cracking and breaking all across and throughout the many levels of the defense.

Then, things didn’t work quite as well.

The fifth tentacle slammed into her side with insane force.

The iron of her armor blazed with heat to the extent that the sixth tentacle sizzled as it struck her, leaving chunks of syphon-flesh behind as it pulled back.

Tala’s will was bent—to an almost frantic degree—toward reforming her armor.

The seventh tentacle simply became a sacrificial anchor on Tala, and with a sickening squelch she was torn free of the creature’s side, her bones creaking under the pressure of entrapping loops of cooking muscle.

Her miniplates of active armor did not work very well against all encompassing, crushing force.

I’ll need to find a fix for that. But it was hardly the time for that at the moment.

An eighth long appendage struck out, wrapping around her torso and legs in a direction counter to the seventh.

The syphon’s malleable nature came into play, then, as the two tentacles seemed to transform into looping chains of bladed links.

Tala didn’t even have time to comprehend what was coming before the syphon pulled, hard, dragging those magically sharp blades across Tala’s armor, tearing away great chunks as each link passed across her.

Because they were pulling in perfect opposition, they kept her from moving with the pulls, or being thrown around.

Instead, it was just tearing into her with vicious abandon.

The syphon’s flesh around her was already torn to bits by her great cutting arcs with Flow, and syphon blood was pouring from the creature, draining down into the abyss below them in this layer of existence.

But it hadn’t been enough, and her armor was failing against another type of attack that it wasn’t designed to handle.

Enough of this.

Her iron blob broke apart, becoming a field of leg-sized, barbed, tri-bladed spikes, which spiraled from tip to base.

Tala hardened her aura around each and drove them forward.

Like laying down a rug across the top of the beast, a wave of impacts radiated from Tala across the surface of the syphon, each accompanied with a fountain of blood as the spikes drilled deeper, crafted almost entirely of magic-disrupting iron carrying Tala’s own aura.

There was a momentary struggle for supremacy, but Tala held on like never before.

Three things changed the circumstances in relation to her earlier attempts to overcome the beast.

First, Tala had pieces of herself within the beast now, giving her a solid platform from which to strike.

Her iron was her.

Second, Tala’s gate was still dumping power into her, keeping her fully topped off and as magically weighty as ever.

Third, the syphon had been spending power like mad to transform and maneuver to attack her and defend against her.

At their very core, gated humans were endurance fighters, and Tala could outlast almost anything.

“Victory.” Tala spoke into the nothingness, power in her words making them resonate through the space regardless.

Each of the hundreds of spikes tore itself apart, blasting outward as hundreds of smaller barbs.

The entire top half of the syphon was turned into a bloody, iron-filled pulp.

On the superficial, the caravan fell apart, even as the main body of the syphon seemed to fall starward, dragging Tala along with it.

A moment later, the corpse of the massive creature slapped wetly to the ground before the gate into Alefast.

Behind her, Rane had just finished dispatching his third syphon-controlled ‘caravan guard.’

It was now obvious that tendrils of the creature led to each of the bisected bodies.

Rane was panting even heavier than after their run, but he seemed uninjured.

Bless the stars for that.

Then, she noticed what her threefold sight was showing her and cursed.

“Orange? Really?! This was only a Mature syphon?”

She fell backward, catching herself in a chair made of iron and white steel.

The metal creaked as she slumped back into the seat.

Her armor was flowing back into shape, and her body was healing from the few wounds that the beast had managed to inflict upon her, but she was still irate.

This thing had been less advanced than she was, and it had still given her a bit of trouble.

Then, her mind went back to the first syphon she’d encountered.

It had been blue to her magesight.

She swallowed involuntarily at her new understanding.

I think I might have been underestimating the effectiveness of city defenses…

Then, Rane began to laugh, an almost childlike grin dominating his features.

Tala felt a smile pull at her lips once more, even as she called a chair into place behind the man.

He sat gratefully, continuing to laugh.

A moment later, Tala found herself laughing too.

Together, they sat there, beside a massive corpse, reveling in the joy of their victory, happy to be together, happy to be alive.