“You’re alive,” Jasmine said, relief flooding her voice. “Where are we?”

I was intact. Whatever bringing my body here had involved, it had also undone whatever damage had been inflicted to it in the moments before. The benefits of drawing so deep on my oath, maybe.

Jasmine was just a little too far from me for me to reach her, and as much as I wanted to move over and touch her, make sure she was real, things weren’t over outside.

“We’re elsewhere,” I said tersely. “Get ready to fight. I don’t know how quickly I can do this again.”

This was my first time initiating the link to get into this place rather than accepting someone else’s invitation, and I could tell there was a difference. I actually had some sense of where I had been when I’d vanished off the baseline layer of reality, and with a colossal effort, I was fairly sure I could move it.

That was promising.

What was less promising was the fact that I wasn’t quite as adept at using this liminal space as Nishi was. I didn’t know what the difference between my last few visits and this time was, but there had to be one, because I could just about perceive what was happening back in reality—which I definitely hadn’t been able to do last time—and time was still moving there, albeit at a slowed pace.

Best guess: there was some attribute to this space that changed the flow of time, one that Nishi and the god itself had figured out how to use far better than I could. Whatever the real answer was, I couldn’t deny the facts.

Time was slower back in reality than it was here, but it was by no means anywhere close to stopped, which meant that the remaining three people who’d come with me to assault a position of a hundred were still down there fighting.

It meant that they were going to die if we didn’t help them soon, and we couldn’t have that. Kyle had been invaluable to me these past few days, and I was left with the uncomfortable fact that letting him die would actually cause me pain.

As for the two Crown oathholders… well, they weren’t noble, at least. Besides, they were on our side for the time being, and letting them die would probably make Jasmine feel bad, and that would make me feel bad. Less of a definite save there, but I still had to make an effort at the very least.

“This is a god’s realm, Lily,” Jasmine breathed. “How—“

I closed my eyes. “Shhhh. After we win.”

My grip on this place was tenuous, but it held. It would be enough for me to make the mental readjustments, to hijack the unreality of the liminal space we were in and use my god’s power to convince the world that we would reappear in an area separate to where we had departed it.

With a start, I realized that I’d never seen anyone do this, never heard tales of it. This was me. If it wasn’t me, it was my god. On some instinctive level, this felt right.

Even as I adjusted the position we would return to, I smiled. I’d not fully believed Nishi all those weeks ago when he’d said that he could teach me to be far more powerful than I already was, but here was live proof that he was right. I’d gained the ability to communicate like a god, and now I could step out of reality like one too.

How soon until I could take the place of one?

I smiled a little wider. That last bit was just a fantasy, but it was nice to think about.

“Get ready,” I said.

Back in reality, one of the oathholders—not Kyle, and I couldn’t tell if it was the man or woman from the crown—had been backed into a corner, no longer committing to any sort of offense. The jester was supporting her and peeling some of the attacks off of her shield, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

The ritual was going to complete, but I didn’t care. The lives of the squad with me were more important than stopping something that would likely have its harm restricted to the Crown.

Moving Jasmine was a little harder than moving myself, probably because of the wall of force in baseline reality that was blocking her way, but I managed.

I breathed deep, releasing my grasp on Inome’s domain, and then sound assaulted my ears from all sides.

Chanting as the ritual continued, the cacophony of dozens of different spells going off at the same time, shouting and screaming from both within the spell-turned-prison that held a whole bunch of oathholders and without—they all combined to make a din that could have shattered the air itself.

Above it all, I had a sense that I hadn’t extracted the entirety of my self from that place.

“Help the others!” I shouted. “I’ll get the prison and regroup with you!”

Jasmine nodded, and then she sprinted towards the jester, wreathing herself in flames. I’d moved us to the safest area of the fight, but that wasn’t saying much. To get to Kyle, she was going to have to fight her way through a dozen Church oathholders, but their backs were turned to her and Jasmine was Jasmine. I didn’t need to watch her. She’d be fine.

I had my own task to deal with. Even once Jasmine got the others out of their current pickle, it wasn’t going to be a very winnable fight. A numbers advantage mattered, especially when the enemy was as powerful as the Church oathholders we were against.

Putting more oathholders in play was the only chance we had to even survive this, let alone win the fight. Thankfully for us, the Church had left an extremely convenient source of oathholders for us.

Nobody impeded my progress as I made my way to the sphere of force, their attentions too occupied by the flaming spear of destruction that was the recently-freed Igni oath.

I smiled despite myself. That’s my Jasmine.

I didn’t see any way they could’ve dampened their connections to their oaths—not that there were many ways to do that in the first place—but nobody had managed to escape it yet, and from the scorch marks, crystalline sections, and a full man-sized hole dug into the ground inside, it didn’t look like that was for a lack of trying.

At the end of the day, though, this was a barrier, and all barriers could fall.

I still didn’t quite feel like myself, as if I’d accidentally brought back a chunk of Inome’s ruin instead of an internal organ. That was concerning on more than one level, but those were implications that could be examined later.

For now, the important part was that I was as in touch with the broken god as I could be, and if there was one thing that meant, it was that nothing was going to get in my way.

The memories that I had borrowed from my oath were still with me, and I drew on them. I didn’t need them to recognize the sphere as a Forcecage, but my own memories told me enough about this spell to know that I would need the other-memories to break it. Forcecage was a class ten spell, higher than my unstructured magic could reasonably destroy.

But I wasn’t restricted to just a few spells now. I didn’t know how long I would hold these memories—I’d gotten the impression that they wouldn’t be a permanent addition when I’d obtained them—but the trip to and from Inome’s domain had crystallized them, shed light on them like they were my own.

A Ceretian disintegration was class nine. Theoretically, it was too high class for me to even cast, but I could feel my oath practically chomping at the bit, hungry and ready to provide me the power I needed.

The frame was more complex than anything I’d ever tried, but it came naturally. Nishi’s memories flowed through me. I had—he had thought of this spell as a “wallbreaker”, but I recognized the pattern from books I’d read.

Executing it was scarily simple, and it didn’t feel as wrong as other structured spells had been before.

“Step back,” I ordered, and the oathholders trapped within did so. Some of them looked properly scared of me, which seemed a bit unfair.

I cast the disintegration spell, lacing it with the ruin of my oath. Ceretian spells took on different flavors depending on the god that their caster held an oath to, and the disintegration was no different. With the aspect of ruin emblazoned into it, the spell was amplified.

Despite its higher class, the Forcecage stood no chance. I even had to hold back on the spell a little, some new instinct telling me that adding too much power would involve killing everyone trapped inside.

Darkness flew forth from my hands, a twisting bolt traveling faster than I could see, and in the blink of an eye the Forcecage was no more.

“Go!” I shouted. “Regroup with J—with Lady Rayes!”

There were even more of them than I’d seen at first. There had to be twenty of them, mostly nobles but with one or two people that were clearly commoners, and they looked terrified. Nobody moved.

Behind me, I heard Jasmine shout an incantation and something exploded, the heat intense enough to bake the back of my neck even here, nearly half a hundred meters away from them.

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“Are you oathholders or not?” I asked, raising my voice. I wasn’t one for dramatic, inspirational speeches, but their inaction was liable to get someone I actually cared about killed. I wasn’t going to let that happen. “Hurry the fuck up!”

Behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck raised as senses beyond the five invaded my mind, my oath lending me the ability to detect the magic of those around me.

As if to punctuate my statement, I spun a hundred and eighty degrees, smoothly drawing and throwing a knife as I did so. Almost without thinking, I added a touch of ruin to it, the unstructured magic more of an extra limb than an external force that I had to manipulate.

The spell that the Church oathholder—this one had been wearing white and red robes, I noted idly—had been preparing died as its owner did, the blackness of my ruin spreading across their body in fast motion and eating them the inside out.

“Do something!” I shouted, and that seemed to get some of them moving.

Fucking nobles. The commoner-looking people as well as Alex and Lucas were getting into gear, setting up their magical patterns and summoning spheres of glowing energy. One of them—Lucas, presumably—shouted an incantation I didn’t recognize, and the earth split apart in a straight line from where they were, knocking four or five Church oathholders off their feet.

The majority of the nobles, however, were just sitting there.

This is wrong, some part of my mind that still lived in the Byron household whispered. The nobles should be moving.

Why weren’t they? They were the ones who were generally actually equipped to handle something like this, not the commoners.

“I know you have training!” I shouted, preparing a Ceretian Ballista’s frame as I spoke. “You fucking disgraces to the Crown, move!”

That last line seemed to get them. The mention of the Crown shook some of them out of their reverie. I wasn’t sure if it was because they’d recognized that the ritual was aiming to destroy the seat of the Crown’s power or because that word was what triggered the hungry power-grubbing bastards to actually start doing something for themselves.

Whatever the case, it worked, and the nobles started casting. They weren’t bad at it, I had to admit. They had had training, and it showed in how their spells were more focused, cleaner, and faster to cast than the commoners.

Wasted training. Those skills would’ve been much better spent on the commoners, that much was clear. Even though the commoners with us were weaker, hampered by a life without access to noble study material, they were the ones who had the survival instinct and the ones who would actually help against dozens of enemies. Alex and Lucas were an exception, not the rule.

“Follow me,” I ordered, my voice colder than it had been. “Your lives and the Crown’s opinion of you may depend on it.”

That line didn’t work as well on the commoners, but they came anyway.

Good people. I wished I could’ve said the same about the nobles.

We needed to get out of here. I didn’t give a single flying fuck about the ritual, which meant I needed to get to the isolated group of Kyle, Jasmine, and the two Crown oathholders. There were a fair two dozen members of the Church between us and them, but we had almost equal numbers.

I strode forward, not bothering to check if anyone was following. If they wanted to be left behind, that was up to them.

The ruckus I’d made by breaking the captured oathholders out of their makeshift prison had alerted a fair number of the Church’s forces, but they weren’t all focused on us. Still, the barrage of spells coming our way would probably kill someone if timed right.

Not that I cared. Nothing touched me. I didn’t let it. A Naan’ti spell exclusive to Caël oathholders—one that would reverse my personal gravity, I was pretty sure—came close to hitting me when my attention was focused on another, but I noticed it at the last second and sheathed my body in ruin, nullifying it.

Behind me, someone screamed. One of the nobles, I was pretty sure. A glance back at them revealed that they’d taken a hit to the leg, a hit that had colored their skin green. From the looks of it, it was spreading.

Not my problem.

I stepped forward, feeling oddly detached from the scene of the fight we were having. By all rights, I should’ve been coursing with adrenaline, the fog of the battle flooding through me, but I wasn’t at all. My oath kept me buoyant, kept my mind afloat above all the chaos, and I continued my path.

I wasn’t going to be able to hold off everything on my own, but I wasn’t alone. Even if it was slow at first, the nobles reacting at a snail’s pace, they started to realize which way the enemy was.

I closed my eyes, ignoring the scream of my drilled-in instincts to do anything but. In any other case, obstructing my own sight would’ve meant death on a battlefield, but my oath was strong with me. Even with my eyes shut, I could see everything clear as day.

If anything, it helped me focus. There was a time for mercy, I was growing to realize, but that time was not now. Now was a time for action, and cutting the battlefield down to its essence—their oaths against mine—was the best way to accomplish that.

Twenty-two separate signatures remained between me and Jasmine. Of those, six were engaged in fighting Jasmine’s group, who had fallen back towards largely defensive measures. From what I could detect of my allies, Jasmine and Kyle’s combined efforts were keeping the four of them safe for the time being, but they were being assailed from all sides, oathholders flanking them from other sides.

We’d whittled their numbers down some, but there were a bunch of them left, not to mention the fifty committed to the ritual. Ten of them were engaging Jasmine’s group, another sixteen faced me and my makeshift squad, and the remaining survivors were playing it more passively, guarding the oaths that were actually casting the ritual.

Two signatures approached me, the telltale taste of a frame filling the air, and I ruined them however I could. With one gesture, I pulled their frames away from them, preventing them from even attempting their spell. Their fuel went haywire, and I pulled that to me too.

“I’ve got a better use for that,” I murmured, and I thrust out, blasting them each once apiece with a Ceretian force spear. With my oath powering the spell, they never stood a chance.

For a second, they screamed, and then it stopped, their oath signatures winking out with their voices.

A third oathholder sprinted towards me, but Alex’s spell—I assumed it was Alex, at least, I wasn’t sure if there were any other Voci oathholders in the group—intercepted them, paralyzing them and disabling their movement. A second later, a spear of earth stabbed them through the head, and that oath died too.

I hadn’t gotten hit yet, but the same couldn’t quite be said for those around me. Behind me, at least three separate people had died, and I couldn’t even bring myself to feel bad about it. With my eyes serenely shut, I couldn’t tell if they were commoner or noble, and I found that in the moment, they felt too distant for me to care.

Still, it was a consideration. I paused to think, casting another spell as I did—this time, it was what my false memories told me was a “dissonance wave,” a spell that I didn’t actually have any knowledge of. As far as I could tell, it projected my oath out in a rough cone, targeting a solid four or five Church oathholders within ten meters of me. One of them dodged out of the way, but the others fell just like the ones before them.

Okay. Think. I had a bit of space and a moment before I would need to fight again.

Even as I thought that to myself, a stray spell whizzed by my ear and incinerated one of the people behind me.

We were losing people as fast as we were taking theirs, and that wasn’t going to look pretty when they had triple our numbers. Sure, I was fairly sure I could survive in this… whatever state I’d attained… but if literally everyone else died, Jasmine would be sure to be distraught.

And fuck it, I’d come this far for her and I wasn’t going to stop now.

I drew in a deep breath, preparing to attempt the same reality-shifting spell I’d performed earlier, and then I noticed it.

One oathholder, sprinting out from behind cover. From behind Jasmine’s cover.

I recognized the signature of their magic, but just to be sure, I opened my eyes.

It was a Crown oathholder. Going just from build, it might’ve been the female one.

She was on fire. Flames trailed from her body as she full sprinted straight through a group of Church oathholders. As she ran, screaming in something that might’ve been pain and might’ve been determination, others attacked her. Blasts of force, disintegrative spells, and so much more slammed into her, and yet it seemed to be taking only the slightest effect.

One particularly nasty spell shot towards her, and I felt it within my range. Without stopping to think twice, I ended it, redirecting it into the endless void of ruin within me.

I didn’t know how she was still alive, but I could guess it was a protection spell of some kind.

What is she doing? She was still sprinting, not attacking a single person as she ran, and she was almost to—

The ritual.

As I watched her, observing her with my mind’s eye while my physical ones locked onto Jasmine’s position, I could see the number of attacks on her increasing.

The oathholders that had been focusing Jasmine were moving, running full speed to match the Crown soldier’s pace.

A hard grin spread over my face. You stupid, glorious bastard.

I took off at a full sprint, running almost directly perpendicular to the path of the Church.

The people behind me followed, but it wasn’t the entire group. Five or six of them split off, all of them noble, their magic igniting with the intent to support the soldier. With how many had died, that left me with maybe ten people following. It was more than nothing.

I noticed it with less than fifteen meters left to run. The Crown oathholder’s protection gave out, and she fell in an instant.

Her oath signature flared.

“Down!” someon cried out from behind me, and I vaguely recognized the voice as Lucas’.

A wall of earth shot up to our right, tall enough to shelter behind, and I dove to the ground.

Not a moment too soon, but it still wasn’t enough.

With her dying breath, the Crown oathholder exploded.

Time slowed down, and it took me a second to realize that that wasn’t just because of adrenaline.

I looked around and my mind fractured, a lance of pain spiking through my head as it tried to simultaneously process the endless not-quite-emptiness of Inome’s domain and the real world.

“Fuck.” I squeezed my eyes shut.

I could feel the strength of the detonation. It was truly powerful, so much so that it was an order of magnitude stronger than anything she’d had to offer before.

Something in the not-reality stirred, and I realized it was my god.

[FAMILIARITY], it expressed, and the flood of images told me what I was already suspecting.

The Crown oathholder had come into the alignment of all alignments. Her god had smiled upon her, and her last fuck-you to the people she was fighting had allowed her to rip off all her limiters at the cost of her life.

An earthen wall wasn’t going to stop this. Nothing was.

But I don’t need to stop them.

I opened my eyes, and even though it hurt my mind just to perceive the intersection of reality and liminality, it hurt right.

We reached out, and we found them. Jasmine. Alex. Lucas. Kyle. Seb. Eleven others I didn’t recognize and yet did.

I pulled on the fabric of reality, and the broken god pulled with me.

One by one, they disappeared, the detonation still progressing in slow motion. I couldn’t save the nobles nearest to it, their lives already consumed by the expanding flames, but I could prevent the deaths of those who’d come with me.

As they reappeared in the not-void of the god’s domain, I manifested fully in it, dragging myself away from baseline reality.

This time, I had the knowledge, the instincts necessary to create a strip of land for us to stand on. I wasn’t nearly as good as Nishi at controlling it, but it was enough to make a circle wide enough for all seventeen of us.

A single second passed, and the confusion set in.

Jasmine met my eyes, the only one of us who didn’t immediately start raising questions about where we were, how we’d gotten here, or anything along those lines.

“You did it,” she said. This time, I’d dragged her in closer to me. Within arm’s reach.

In lieu of an answer, I stepped forward and kissed the girl I loved.

The movement was sudden, irrational, and probably poorly timed, but it felt right.

For a second, I feared I’d utterly misjudged things, and then Jasmine placed her hand on the back of my head, pulling me in and kissing me back.

Warmth blossomed in my chest, and I took her in my arms.

Her lips tasted like soot and blood, but she was still soft and still warm and still Jasmine.

It had been a long, long day, but at the end of it all, I was finally complete.