Lifting her head slightly before dropping it back down, Sathera stopped her rasping breathing to groan in pain as she started squirming on the ground, testing what still worked right. Her entire body throbbed with a muted pain as if someone had none too gently taken a club to it.

Clumsily, she lifted her left hand and wiped at the source of the intense tickling on her upper lip, scrubbing it away. Pulling her hand away, Sathera squinted, trying to focus on the blur she suspected was the back of her hand. But she could not be entirely certain as it refused to come into focus, so Sathera brought it close enough to nearly touch her eyes.

Even then, it took an annoyingly long time for Sathera to discover the black smear covering her knuckles was her blood, and there was far more where it came from if her clogged nose was any indication. Pressing the back of her hand against one nostril, Sathera momentarily forsook her noble heritage — and was unable to find the tiniest fleck of remorse inside of herself about it — as she forcefully expelled the blood blockage with a blast of air.

Now that she could breathe, Sathera clambered to her hands and knees before she sat back on her thighs. While the mental pressure was all but gone compared to her fragmented memories of traversing the stairwell gauntlet, even the light pressure of this room was weighing on her. Its touch was little more than what she felt at the edge of the pillar's square, but it was still making it hard for her to move as it slowly pushed on her thoughts.

It isolated and disconnected her from the world, making it impossible for her to rest and recover even for a moment. She had to keep moving and pushing while she still could, but even that was more difficult than it needed to be.

When Sathera moved anything, there was a moment or two of hesitation, like she was watching someone act out what she told them to do rather than doing it herself. Sathera only knew for sure that she moved when she saw her body move from the back of the long tunnel leading to the heart of her mind, as what she felt was so distant it could have simply been her imagination.

But while her body and mind burned as they were slowly consumed by the almost psy that invaded her, it could not break her, not yet. Because the core of her mind was a bastion, a shimmering golden bead of psy that resisted the eldrich corruption around it. And until it finally cracked, she would not stop.

Lunging up to plant one leg against the ground, she used the momentum, driving her heel into the ground and bouncing to her feet. As Sathera landed, her body swayed like a stalk of tall grass dancing in the wind, almost as if her bones had partially lost their rigidity. Head lolling from one side to the other, Sathera's eyes rolled across the chamber in a single sweep, taking it all in.

The walls radiated a matted green glow, which was barely enough illumination to call it light, but it allowed her to see the chamber. If you took a large ball and cut it in half, that would be this space. The walls were smooth and symmetrical as they arched up to the center of the enclosure. At the highest and centermost part of the room, there was a marked change from the smooth surface as a delicate latticework of crystal broke out of the wall to hang like the chain of a chandelier from the ceiling.

The crystal threads sparkled as points of light moved within the interconnected deep emerald and jade strands. The woven cords arched and twirled their way down from the roof of the chamber, only to abruptly curve toward a single point three feet above the ground. At the center of the hair-thin web was a head-sized diamond-shaped dark jade crystal. If you removed the threads holding it in place, the crystal looked perfectly symmetrical. From the wider middle, the crystal narrowed along half a dozen flat planes to points at the top and bottom that she could not make out with her eye.

Something about the pretty stone drew her attention, causing Sathera's eyes to linger on it. The longer she looked upon the crystal, the more she felt the beating of her heart. It was slow and steady, like that of the earth. Once every couple of seconds, it would throb. A slow yet implacable, ba-boom… ba-boom… ba-boom…

Every time the crystal-heart beat, Sathera's connection to it grew. And then she felt it. A small but growing tug inside of her. Like the blood inside her veins was trying to reach out and join the crystal, and only her skin and flesh were delaying what would be the glorious union.

The longer she stared at the crystal, the more annoyed she became that her body was betraying her. Her skin should just split and tear open so they could be joined faster. Since it wouldn't, she would just ha— Ripping her eyes away, Sathera stared at her feet while taking several labored breaths as her heart raced within her chest.

Sathera blinked owlishly at her feet, and for one blissful moment, her mind was clear. There was no foreign energy grinding her sanity into dust. The relentless attack devouring her psy and willpower until it would ultimately leave her an empty husk, without even the capacity to breathe, was gone. It was bliss. Sathera could not think of a single moment in her life that she felt more relaxed.

Then she staggered to the side as her mind was clamped in a pounding headache, and her body screamed of a thousand pains. Worried that she might pass out if she fell to the ground, Sathera drunkenly stumbled around as she processed the different aches and release from the pressure, causing Sathera's iron grip over her psy to finally waver.

At that moment, she didn't have the wherewithal to exert her control over her psy. After who knew how long, where a large section of her mind had been solely focused on keeping her shield from fracturing and reinforcing it with what little willpower she could dredge up, the last bastion of her inner mind finally shattered, releasing her psy.

It wasn't the pressure or apathy that broke her. It was the release felt in a single moment. One second where Sathera could relax and stop fighting, only to find she was unable to jump into action again.

Sathera's psy quickly spread through her head and down her neck but had hardly entered her chest before it came into contact with the foreign energy remaining within her body. Sathera gathered herself to pull back her psy for one last push, only to find there was no need. The energy was… weak. Pathetically so.

There was no comparison between withstanding this twisted energy and the energy of a matter of seconds ago. It was similar to dropping a hundred-fifty-pound bag and then having to pick up a ten-pound one; they just didn't have the same impact.

Not bothering to reinforce her psy with willpower or even control it, Sathera looked down at herself. Fresh blood was dripping down her arms and legs, making her look like some kind of creature out of a nightmare related to half-dead legionaries.

A smile came to her no doubt blood-stained lips, and she laughed into the cavern, "Is this all you got! I can go another round or two!" Her challenge to the empty cave went unheeded, but Sathera found herself doubling over in a full-body heaving laugh. It probably went on too long for multiple reasons, but eventually, her laughter petered out, and Sathera regained some composure. "Let's finish this," Sathera croaked as she straightened, her throat ragged.

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Striding forward, Sathera flicked out her sword arm, extending her blade, which she had held onto during this whole struggle, out to the side. After swinging her arm around a bit, she started rotating her wrist to loosen it up. During all of her warmup, her eyes were locked on the crystalline roots just above the crystal heart.

It was too dangerous for her to be enthralled by looking at the stone again, but those delicate strands looked like a wind could blow them away. A few strikes of her sword should be more than enough to shatter them.

"Well," chuckled a husky female voice that filled the room so completely that it felt as if it was coming from all directions at once. "This is a shock." She didn't sound concerned in the slightest. Instead, she sounded amused and pleasantly surprised, like something interesting had plopped onto her lap after a long day of tedium.

Sathera was still processing the fact she had not imagined the words when her body locked up. It was like she was a puppet, and suddenly, the controller decided to pull the strings in every direction at once, restricting her movements. In desperation, Sathera strained every muscle to flick her arm forward and throw the blade but quickly realized that no amount of physical strength would accomplish the task right now. She was trapped.

The almost-psy surrounding her body, which was mindlessly pushing forward a moment ago, had gained new purpose as it solidified, sealing her in place. And with every chaotic pulse of her heart, the new purpose was spreading into the energy already saturating her body, further preventing her movement.

Terror filled Sathera's mind as she felt the energy inside her body shudder like a pool of oil suddenly igniting. After she watched in horror as the shift exploded through her, there was a moment when the energy was utterly frozen. Then, it pushed upward and started fighting with her psy. Exactly like what happens when…

And that was it. Something that Sathera would think was impossible, but it fit everything she knew about the twisted energy.

It was psy, just without willpower and intent. It was bland and empty, devoid of everything that gave it purpose, even as it took up space in the world. The actions it took — if you could really call them actions — were like compressed air trying to escape the container it was trapped in and then drifting around. No, it was more like water blending with wine.

If wine is psy with willpower and intent infused into it, then water was what the twisted energy was, though the analogy could only go so far. Water was the basis of all life, not some crime against creation like the void-psy. Another major problem with it was that instead of mixing with and diluting her psy, as water does to wine, the void-psy acted more like a leach.

True, it also took some of the psy maintaining a casting as they came into contact, but that was a false lead. The empty psy wasn't eating away at the casting so much as trying to reach an equilibrium of willpower. In the attempt, the psy constructing the casting was altered. It was an ingenious attack, really.

How the enemy responded didn't matter. Whether they spent more willpower to protect their casting or simply let the will and psy suffusing their casting gradually be drained away, the result was the same. And horrifyingly, the empty psy could enter a body so long as it was around in large enough quantities before whoever was generating the void-psy directly shifted and controlled it.

It was too much. Far too much. The psy that had already infiltrated Sathera's body was waging an internal battle against her own psy. She couldn't win the fight even at her best, as the energy inside her was several times that of what her core could hold. To make it worse, even if she somehow won, her internal organs would be damaged or destroyed, as a psy battle was not without random physical manifestations.

As all the thoughts flashed through Sathera's mind, the woman controlling the artifact crystal — which Sathera could feel as the source of the psy — continued to speak into her mind, not seeming to care that she was talking to herself. Although it soon became clear she wasn't. "No, I'm not surprised the goblins failed to keep you out of here. They have failed countless times in the past and will fail innumerable times in the future. It is a true shame that we are burdened with such useless help… but what can you do? Plan around their incompetence, that's what. They were never the real guards for this chamber. The spectacle you made as you traversed the stairs while keeping your mind intact without the proper preparations was what surprised me. Few can say they could do the same…" The disembodied woman's voice drifted off into contemplative thought, and the pressure grinding through her body relented ever so slightly.

In a flurry of mental effort, Sathera pulled most of the psy she was using to protect her mind away from the battle, leaving only enough to buy her a few moments. Reforming the psy into a spike, she drove it out of her mind and into the wall of psy surrounding her head. Like a piton driven into stone, she cracked the barrier, allowing her psy to secrete out of her forehead.

Exerting her will, Sathera formed the psy into a tendril and extended it as fast as she could manage to lash down and wrap around her belt knife and move to throw it at the crystal formation. Before the tendril could remove the knife more than a few inches from its sheath, a wave of psy exploded from the crystal. A moment after it shattered her casting, she felt it smashing into her chest to throw her back against the unyielding psywall to her rear, forcing out her breath from the impact. Gasping for air, Sathera watched her knife skitter across the ground, her heart filling with despair as her mind was enclosed.

For the voice, it was as if nothing more meaningful than swatting a fly had happened, and she continued to speak as she put her thoughts into words. "It makes me wonder… Have we underestimated your people? Hard to fathom that being the case, I know, but if a random pawn is so capable, what can the true powers do? However, it could be that your people's extreme resistance to foreign energy is at play here… Well, I will know soon enough." With what felt like every word, the attacking energy pressed in, crushing the desperate mental defenses she erected time and again. All that was left to her was the center of her mind, and Sathera could already feel the cracks in her last should forming against the implacable pressure.

"I will say," The voice said, more than a hint of malicious delight in it, "I heard how exceptionally resilient your kind are, but I didn't believe it. This though… This is remarkable. It makes crushing your mind so much more enjoyable! …Ahh, but it's such a pity that the same force that strengthens you leaves you open to exploitation. You could never imagi— What? No!

Suddenly, the pressure vanished, and Sathera started to fall to the ground. As she hung in the air, she just so happened to partially turn, letting her body face the door. Standing within its arch was Jim, a look of strain on his face and arm stretched out. As he pulled it back, the sound of crystal cracking filled the room, and a spike flew into his hand.

A moment later, Sathera hit the side of her head into the ground with a meaty thwack, causing her already clouded thoughts to spin and deform to the point that she couldn't even lock her eyes on a wall. One thought, then another, drifted through her mind, and she couldn't grasp onto any of them before they vanished.

As she struggled to blink, her eyelids moved painfully slowly, and time began to blur, causing her life to become a series of snapshots filled with reverberating tinny sounds.

Jim appeared above Sathera, and she forced out, 'Leave me.' Only for his face to distort with concern before setting in determination. She tried to tell him to leave her again, only for him to sit back, "Shut up, I need to focus!" before he shifted and lifted her across his shoulders.

Eye fluttering open, Sathera was looking down the endless flight of jade stairs, somehow only seeing a dozen where there should have been thousands.

Another blink, and she was out in the courtyard, where hundreds of goblins were getting to their feet in a daze, looking around and stumbling into each other as they glanced around in confusion. Joxin's voice broke through her twisting world, shouting, "Move your ass! They're getting back up!"

Then, she was looking down upon the goblin camp, a line of the creatures marching through the camp and waiting for their turn on the stairs. At that moment, a single ominous crack of stone filled the chamber, and the ground under Jim shook. Thrown to the side, as he lost his balance, Sathera saw the quickly approaching steps an instant before the world plunged into darkness.