Sierra allowed herself a quiet sigh.

“I was hoping you had not noticed that,” She replied. When he said nothing she pushed on ahead. “The Trinity Isles have belonged to us for years. You are not the first potential asset that has been sent here to train.”

Alarion frowned. “Don’t call me that.”

She winced at her own mistake. “The Governor’s term, not mine.”

Their conversation was briefly interrupted as an obstacle interposed itself. The ground was cracked and shattered along a fault line. Tremendous pressure had driven the earth ahead of them nearly ten feet into the air down the full length of the fault. With no tools to climb, they relied on one another. Alarion boosted Sierra up to a safe point, then took a running leap to catch her arm as she hauled him up and over.

“How many?” Alarion asked as he collected himself, checked his pack was secure and began the march anew.

“I have been with the Governor for under a year, and he does not spend most of it on the Isles.” Sierra could tell from Alarion’s expression that he was unsatisfied with her evasive reply. A specific question was on the tip of his tongue, and so she relented. “Twelve casualties over ten years.”

Alarion glared.

“Oh grow up.” She scowled back. “Killing fiends is dangerous work. So is trying to cut out years of training with practical experience. The groups that died were low rank and low born. It was assumed they overstepped to make the most of their time here and got themselves killed by a more powerful fiend. A few were brought back as revenants and killed by subjugation teams. The rest, we assumed, had not Awakened and were fed to the boil, or were killed in such a fashion that they could not be brought back. They were failures, you are not.”

“And you told me none of this.”

“Mistress Elena also did not tell you that Ezekial outright rejects more than half of the pupils brought before him. Or that you were to be sent to the Auxilia immediately if he had. If they do not tell you there is a reason, and it is certainly not my place to overrule them."

Alarion stared at her defiantly.

“Alarion, did you really think that was my decision? That I would knowingly put you at significant risk?” Her face darkened at his continued expression and she angrily added. “Do you think I would knowingly put myself at this sort of risk?”

She had a point there. One that Alarion could not deny, despite the anger welling up inside of him. He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again his thoughts had shifted to another track. “Can we trust it?”

Sierra laughed if only from the sudden deflation of tension due to the question’s absurdity. “Not at all. We can trust the Geas because it is System enforced, but the only thing we can trust from this Lamesh is that it would tear us to pieces the moment it does not need us.”

“Mm.” Alarion acknowledged. After a thoughtful pause, he added, “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it seemed different from how you described them.”

“It is different.” She confirmed. “Revenants are fully sentient, we know that from ones that have been taken ‘alive’, but they seldom do more than shout threats and invectives when encountered in the wild. Even when outmatched, they choose to run, rather than to talk. Admittedly this was only the second I have personally encountered, but I have never even heard tales of one that tried to bargain.”

“Is he that much stronger, then?”

Sierra shook her head. “It is not a matter of strength. A revenant is a dead thing brought back with the same instincts as a fiend but with its mind intact. It sees a living thing and it wants to kill it. To get more powerful individually by leveling and to feed it to the boil. It wants to kill you the same way you or I would claw and punch if someone had their hands around our neck. Being a higher rank does not change your nature, and it would not change its nature. Not that he is that much stronger.”

“How could you tell?” Alarion asked.

Sierra considered the question briefly, then shrugged. “No harm in telling you. One of the skills I selected in my combat class was an observation variant.”

“Like my detection skill?”

“No. At least not directly.” She answered. “Detection type skills focus on seeing, hearing, smelling or otherwise sensing things that you might otherwise miss. They are mostly passive skills, as a result. Observation types focus on gathering additional information about something you already know is there and require an act of focus. Mine lets me get a sense of the difference in UCL between myself and my opponent, gives me combat advantage against a foe I have observed and makes it easier for me to tell when someone is lying. To get more information from such skill you either need to have a higher rank or rarity, or have the skill become more specialized. Evaluate, for example, is available at Rank I and gives you a near perfect understanding of someone’s status. If they let you.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Alarion drank in her information, mulling it over for further questions, before he instead returned back to his main line of inquiry. “We can’t beat him?”

“No.” Sierra shook her head. “Not unless you are able to level up substantially while we are here. He would walk away bloody, but we would not walk away at all.”

“So we do what he says?”

“Do you want to give a homicidal monster access to whatever secrets are in that enormous tower?”

“No.”

“Good. That is why we’re not going there, we’re going there.”

Alarion followed Sierra’s outstretched finger as she pointed away from the spire to wall ahead of them. He had to squint and shift his position slightly before he saw what she was pointing out, but once he did it seemed obvious. Another entrance set into the wall of the cavern. It was a considerable distance away, over an hour on foot, but he understood her meaning immediately.

The two quickened their pace.

—

“Damnit!” Sierra swore, her booted foot impacting the sealed door with a resounding bang that echoed off into the distance.

It wasn’t the first door they’d tried. Nor the second, or the third. Near as they could estimate there were twelve large doors that ringed the outskirts of the city at regular intervals, each made from a different metal. Each equally sealed against the best of their abilities. They’d tried pulling and pushing. They’d tried to bend the door with a pry bar, to slash it with Alarion’s sword and to shatter it with Sierra’s sonic powers. None of their attempts had left so much as a mark on the surface of any of the first three, and though Sierra was more than willing to make a fourth attempt, Alarion stopped her.

“It can’t be helped.” He said as he put himself between her and the door, gently crowding her away from it. “Either the fiend sealed them, or something stronger did. There is no getting through.”

Her eyes weren’t on him, but on the door. They burned with a rage normally reserved for untrue lovers, but eventually she stalked away. She kicked a loose bit of debris and yelled a wordless, frustrated curse.

They’d spent most of the day on her plan. The city was enormous and even though the outskirts were mostly clear of the damage that had rocked the valley’s core, their sheer size had taken considerable time to traverse. They’d been walking for hours, broken up primarily by time spend hammering impotently on closed doors. Neither would admit it, but both were hungry, tired, frightened and frustrated.

“We can reach one more before nightfall,” Sierra suggested as she finished with her angry pacing.

“And we’ll be locked out there as well. We need to start looking for a place to rest now, not later,” Alarion said patiently.

“You do not know that.”

“You’re right. I don’t,” Alarion admitted. “But you do. We both know it. The question is if we want to spend the time to prove your intuition.”

“It is… disconcerting to have you acting as the voice of reason,” Sierra replied, her mood far from improved. “But you are right. We should find a place to rest and decide how to proceed in the morning. It has been safe enough so far, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way after dark.”

“That it can get dark at all is unsettling,” Alarion said with a wary upward glance. “How does that even work?”

“How does any of this work?” Sierra frowned, her question more existential than she let on. “Pocket dimensions are nothing new, the System offered you one with that bindle skill of yours, but I have never heard of one even a fraction of this size. And this can’t be a real place. I am not sure how far down those stairs took us, but that sky goes up for miles where we should be seeing the island or the ocean above us.”

“Someone of a very high rank, then?” Alarion posited as they turned away from the outer wall, toward the lip of the valley.

“A Ranker might be able to produce something of this size, but it would have to be their sole focus. Rank V at the least. Possibly even Rank VI. A much larger group could be able to mimic it with enough resources, but then why bury it in the middle of nowhere? And the ‘sun’, the city, all of this would be separate skills or built manually. I can not even imagine the scale.”

“We might find some answers there?” Alarion gestured to the spire at the city’s center. “And if there are defenses that can hurt the Revenant, then maybe we can use them to our advantage?”

Sierra sighed. “We will consider it in the morning.”

The two clamored down the sloped edge of the valley, over shockingly green grass that had grown rampant in the absence of its caretakers. Buildings loomed above them as they walked along damaged streets, glass crunching under their footsteps. Even these structures, comparatively small as they were, set Alarion’s teeth on edge. There were too many windows. Too many doors and blind alleyways that could pose a threat.

“We should get up high,” he said.

“I was thinking the same thing.” Sierra gestured to a set of switchback metal ladders set into the side of one of the tallest nearby buildings. “That should get us to the roof. We will have a good line of sight, and only one way to reach us.”

“And only one way down,” Alarion pointed out.

“Not if we jump to the buildings next door. Easier to hop down than up.”

She had a point. Even if the idea of leaping between buildings made his stomach lurch with memories of the pit.

The pair made an awful clatter as they ascended. The clang of their footsteps on grated landings echoed down the empty streets, accompanied by the shriek of metal whenever they pulled a new ladder down into place. Despite the obvious lack of maintenance, the metal was not rusted or damaged beyond whatever impact had ruined the city all those years ago. Having spent considerable time in the Old City, Alarion knew what it looked like when a city was left to rot, and this was not it.

They reached the flat rooftop with little fanfare to find a curious sight. Flimsy chairs set around a brick pit, glass bottles overturned and covered in dust, as though the occupants had left in the midst of some revelry. The far end of the rooftop was covered by an awning, with a few pieces of plush furniture sitting beneath it.

Alarion and Sierra exchanged glances, but it was she who spoke.

“Well, at least we do not have to sleep on the ground.”