A young man of about seventeen years of age silently shifted into a shadow on the other side of the ornate stone doors that led to the array chamber and the cave’s entrance. He phase-shifted in the shadow while he spread his senses and reviewed the surroundings.
Beyond the shimmering protective ward, he could detect an Ebon Specter watching. ‘There must be more in the ravine,’ he thought amusedly. When he had first entered the labyrinth, these stage two Ebon were a threat, but now they weren’t even an inconvenience. He was surprised four years later, and they were still waiting for him.
He weaved umbraskim to jump to a shadow beyond the ward as he shifted his Mu to avoid disturbing the ward and checked again. ‘It’s best if they don’t know I’ve come out,’ he thought as he retracted his Mu signature to its minimum.
As he waited in the shadow, scanning for the others, his mind wandered to his first day on Ombre Island. Walking down the boulevard lined by ancient sect buildings to the lake at its center. The flying boat that took him to Sect Master Island. The army of golems that kept the place running and so many wonderful and astonishing things. He remembered the joy in Ayg’s voice as she explained the workings of the Enclave, but Ayg was no more. He cut off a cascade of painful memories and brought himself back to the present. “Get to Constantinople. Check on Aunt Martha. Find Gustav and kill him.’ That was his short-term list. ‘But first, avoid these Ebon.’ The other four were about a half kilometer away in a small camp at the bottom of the ravine.
He skimmed to another shadow outside the cave entrance past the guard and dropped off the cliff. As he fell, he quickly scanned to see if he had been noticed and satisfied, weaved pranglide. Although his initial stage four wouldn’t let him fly very far, it would be sufficient to cross the ravine. In a few seconds, he was across but quickly falling. His landings were still a problem, but he had figured out a shortcut; weaving umbraskim allowed him to jump into a shadow on the ground and arrested all his inertia.
'Best to walk the rest of the way to Hisn-Mansur,' he thought. Hisn-Mansur was the city where he had killed the two thieves twenty-two years ago - well, almost four years ago in this world. He had now gotten used to thinking about different worlds, plains, dimensions, and time flows after discussing them many times with the Keeper during his training inside the Aymbria pocket world.
He looked nothing like the young boy that entered the cave. First, because developing his Samvid Nexus and all the training that followed had changed his body unrecognizably. Second, because he had weaved ethermask to change the color of his short hair to black, his eyes to brown, to tan his skin, and to change his facial features to somewhat resemble Gazi's, the only person he remembered with enough detail to mimic. He looked, he figured, like a young Gazi.
A few kilometers through the woods led him to the road to Hisn-Mansur, and shortly after, he met, going in the opposite direction, a patrol. About ten meters before he reached them, he weaved omniglot on the leading guard. The guard's eyes curled into the back of his head for about a second and then returned to normal, the guard none the wiser. Omniglot was a weave the keeper had given Renier that pulled the person's language skills into the weaver. Suddenly, Renier could speak Turkish like a native.
"Selamün aleiküm," Renier greeted them.
"Aleiküm selam, what business do you have on this road?" asked the leading guard.
"I'm traveling to Hisn-Mansur to meet my uncle. I'm to become his apprentice. How's the road ahead and the city," answered Renier, smiling.
The guard looked at him for a few seconds, but since he wasn't armed and looked fairly young, he dismissed him as just a traveler. "The city is safe enough. But you should not be traveling alone. There are many armed bandits along this road. Continue to the city, and we will catch up to you on our way back. You can travel with us," offered the guard.
"Thank you, Captain. I'll wait for you here," answered Renier, bowing.
However, as the guards moved onward, he weaved abysalfracture and erased the encounter from their collective memory. 'It would not do for you to remember me later,' thought Renier as he umbraskimmed to a shadow in case someone looked back.
When they were out of sight, he stepped out of the shadow and continued towards the city. He remembered this dusty road and its unbearable heat. Fortunately, it was almost winter, and the temperature was chilly.
As he walked, he meditated. Although he didn’t need to do it, the reserves embedded into his aakash gates provided many times more energy than any sangami at his stage. But the action was now second nature after decades of practice.
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He mused about the many hours it had taken to craft the Lucine Spirite talismans for his reserves when his perception picked up a group of people about a kilometer down the road.He could perceive the corruption left by the Penumbra Spores in their Mu shell. The “taint,” as Ayg had called it, marked them as Ebon.
Two waited in ambush on either side of the road, and there were another eight camped in a clearing behind thickets about two hundred meters from the road. While he couldn’t get rid of the ones guarding the cave for fear of alerting the Ebon, ‘these guys can just disappear,’ he thought.
He umbraskimmed until he was in range and, from the cover of a shadow, weaved an etherbolt through each one's skull—silent death. Before the bodies dropped, he appeared next to each of them and stored their remains in the ring. The Keeper had assured him that in time stasis storage, nothing would happen to his other items if he stored dead bodies. He was apprehensive about the food and water.
He skimmed into a shadow near the thicket.
"Leader, can we at least go into town? We've been here for months… it's a total waste of time." a skinny brown-haired Ebon asked as Renier listened. The six men and two women sat resting around an extinct fire pit.
A tall, dark-haired woman answered, “We need to stay here and be alert!" she growled, "He'll be coming out anytime now and is extremely dangerous."
‘A dead enemy is the best enemy,’ he could hear the Keeper admonish him. In another time, he would have been squeamish, but after all the deaths that had followed him to Moirai and his many years of training in killing, it was just something that needed to be done.
"I am…" Renier said mockingly as he stepped out of the shadow. Seven Ebons dropped dead - bolts passing through their skulls without a sound - while the leader got her face smashed by a kinedisc. It was one of the secondary uses he had learned for the energy shields during his second tour in Aymbria. He could weave a kinedisc that moved. It wasn't as fast as a bolt, but fast enough to knock someone out. The leader dropped unconscious.
He stored the bodies in the ring first, then took them out and arranged them side by side. ‘Easier the dragging them.’ The leader was still out, so he used the time to rummage through the bodies. Three gold and thirty silver between the lot. Anything else he took would probably be recognized as belonging to an Ebon. He would put the bodies back into storage later and burn them at a more convenient time. For now, they would serve a purpose.
The leader was still passed out when he finished, so he poured a flask of water on her bleeding face. The kinedisc had broken her nose. With a gasp, she opened her eyes, a terrified look on her otherwise beautiful face.
"How many of you are there in this region? Where are the main camps? Who is the overall leader of the mission? Spare me the theatrics. I know who the Ebon are, and I'm not frightened by Zain or Auberon, for that matter. Answer my questions, and I'll only cripple your adhikendra and let you live. Be particularly forthcoming, and I'll cure the corruption that will kill you in about two years. You'll get to live to a ripe old age or don’t, and you’ll end up like them." Renier quickly fired his questions to keep her off balance; the bodies would serve as the stick and the promise of healing as the carrot.
The leader looked horrified at the bodies of her men. 'Who was this guy?' she asked herself, 'he had killed them all without warning! They had no intel on anyone with power in the Ottoman Empire. She only expected a young blonde boy of about sixteen. She had been warned about the danger, but not from some random guy.' She stayed quiet.
"Let's start with something easy. What's your name?" Renier just wanted to get her talking. "Give me your name; I'll heal your nose."
"Yasmina," she answered hesitantly. A three-second weave of astralmend returned her nose to normal.
'Who was this guy? No hand gestures, no concentration. He just weaved like nothing,' she pondered, worrying even more.
"All right, let's continue. How many of you are there in this region?"
"Eight teams of five, including the two teams here," she quickly answered. She had no fanatical love for the Ebon and was starting to believe that this guy could cure her of the corruption.
"How are they arranged?"
"A team is guarding a ravine not far from here. A team is in Hisn-Mansur. Another is traveling the road from there to Sarmalius. There's a team in that city and one traveling the road to Ancyra. The final team is in Ancyra."
"Why are you guarding the ravine?"
"There's a cave that we believe is the entrance to one of the ancient sects. We have not been able to breach its defenses."
"Why are you guarding all these roads and cities?
"We're looking for a boy of about sixteen. The rumor is he has the key to enter the sect."
"That many people for a boy?"
"We were told he was very dangerous. We have orders to only follow and report." The information was what Renier had already surmised, except for this last part. Zain was being very cautious.
"Who is leading this mission?"
"I don't know her name. She's called Viper. She's the new leader after Falcon failed to capture the boy," she added, thinking that being forthright would be best.
Renier weaved a low-power etherbolt to her chest just to the right of her heart and followed it by a localized astralmend that healed the wound. Her adhikendra was destroyed. Then he did an intense, complete body astralmend and removed all her corruption. It would have been impossible without the talisman reserves, but he had more Mu energy than a stage seven could hold.
She gasped and felt her chest, but there was nothing except a feeling of emptiness—a look of awe on her face.
"Yasmina, I'm a man of my word. You're free to go. I would find a place far from here and enjoy life. You're free of corruption, and I fixed a few old injuries, so you should live another seventy or eighty years."
"Let me follow you. I'll do anything," she said suggestively.
Renier turned around, stored the bodies, and before he skimmed to a shadow by the road, said, "There's a patrol coming soon. I'd leave if I were you!" He had been tempted. After all, he had never been with a woman, but although his body didn’t show it, his hormonal teenage years had long passed, and he had a mission. Gustav and his men, the slavers in the Balkans, the Ebon, Zain, and Auberon, would all pay the price. He did not want to carry the weight of his promise to his family and friends for the rest of his life.
His senses showed that the road ahead was clear; he could slipstream and arrive at the outskirts of the city in less than an hour.