Quet groaned and opened her eyes. “...Ow…” She sat up and looked around with blurry vision. Orbs of multicolored light were growing stone-like shells around them all over the room, shards of glass covered the floor near a broken window, and bullet holes were scattered across the walls. Well, she was certainly glad she hadn’t been here when everything had gone down. Instead, she had taken the much more pleasant alternative of getting thrown through a wall and being struck by lightning.
Omet saw that their sister was awake and hurried over. “Great, you’re up. The others left me behind so you wouldn’t wake up alone. They’re trying to find Xiao and/or figure out what to do about Orsinus.”
“Aw, no time to play catch-up?” She got to her feet. “I’ve probably only been out for a minute or two, right? We can probably make it up before anything goes down.” She took a few steps towards the staircase before patting down the front of her slightly singed shirt. “Hey, uh, where’s my belt?”
Omet winced. “Yeah, Waia said it caught fire during your little, uh, tussle with Orsinus.”
Quet started to tap the back of her hand. “What, so… All my glyphs just..?”
“Well, yeah. Again, Waia said she took it off before she carried you down here. There wasn’t really anything she could do. I-I assume. I wasn’t there.”
Quet didn’t say anything, she just began wordlessly pacing in a circle with her arms across her chest. Omet held a hand up, then let it fall back to their side. “Yeah, so that’s… That’s most of your stuff gone. That’s pretty stressful, also scary, bu-y’know, I-I’m here. Still.”
Quet stopped walking in a loop and began to head up the stairs, in the direction she figured the others had gone in. Omet followed her up and walked parallel to her, one hand on her shoulder. “Wh- You’re just gonna keep going? I know it’s the responsible thing to do and all, but there’s a reason I’m the one who got left behind to keep watch. They didn’t say it, but it’s because we suck. I know you’re not really in control of your feet right now, but once you’ve managed to calm down enough to start making non-autopilot decisions, can you please slow down and listen to me?”
Quet didn’t slow down, and simply walked down the hall in a straight line. Omet sighed. “Okay, step one, they went this way.” They redirected her down a T-junction.
-
While Yang and Xiao crossed blades, they both heard the not-so-distant sound of lightning strikes. The Locus had attempted to return to Yang after losing Quet and Waia, but the others had managed to catch up before it had arrived. Xiao was fine with that, but he was getting worried by how frequently Yang was trying to angle him towards the source of the sounds.
Yang growled in frustration. “You’re making this really hard for me, Xiao.”
“I’m afraid that’s kind of the point of wanting to win.” Xiao pushed up against his former friend. “By the way, did you hear? We got that Salazar guy on our side. Our lightning guy’s in a six-versus-one right now.”
“Great to hear.” Yang knocked Xiao’s polearm to the side. “But it’s not gonna save you.”
“Right, sure…” Xiao kept his distance from Yang while moving away from the noises. “But from the way this is going, we’ll be here a while. It doesn’t seem like you want to kill me, and I definitely don’t want to kill you. We’re just gonna keep up this little dance of ours until one of the others comes out on top. And I’m not exactly hedging my bets right now.”
For a brief moment, Yang’s hand went to her temple and she screwed her eyes shut. A split second later, she opened her eyes again and laughed to herself. “You know what? That’s on me. I’ve been going easy on you, thinking I could win without killing you. At this point, I should’ve realized that we’re past that point. And you should’ve too, but I guess that was too much to ask of you.”
“Wha-?” Xiao’s halberd was once again knocked to the side. But this time, Yang extended her own weapon and brought it down on Xiao’s like a rubbery axe, splitting the shaft in two. Xiao looked back at Yang, who was slowly and intently advancing on him like a serial killer.
“If there’s one thing about me that I’d say gave me the chance to rise out of all the other cogs in the machine, I’d say that it’s my ability to learn. I learned from the family that brought me along with them, I learned from Erlani’s disaster of a campaign against the Greeks, I’ve learned from my own mistakes. But you? You’re the same old Xiao you were when you first got conscripted into the army. That’s the real reason you’re scared to go through with this, you know.”
Xiao looked over his shoulder. The hallway that he was being pushed down appeared to lead to a dead end. “Really? You think all this is normal? Sure, you’ve changed, but that usually doesn’t lead to trying to murder your friend! At least with Long, that was him being stupid! This time, it’s just y-”
“Shut up!” Yang slammed the flat of her halberd’s blade against Xiao’s head, sending him stumbling to the floor. “Stop blaming me for this! You’re the one who brought all those Primoi here and thought you could get us all out of this with the power of friendship!”
Xiao attempted to stand up, but dropped back down when Yang swiped horizontally at his head. Yang kept advancing while Xiao was forced to crawl across the carpet.
“That’s why you’re losing here, Xiao. Not because I’ve got a fancy weapon or a giant lightning ball, but because you’ve kept the mind of a one-in-a-million soldier. You’ve never had a good look at how the world works, because you’ve always had that done for you by people like Thel, or Erlani, or me! But I’ve been learning all this time. I know that you can’t just kiss and make up and send all your problems away. I don’t need saving from all this, because I know that if you want to make it in the real world, you need to become the real world!”
Xiao scurried on his back while Yang extended her halberd once again and let the tip fall to the side. He said nothing, simply staring at her in terror.
“The real world hates you!” Yang swiped again, carving a gash in the floor at Xiao’s feet. “If you give it the chance, if you let your guard down or get hung up on the small things, it’ll chew you up and spit you out!” Another strike, this one almost cutting off Xiao’s arm. “It weeds out the weak! If you can’t manage what you’ve been dealt, someone else takes your place for you. So if you want to be stupid and try to fix this like it’s all just some light-hearted game, go ahead and try. But me? I won’t let myself get pulled down into the ground by someone like you. If you’re too scared to do what it takes to rise above the rest, to be the one on top, then don’t try to stop me when I’m not.”
Yang swung for Xiao’s throat, and he was forced to leap back. He felt his back hit the wall, and looked up to see Yang standing above him. He looked directly into her eyes. Had they always been that blue? And were those tears? “Yang, I… It’s not too late. Don’t do this.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Yang snorted. “Yeah, sorry, no. I’m not falling for some sappy feel-good shtick. That’s the kind of thing that gets you to make dumb decisions, like dangle a carrot on a string in front of a bunch of immortals with superpowers and act like it’ll get you anywhere beyond an early grave. But me? I know when I’m being played. I know when I mess up.”
She shifted her grip on her halberd. “I know how to adapt faster than the people trying to take me down!”
She raised it over her head. “I know how to survive!”
She brought the blade down.
-
Waia lifted a large, rectangular stone brick out of the floor to block another one of the Locus’ lightning strikes. While hiding behind the makeshift cover, she decided that this one was getting pretty messed-up. She could probably pull another one out of the floor before the Locus could charge up another strike.
Meanwhile, Mark glanced across the room at Salazar, then counted down from three with his fingers. On zero, both of them fired a burst of their respective projectiles. Before any quills or bullets could even touch the surface of the Locus, however, several smaller arcs of electricity shot out and reduced the shots to ash.
While all three of the others were engaged with the orb, Horan jumped off of an overhead balcony and chucked his sword at the Locus from above. As expected, it was turned into slag a few inches from making contact, but Horan quickly summoned a new sword and dove past the first, trying to get something in before the Locus could charge up another shot. Or something. He hadn’t exactly gone into the details beforehand.
It took little effort on the Locus’ part to send Horan flying away. Mark noticed the Primus land close to him and pulled him behind a collapsed pillar. “Okay. You have any ideas on what we can do against this thing?”
Horan blinked at Mark. “You’re the guy who makes the plans for us, and you’re asking the guy who just flew face-first into a lightning ball if he has ideas?”
“Wh- I’m desperate, okay?” Mark leant against his cover, peeking up at the sight of Waia constantly pulling things up to act as cover for herself. “Not exactly something we can obviously use against it, I’m very much open to suggestions right now.”
Horan glanced over at the nearby staircase. “Well, there’s always not fighting it. We just… find Yang, kick her out, make Xiao give us the map as per the deal, y’know?”
“That could work, if we knew where Yang was. We can’t do a scavenger hunt all over the castle while that thing is hunting us down the whole time. Unless this fight takes long enough that she just eventually shows up, we gotta find a way to-”
Horan pointed to the balcony overlooking the room that he had jumped from. “She’s up there.”
Mark banged his forehead against his knee.
Yang snapped and the Locus immediately stopped trying to roast Waia. “You can stop ripping up the floor now.”
Waia dropped the boulder she was currently holding, stared up at Yang for a moment, then scooped an apple-sized chunk out of the floor. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Okay then.” Yang fished the rolled-up map out of her pocket and, with shaking hands, held it out over everyone. “Heard you were after this little old map.” She quickly pulled it back to her chest before a gust of wind almost shoved it from her grasp, then singled Horan out from the crowd, who was so close to directly underneath the balcony that it took her a second to find him. “Nice try, but I’m not that dumb.”
Waia noticed something behind Mark and Horan. “Are you sure? Because that seems more like ground to me.”
While Yang responded to Waia, Mark felt someone tap his shoulder. He turned around to find Omet and Quet crouching down by the stairs. Omet glanced up at where they heard Yang’s voice and whispered to Mark, “So, how’re things going over here?”
Horan looked at the Locus, which was still floating menacingly in the middle of the room. “Well, we can’t really touch that thing, and it keeps trying to electrocute us, so it could definitely be going better.”
Quet shoved her hands into her pockets to try and stop her fingers from moving. It didn’t work, but at least it was harder to spot through the fabric. Omet grimaced at the sight and looked back at the Locus. “Well, Quet’s down on her magic, and if I can’t touch it, I can’t do anything. Also, splitting that thing in half would probably make it worse.”
“Wait, hang on.” Mark looked over at Quet. “Not quite all of the magic.” He pulled a few glyphs out of his hoodie pocket. “Are these worth anything?”
Quet’s eyes shot open at the sight of the pebbles in Mark’s hand. It took her a second or two to properly start formulating words. “Wh-d-I- You just had those?!”
“I picked them up after you left them on the ground a couple nights ago. I’ll be honest, I kind of forgot about them. Until now.” Mark handed them over. “But this is just the stuff you used for that presentation, so unless we can do some serious brainstorming before Yang stops talking, we probably won’t get much mileage out.”
Quet looked over the glyphs. “Okay… We’ve got my reflective photonullification matrix, there’s the paper-based telekinesis one that I couldn’t come up with a smart-sounding name for… Anti-gravity…”
“Also this.” Mark pulled out her glitter pen and gave it back as well.
“Also a pen, yeah.” Quet nodded. “ I was wondering where that went. Well, it’s not nothing, that’s for sure. Shame the blueprints for that anti-magic matrix I wrote down blew up…” She began tapping the pen.
“Hey,” asked Omet, “Do you think you can remake it? Like, from memory?”
Quet paused. “I… Maybe? It could probably start coming back to me if I tried? Not exactly any way for me to write it fast enough. Wow, is she still talking up there?”
Waia was just trying to stall for the four others. “So, what? The carpet doesn’t even get involved in the definition of a floor? Is it just whether or not it’s inside or not that matters?”
Yang’s hand came to her forehead. “This is the dumbest conversation I’ve ever had. Yes, that is the definition.”
“Then what defines ‘indoors’? Does a gazebo count? The ground under awning? You’re digging your own grave here!”
Salazar’s gaze jumped between everyone else in the room at random. “Am I dreaming? Is this some kind of coma dream? Am I still in the hospital?”
Quet looked away from Waia. “Yeah, she’s got this for us. Still, I don’t exactly…” She trailed off and began sorting through her glyphs. “Buh-buh-buh…”
A grin crept across Mark’s face. He could practically see the wheels spinning in her head.
Quet looked back up at Mark and Horan. “Think you can keep her distracted for another two to three minutes?”
Horan gave a thumbs-up. “I’m gonna make Waia over there look like a chump.”
“Great.” Quet got up, glanced over at Omet and stuck a thumb over her shoulder. “You mind helping me out?”
“Yeah, I’m down.” They followed her down the stairs.
Mark nodded as he watched them leave. “Nothing better than a plan coming together.” He elbowed Horan. “Go do your thing.”
“No problem.” Horan flew straight up so that he was eye-level with Yang. “Morning.”
“Wha-AH!” Yang leapt back upon noticing Horan, then snapped.
Horan flew onto the balcony right before the Locus split the air where he had been a second before. “Okay, that’s just rude. Can’t we just have a civil discussion over whether the stuff Waia is standing on is ground or floor?”
Yang’s expression hardened. “You’re stalling for time.” She pocketed the map. “That, or you’re after the map. Trying to lull me into a false sense of security? Well, joke’s on you, I’ve never been less secure in my entire life!”
Horan shrugged. “Okay then. You can run if you want, away from the one thing keeping you safe. Or, alternately, you can listen to Waia and I argue with you about the taxonomic definition of a floor in a desperate attempt to stall in the hopes of getting saved by something that I don’t think will actually end up working.”
Yang sighed. “I hate every single one of you.”
“And I would judge you if you didn’t.”