Kayden and Varokan approached the low tower upon which the Everbender stood.

Commanding her troops, she wasn’t even fighting. She didn’t even feel the need to fight. Kayden narrowed her eyes, holding the Mimicker to the side.

Lauren.

He wouldn’t kill her. But he would for sure beat the heck out of her.

The Everbender noticed them soon enough. Her face seemed to twist into a smirk below the metallic mask covering the lower half as she unsheathed her rapier.

“Up for a Round Two, are you, Kayden?” she said, her slightly-metallic voice booming across the battlefield. “You never learn.”

The two of them picked up the pace, speeding up with their weapons to their sides.

“Stick to the plan,” Varokan muttered.

Kayden was about to reply when the sharp sound of metal scraping rock came up behind them. Focused pain erupted on his stomach as he saw the Everbender’s rapier pierce through. It lasted no more than half a second, and then back up he was, perfectly healed. He turned with his blade to face her.

“Oh?” the Everbender giggled. “So your friend is a Timebender too, huh.” She grinned. “This’ll be fun.”

The Everbender then erupted into a highly-Speedbent flurry of extremely-precise attacks. Kayden and Varokan’s mastery of their swords could barely hold their own against the barrage, but each time one of them was wounded, the other would instantly regress time on him, and so they continued.

The rocky ground was littered with bodies from both sides, the darkness of the night only cut through by sparsely-lit torches and the full moon. Under the moonlight they fought, Kayden and Varokan against the Everbender in a fiery dance where the three gave it all they had. Sparks flew as the clash of steel against steel filled the air.

Deep inside, Kayden knew that, if he failed here, he’d never get up again. Even so, he also knew he couldn’t kill Lauren. And so he rushed her time after time, hacking and slashing at her seemingly-flawless defense in a thin gray line between doing what he needed to and following what he believed in. The Everbender wounded them time after time, and time after time the other regressed time, and they continued fighting.

Then, the Everbender said it.

“Kayden,” she started with a grin. “Do you… remember our dream?”

And Kayden froze.

He unconsciously lowered the Mimicker as his eyes widened.

“We promised we’d appear in history books together,” he whispered.

The Everbender laughed.

“Kayden!” Varokan shouted, glancing at him.

And the Everbender stabbed, with all her might. Not at Kayden, but at Varokan. Her rapier pierced deep through his chest, and after holding it in place for several seconds, kicked him hard in the stomach.

The shocked Varokan flew backwards, slamming against the base of the tower.

“No!” Kayden shouted.

But Varokan was too far. Way beyond Kayden’s Timebending range. Kayden winced in horror.

“It’s just you and me again,” the Everbender said, “Kayden Almerth.”

From the corner of his vision, Kayden saw something thrown weakly and Timebent through the air.

“Kill her.” Varokan’s whisper barely reached him.

Stretching out, Kayden grabbed the long Unbound air vial Varokan had been carrying, and without missing a beat, shut his eyes and uncorked it in his mouth.

Pressurized Unbound air shot through his lungs, filling them with a level of power he hadn’t felt in a long time. His every vein seemed enhanced, his Timebending abilities shooting through the sky. He opened his eyes.

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His right blue eye felt like it was burning.

And the mere sight he unlocked was enough to make him fall to his knees.

Thousands of Laurens, overlapping through the battlefield. Thousands of Varokans, flying through the air. Thousands of Mimickers, slashing back and forth.

Is this what the legends call Timesight?

Kayden could see their trajectories. Into the future and from the past.

His eyes widened. He couldn’t recognize the present.

Kayden gasped in pain as a steel boot kicked him in the stomach.

The Everbender said things that all blended together at the same infinite moment through time. Kayden was kicked again and again, curled up on the ground as he tried to process what in the world was going on. A thousand Laurens.

A thousand maniac laughs.

He recognized some words in the overlapped flow of time.

“I still need you… My final power source… The Skylands are going down.”

I need to do something, Kayden kept thinking. I need… to do… something!

But his every sense was overloaded. He couldn't.

Kayden couldn’t say how long passed. He only recognized pain, laughter, and the rocky ground. Eventually, it all suddenly stopped.

The infinite visions of time merged together again to form the present, and there he saw. The Everbender –Lauren– was fallen on the ground, far away, struggling to get to her feet without losing her composure. In front of Kayden, a wide-shouldered middle-aged bearded man in peasant’s clothing was cracking his knuckles with a grin.

“I’m not what you think I am,” Kayden recalled him saying. “I’m not just a bartender.”

“Hey, Kayden,” Abner Chafter said. “You made me fight again. So don’t ya die on us yet.”

“Chafter…” Kayden whispered, eyes wide.

“You again?” the Everbender asked, looking annoyed.

“I’ve seen enough realities consumed by people like you,” Chafter said, lowering his body slightly and extending his arms downwards. “Always the same. The evil emperor of the world. It works time after time… for a while. Time after time, heroic adventurers rise up, and fight.”

The Everbender laughed. “How do you know which is which?”

“You know ‘em when you see ‘em,” Chafter replied. He looked back at the fallen Kayden and winked. “And I can’t let this hero die.”

Reality itself seemed to warp at Chafter’s fingertips as shards of glass rearranging.

“I can’t stay idle anymore,” he finally muttered.

The Everbender dashed at him with a manic smile as sharp as her rapier.

“I once knew an adventuring party,” he shouted as he raised both reality-warping hands, “that never stopped messing around! That never let the horrors they faced take over their selves!”

Chafter slammed his hands down on the ground, seeming to shatter it as a river of world shards shot towards the Everbender. She sprang to the side as the cosmic shards distorted the rock into colors and shapes too bizarre for Kayden to process.

“Libertatum! Ring a bell?” Chafter said as the Everbender soared through the air with her rapier held forth. “It’s also the name of the rebellion that’ll bring you down.”

Chafter raised his hand into the sky, pulling out of thin air a broadsword as thick as himself and parrying the Everbender’s thrust.

The floating Everbender’s stick-thin rapier pressed against the giant broadsword, pushing Abner Chafter backwards with such force the rock beneath his feet caved in. Then Chafter stomped down and the surface opened up beneath the Everbender, the void pulling her downwards from the sky. She fell through the ground and then somehow from above, straight towards Chafter’s raised blade. But she changed direction in mid-air, and the two swords slammed each other again and again, so fast the shower of sparks was all Kayden’s still-stunned mind could see.

As fast as the swords flew they stopped.

Kayden’s breath caught in his throat as the Everbender buried her rapier deep into Chafter’s chest, a look of utter focus on her face. Chafter was in turn gripping her arm in his fist, unyielding even as he knocked on death’s door.

“Guys,” Chafter coughed. “The others have what you came for. I’ll keep her entertained. Carry your wounded and retreat.”

Kayden couldn’t move. He tried to blink his tears away as they wet his face.

“But you barely know us,” Kayden whispered.

Chafter smiled through bloodied lips. “Nevermind that. Keep on living, y’all. Take care of the Wandering Wonderinn and the others for me.”

Kayden shouted into the ground with shut eyes.

He would’ve stayed that way forever were it not for Varokan, who pulled Kayden to his feet even with a wounded chest and eyes that were struggling uselessly not to cry.

“Stand,” Varokan said shakily. “This is no place to die.”

Kayden pulled wounded Varokan’s arm around his shoulders as they stumbled throughout the corpse-littered battlefield. In the distance, the Libertatum Brotherhood’s army seemed to have won –they were loading bags and chests onto Kaijin Base’s lower platforms. The rest of the Skyguard was nowhere to be seen, but they seemed to have been successful.

Behind them, the Everbender shouted and screamed, struggling with her every power as Abner Chafter refused to die and held her in place with all the last of his dwindling strength. They hadn’t long.

But they had enough.