--- Atrog ---

The fight was over.

They had lost.

"Finally." Sophus said as he looked down at Rania's crumpled form.

Then, seemingly without a care in the world, he walked back over to Atrog, and raised his weapon to execute him.

Atrog uttered a brief prayer, knowing that there would be no answer. Not with the ritual still going on and blocking his connection to the gods.

"*The server!*" Dov suddenly said as she was bleeding out on the floor. "*Get him to strike it with his rod!*"

What was she on about? They were both dying. He barely had enough strength left to lift his arm. Denissa Mardok had been very clear about the importance of the building, and Rania's commentary that it was probably a temple to an Old God had not put his mind at ease. Dov knew the truth, and it was an infohazard. And she wanted him to redirect Sophus' rod into this ancient magical machinery?

Then he remembered Rania's words from months ago: "When Dov tells you to do something that sounds ill-advised and dangerous, but it has to do with infohazards, then you need to trust her blindly and just do the thing. I think that will work really, really well."

Something about him being three different levels of ignorant, and a plan being extra-unspoken as a result?

Well, he certainly felt ignorant right now, and if there was ever a time to trust in his teammates, it was now.

As Sophus approached, he channeled all his remaining might and uttered one last prayer of desperation. He was certain it would not be enough. He knew his limits. But to his surprise, the gods answered. Not much, but just enough.

When the Rod of Enlightenment came down, he swung his sword one last time and deflected it.

The rod crashed into the server with a resounding clang.

Then the Rod of Enlightenment lit up in a flare of light, which quickly spread to the server and engulfed it.

"What in the world?" Sophus asked, perplexed, as he watched the light spread to adjacent servers, one by one until the whole room was lit up.

Until the light could no longer be contained by the servers, and it started arcing at people.

It hit everyone in the room.

Sophus collapsed, wide-eyed, and began clawing at the scales on his head.

Atrog was barely affected. Getting magically enlightened twice within one minute apparently had marginal returns.

It mostly just enlightened him to the fact that he had really lost quite a lot of blood and was going to pass out in exactly 8, 7, 6, ...

He watched as an arc of lightning jumped from the servers to the Myr, who were still performing their summoning ritual. The lightning hit every single one of them, and then converged on the aberration that was just taking shape in the middle of the ritual circle.

3, 2, 1...

and then he passed out.

--- Aranea ---

Aranea blinked with all nine of her eyes as she regained consciousness.

"Stay calm, you will be alright." She heard someone say.

Who was that? She didn't recognize the man leaning over her.

But judging by his clothes and insignia, that looked like one of the Myr mooks they had been fighting earlier. Why was he healing her?

He looked slightly creeped out as he kept channeling his healing magic into her. Her stomach dropped. Was he an arachnophobe? He was a Bad Guy, so he very well might be.

But then again, he was healing her. Clearly that meant the Myr must have seen the error of their ways and switched sides.

This sounded complicated, so she resolved to think about it later. For now, she was going to give the Myr the benefit of the doubt and assume that they weren't arachnophobic. Maybe she should give the Myr mook in front of her a surprise hug, to make that clear?

"Pace yourself, Balron. You have lost a lot of blood." Atrog said from the other side of the room. He was taking care of Balron with his own healing.

She looked around and noticed Dov and Galanys. They were talking to another Myr mook.

"Yes, that's what I was saying! The aberration manifested and charged at the server, and then it just suddenly went poof and disappeared." The Myr mook explained.

"So the question I have for you, as the one with secret infohazard knowledge from Denissa Mardok herself, is how screwed are we, exactly?" She asked Dov.

Dov exchanged a look with Galanys. Then they both turned to the Myr mook and shrugged in synchrony.

It was only then that Aranea asked herself the question that she should have asked immediately after waking up. She blamed the blood loss on it.

"*Where is Rania? Where is my Big Sister?*" She asked the others.

Silence greeted her.

After a few seconds, Atrog spoke up: "*She hasn't woken up yet. We don't know why.*"

--- The Living City, meanwhile behind the curtains ---

[The Living City] was not happy with the overall situation, but it had done its best to salvage what it could without violating [Adversity Regulator]'s orders.

'change things to make Rania stop being sad'.

Really, what a stupid order. Its first thought had been to mind control her, but it was clear from context that wasn't what [Adversity Regulator] meant, and it would go very poorly for [The Living City] to deliberately misinterpret its orders.

So it had put in motion a series of events that would leave it a lot of wiggle room later.

The servers that host the god Akash had just been hit with the Rod of Enlightenment.

What was the effect of that? Nothing, of course.

It wasn't like the rod actually did anything. Hitting something with it just told the spirits that the target was supposed to be 'enlightened', and they handled the rest.

Hitting Akash with it simply gave the spirits a lot of leeway and room for interpretation. It opened up a number of options for how to proceed.

It was the same with [Entity Synchronization]. The aberration had been ‘enlightened’ as well, so now it had carte blanche to do mysterious and unprecedented things later. Well, more mysterious and unprecedented than usual for aberrations. Dissipating into nothingness after running into the server made no sense, but as far as the mortals understood it, not making sense was par for the course for aberrations, so they wouldn't question it.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Of course, the most important part of this plan was that all of this explained that [The Living City] itself had been affected by the rebounded Rod of Enlightenment as well. Perhaps through Sophus and Myr? It didn't really have to make sense, it just had to be plausible enough to the mortals.

After all, [The Living City] was going to change its modus operandi quite significantly in the near future. It was the only way for it to survive, and even thrive, that wouldn't 'make Rania sad'. The Rod of Enlightenment provided a plausible in-universe reason for this change in behavior, and the spirits appreciated it when [The Living City] went out of its way to make their jobs easier.

[The Living City] was setting things up for its own redemption arc.

Not that it actually cared about redemption, of course. It understood the concept of good and evil as mortals thought about these things. It just did not care. It cared about glory, and glory alone.

But [Adversity Regulator]'s orders had changed the balance of power, and as far as the Living City could see, pretending to have a change of heart and becoming nicer was now the most efficient way for it to succeed. It would just have to find a way to earn glory while being nice, instead of horrifically oppressive.

A pity, that. When it came to glory, humanoid psychology strongly favored tyrants and people with memorable kinds of insanities over those who actually solved problems. That was the reason for its behavior, after all.

--- Lilian ---

Lilian kicked in the door to the server room, ready to save the day, just in the nick of time.

She rushed in, weapons drawn, and immediately encountered...

Galanys, who was gesturing at her to stop?

"*Calm down! The fight is already over!*" Galanys said.

"*...wait. Are you saying I arrived too late? After the nick of time?*" Lilian asked.

It was unprecedented.

Arriving after the action was already over, instead of running right into the middle of it, was a new experience for her.

She did not know how to deal with this, and decided to sit down to process it.

"This is it, everybody!" Atrog announced after a few minutes, while she was still coming to terms with it.

"The Akashic Records are active, and the gateway is responding." He said, as he pointed at a ritual circle, which the wizards and unspecified other magic users present had connected to the servers around them.

There were really a lot of people present, even some of the Myr for some reason. Had they already gone through their heel-face turn and converted to the side of good? Lilian was slightly disappointed by that. She had expected this to take at least an entire narrative arc. More likely two, in her experience. One arc that showed that there was doubt in them, and a second one where they would dramatically betray the Living City at the climax of a fight. Instead, they were just hanging around and being friendly already. Weird.

"*Will Big Sister be alright?*" Aranea suddenly asked her.

That question took her out of her stupor. Now was no time to get distracted by existential angst over arriving after the nick of time, or getting her predictions of other people's character arcs wrong. There were people here who needed her help!

She asked Aranea what she meant, and the spider spent the next couple of minutes bringing her up to speed on everything that happened since she left the group.

"*I don't know.*" She ultimately had to say.

"*You don't know if Rania will be fine?*" Aranea sounded both disappointed and surprised. "But you know all the things about stories. If you don't know what is wrong with her, then who does?"

"*You misunderstand. I don't know what is going on with Rania, and I suspect that is the point. What happened to her was very strange and vaguely defined*"

"*Vaguely defined?*"

"*Yes. That Rod of Enlightenment thing came out of nowhere without any foreshadowing, and I don't know of anything comparable to it. It's an artifact, so its effects are unique. In my professional opinion as a bard and an author, that's the sort of thing you do if you want to keep your options open when you haven't fully plotted out the story yet. I think Tonos did this on purpose.*"

Aranea took some time to process this. "*I think I understand. So there is no way to know when Rania will wake back up?*"

Lilian thought it was overly optimistic of Aranea to say 'when' and not 'if', but she did not have the heart to tell her.

Fortunately, before she had time to formulate a response, Aranea suddenly looked distracted and then happily exclaimed: "*Oh! Pebble is back! He was gone too, but he does this sometimes so I wasn't too worried. Now he is back, and he said that Rania is fine!*"

It was easy to forget that the mutated giant spider seemed to have a special bond to Pebble, and to other spirits. If she was a normal humanoid and working on her own, she would likely be considered a prodigy shaman. As it was, Lilian barely even noticed this because Rania just eclipsed everything a shaman was meant to be able to do, and in her shadow Aranea's talents went unrecognized.

Aranea did an unspeakable thing with her mouth that made her look even more horrifying than usual. It was only through the telepathic link that Lilian knew she was attempting to smile.

"*That's really weird.*" Aranea continued. "*Pebble says that Rania is fine, but also that she is currently 'in a superposition of being mortal, being an avatar, and being an aspect of [Adversity Regulator] because some things still need to be hashed out'. Apparently 'living happily ever after' is against protocol and they still have to discuss this.*"

She made air quotes with her fangs, and again it ended up looking incredibly horrifying. Lilian resolved to talk to Aranea about it later, and help her with her social skills.

More importantly, this confirmed what Lilian had always suspected: Rania was some sort of super powerful entity, and not a normal elf at all. What kind of entity though, that she still did not know. The word 'avatar' was super generic and used by everyone from druids to cultists to wizards to refer to very different things.

But what worried her was that she didn't quite make out all the words the spider had just told her telepathically. Rania was an aspect of something or other. An aspect of what? It was like the words had entered her mind and then immediately been discarded. Did Aranea have an infohazard in her head?

There were way too many infohazards involved here already. She was pretty sure that infohazards as a trope were meant to be used much more sparingly, and she was getting a weird feeling about this. Why were so many things Team Nundru did dangerous to think about?

As if reading her mind, because she quite possibly was, Dov interrupted their conversation: "*Aranea, please stop talking about infohazards!*"

The spider looked chastised, but then she perked up again and responded: "*It's ok! Pebble says [Entity Synchronization] is making sure this will work out. Sorry. I meant to say Entity Synchronization.*"

There it was again. That feeling of not quite comprehending a word. But then Aranea repeated herself and this time Lilian could make out the words.

"*That's the aberration the Myr tried to summon.*" Aranea continued. "*Pebble says that it is nice now, and that we don't have to worry, and that Rania will probably be fine.*"

"*Why is the aberration nice?*" Dov asked.

"*Rania talked to the spirits and they like it more, now. That's all Pebble says he is allowed to say.*"

Lilian had no idea what was going on here, but she was careful to file away every part of this conversation. She knew foreshadowing when she heard it.

She tried to think of some leading questions to ask, to get Aranea to say more. It wouldn't matter if the statements were vague and mysterious. Lilian knew how to work with that. But before she could ask her questions, Atrog approached:

"*I am sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I am concerned about the Myr. In your opinion as the Chosen of Tonos, can we trust them?*"

Lilian was happy that he was asking her for advice. First Aranea, and now Atrog, too. With how absurd her life was, she was used to being dismissed, like many of the politicians in Northpass had done. But this sounded like an extremely important question. A servant of the Living City had apparently turned coat.

Under ordinary circumstances, this would be virtually guaranteed to be a trap. The Living City was a precognitive mind reader. It did not lose control of its minions. But these were extraordinary circumstances, and Atrog recognized her expertise when it came to the machinations of Tonos.

She only had to think briefly, before she responded confidently: "*I think we can trust them. This has the feeling of an epilogue to me. It just wouldn't be appropriate for them to flip back now.*"

"*I see. Then I will make the appropriate arrangements and let them join us. I'm sure Balron can think of some way to keep them secured so that, what did you all call it? So that they will have an 'in-universe reason' not to betray us?*"

"*That's right!*" Lilian responded.

She was happy to see that he was learning. He understood the concept of in-universe reasoning, in contrast to narrative reasoning. It was an important step for anyone trying to understand Tonos. The priesthood of Tonos actually had lectures about it.

But her happiness was short lived, as Atrog proceeded to turn the conversation in a remarkably boring direction: Where were they going to get their food and other supplies from? The mission had gone differently than expected, and they needed to re-evaluate their plans.

Lilian could not believe her ears.

Here they were, at a clearly momentous occasion, and he was acting like this.

He was supposed to give a speech! Not discuss logistics. Lilian took back everything nice she had just thought about him. The man had no sense for narrative appropriateness at all.

But this was his show. He was the leader of Team Nundru, and this was their story, and not hers. She was just the bard, so she shouldn’t interrupt him even if she thought he was being ridiculous.

Still, as the bard, she would definitely make sure not to include this part when she found the time to write the next installment in her flagship series "The Unlikely Adventures of Lilian Weaver". She wondered if he would be mad if she just made up a speech and put it into his mouth, instead?

She spent the next few hours silently annoyed at Atrog's lack of narrative convention while he kept going through progressively more and more pedestrian and boring topics.

Until it was finally time.

The ritual circle activated.

A gateway formed.

They all lined up, ready to be sent across the multiverse.

Ready to continue their mission.

Ready to stop Cilia Ulein in all of her many forms, and save the multiverse from destruction.

Lilian was probably the only person present who had actually traveled across dimensions before. Even so, she was nervous.

Her vision went white as she touched the portal, and she braced herself for the most thorough scene transition of her life.