Lavastro’s sobs burned her throat, tears carving moist furrows across the dirt caking her cheeks. Emotion writhing unchecked, raw and irresistible as a child’s. So strong it almost burned like fire even as she released it.

She shook with the sensation, rocking, almost, where she sat atop the pile of ruined mortar. It shifted below her weight with every heaving cry.

Thoughts of Pyrhic were like a poison, yet one ingrained too deep to be staved off. Consuming everything else she might have turned her mind to, seizing her faculties and making a torturer of them.

It pained her to think of the woman’s smile. Her quickness. That beguiling humour she’d displayed so scarcely and effectively. Every recollection was a fresh agony.

Still, Lavastro delved deeper and further into the past. Bringing yet more of her fallen companion to the forefront so that she might engrave every detail beyond forgetting.

Only Kleidra’s presence held the tears back from continuing endlessly. The man’s throat cleared, perhaps for her attention, perhaps against the clotted air’s scraping. It mattered not. Either served to recapture her focus, bringing a sudden self awareness to the juvenility of her display.

No matter her mood, she was Lavastro Kaiosyni. Daughter of He’aran, heir of Taiklos. Ordained by competence and aptitude to rule over the greatest empire in the world’s history.

There was no chance of mastering the world without mastering herself. Mirandis dwarfed the petty feelings of any individual.

Wiping the tears from her eyes and unblocking her nose with as least pathetic a sniffle as she could manage, Lavastro forced herself to stand. Turning to her bodyguard.

He stood placid and stoic as she rose, unmoved by the display. Eyes glassy and expression mathematically flat. Lavastro felt a stab of gratitude for his effort, even as it bubbled into resentment. Revealing how little he thought of her strength, to take such measures at all.

“We need to move.” She said. “This building could come down fully at any time, not to mention the ones who damaged it returning. Time is of the essence.”

Kleidra barked out a sharp warning just as Lavastro moved to step forwards, a sudden, fiery pain lancing through her leg and rendering the limb jelly beneath her.

She fell again, dust masking her face and filling her mouth where she landed.

The fall jarred her leg, and the pain returned rejuvenated. Festering at the midpoint of her thigh as if feasting on the very viscera that held it.

By the agony’s extent, Lavastro imagined it must have found her flesh a fattening meal.

“Your leg’s broken.” Came Kleidra’s voice, muffled by the mists engulfing her mind.

The inanity of his remark stunned her almost as much as its idiocy. Lavastro looked down to prove him wrong, certain he was gripped by hysteria. Instead her eyes fell upon a pale bone jutting agonisingly from its bed of meat, streaked with red where blood still clung to it.

So great was the horror that it filled Lavastro’s mind like dirt in a grave, keeping Kleidra’s voice from reaching her for moments more as she stared.

“Sir, you need to focus. We have to move like you said. You’re a mystic, is there anything you can do about that leg?”

A mystic. One who could act, one who needed to act.

The rationality of Kleidra’s prompting, the necessity of it, brought a focus to Lavastro. Armed with the blade of her mind, she hacked her way through the discordant agony.

She was a mystic, and there was something she could do. Something imperfect, for she was no healer. And something dangerous, for she’d improvised it only at that moment. But something nonetheless.

Lavastro felt for her magic, let it relieve her as the arcane energies brought strength flooding their vessel. Split its flow like light through a prism, then seized the shaft of refracted Manamis with both hands.

In an instant her fears were dead, bodily protests along with them. Killed in a single stroke by the magic of minds and souls.

With a thought, Cutaris answered her beckoning. Sterility conjoined with wildness to leave a confusing and elemental touch in her.

She allowed the power to gather for a moment before moving it outwards.

By Lavastro’s will, the energies crept in an invisible silence. Coiling around her leg, grabbing the bone, feeling every bit of the wound from the jagged break to the bloodstained fissure below.

It was a dangerous thing she attmpted, and painful to do right. But disastrous if wrong. Lavastro felt needles prick her as she applied pressure from all sides, probing the damaged tissue to glean its shape and location. Committing both to memory.

The Manamis helped, ordering her thoughts and smothering the jerks of pain before they could grow to distractions.

However close the magic allowed fear to be approximated, it made no obstacle.

Lavastro took action the moment she was confident in its accuracy, twisting and pushing down on the shattered bone with a precision no human limbs could manage. Telekinetic force proving the match for a thousand surgeons.

She waited moments for the heat substituting agony to fade, for her restless viscera to grow subdued and quiet once more. Then, carefully, stood.

No sharp protests cried in her leg, for Lavastro’s magic remained tight around the bone. Holding it in place more firmly than any splint. She relaxed at the feeling.

“Let’s hurry.” She said, walking before Kleidra could protest again. Stifling his words with a simple show of how little her wound deterred movement. He followed shortly.

“Where are we headed?” Asked the soldier, a man of cold steel once again. It was relieving to hear, Lavastro could use a soldier.

“The Crux is under attack.” She answered. “Most likely the entire city. There are certain elements within that Taiklos cannot do without, we must be certain of their safety. After that, we will leave.”

His judgement was loud enough to carry even through silence, but Manamis left Lavastro uncaring.

Gem was in the city, somewhere. She would see to the girl’s safety before anything else. Then leave alongside her.

Udrebam was of Unix. Lavastro was of Taiklos. Her duty was as clear as anything in the world, and Manamis stamped out any irrationality which may have drawn her from it.

***

Ajoke felt the woman’s magic as she rushed onwards, the very air around her seeming to shake with fear at her passage. A horror beyond the physical, and obvious at a glance.

She turned her fear into fire, let the conflagration scream for her enemy amid sizzling air and tortured ground. Glimpsed the grin just an instant before her assault struck home.

The woman disappeared from sight in the burning orange tongues, then reemerged barely a heartbeat later. She moved like an arrow.

Hands were upon Ajoke before she could think, a knee in the gut emptying her of air and leaving her body convulsing uselessly. The world flipped as she was thrown, landing a score of feet from her enemy and almost bouncing from the hard ground. She tried to stand, but her surrendering flesh was far too slow to beat out the woman’s advance.

Ajoke had barely turned on her knees when the enemy was on her again, a hand closing around her throat. Tight enough to cut off breath, then tighter still. She gagged, fought, tore her nails free against the mystic’s impossibly hard skin all without gaining an inch of freedom from her millstone grip.

Her vision darkened by the time Fisher was on the woman, a great arm hooking around her throat from behind. Bulging so broad and swollen as to shame draft horses.

The woman’s eyes widened, hold relaxing as she shot her hands back to free herself. Too slow. Fisher dragged her from Ajoke, leverage and surprise compounding his strength.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

They’d moved a yard by the time his opponent regained her footing.

Ajoke was scrambling to her feet as Fisher dropped down from a strike to his gut. Stood by the time her friend was thrown as she’d been, composure regained and leaping forwards.

Her kick gave the woman pause, yet it was like a child’s against her strength. A backhand cast Ajoke down again before her foot was even lowered.

Blurred vision revealed another contestant leaping at the enemy, slower even than Fisher. Weaker than Ajoke herself by far. The poor, idiot girl was tossed back with blood flecking from her lips and pain twisting her face. A single strike proving more than she could withstand.

Ajoke groaned, idiotically. Bringing the enemy’s eyes back down to her as she tried to right herself. There was barely time enough to regret her mistake.

***

Crow was seized by confusion as he fought, panic mingling with the sensation. The thrill of battle eclipsed at last.

He’d barely noticed when the rain stopped, barely noticed when the ground beneath him became hard and unyielding. Yet his battlefield growing saturated by hundreds more was something far too great to escape even him.

It took little time for he and Rajah to mutually realise they had greater concerns than victory. Both recognised fellow contestants among the melee, even members of their own teams. Crow had made for his own quickly.

Within minutes he’d been regailed of what was happening. The new fight gripped his attention far more tightly, and even as his aching body slowly pierced the adrenal cloud about it, he found relief in being confronted by enemies he could contend with.

Crow struck the attackers down one at a time, and he cut a swathe that was halted only by a mystic emerging to stop him.

The woman was made predictable by his strain and fragile by his enhancement, succumbing even in spite of his youth. A middling mystic, and older than him by at most a decade, but replaced by yet more when she fell. Be it five blows or fifty, no one of the enemy could withstand him.

Even half Crow’s potency brought more strength than they could muster, and none was half the fighter he was. Still, it became clear before long that his true enemy was not the individuals swarming him. It was time itself.

Crow’s magic reserves had been depleted by perhaps a third in his battle with Rajah, and he had no way of knowing how long the attack would last. Reluctantly, he let his Neramis go.

Immediately the enemies pressed him harder, glimpses no longer warning him of every unseen blow. Crow had been cutting a path through them with his Eye of Temporis, but its absence forced him to cede that ground. He did so without hesitation, finding nothing to gain with heroics.

Soon his back was to other contestants, strangers too far consumed by the battle to glance his way. Crow found his own senses snatched no less thoroughly. They repelled the attackers in a stalemate for some time, sinking into a combative rhythm, holding their line and proving talent the better of age as they turned their elders back one after another.

Stability was taken from the conflict as Crow glimpsed a man sprinting across the arena. Dressed well, without the band that signified the attackers or any magic to speak of. Looking more terrified than any around him and charging bloodhound-focused for the nearest exit.

He took only three paces in Crow’s sight before a blast erupted beside him.

It was over instantly. Light, chips of stone. The air quivering in answer to the kinetic wave rolling across it. None of the smoke of black powder, none of the fire. Force distilled to its purest form.

The sterility of magic was almost beautiful to behold, yet its devastation made Crow’s skin crawl. When the light cleared he saw what was left of the man strewn across yards of ground in a bloody smear. Nothing more than a feast for flies.

Memories of Sorasis struck him like a charging bull, rocking his thoughts so thoroughly as to almost shake his hand from the touch of magic. Crow’s legs weakened beneath him, head muddled and heart racing as if to escape from his chest.

Then anger bled through to bring strength anew, drawing him to sprinting speed as a scream clawed from his throat.

He didn’t know which of the banded mystics was responsible for the man’s death, for the memories racking his mind like steel whips, but Crow was past caring.

There were more than enough bodies to vent his fury on.

Crow came upon the nearest of them like a rabid dog, stunning the hapless mystic with a blow to the temple, then slamming his forehead down hard against their collar as they fell to a knee. The fragile bone beneath snapped with little protest, forcing them further towards the earth and holding them their in agony as he brought a boot down hard.

He didn’t let the blows falter even when his enemy stopped moving, rage driving him to stomp long past the point where resistance had been crushed out beneath his heel.

The fury had barely dwindled by the time Crow was finally satisfied with their destruction, stepping back and allowing himself a single moment to study it further. There was enough bloood weeping from beneath the fissured scalp that he was confident no more fight would come from the mystic.

Another enemy found him just as Crow found them, a man this time. He was big and broad, face scarred and eyes beady and cruel. He looked every bit the sort that would wreak the havoc unfolding all around them.

Blades protruded from the man’s fingers, knife-long and razor-sharp. Clinking and scraping against one another as he flexed the digits, coming on with an ominous and terrible thirst that tainted the very magic forming them.

Crow was on the backfoot instantly, panic seizing him as the jagged edges flashed for him. He felt lengths of heat spawn across his skin where they snagged, parting the flesh and warming him with spilled blood.

A grin split the man’s face just as the gashes did Crow’s, his assault seeming to hasten with every clipping cut. It took moments for Crow to realise he was outmatched, moments more for him to begin reaching for Neramis once again.

It was a fatal delay, for his enemy was so swift that the time proved easily long enough.

Only a jet of light soaring in from the left saved him, searing the man’s arm and sending him stumbling. The opening was long enough for Crow to lash out with a kick.

Wide and unrestrained, every ounce of his weight and strength pitted behind the motion in a dangerous, maddenned gambit.

His bet proved more right than he could have known. Whatever magic gave the man his speed was clearly of a singular focus, for the kick threw him down like a dog beneath the swipe of a bear, sent him spinning slack and limp.

Crow didn’t wait to see the man stand again, closing in the moment he tried. His second blow was a kick to the ribs, followed by a dozen more. Breaking bone inwards and driving splinters into the viscera beneath.

Another enemy bested, he moved to find his next. Still feeling the coals of rage hot within him, still needing something to loose their toxicity upon.

It took little time for him to find a viable replacement. Ajoke Balogun rolled back from a mystic woman, cursing and fearful as she tried to scramble from her. The giant- Fisher- lying some fathoms back. Something about her terror called to Crow, rousing him to action.

He’d fought Balogun, seen her determination and bravery first hand. It wasn’t something that deserved to be crushed so easily.

Crow’s shoulder took the woman in her side just as she reached the girl, sending her stumbling. She halted herself with a surprising speed, answering his tackle with an outthrust palm to his chest.

The blow fell with the weight of a crumbling mountain, emptying his lungs like a bellows and opening the space between them instantly. He’d not even finished reeling before another followed, then another.

Rajah had struck weaker and slower than the woman by far, and Crow’s defence was swatted aside almost effortlessly as he fought to keep it up. Arms forced apart, balance shattered. Pain amplifying by the second.

He fell quickly, one leg giving out with a shock, the other when his enemy seized her chance and swept it. Crow was down before he knew what was happening, saved only as Balogun threw herself onto the woman’s back.

It took moments for the Írìsi to be flung back, for the pillar of magic that was his foe to round on Crow once more. He’d scrambled up again by then, fists raised and Neramis flowing forth to tint the world. The battle was barely shifted by his advantage.

Again the woman’s fists battered apart his defences, bruising flesh, testing bones and leaving the strength to leak from him as limbs numbed beneath their impacts.

Soon Crow was down again, and the mystic struck without the pause she’d left before. Her foot landing hard against his side, lifting him high and far to fall face first.

Crow’s nose burst as it struck the sandstone, his side screaming in pain with the jarring deceleration of his impact. Something had shifted in his ribcage, buckling inwards, split like a board.

There was no time to dwell on his wound before hands closed around him, lifting him high and dropping him back down into the stone. His skull proved an effective weapon, denting the hard ground below as it landed.

He struggled, thrashed beneath the woman. Failed to break her grip as she hoisted him up anew.

He barely noticed as the pressure subsided, relief was like a sun beside the candle of curiosity.

Crow rolled onto his stomach, ignoring the protests of his ruined ribs. Staring up with confusion and awe to see what might have deterred his enemy.

His heart soared at the sight of Amelia, eyes dark as ever and harder than he’d seen them. Face twisted in a snarl, blood painting her hands and hair tied back.

The woman retreated from her, eyes finally bearing emotion. Terror. She seemed smaller with the emotion, somehow. Diminished in her humanity. The pure magic that had given her such presence diluted.

“You’re one of them!” She cried. “One of his! I don’t understand, what are you doing?”

Amelia paid no heed to the protests, nor the world breaking around her. The veins jumped across her flesh just as they had against Rajah and Astra’s, skin darkening with blood and tightening around the bulging muscularity beneath. In moments she was the monster Crow had seen dominate the Sieve, eying her newest prey with a terrifying focus.

The air was rent by her approach, boots tearing beneath the stride’s power and lips peeled back by the wind. She was on her enemy with barely an instant’s lapse, a cannonball against stone.

Crow lost sight of the pair as they shot backwards, tumbling from sight amid flailing limbs and cries of pain.

In an instant they were gone, leaving him alone with his pain and worry. Battles still raging around him, forcing him to move. Spiting his ribs with will.

He soon rediscovered Amelia still fighting the retreating mystic. So fast that Crow couldn’t imagine stepping in to even help. He watched, helpless to do anything else. Paralysed and left bitter by his weakness. Unmoved even as the girl was pulled from her mystic enemy and cast aside fast enough to leave even her stunned and spasming.