"Michelle, once we've put all this behind us, let's get out of here. Head to Freedon, start fresh."

Their heart-to-heart concluded, the trio set off once more.

The atmosphere had transformed completely. The two women chatted away like lifelong friends, all traces of earlier strain vanished.

"I'd love nothing more. I've been itching to leave this place for ages," Michelle replied, her tone warm and intimate.

Of course, this newfound camaraderie did not extend to Kyle.

His circumstances remained unchanged - wrists chafed raw by coarse rope, legs quaking with exhaustion, and no right to speak. One wrong word and Annie's congenial smile would twist into a snarl, her whip eager to taste his flesh.

"We need to find a way to lure the Lither forces here without tipping off Michelle. That way, when they show up, she won't have time to off me…" Kyle muttered under his breath.

The AI chimed in, "The probability of success is insignificant. You'd have better odds attempting to seduce Michelle - a 25% chance, by my calculations."

"…"

Kyle actually paused to mull over the suggestion before responding, "Yeah, I'll pass, thanks."

The group trudged onward. Kyle shambled along behind Michelle, feigning a state of near-collapse to lull Annie into complacency, all the while wracking his brain for an escape plan.

Suddenly, inspiration struck like a thunderbolt.

"Well, it's not like I have any other bright ideas."

Annie prodded him forward, and he obediently stumbled along. Then, without warning, he pitched forward and crumpled to the ground.

Eyes screwed shut, body limp and lifeless.

Michelle halted, turning to regard him. Annie approached, studying Kyle's prone form for a long moment before shaking her head.

"Out cold."

Michelle said nothing, seemingly lost in thought, her expression unreadable.

"These nobility types are a waste of space," Annie grumbled, punctuating her disdain with a vicious kick to Kyle's side.

Kyle bit back a yelp of pain, careful not to break character.

Concealed beneath his body, his hands traced a single word in the dirt: "Vault."

This was Kyle's gambit: play possum and leave a breadcrumb trail for the Lither forces, revealing Michelle's intended destination. With any luck, his family would be lying in wait at the vault.

His movements were subtle enough to escape Michelle and Annie's notice.

"Do you honestly believe this will work? Even if they find the clue and beat us there, Michelle will have ample time to dispose of you," the AI pointed out.

"Beats doing nothing," Kyle retorted silently.

Besides, if the Lither clan set up a halfway decent ambush, they could catch Michelle with her pants down. The AI's naysaying aside, Kyle had a gut feeling the Lithers were no pushovers, given how seriously Michelle seemed to take them.

He allowed himself a flicker of hope.

As Kyle scrawled his message, a string of strange, unintelligible words reached his ears.

Annie was chanting under her breath, her voice wholly unrecognizable. The alien syllables reverberated through the trees, carrying an otherworldly resonance that left Kyle feeling untethered.

His very soul quaked.

Before he could react, a sphere of water coalesced from thin air, drenching him in bone-chilling cold. The shock of it shattered his ruse.

Shivering violently, he "came to."

"Tch, what a pain. Wasting my mana on you," Annie griped, her voice returning to its usual cadence.

Kyle, however, remained paralyzed with awe.

Was that… a spell? Real, honest-to-god magic?

Though he'd gleaned some understanding of this world from prior conversations - of Michelle and Annie's identities as mages - bearing witness to the art firsthand was another matter entirely.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The instant the incantation was uttered, reality itself seemed to warp and twist.

Time slowed to a crawl. The trees and earth, once close enough to touch, grew indistinct and remote. Fear and euphoria twined together in his core, the universe shifting into stark clarity… into something more…

More what, exactly, Kyle couldn't say.

"More fundamental," the AI supplied.

Yes, that was it! More fundamental.

Kyle's pulse raced. As the spell took hold, he felt an intense connection to his own quintessence.

The sensation was at once familiar and utterly alien, evoking memories of his first time with a woman, yet infinitely more profound. Transcendent bliss shot through with the exquisite anguish of the abyss. Intoxicating beyond reason.

His body trembled uncontrollably.

"So this… is magic?" Kyle breathed, barely recognizing his own voice.

He craved more.

Lost in the afterglow of the casting, Kyle was startled when Annie deigned to respond.

Some long-buried bitterness ignited within her, venom dripping from every word as she snarled, "Yes, magic. What, did you expect a parlor trick? Your kind never bothered to understand even a fraction of the art before banishing it to the shadows. How could you possibly comprehend its majesty?"

Kyle blinked at her, taken aback by the sudden vitriol.

Annie barreled on, the tirade picking up steam with each passing second.

"You're all just spineless cowards. Terrified of anything that doesn't fit in your neat little boxes. You won't be satisfied until everyone is cut from the same drab, powerless cloth. Yet you feel no shame in painting those blessed with true talent as monsters while parading your mediocrity as a virtue."

She was practically vibrating with righteous fury.

"Annie, enough!" Michelle cut her off. "There's no point wasting your breath on the likes of him."

Annie faltered, her rant sputtering out. Realizing how severely she'd let her emotions run away with her, she turned to Michelle, abashed.

"I… I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me."

Michelle waved off the apology.

"We've dallied long enough. Remember, we're still at the top of the Church's hit list." She shot Kyle a pointed look. "Time to move."

Annie nodded curtly. Pivoting on her heel, she planted her boot squarely in Kyle's ribs.

"On your feet, dead weight!"

Kyle barely registered the abuse. He scarcely acknowledged Annie's outburst, simply hauling himself upright with a show of feebleness before falling into step behind Michelle once more.

None of them had the slightest inkling of the elation coursing through his veins.

"Again! Play it again!" he silently demanded of the AI, his inner voice bordering on unhinged.

A mere half-hour prior, the notion of that coldly mechanical presence inciting such fervor would have been laughable. Unfathomable, really, that he'd find himself not merely tolerating its chatter, but actively encouraging it.

Now?

Now, the normally loquacious AI almost seemed bashful, hesitating for a small eternity before shyly parroting Annie's incantation back to him.

It was all gibberish to Kyle's woefully untrained ears.

But that hardly mattered. This jumble of nonsense syllables was the very same chant Annie had used to conjure that sphere of water out of nothingness.

The AI had perfectly replicated it, down to the last arcane phoneme.

Meaning Kyle could listen to it to his heart's content.

Divorced from the primal resonance of a true casting, filtered through that flat, affectless monotone, it sounded patently ridiculous. Like the ravings of a lunatic.

Yet Kyle couldn't bring himself to care. He understood, in his marrow, that this string of absurdity held the key to true magic. That in the right hands, it could unleash the miraculous.

He would unravel its secrets. Master its intricacies.

Because from the instant he'd borne witness to the genuine article, Kyle had vowed to claim this power for himself.

It wasn't merely about acquiring might or prestige.

From the moment he'd first drawn breath in this strange new world, one question had plagued him relentlessly: Why was he here? What purpose could such a ludicrous twist of fate possibly serve? Perhaps it was sheer chance. But even chaos has its own immutable patterns.

And now, he'd found his answer.

Magic itself had summoned him.

He hadn't fought his way free of the strangling mundanity of his old life, crossing untold expanses of time and space, merely to settle into yet another unremarkable existence. To while away his days as yet another cog in yet another banal machine.

The butterfly effect had already been set in motion. It was his sacred duty to ensure its ripples would remake this world entire.

For now, his sole focus had to be committing that incantation to memory.

"You can loop it until the end of time and I won't breathe a word of complaint," he assured the AI, euphoria thrumming through his every atom.

"Sir, I suspect you may be exhibiting symptoms of Stockholm syndrome," the AI replied, its mechanical voice somehow conveying a distinct note of long-suffering exasperation.

As Kyle lost himself in contemplation of the incantation, half a world away, the night held its breath…

The hallowed inner districts of Havenlight stood solemn and shadow-draped.

St. Peter's Cathedral loomed in the moonlight.

Hurried footfalls echoed through alabaster columns, coming to an abrupt halt in the cavernous nave. Abandoned pews stretched out in all directions, yet an uncanny sense of unseen congregants lingered.

"Your Eminence! It's happened again - another disturbance!"

A young priest struggled to marshal his composure, his voice quavering with poorly-suppressed dread.

"Such mischief is hardly an annual novelty. Surely there's no need for this level of agitation?"

The archbishop's tone never wavered from casual indifference. He stood with his back to the door, bent over an ancient, hidebound tome atop the pulpit. His crimson vestments were severe in their perfection, a sliver of blood against the stark black and white of the cathedral's interior.

Moonlight shivered through panes of stained glass, the colors muted to watercolor softness.

"Your Eminence, I assure you, this time is different!" the priest pressed, desperation lending his voice a fevered edge. "It's not merely the disturbance - the holy relics, they've begun reacting as well. And… we've received a revelation. Direct from the Heavenly Spheres!"

A trickle of cold sweat carved a path down his temple.

The archbishop turned at that, piercing eyes glinting hawklike from beneath a jutting brow.

"Has the augury been deciphered?"

The young priest bobbed his head in assent, a shadow of pure, atavistic terror warring with his agitation.

"It… it has, Your Eminence."

The archbishop remained a study in perfect neutrality, not a flicker of unease in his bearing. "Then speak it plainly, if you would."

The priest swallowed convulsively, the motion painful in his parched throat. He wet his lips, striving in vain for some semblance of oratorical gravitas. Inevitably, his voice emerged rough and strained, scarcely recognizable as his own. As if even his body rebelled at the heresy of relaying this message.

The words spilled out thus:

"On the seventh day… the bells toll an end to the Lord's repose."