Once the Mystic was gone, I wiped away my sadness and Sophie's figure returned to a solid form.

“Sophie, we have to move.”

I grasped her arm and dragged us away, into the depths of the Caverns. The Mystic couldn't die in vain. There needed to be meaning behind his sacrifice, so we had to move on.

We soon found ourselves in a thick, overgrown forest of stalagmites. The trees of stone stood so dense that we had to squeeze through the gaps. Wet stones glittered and shone, illuminated from behind by the chaos within the cavern. As we went deeper and deeper, we left not only the lights of the people, but also the sounds of the raid. Soon found it replaced by the murmurs of water. All I hoped was that we wouldn't get lost. If we did, we might never make it back out again.

After a while, Sophie had calmed down somewhat. There was still sniffling from beside me, but strength had returned to her posture. So I let go of her arm and let her walk by herself.

“Why care this much? We've only met the old man a couple days ago.” I asked even though I had been affected as well. Still, Sophie had never struck me as emotional. Maybe some perspective would help her cope. However, my ward really proved me wrong this time.

“You don't get it, do you? I always knew that something was wrong. That the world was crooked and broken and needed to be fixed. The old guy understood me. I know you like to play nice and you want to help, but all the professional help really isn't doing me any good right now. When I sat in that shitty, dirt house and talked to the old geezer, I felt...”

“...as if you belong,” I finished.

“...yeah. Something like that. Maybe not that cheesy, but something like that I guess.”

“Well, you can keep going and we'll see just what lies ahead. You don't even know that the old man won't make it. When we get back, he may well just sit on his sofa, to welcome us back with dry bread and stale water.”

“Yeah.”

Of course, both of us knew better. So we walked in silence, trapped in our own oppressive thoughts. I had expected the light around us to fade by now, but the Mystic must have managed a shape so delicate that I couldn't even spot it. Anywhere within the forest, the light was always just enough to see. After a while, we heard distant voices join the ambiance of the cave. With a frown, I let myself be led by them. When we got closer, loud curses peeled themselves through the echo.

“Shit! Shit!”

A familiar voice. A familiar vocabulary. I stuck my head out from behind a stalagmite to find a small clearing in the forest. Right within it, Lester's henchmen sat on the ground, frightened and exhausted looks on their faces. On the other hand, Les himself looked more agitated than ever.

“This is all that little bastard's fault. There wouldn't have been a raid in the first place!”

Then, right behind them, next to a spring from the wall, I saw it. That unmistakable signature shape: The Mystic's illusory wall. I retreated my head behind the safety of the natural stone pillar to face Sophie.

“The entrance is right past them,” I said.

“And what is this place anyways? Are we even gonna get back out again?” Les continued to scream.

While the fatty worked himself into a frenzy, Sophie sunk into the shadow and grabbed for her stun gun. Of course she would recognize the voice.

“Can you make us invisible like before? No need to bother with them. We’ve got more important stuff to do,” she whispered.

Confronted with my old demons, it looked like Sophie was worried about my state of mind. As nice as that was, there were certain things left to solve before I could move into the world of the mages. Right here, I just couldn't leave my old tormentor be.

“What's going on? Didn't bro say the beasts wouldn't get inside the caves? How did they find this place?”

While the fatty still held a monologue, I stood up and marched around the pillar in one fluid motion. Sophie didn't even have the time to stop me.

“It's because you led them here, fatty.” My voice was loud and confident. There was no reason to be afraid anymore.

At first, the fatty flinched in guilt. He must have thought himself busted, running away while his gang brothers were fighting for their lives. However, as soon as he realized who stood before him, his arrogance returned. It was the same arrogance he had carried in our school years.

“Now who do we have here? Been looking for you, Coaty.” The fatty swaggered towards me with absolute confidence. A familiar look. However, today I was different from school, different from the day of the raid.

“I heard. You've been trying to make me a scapegoat for your mistakes. You're really good at that, by the way,” I answered.

“What did you say, you little bastard!?”

The fatty wasn't used to being opposed. With those familiar movements, he swaggered over to me and stretched out his arm to grab my left shoulder. This time, he had looked for the wrong target.

Rather than run, I took the fat guy's wrist and squeezed. Shocked by my courageous move, the fatty offered no resistance. With the shell around my fingers to reinforce my movements, my hand turned into a vise as I pushed Lester down into a submissive position.

“Wha- What the...” he stammered as his free left hand ruddered in the air. Before my strength, all he could do was prevent a fall and thus total humiliation before his minions. With my free hand, I reached over and into the fatty's collar. Though the object was so small that it was almost invisible to the naked eye, this close I sensed the magic signature with ease.

When I ripped off the little synthetic bug, it took a good piece of the fatty's skin with it. As blood began to pour out of the tiny wound like water from the fresh spring besides us, I took the small object and held it right in front of Lester's face. Finally, he could see the reason the Caverns had been discovered.

Baffled, he stopped his struggle. His eyes flitted over the tiny object. The little flesh-colored thing had a rounded body with a flat base. Protruding from it was a sharp claw, still caked in Lester's blood and skin tissue. Now that he had ceased his struggle, he was stable enough to bring his hand back onto his neck and in front of his face to stare in shock at his own fresh blood.

“You know what that is?” I asked in a stern voice. Les looked at me in confusion, unable to react.

“This thing has been stuck in there, right at the back of your neck, boring its teeth into your flesh as it has clung on to fulfill its only goal: Send the signal which would lead the red guards into the Caverns and end the resistance of the Squalor. You led them here, you fat bastard. It's your fault.”

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Derision dripped from my voice as I looked down at my old nemesis. This scum didn't deserve my sympathy, or forgiveness. He hadn't led the guards here on purpose, but it didn't absolve him from sin. With his track record, he might as well have.

“You made me bleed.”

“Huh?”

Confused at the fatty's voice, I bent down to see his face. Confusion had been replaced by the redness of anger and humiliation.

“You little bastard! How dare you make me bleed! Boys, get him! Show him what happens when he messes with the jackals!”

I hadn't expected any better from Les and his people. Of course they wouldn't accept their guilt. With a now familiar calm, I watched the young gangsters organize themselves in a semi-circle around me. There was no misunderstanding to clear up and nothing to fear. I still had a request for them anyway. This was perfect.

The first gangster rushed towards me with a battle cry, a baseball bat in his hand. Some extra pressure from my hand righted Lester's posture before I put my right hand to the fatty's chest.

When the mana escaped my palm, a field of pressure formed between me and Les, incidentally crushing the spy bug in my right hand in the process.

However, not only the bug was crushed by my attack. I could see fatty's rib cage deform and crack under the force, before he hurdled off towards his bat-swinging minion and took him out like a bowling ball into a pin. As if hit by the fatty's shockwave, the eager henchmen stopped where they stood and stared at me.

“You were trying to get to my sister, weren't you?”

No answer. That was fine. They only had to listen. Three quick steps took me into their stunned ranks.

Another bat from the right.

I took the hit with my shoulder and bulldozed my way to the front. With a dull crash, my tackle collided with another minion and forced him onto Lester's pile.

My head turned to find my assailant stand with his bat still in hand, as his eyes hovered back and forth between his useless weapon and me. I answered him with a hearty grin.

Although he raised his hands in surrender, it wouldn't save him from punishment. By the time his bat produced a clunk on the stone floor, he had joined Lester's garbage heap. Three, four, five, six. Soon, the heap had grown into a hill. I looked upon my work and dusted off my hands in satisfaction. In front of me lay a tangled mess of bodies and limbs, groaning in pain.

Although I didn't care how much damage I had done to the human scum within the pile, at least the sounds reassured me that they were breathing.

Good. I needed them to hear the next part very clearly and dead people are always the worst listeners.

“Now then, friends. Here's the deal: I know you planned to go after my sister, to get to me. Well, here I am. Now that you found me, I assume there won't be any more reason to go after Amy, right? Consider this a fair warning from a good friend. We are friends, aren't we?”

One of the minions had peeled himself off of the tangled mess and righted himself in a sitting position. His weak nod of defeat was easy to understand.

“Good, good. Since we are all such good friends, I'm sure you'll do me that little favor and leave my sister alone. In return, I'll do the same and leave you be as well. Sound good? Good.”

“Brayden. We have to go.” Sophie's voice reminded me of our mission. I nodded in reply.

“You guys best go back now. By the time you return, the Caverns will be safe, so there's no reason to play chicken anymore. At least they're gonna be safer than any place near me. That I can guarantee you.”

I blessed the clump of human misery with a disarming smile and turned towards the wall. Unperturbed by the brutal spectacle it had just witnessed, the little spring still quietly murmured along. I ignored the bustle as well as the low-volume curses from behind. The bullies could get themselves organized without my help.

There were more important things to focus on for me. At first I had thought this entrance would be another fake wall like the ones before, but this gate must have been special to the Mystic. No wonder, since it was the place that connected the world of the mortals to the world of the Grand Mages.

As I began to study the shape of the gate's mana my heartbeat sped up, far more than it had in my fight.

This is beautiful.

Breathless, I stared at the intricacies of the woven shapes, all flowing together, rotating around one another. From the mystic's descriptions, I had imagined the more complex magic spells to look like clockwork, mechanisms that gripped together and rotated in sync. However, as I found myself in front of one, I could say with confidence that I couldn't have been more wrong.

Rather than cogs and wheels, the individual parts of the shape were like dancers. They whirled around each other in ever changing patterns, all to a constant rhythm, as if the magic had been given life. I stretched out my hand to feel the shape, or at least the stone surface it had been imprinted on, but my hand paused mere inches from the surface. A strange sense of familiarity had overcome me. I had felt like this before, back when I had seen the dark canvas in the mad painter's house. That mystic picture of an island of chaos within a sea of order had put me under its spell just the same as this. Just the same, it had felt like a gate to another world.

After seconds, I forced away the obsession and returned to reality. Reigned in, my hand returned to my side. Who knew what kinds of unknown dangers would await the one to touch the complex shape without preparation.?

Although I could never comprehend the shape, I had trust in the Mystic. Since he had already planned to send someone else through this door and into the Towers of Knowledge, it should be possible for an inferior mage to open the wall somehow. I stepped back a bit to get a full view of the shape and started to study it in earnest.

Though the individual parts danced around in seemingly erratic patterns, after a few minutes of observation I could see that they all circled around a single spot. The area was the only part of the formation that didn't move. Since it was shaped like a funnel, I was sure what had to be done.

My hand reached out again, this time with purpose. When my fingertips touched the moistness of the cold stone, I released unshaped mana into the center of the doorway. At once, the dancers turned frantic. They began to meld together as they synchronized their movements, faster and faster. By the end, they had formed a spinning circle, focused on the funnel which now glowed in the clear, bright color of mana.

Against my expectations, the door didn't turn to the side, or slide up with a loud rumble. It just sat there. I was confused for a while, before I realized what was going on. Any form of physical door would always be vulnerable. With how paranoid the old Mystic had been, he would never leave a weakness like that in the design of his most important secret door.

Over my shoulder, I could see the bullies run back towards the Cavern. I wasn't sure if they were looking to get revenge or if they would behave from now on, but nothing they could do mattered at this point.

Instead, I turned to Sophie, who had been standing off to the side and observed my movements with patience and calm. Though she couldn't sense what I had done, the girl was smart enough to realize that I needed concentration and so had refrained from any interruptions.

“Let's go,” I said in a firm voice.

We nodded at each other in understanding. Together, we stretched out our hands and pushed ourselves forward. As my hand touched the wall, it didn't feel the hard, rough texture my eyes and brain had expected. Instead, I felt like I had gripped into loose sand. As I stepped ahead, the wall turned into tiny particles of dirt, suspended in air, and made way to my touch. I took a deep breath, pressed my eyelids shut and stepped through, into the world of the mages.

Once my eyes opened again, I found myself in complete darkness. Only a second and a light turned on beside me. Luckily, Sophie had thought to pack a simple flashlight in her luggage. Behind us I could see the magic wall in the darkness. Although the dancers had calmed and returned to their usual formation, they had become sluggish, tired out from their frenzy. At least for a while, the wall might not be usable again.

“What do you think we'll find in there?” Sophie asked, the tiniest quiver in her voice. I didn't know if it was fear or anticipation, maybe both. While I had looked behind us, she had cast her eyes ahead, into the looming darkness of the earthen tunnel.

“Whatever it is, it'll be closer to the truth than the life we have been living. No matter how ugly, it will be worth more than the facade we've left behind.”

I said words to sound hopeful, but couldn't believe them myself. Still, I thought of Eileen and pushed back the gloom in my head. Although my mind had begun to imitate the spinning dancers on the wall, I needed to stay focused. First things first: We had to meet my sister in the towers and find out just how crazy the Mystic had been.

Together, the two of us took our first steps into reality.