The crystals in this cavern are singing again.

Joey doesn’t know what that means, only that there are very strange things going on with this place that she has no answers for. There’s a skittering of small creatures in crevices of the natural chasm, and up above them, spanning a hundred meters or more, are massive spires of blue mana crystals–even a few of the rarer purple ones that are the prize of the mage world for its unrivaled potency in mana. But here, all Joey can appreciate is their natural beauty.

“Monster slaying is disgusting work.” Drenar tries to wipe off the remaining spider guts from his armor vest, disgusted by the smell and the displeasure of knowing they’d blown up a monstrosity and gotten showered with viscera. She tries not to laugh, and he scowls at her. “This is your fault, you know.”

“I’m sorry, I know, but it’s too priceless to know that Nick has never looked more fashionable,” she says with a sly smirk to him, and he’s trying not to look disgusted at the clean-off. They’re climbing a natural path up the cavern pathway, where it meanders around a river below. The span of the cavern is immense, and the lighting is provided by most of the crystals, and a wisp light provided by Levine, looking as professional as ever with a wary glance around every nook and cranny. He’s still cautious enough to leave trip mines behind them–the last of their ordnance, in case the Talons got clever and found a way past the hazards they’d left behind.

That mess of spider guts is going to be a fun find for them, she thinks grimly. And hopefully, enough of those murderous spiders survived to give them a hard time, too. Angela keeps peeking around and is utterly fascinated by the scene.

“You’re acting like you’ve never seen this before,” Joey says with a wry smile. Angela beams even as she shakes her head.

“Never. I wish our parents hadn’t had to hide this. The wonders of our world. It would have been so much better for us if a few secrets were laid bare. You know? And the um…the other thing.” Angela still strays close to her. Joey, why do you have to hide? Nick…gave me some indication that Kitsune had a raw deal that I don’t know the full details of.

Soul-touched, they were called once. Powerful. Given a gift of chance, and nearly exterminated due to the whims of power-hungry dragons. She can hear the sorrow in Samarina’s voice. Those dark days stain our history, Angela. Terrible things happened that shouldn’t have. Angela exhales softly–Joey can feel her anxiety in the face of these uncomfortable facts.

Angela, can hear me now? Joey finally stops holding it in, and just lets those tendrils of connections out. She can still feel a stray connection to Drenar–a faint whisper–and Julia as well. Julia is mostly thinking of guns, optimal ammunition, and ways to tear Valosterla to pieces. Drenar is wary of corners, and that their pursuers should have caught up by now. Angela tips her chin and keeps moving forward, weapon ready. She’s very good at being subtle.

I can hear you, Joey. Psychic radio is crazy. But now, it’s two ways. This is new to you, isn’t it?

Very much so. Angela, I can’t explain how things are changing for me. It started a few days ago, after Luminari began calling out to me.

Could it be tied to Drenar’s sword?

No. I think something else is going on. The crystals…can you hear the chimes?

I do. All around us. It’s the most calming thing I’ve ever heard, Angela responds in silence.

This is one of the few moments she feels she can trust someone besides Kyle, and it feels hard-earned. I honestly don’t know anymore Angela, the last week has shattered every notion I had about magic, and then some. I’ve got no business as a small kit getting thrust into this craziness.

Joey, you saved our lives, you are unwavering in the face of adversity. We’ve known you for a total of three days. That’s saying a lot about yourself, you know? She nods quietly, eyes peeled for threats in the cavern. Angela really does radiate warmth, in a way. Besides, I need someone with less crazy ideas to balance out Drenar and Julia. Those two can lean into the crazy a bit too comfortably of late.

You might be a little disappointed to find out I do have some crazy ideas. And dangerous ones, but she doesn't send out that particular thought. Also I might have been contacted by a literal goddess tonight, or I'm going insane. That gets Angela's attention.

That would not be the craziest thing I would have anticipated. Joey, when I used that blink thing with Drenar to rescue those people, I think we jumped into the aether. I saw someone there, and--

“Guys, I think I see it.” Drenar points ahead and breaks up the private conversation. “Let’s keep to pace, Volkir, I think I see some kind of stone bridge just up ahead, it looks like it leads to some bunker building set into the cavern wall. Is this your summer retreat?” Angela gives her a tilt of her head.

Guess we better stay focused, then. I feel my sense of danger going off. Joey notices it too, but she can’t pinpoint the source. It’s also possible to be driven to paranoia by it, so she only tunes into it when it starts getting more urgent. No one is quite sure how dragons and kitsune have such a threat detection, even with numerous studies performed on the subject matter. Drenar in the meantime, is still conversing with their dragon sage.

Volkir grunts. “It’s been a home for a long time, hatchling. Though I have neglected its tending for a time or two, I admit. Those mana crystals are hundreds of thousands of years old. I resettled the whole facility in this natural cavern area…it just…took a long time, you know?”

“So you packed up the whole facility?”

“I formed a stone seed. It compacted the facility down, and I was able to transport it across the ocean from the original point. Dragons do have some secrets to keep about teleportation and matter transformation, you know,” he says proudly. “The process is a little slow though. It took a dozen years to unfurl and uncompress, plus some manual patching. It wasn’t an easy task. Zameren only knew the bare minimum of what was below the surface. He’s a good man, you know. If a bit lacking in common sense at times.”

“Sounds like him, alright,” Levine says with a tsk sound, then stops, and puts a hand up. “I heard something. Sounded like a tremor.”

“I didn’t–wait.” Joey wishes she could reach out to her kitsune form right now because her hearing is unmatched when she's in her true form. But she can hear a low rumbling sound, and a few rocks patter down. It came from above them. But, from what? “Volkir, do you have any eyes on what’s going on?”

“A Valencian red is boring through the ground rock using their burrow ability, they’re parting the earth at scale, making a dig shaft. They seem to have a general fix on where it’s going to end up. Pick up the pace, they’re going to destabilize that mana crystal if they keep shaking it to pieces like that up there! No regard to anything, these black-clad bastards. I’m also preparing our exfiltration plan. There's a teleportal functional by the end of my little fortress that comes out right by the power plant, on a separate, hard-coded network. I know it’s a bit of a loop, but I couldn’t risk them getting down here first. As it were, its access is restricted as an emergency escape.”

“Man, you could have just come up that way and just brought the damn journal!” Drenar snaps angrily.

“And come out in the middle of the Talon's army? They’ve been staging in that area, from what I’ve seen through the few functional arcanist lenses upstairs. You need to keep moving! I’ll also get some goodies to go, you all look like you’re in rough shape.”

Joey picks up the pace and they hustle together, working their way past the rough terrain and outcroppings of mana crystal. It’s humming again, and she swears the pitch gets higher the closer she gets to it. Or is that due to Angela, next to her? There’s a–

“Angela, did you know you have a shard of mana in your heart?” Joey asks suddenly. Angela whirls around, looking surprised.

“How’d you know that?”

“I saw it on the golem two nights ago, one of the alternate vision modes allows it to see mana traces. Did you know about it too?”

“Not until yesterday, no. That’s uh…a very weird discovery. Along with what that other crystal did to me.” She taps a crystal and it sounds like someone struck a chime at an almost deafening volume. Julia grimaces and pulls Angela away.

“Girl, superpowers are cool and all, but hulking out in here might be a bad idea, you know?”

“Eh, yeah, good point. I don't want to become a shard of crystal and be a paperweight. Or something else rather ridiculous,” she laughs nervously. A cracking above them, and the splitting of earth, get all their attention.

A shower of rocks comes tumbling down, and the mana crystals are shaking in place, in the background, there is an awful tremor. Joey clicks open her staff to full length and she knows bad things are about to happen. “What'd they do, bring a whole mining team or something?!”

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

“If Curtis got them info on the layout, they might have just said to hell with going through that dungeon. Also, we should start running!” Drenar calls out as he starts moving at speed. Giant stalactites of rock and mana crack and fall away from the ceiling, and the sound of shattering crystal is deafening. Pieces rain down and bounce off her arcane barrier with relentless impact. Angela puts a barrier up above their heads after grabbing a crystal shard and her skin is slowly glowing blue, patchwork bits of crystal tracing up her arm and she grimaces under the pain while keeping their heads covered.

“Keep moving, don’t stop!” she screams out, and they book it as fast as they can. A dragon emerges from the newly bored tunnel, and flings a fiery ray at them. It bounces off Angela’s barrier, but she still staggers from the impact. Joey grabs her to keep her moving, and they’re getting closer to the bridge, a few hundred meters through the stone warren, and deadly rainfall of razor-sharp crystals.

And gunfire now. Talon's soldiers are rappelling down while trying to fire autobow bolts and rifles from an immense distance, and a bolt sticks up from the ground where her leg had been a split second ago. They’re in a full-tilt run, with Nick and Levine aiming to snipe at the deplorable bastards. One loses their grip on the lines and plummets down, screaming.

“Volkir, they’re already here! Roll out the welcome mat, fast!” Drenar barks out while diving out of the way of a chunk of debris the size of a refrigerator. The shrapnel pings off his arcane barrier, flaring it but not stopping him. He fires upwards and pins another bastard with a bolt to the gut, and he just hangs there from the harness, dangling feebly in the cavern.

Meanwhile, the dragon is scrabbling to pull itself out of the new opening, and grips onto one of the mana crystals. Joey has an idea about that and grabs Kyle’s autobow off his back, and loads his one last explosive bolt. She coats it with an alchemical booster and hopes that it’s enough to do what she hopes it does to the purple crystal. She aims high to account for the drop due to gravity and fires. “Angela, max barrier NOW! Take cover!” She swerves behind a rocky outcropping as soon as the bolt is in motion, and everyone follows suit.

The bolt bounces off the crystal and hovers in the air for a split second before it detonates in a fiery roar. But this is enough to destabilize the crystal as giant cracks fissure away from the impact site. The dragon gripping it and preparing to launch off with their wings is stumbled by the explosion, but it looks on in horror as that crystal continues to spiderweb crack, and then the entire thing explodes outwards in every direction. A rain of purple shards of incredibly deadly shrapnel radiates in every direction, and the dragon next to it is perforated with the shards, and flaps weakly with badly damaged wings, screaming as it's unable to defy gravity. A few of the Talons' soldiers fare even more poorly, and she’s glad they’re far enough away so that she can’t see what that detonation did.

“It’s raining freaking razor glass!” Julia screams, and a piece skims her arm and she flinches, a trickle of blood visible. “Does all mana do that?!”

“The purple stuff is a lot less stable! You don’t want to mess with it unless you know what you’re doing, it grows way faster than normal crystals, hence the chemical structure is weaker!” Kyle relays, just as a shard pings off the metal armor. “We need to go!”

Their relief is short-lived as heavy soldiers rappel down, and some of them don’t even bother with ropes. They’re using–oh dear, pyromethanine tanks?! They’re either insane or weighing the risks of the equivalent of a jet pack, and thrusters slow their ascent, firing and missing by wide margins. That is until she sees one hefting tubing that looks like–

“RPG!” She screams out just as the man fires, and they dart forward just as the explosive washes behind them, blowing out chunks of rock and debris. Her barrier flares from a ping of shrapnel, and she feels the impact on her back and stumbles. Drenar grabs her and keeps her running, firing bolts with impunity at the mobile foes.

“This is getting nuts! We’re getting shot at by rocket launchers!” Julia roars as she fires a spray of bolts, one of which hits home on one of the thruster tanks. It ruptures the thinner wall metal, ignites the errant jet of combustible, and sends the man screaming in a spiraling path, where he impacts with little fanfare into a cavern wall. The muted detonation a split second later confirms his grim fate.

They’re almost at the bridge, scrabbling across with a rain of heavy fire dogging their heels. Nick and Levine are first at the door, taking what little cover they can by rocky outcroppings by the giant double doors made of gleaming metal, covering the rest of them.

“Volkir, open the door right now, we’re coming in hot!” Drenar screams into the armband next to her, and she unloads a few more bolts at the soldiers who manage to touch down on the ground, missing but forcing them to take cover. She is a very good shot from her forays into the MBPS, but this whole nonstop battle is leaving her with a dangerous desire to continue reveling in the danger. She glances at Julia–is her influence bleeding into her psyche? Because that’s the oddest thing she’s felt, and it’s only countered by Drenar’s steadfast calm under fire, the same as Angela.

If they live through this, her psionics are getting a full suite of tests. Because she’s never heard of anything like this. “Volkir, open up the damn door, or you’re gonna be fighting the nameless killer army yourself!” Drenar shouts to his armband.

The dragon sage grumbles and there’s a rattle at the door. But before they can cross the bridge, a dragon emerges from the excavated tunnel and dive bombs down–a Nightwing. It lobs down a massive satchel charge in a diving bomb run right in the middle of the bridge, and she sees it click a remote. She pulls Drenar away, but it’s too late.

The charge detonates and pulls a big chunk of the bridge downwards, and it causes a chain of collapse. They’re split off from Nick, Levine, Kyle and Angela! “It’s falling down, MOVE!” she screams at Julia, who stows her weapon before they scrabble to outrun the collapse.

The ground however is unforgiving, and stonework and steel collapse underneath their feet, and she screams. Drenar grabs her and Julia is dangling from a piece that is going to snap off at any second. Drenar is straining to hold on, but he’s been fighting a running battle against fatigue, and when the stone crumbles, he doesn’t have enough strength to get them to safety this time, not into the line of fire of the advancing Talons soldiers

The only way is down, and she screams in terror, feeling the rush of air past her. Drenar and Julia try to shapeshift and they grab onto her, nascent wings emerging from their backs, but Drenar has been pushing himself too hard. He’s barely able to, and he does the next best thing he can. He grabs both of them as the water down below comes up to meet them, and she prays that their death will at least be a quick one.

Drenar’s barrier flares to life with one last immense burst, pushing everything to the limit, and she puts hers out in tandem, hoping to reinforce it with just that little extra bit. She sees the fear in his eyes–not for himself, but for her and Julia.

The impact is less intense than it should have been for reaching near-terminal velocity. The barrier absorbs the sheer majority of it, but the rush of freezing water around her nearly tears her away from Drenar and Julia. She tries to hold onto him–but he’s swept away by the current, mouthing something in desperation under the water. She holds her breath and Julia lets go of her to dive after Drenar. Her lungs are burning, she has to get to the surface, it’s just a few meters away!

Her head breaks the water line and she gasps with all her might, her body aching all over, the icy chill of the water seeping into her bones, and she coughs up a small amount of water. She looks around frantically, seeing where Drenar and Julia went. “Drenar! Julia!” she screams out. There’s still gunfire going on far above them with muted echoes through the cavern of silver and tan stone, and she dives under the water, desperate to find them. She swims with all her might, looking to see where they are–they couldn’t have gotten far!

She sees motion and light–Julia is lighting plasma across her half-formed scales, and she’s got Drenar, and is pulling him to the surface! His eyes are closed and he’s not–

She grabs him and heaves upwards with all her might, breaking the surface and sputtering. She points to a small outcropping just out of sight of the collapsed bridge, and they haul Drenar out of the water, panting.

“Joey! He’s not breathing!” Julia screams out, and she hauls him out and starts doing chest compressions. A trickle of water comes past his hips, but he’s still unresponsive. Joey fumbles for a syringe and an adrenal booster and feels for a pulse.

There’s none present, and she feels a trickle of existential dread. “Joey, do something!” Julia screams out, still doing chest compressions even though she is on the verge of passing out. She leans down and keeps going, swearing. “Breathe, you stoic bastard! C’mon Drenar, breathe god damn it!”

Joey can see the desperation in her eyes. He hadn’t been underwater long, and a trickle of water was still coming past his lips. She turns him on his side lightly, moves Julia aside, and takes over, doing compressions as steadily as she can.

He has to make it. He has to. There is no way she is letting him die after he had fought and bled to defend her home, and the people in it. “Julia, syringe, 2 CCs of adrenaline, and inject it slowly!”

Julia is fumbling, but she eventually gets it lined up and slowly gives him the shot. Nothing happens, but it might take a minute to get it circulated. Had he pushed himself too hard? What if this doesn’t work?! She can feel that dread building the longer she’s at it, with no response.

“Joey–”

“It has to work!” she screams out. “C’mon Drenar, I can’t fight this on my own! We need you here!”

I need you here…

It has been a full minute and a half. If they don’t get him revived in time, there could be possible oxygen starvation in the brain. She feels a trickle of tears blurring her vision even as she remains focused on the job, hoping–praying–that Drenar makes it.

Because if he doesn’t, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. That adrenaline shot should have worked! Did he suffer mana burn? All she can focus on is what works, she's out of time , and anything else she tries would take far too long–then the idea comes to her.

Maridian silver biocurrents. He just needs a small charge!

“Julia, zap him.”

“What?!”

“He's a Maridian silver, bioelectric currents! A trickle charge might be enough to jump-start his heart!” If this were any other circumstances, Drenar would have no hope right now, but Julia, at the brink of collapse, summons plasma to her hand, weakly flickering. “Here and here, keep the charge as low as possible!” She doesn't hesitate other than a split second, terror in her eyes as her fingers hover over his chest.

But she commits and his body jerks reflexively. Julia collapses from the effort, panting, and Joey checks for his pulse, hoping this is enough and she didn't cook his insides. To her amazement, there is a weak pulse.

Then, she feels it. That mental connection is back. And she hears it–someone else's voice. And what she hears is…impossible…

Mom, I can't say goodbye yet…

There’s no such thing as goodbyes, Drenar…it’s just until we meet again.

He gasps a desperate breath of life.

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