Rieren wasn’t certain how she was supposed to feel at that moment. It was excellent that they had caught a whole four Banishedborn like idiotic fish in a net, but there were more out there. They definitely wouldn’t be able to replicate the same trap for them. Would they need to deal with the remainder the old-fashioned way?

“You look gloomy,” Starloper said.

She turned to see him finally approaching the area. His fake appearance was dissipating the closer he got. His skin was turning the pale maroon, his eye flashed starlight blue, and his hair was once more turning back into gemlike strands.

Essence swirled around both his hands. It was the same prismatic glow that ran riotously through the Anchor’s crystalline exterior. Rieren wondered if Starloper had been connected to or powering the Anchor all this time from the very beginning. For all she knew, he was the one who had brought it here in the first place.

“There is not enough of them here,” Rieren said. “Forgive me if I end up entertaining some disappointment.”

Starloper laughed softly. He seemed much less tense now that his plan had come to fruition. All this time, it had likely felt much like holding one’s finger at the trigger of a crossbow. Now, he was finally able to release. “We must make do with what we can.”

“And the others?”

A brief look of consternation crossed his face, but he smiled quickly again. “We will deal with them when they chose to appear.” He looked at her pointedly. “You have a different task.”

Rieren took a deep breath. She did. Perhaps she shouldn’t have even come here, meddling with the trap that Starloper should have been taking care of, but would he have had the solution to Elder Olg’s interference as Rieren had? Perhaps so. If he could manipulate the Anchor as he was doing now, he could very well have activated its innate Domain.

“Are you manipulating a technique through the Anchor?” Rieren asked. “Because I know this is not its Domain.”

“Yes, you already found its Domain,” he said. “This is an Enchantment, one that just needs the Anchor as its primary source. It took me a long a while to find something that would work on this scale.”

Rieren could appreciate that. She herself had no idea about the existence of such an Enchantment, but there was a lot she hadn’t discovered herself.

That last Enchantment of hers that had allowed her to reverse the timeline had taken such a tremendous amount of preparation, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Starloper had needed the entire time since the timeline reversal to prepare this.

Wishing him fair fortune, Rieren turned away to head towards her real battle. But before she could go very far, Kalvia appeared.

She stared agog at the crystal, at the Banishedborn trapped within. “What in the—”

“Kalvia.” Rieren stood before her with renewed urgency. “I can explain all this, but right now, we need to take care of our side of things.”

“Is that him?” Kalvia’s eyes were fixed to a point deep within the crystal’s depths.

Rieren wasn’t surprised one bit. That was her father there. The old Forborne Emperor, the one who had sired her, had been set alight with the flames of fate. “I can explain later. We need to take care of everything else now, Kalvia.”

She shook her head, forcing her attention away from what lay before her. “There isn’t much to take care of. The fighting is still ongoing, but we are at an impasse.”

As she explained the layout of things to Rieren, Starloper listened intently as well. Kalvia glanced at the Banishedborn with a questioning, almost suspicious look, but she went on anyway.

It turned out that the opposing forces were somewhat evenly matched. The forces led by Clanmistress Avathene—including Oromin, Mercion, Silomene, and the cultivators they had brought from the Shatterlands—were being aided by Silvas Fraile and his contingent. Even the Karlosyne brothers had decided to lend a hand.

No one else, though. The rest of the Archnobles and sects were waiting to see how things shaped up before making their move.

Rieren tutted. Opportunistic bastards, the lot of them. Everyone she had sent entreaties to, people like the Arteroths and Ceraline… well, she supposed it was better than them being actively antagonistic like Remis Sharan. Speaking of whom, Kalvia had no idea where Sharan was.

As it was, the imperial court had pulled in support from the imperial clan, including several Avatars. It was these Avatars who were causing Rieren’s side the most grief. A whole bunch of Ascendant-realm cultivators were of course going to be a problem when they had only a few to spare of their own.

But that was where Rieren and Kalvia came in.

“We can take care of them,” Kalvia said with determination burning in her eyes. “With you at my side, they won’t even know what hit them.”

Rieren grinned fiercely. She could perhaps take on an Avatar with just a boost from Reaver Stance, now that she was almost at Peak-Exalted, but Call of the Past would make her cut through them without a great deal of effort. Yes, that was going to be the best.

She could hear the distant sounds of ongoing battles. Furious and devastating. Cries, explosions, clangs, all piercing out from the battlefield.

Kalvia was right. This battle needed to end in their favour, and they were the ones who’d do it.

“Do not exhaust yourselves,” Starloper cautioned as they headed off. “Even if this battle is over, we are not free from all opposition.”

Rieren turned back once to see the trapped Banishedborn furiously trying and failing to claw their way out. She looked closer. Not at them, but at the prismatic shell. The colours… they almost seemed inverted when compared to the flames burning upon the old Forborne Emperor. “Star, is this enchantment… similar to what he is experiencing?”

She pointed to the old Emperor. The one who was actually struggling physically now, at least in a way that was visible.

“Yes,” Starloper said. “They are now trapped in the same way they sought to trap him. I felt it was ironically appropriate. Although, this has the potential for some consequences I hadn’t foreseen yet…”

“What consequences?” Kalvia asked. Her thoughts, it seemed, were travelling along the same lines as Rieren’s.

“You might see for yourself later,” Starloper said. “For now, you have important business to attend to.”

He was right. It seemed their little conversation had cooled Kalvia’s emotions. She was no longer desperate to know what exactly was going on, though Rieren supposed she had already guessed much through context. Rieren herself had told Kalvia a lot of it beforehand. She nodded, then immediately led Rieren away. It was time to take care of the Avatars.

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Rieren would just need to find Batcat first, wherever the kitten had gone to.

“I will need to find my Spirit Beast,” Rieren said.

“Can’t you call it or something?” Kalvia asked.

Rieren could. There was a connection between her and Batcat that they had developed all that time ago when she had first left Lionshard Sect. Basically, her Spirit Bond.

She focused and raised her sword, cycling her Essence so that her signature was unmistakable. It would alert anyone nearby who was keeping an eye out for other Essence signatures too, of course, but Rieren didn’t truly care. Once Batcat reached her, she wouldn’t need to worry about any attention at all, no matter who it came from.

Well, maybe except for other Banishedborn.

“Oh, there it is!” Kalvia said.

With a short meow, Batcat rushed into the area with its little wings flapping. She smiled at her little Spirit Beast in welcome.

“We need to work hard, kitten,” Rieren said. “We need to win.”

Almost as if it had already deciphered what Rieren intended, Batcat started to disappear with a slight shimmer. A second later, it was gone.

At the same time, Rieren felt herself changing. Her physical stature was reverting to a different time, her elixir field and the meridians within her expanding by leaps and bounds. Greater strength rippled along her limbs. Essence thickened until the concentration of it was more than visible. She could almost taste it.

Rieren was tempted to check herself in a pool of water to see her appearance, but she had a good idea already. Her hair and eyes had turned dark, but little scales ran up her arm. She was once again taller than she used to be. All the effects of her climbing through the Ascendant realm, when she had turned her body into that of a true immortal.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing that,” Kalvia said with an avid look.

Rieren grinned sardonically. “Now is not the time, Kalvia.”

“Sadly.”

Rieren’s transformation had to have alerted their presence to the others. She could already sense a change in the pattern of the fighting farther off. There was an obvious shift as the combatants took note of the new power who had taken the field.

She wondered what they had felt when the Banishedborn had appeared. Abyss, when the god had landed down in the Mortal Realm.

Most of them would have known the greater intricacies of what was going on. They knew that the old Forborne Emperor was being summoned down so the Banishedborn could deal with him. Rieren’s side also knew that the Banishedborn would be trapped in short order. In other words, neither the summoned god nor the Banishedborn would be interfering in the battle.

Rieren would, however. She was still in the Ascendant-realm, theoretically still within reasonable limits of those who might have sought to defeat her.

But this was Rieren they were facing, not just any old Ascendant-realm cultivator.

It was no surprise that roots exploded out of the ground to stab straight at her direction. Rieren turned to deal with it, but Kalvia was already moving.

“They think they can use my Domain against us?” Kalvia shook her head as she positioned herself between Rieren and the roots. “Didn’t they learn their lesson the last time?”

The roots were powerful enough to push Kalvia back by several paces when she blocked them. But she did end up blocking them, even if she was still in the Exalted realm while the Avatar empowering them had to be in the Ascendant realm at the least.

Of course, that disparity in their relative strengths would come into play before long if they continued a direct confrontation. Kalvia had simply taken the Avatar by surprise.

Which meant Rieren needed to act.

Her Domain was already exploding over the area, the water rushing towards her target. Her Proprioception told her that the Avatar was about seventy paces from her current location to her left. Rieren sent her water ahead of her, then followed at a rapid pace.

One step, two, then she was before her target.

Abyss-cursed Avatars with their Abyss-cursed masks. It was annoying how they deprived Rieren of the joy of seeing their shocked expressions.

She was already slashing in with a wide sweep that probably would have chopped the Avatar in half. But before she could get close enough, her target summoned a tree and rose high into the air. The motion reminded her of how she used her geysers.

Thankfully, the tree didn’t get to rise very high. Rieren’s Domain charged in behind her, Tidal Summons boosting it into a tidal wave that was almost as tall as the tree itself. As the enormous wave crashed in, Rieren applied her other Aspects to it as well. The water turned into a storm cloud and sparked into a blistering salvo of lightning as it struck.

No surprise that the tree’s trunk was crushed behind the explosive power of her wave. The tree started to fall.

Rieren was too close to the impact and the resultant explosion to see things properly. She slashed her sword to cut herself a window of clear sight. Ah, so the Avatar had decided to leap off the tree and create some distance between them. Well, it wasn’t going to be that easy escaping from Rieren.

The Avatar was already erecting another tree at the new location. Rieren was already tired of it.

She was about to send another wave to tear it down before her opponent started to get tricksy, but then someone approached from behind. It was a combination of her Electroreception and her Essence perception that alerted her. A random imperial court cultivator who sought to strike her back.

Ah, well. Maybe she should try a different tact. Rieren summoned up Wrath of the Swordwing.

A halo of molten orange popped up behind her back. It was too late for the onrushing cultivator to halt. Rieren had timed her technique’s activation just right. A blink later, a thousand swords burst out of the molten halo.

The scream behind her was quite satisfying. As were the slopping splashes of blood that confirmed her instantly appearing swords had pierced into the woman who had tried to attack from behind. Rieren almost winced in sympathy. Dozens of burning swords stabbing in at once couldn’t have felt nice.

With a flex of her shoulder blades, Rieren pulled her wings apart so that they were spread on either side of her. That made the swords pull apart her attacker’s corpse until it was shredded to about as many gory little pieces as Emrith’s appearance had done to that Avatar.

Well, that would teach anyone trying to stab her while her back was turned.

The wings took her into the air. That little interruption had allowed the Avatar to manifest the entire tree. No matter. Rieren was about to cut it down anyway.

She released her Swordwings. The molten swords unleashed themselves from behind her back to rocket towards the Avatar’s Domain Summons. Rieren lost her the power keeping her afloat and dropped to her own Domain with a ripple of water. As her swords began connecting with the enormous tree, causing a series of explosions that tore the whole thing down, she swung.

Heaven’s Arc sent a rippling white arc rushing at her target. Water rose along with the charging crescent, surging into a wave that rivalled the tree in height. Or would have, if her swords hadn’t brought the tree down.

The Avatar had jumped down from his Domain Summons to take shelter against Rieren’s storm of detonating swords. Temporarily safe, he raised one arm high to summon a strange contraption of twisting branches crowned by a vivid red flower bud. A bud that began glowing as it opened up.

Then sent a coruscating beam of crimson-tinted gold energy shooting at her.

It collided with Heaven’s Arc, stopping the technique from reaching the target. A great explosion of steaming water and sparkling motes of red and gold sprayed in all directions.

Rieren was of course moving already. She had been doing so as soon as she had seen the Avatar start pulling on that strange flower of his. Her gut feeling had been right. Heaven’s Arc had been stopped. But that was a blessing in disguise. The explosion obfuscated her motion, empowered by Silken Passage to take her fatally close to her opponent.

Just as the steam and sparks began clearing, as the swords continued falling in a rain of devastation, Rieren used Swordstorm Severance.

The skill was an advanced version of Gale Blade. Her speed went up tenfold. It made the whole world blur and meld into one. She slashed forward, unleashing a barrage of swings and slices that lasted barely a second or two. Over three dozen strikes lasting barely a heartbeat.

The Avatar had tried to defend himself with a summoned spear of ironwood and a wooden cocoon around himself. But it hadn’t worked.

Rieren’s slashes had cut through his shoulder, chopped off one ear, torn through half an arm, and even chopped off one of his legs. That was apart from the dozens of other slashes and stabs she had left upon his entire body, all bleeding copiously. He twisted around to face her, but that just made several of his fingers and chunk of flesh on his shoulder fall off.

His scream shattered his ceramic mask. Thankfully, it didn’t last long. One of her flying swords shot in, stabbing through his torso and setting off another little explosion of ripping, churning Essence.

When the water and mist cleared, all Rieren was left with was a pool of blood and assorted bits and pieces of the Avatar.

“Brutal,” Kalvia said as she jogged over after the barrage of Swordwing ended. Rieren had called off her Domain too. “Now we just need to—”

Her words were cut short when a jolt of Essence sparked through the entire area. A powerful jolt. Rieren’s spirit shivered in alarm as she turned around, trying to find the source of that spike of spiritual energy. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t tell wherever exactly it had landed. But the sheer power behind it confirmed that her fear had materialized.

The other Banishedborn were coming, and there was no one to stop them.