Sun Geon struck first.

The ground buckled at the cultivator’s lunge. He was coming fast, his face placid. He was so sure about ending her, no doubt in his mind. He raised a single hand to cut her neck.

She had plenty of time to intercept. Her arm rose and her forearm caught the blow. The impact was enough to blow the ring dead elves away, a hurricane blast that made the trees shudder.

Sun Geon’s eyes widened in surprise.

Willow made no witty retort, no snide remark. Her right hand went straight for the kill, toward his abdomen in a chisel shape, and Sun Geon just barely managed to twist out of the way. He danced along the field of corpses as Willow spun to intercept him.

His pointers hadn’t all been for nothing—they’d shown her two very important things: first, the importance of letting one move flow into the next, like a dance.

And second: the concept that essence could be pulled back into the body to strengthen it, to speed it. That every ounce of power could be used not for casting spells, but for sheer physical power. He’d beaten her every time, and she knew he was holding back. She saw, even though he tried to conceal it from her, that he was barely activating his internal essence.

As a mage, she had a little more than just internal essence. She had a few spells that helped as well.

Willow descended from her mid-air spinning kick onto Sun Geon’s head, but he managed to turn her blow aside. The trees at the edge of the clearing bowed with the shockwave. He turned with a follow up attack, but she was already gone.

She was behind him. Willow once again aimed a spear hand at his kidney, but he twisted away far too quickly. Even with her spell of acceleration he was too fast. He countered with a hammer blow that she managed to ward off. If not for her spell of stone skin, it would have ripped her flesh to shreds.

He jumped back, opened his mouth to make some quippy remark, but Willow was already there. Each stride buckled the earth and sent gouts of stone and wood into the fray surrounding them. She knew their battle must be a terrible risk to her people, but if she was killed then Sun Geon wouldn’t hesitate to finish them. Clearly he’d seen her as a way to cripple the city-states of her land. Well, he’d almost gotten what he’d come for.

He crossed his arms just in time to block the punch Willow hurtled at him, too intent on her primary attack to see the secondary punch coming in toward his gut. Her fist made contact with his body and it felt like punching steel, but she felt it yield nonetheless. Sun Geon shot back and skipped once on the ground before smashing into a stand of pines.

Willow raced after him, but not before he’d gotten up and begun a dance all his own. In her second sight she saw essence course down his arms and legs to be twisted into shape. She smelled the concept, tasted the spell-form, and only just threw herself out of the way as he activated his spell.

“Ten thousand drops of rain,” Sun Geon roared, and the moisture in the air around Willow congealed into thousands of droplets, before all shooting toward her at the same moment. They crashed together with enough force to rip the air asunder, but she was safely a dozen feet away, although she’d had to parry a single one of the drops as it sped past her. It had been almost impossible to move out of the way.

Willow didn’t need to rest, didn’t need to catch her breath. Her psychokinesis was taking care of all of her movement for the first time in months as she relaxed nervous control over her muscles. Maybe this wasn’t what Andrew had envisioned when he’d created her, but it was what she needed to battle this foreign adversary.

With a flick of his hand the thousands of drops of water exploded outward, half coursing toward her in the air. Their very passage tore soil from the earth and created a rippling shockwave. It took everything Willow had to dodge the deadly missiles.

A stand of trees pulped at their passage, but Willow had ducked the lethal storm and was headed back in toward Sun Geon at full speed. Let’s see him keep this up while going hand to hand.

Only a flicker of essence betrayed his intent, and she once again threw herself out of the way as the cloud of drops above her head hurtled into the ground where she’d been. She tried to catch her footing, but she’d thrown herself too hard and only skipped over the churned earth until she managed to claw two long furrows to stop herself.

The missiles were already on their way.

Willow thrust out a hand and channeled an unconcepted stream of essence toward the deadly cloud. Months ago Carl had told the class that streams of essence could interfere with each other, and that’s what she was aiming for. Sun Geon’s control over the droplets slipped for a second as his technique’s control faltered, and fully half of them fell to the earth as a shower of rain.

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It was the chance she needed. She took the long way, skirting around the remaining cloud—sluggish, but still deadly—and sped toward Sun Geon’s side. He turned in his dance and made a chopping motion.

She’d missed one. If there were truly ten thousand droplets, then of course she’d miss one. A drop shot up from the ground and passed through her midsection, blasting through to hurtle off somewhere into the upper atmosphere. Sun Geon smiled.

Willow didn’t miss a step. The smile on Sun Geon’s face turned to confusion, turned to horror, as she pounded the ground twice more with her feet and was right there beside him. For anyone else, anyone who was using their body the way it should be used, the injury should have thrown them off. The excruciating pain of it, which Willow was just managing to keep under control, should have made them misstep. But not when her limbs were powered by psychokinesis alone.

She landed two blows: a kidney shot and then a jab to his ribs. She felt the iron banding that passed for his bones crack and she allowed herself a small smile. The essence coursing through his limbs flickered and died as he interrupted the water-control technique to block her follow-up kicks, though it was a close call. She landed another solid blow, straight to the solar plexus, which sent him hurtling some distance away.

She had time. Willow turned her head, surveying the battlefield. Beyond the portals battle raged between the magical creatures and the mages, but surprisingly the magical creatures were holding their own. Perhaps the mages hadn’t expected them to pass through the portals themselves, because their ranks were disarrayed.

The land on her side of the portals, the battleground, was completely devoid of life. Only churned earth and eviscerated corpses.

Movement. Leopold flickered into existence long enough to take a shot at Sun Lin with one of her spell capsules before disappearing again. The grasshopper’s essence was roiling without coordination—she was infuriated at his strategy. Good, that should keep him alive long enough for Willow to finish off Sun Geon and come help.

A hand closed around Willow’s throat and her eyes widened as she turned to see Sun Geon standing right beside her. When had he come back?

“If you were my disciple, you would have long known to never take your eyes off your opponent,” Sun Geon said, a towering portal looming behind him. “I regret that we couldn’t have met under more auspicious circumstances. You would truly have been an exciting pupil.”

Willow thrust her hand forward and released an unconcepted torrent of essence, which Sun Geon easily knocked to the side. The luminous stream crashed into the thirty-foot tall portal and the image beyond began to warp.

Willow pushed harder.

“If it is any consolation, I will spare your lover,” Sun Geon said. “He is no threat to the empire. Not after I take care of these… cities, as you call them. As for you. Goodbye, Wraith Willow.”

“Just Willow,” she choked as he brought the flat of his hand back. The portal behind him warped further, grew dark in the center, and began to elongate. He sensed the change too, and turned before delivering the executioner’s blow.

The round portal grew corners, it stretched until it grew into a rectangle. Then a sound—the creaking of a door. Next came the dread.

“What have you done,” Sun Geon whispered, voice full of fury.

“I’ve won,” Willow said, and to his momentary distraction she took full advantage. She slammed her fist into the side of his elbow, in his surprise no longer reinforced by his internal essence, and heard the bone crack. His hand went limp around her throat and she pulled back for a strike.

He turned to look at her, and his face wasn’t that of anger or surprise, but fear. She struck anyway, driving the blow into his chest. He shot off at high speed, and no matter how he twisted in the air he couldn’t change his trajectory. A legion of raindrops rose from the ground to catch him, but too late.

As he passed the plane of that terrible door, he disappeared completely from sight as if he’d been devoured by the darkness. Willow hit the ground and turned over twice from the momentum of her last strike, barely able to get her feet and hands under her from the terrible pressure of the door.

A scream of anguish rent the air and Willow watched Sun Lin shoot off from her battle with Leopold toward the door. Willow reached out, as if she could grab Sun Lin, and perhaps she could have if her psychokinesis hadn’t still been so seeped in her body, but the grasshopper passed into the darkness of the door as well and was swallowed up by it.

Silence. An oppressive silence followed after the ear-rending shocks of battle, and suddenly she found Leopold at her side. He was muttering something, but Willow was too focused on the door and its terrible intent to notice at first.

“No, oh no,” he said and looked around. “Where’s Annabelle.”

Willow looked down and saw he was fussing over the small hole in her stomach. It didn’t seem to be such a big thing, except that it was spilling quite a large amount of blood onto the surrounding soil. Willow leaned back on the churned enbankment.

“I don’t know what to do,” Leopold said, and turned back to her. “I don’t know how to fix this. Where’s Annabelle?”

Willow didn’t want to say ‘dead’, because she didn’t know it, but who could have survived their brief battle on this side of the portals? Nobody, apparently, because there was nothing moving on this side at all besides the two of them. She had killed her people in the end, attempting to save her own life.

Willow gasped as she released the psychokinesis from her body. It drifted up for a moment into the huge sphere above them, then descended again and began to probe the channel which the single raindrop had taken through her body. She groaned at the pain, but it allowed her to understand just how injured she was, and how to fix it.

“What… what’s happening,” Leopold said as she used her psychokinesis to pull together strands of ragged flesh. Small tubes of veins and arteries were matched and held in place, and the blood once more flowed through them and not out. She matched tissue to tissue as best she could guess and held it all together with a concentrated effort. How long would she have to hold on? How long until it all set?

“What is that thing,” Leopold asked, and Willow barely opened her eyes. The door of darkness stood there, silent and unmoving, but beyond it she could sense something unfurling. Something opening a great, sleepy eye. Something taking notice of them and the hole they’d cut into its reality.

“We have to leave,” Willow breathed. “It’s waking up.”

Leopold nodded and picked her up with ease, still under the effects of one of the many spells he’d cast during the battle, and ran in the opposite direction of the yawning gateway.