"You sure this will work?" Callie asked anxiously as Yvette worked on the preparations. Rather than just slot in the coffin and turn it like before, the golem was actually carving new symbols onto the coffin itself. Since we'd killed all the other conduits and would probably kill the rest, they were automatically severed from their connections to their own Impact and the people who had ingested it.

Satala wasn't going to die (hopefully) which meant we had to manually sever the connections. That was part of why we weren't sure if she would survive. This was going to be dangerous and traumatic, and my healing bursts might not be enough to fix it, not to mention she'd be having her life force sucked out to fuel the temple.

"No." Said Yvette flatly. "Just as I was not sure twenty minutes ago, and I will not be sure when I complete these adjustments. This was not part of my designated purpose, and I still believe it may be a foolish decision. However, I am willing to try to aid you in this endeavor, since it will still result in the deactivation of the ritual."

"Yeah, but we have an advantage this time don't we?" I pointed out. "Satala is willing to help deliberately. The other times we had to hurry and trigger the effects of the temple and the coffin because the dead bodies were losing energy by the second. With Satala taking an active role, we can actually study the necessary changes ahead of time and set up an efficient order and timing to get the changes over with as quickly as possible. That'll give her the best chance to survive."

She nodded without looking up. "This is true. But I urge you not to become complacent. There is still a good chance this may end in tragedy."

Bethy cleared her throat loudly. "She can hear you. We can ALL hear you. Come on Yvette, show a little compassion will you? You're talking about the girl's death." The Vampire had latched onto Satala and was sitting with the former A-ranker, trying to comfort her. Admittedly, Yvette's casual discussion of Satala's grizzly painful death wasn't exactly the most compassionate thing I'd ever heard.

The golem shrugged. "She wished us to kill her. A minimal chance to live is still better than certain death."

"It's alright." Said the silver haired girl with a wan smile. "She's right. You're doing so much for me already. I don't mind her being realistic about my chances. It means so much that you're willing to take such a risk to help me. I know that your opinion of my lineage must be abominable."

To my surprise, Abel was the one who spoke up. "Not really. Sure, your mom did some terrible shit, but so did the six, or I guess the five at the time, I think this might have been before Unity Ascended."

I hadn't even considered that, but he was right. If it was that long ago, it might have been pre-Unity. I didn't know why, but for some reason that made me feel a bit better. I'd never met the Unity, but the god of the conglomerate was the person I associated with the heroic organization to which I nominally belonged. The knowledge that he might not be involved in this was some small comfort.

Callie took my hand, squeezing it gently. She could feel my unease, and the discomfort I'd felt since we learned about what had happened. The worst part was that I couldn't really say that it was shocking to me. It sounded like something the factions would do. I could see where it might even seem necessary, I doubted most of the vanished gods were as friendly as Suvaya apparently had been. But it left a bad taste in my mouth all the same.

"It's ready." Said Yvette finally, slotting the coffin into the circle and then gesturing for Satala to get in. "Don't worry, we won't be starting just yet. I'm going to make instruction lists for the alterations. Solomon is right, we have more than enough time to do this properly, and preparation will make your survival all that much more likely."

Satala smiled at her gratefully and climbed into the open coffin. Most of the final changes to the device had been carved on the lid, I understood precisely none of them. I'd lost my skill in Enchanting, and the little bit I did remember was nowhere close to this level of complexity.

Yvette passed out a series of papers, each one for one of us, with a number of instructions written out on what to alter. Since we had time she was able to study what changes needed to be made and how to make them fastest. Cutting out the whole 'direction' aspect of the ritual alterations would make it MUCH faster.

We were all powerful Ascendants with high Focus and Might. Being able to think and move so quickly meant listening for someone to manually call out the changes was highly inefficient, it just wasn't something we could help because Yvette was recalculating all the changes to the ritual from a new starting point after we'd killed two of the conduits in advance. She needed access to the actual temple to give us the altered formulas, even if most of the work was already done in advance.

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Once we had them all memorized, we each took up position near out starting points and prepared as best we could. I triggered State of Grace, and then Yvette hefted the coffin lid back up onto the coffin with Satala still inside and began to shift it into position. As soon as the light flooded the room, we started to move.

I was almost shocked into stopping when she started screaming, but I powered through. I felt Callie's horror through the bond, but she kept focused too, following the instructions we were given in exacting detail, making sure we performed our parts at exactly the right time.

Listening to the muffled screaming from a girl I'd just met, I suddenly felt a LOT worse about my stunt with the shield back at the fortress. Imagining Callie having to hear this from me made me feel a little sick. I didn't even know Satala and I was horrified. In movies, when people scream, it's usually just noise. Loud exhalations of surprise or fear. But screams from people who are in agony, from people suffering true torment, those sound different.

Despite the horror my girlfriend and I were both feeling at having essentially volunteering a person to be tortured for an uncertain chance at life, we pushed on. I blurred forward. Touching a spot on the floor with each hand as the glow flared through the runes all over the temple. I shoved hard to switch the runes as I'd been instructed, then shifted my hands and swapped one of those two with another.

Ten feet and another three or four runes, then fifteen feet. I was using my overlay to avoid banging into the others as they blurred around the room, trying to get this finished as quickly as humanly possible. In the background, the screaming began to dim, and I knew not a single person here thought that was a good thing.

Finally, I finished, looking around and confirming that I wasn't the only one. "Everyone done?" I shouted? At the affirmatives I dove forward, kicking the coffin lid and sending it flipping off into the air as I reached in to grab Satala and pull her out. The runes began to dim as they lost their power source, and I wasted no time at all.

Afterburner, heal burst. Five times I dumped an enhanced healing burst of life energy into the shuddering tear stained form of the silver haired girl. Her skin was waxy, eyes sunken and unfocused, and she was twitching like electric shocks were wracking her body.

As the supercharged life energy roared through her, Bethy and Callie arrived by my side. My girlfriend was the most observant of us, and she noticed the seizure before it had a chance to really begin. She manifested a thick strap of shadows and jammed it into Satala's mouth as her jaws slammed shut, her back arching as her body became a battleground between the leaking sieve of her lost connections to her former power and massive overload of life energy I'd dumped in.

Honestly, if she hadn't been literally about to die from energy bleedout and life consumption I would never have even tried it. Each of those charges was hundreds of points of Vitality, multiplied several times over by afterburner and then stacked on top of each other. If one of those was like a healing energy drink, all five was like jump starting her heart with a regenerative car battery.

Bethy reached out and clamped down on her wrists, keeping the silver haired girl pinned as Abel arrived and grabbed her feet with help from Gabriel. The green light bleeding from her eyes as her body seized was much more unnerving to see at this level of intensity. It took several minutes for her to stabilize, her body managing to repair the damage from the severed connections, which while not physical were more body related than soul, being stat based.

Through it all, the Vampire talked to the silver haired girl softly, telling her it was ok, and that she would be alright, and not to worry. Meaningless nonsense that was meant to comfort her and give her something to focus on, but kindness all the same.

Once she stopped jerking like she was being electrocuted, we were able to let her go, and Bethy cradled the still twitching girl and stroked her hair. Not in a romantic way, but just out of concern. I suspected our Vampire saw a bit of herself in the other girl's situation. What that might be I had no idea, not having a firm grasp on Bethy on my best day, but at the very least I knew empathy when I saw it.

Finally, she was healed enough to sit up slowly, and we all helped her up. "Water." She croaked in a raspy, torn voice. Callie was closest, and called a bottle from her ring to pass the other girl, who drank it slowly with a wince. Having recently screamed so loud I'd torn my own throat during my adventures in shielding, I recognized the signs there.

"I'm sorry." I said when she finished. "If I'd known it would be that bad..." I trailed off because I probably still would have suggested it. I hadn't wanted to murder her, or let one of my friends do it.

She gave a tired smile. "It's a relief in some ways. Being free from the abomination that became of my mother's last desperate gambit. Being free of all the things she made me. I still love her, but the Impact and stats harvested from me were twisted up in the harming of a great many innocents. Having to start over isn't so bad, really."

"Weird question." Said Abel. "But why aren't you like...old now? Maybe not dead, but you must be thousands of years old to be an A-ranker, even independent of how long you were in that coffin. Now that you're an F-ranker your lifespan should be like four thousand years."

She giggled. "The coffins kept us in stasis, but I'm only about thirty years old aside from that. My mother was a goddess. Accruing renown and gathering resources were hardly an imposition for my family."

I hadn't known it worked like that, but I guessed it made sense. The children of gods would be massively renowned and by that token would grow absurdly fast. A-rank in thirty years. I wondered if that was some kind of record. "Well." I said with a sigh. "Good to know we didn't waste the effort at least. Now, let's get back to base camp. I need to rest up, and then we have to figure out how we're going to help Satala." Saving her had been the easy part. Now we had to deal with the fallout.