My heart hammered against my rib cage as I put Kyro’s body into my backpack, head peeking out like a toy poodle, and walked up to the crystal ball. He was dying, and I had to complete these trials to save him. But Brindle taught me how difficult it was, and I had very little practice. Now, I had to take a ball ten times that size, break it apart, stitch it together, and shape it to put it into the Omoxilian—the plant monster.

It was the worst.

I studied the creature. It was as terrifying as it was silly—a monster made of plants. It seemed… impractical with its dark eyes that likely had no purpose and spaghetti tendrils for arms.

But I knew better.

I chuckled nervously at the insanity of the creature. Then I looked at Kline, who was watching the Bramble, and Kyro, who I gave alcohol to ensure he didn’t go into a seizure—in case he did.

“Mom… Dad… Tyler…” I paused and looked at the white, misty sky. “Your daughter’s an idiot… and… let’s be real. That’s not going to change. But… she loves you guys.”

I looked at my guide and glanced at the message my parents had sent me after my last letter. I hadn’t read it because I was going off to kill myself, and I didn’t want to have second thoughts about it. And right then, facing certain death, I felt the same way. Opening it would be my reward. The last thing I needed was closure.

It was a good life, she says as she faces the end… I mocked, get out of here. I turned to the podium. Let’s just do this.

I cleared my mind and placed my hands on the crystal ball and activated it. The light blinded me and the force felt like I entered the stratosphere in a rocket ship. The sky warped, and all the fog in the area sucked downward in a hurricane, touching down in a tornado that created a massive blob of souls around me—and they started screaming at me.

Whole souls were inside, and they were furious, screaming, crying, howling, barking, and growling at me from all sides.

Son of a…

I activated Mental Shielding and doubled down, pulling souls faster. It was just in time. The forest erupted with angry howls, and trees crackled.

Hurry…

I got in the zone, trying my best to recall what it felt like to be melded with Yakana. I activated Soul Sight and my channel visualization spell to view mana from all ways, chanting the spells I could remember despite not needing to. Anything. I need to go faster.

I churned my core, and the atmosphere warped—then I activated Moxle Dilation, and the gravity became crushing as I forced myself to go faster. And when I opened up my eyes, I found my entire world surrounded by souls that were swirling and separating and connecting.

I grabbed two of the souls in the fog, which was far easier than I thought because they were far more whole than anything I had worked with, and started stitching them together, creating bridges between the two souls using loose remnants like Legos to bridge the two.

It was an art that required immense skill and concentration, but I did it sloppily, feeling the dull throb of a headache as I quickly arranged pieces and allowed them to snap together.

One down.

I grabbed another one as my head started to hurt from the strain of Moxle Dilation, so I released the spell after activating Mental Shielding and heard the beasts screaming far louder and more intense than before—but I didn’t stop.

Keep moving! I yelled to myself. I pulled more remnants together and stitched the third and fourth and fifth soul. It got faster until I hit the tenth soul, and hell broke loose.

Howling beasts crashed into the Bramble, and Kline growled at them. Not a moment later, I heard the guardian miles in the distance. Or rather, I just heard the sound of multiple snapping trees.

Hurry up! I cried, but panic always makes things worse. Yakana…

I prayed for Yakana because he was always there for me—but he wasn’t coming. Not this time. For the first time, I was completely on my own when facing a mounting task meant for people with centuries of experience. I gritted my teeth, but I kept going.

I stitched my eleventh soul, then my twelfth. The beasts crashed, and the howls increased, and the guardian roared in the distance, but I pressed forward, stitching the thirteenth, fourteenth—fifteenth.

Then the Bramble broke, and a beast flew through. Kline released a roar and used his phantom claws, shaking the earth as the impact hit the dirt. Time was running out.

There was no choice.

I activated Moxle Dilation again against the wishes of my screaming head and got to work. I stitched one after the other in a matter of seconds, creating a total of twenty before I heard the Guardian release its slow, devastating roar in the distance. Then, my head cracked like an egg, but I didn’t give up.

It’ll have to be enough… I thought, raising my hands. I lifted the soul tapestry and manipulated it, giving it tentacles like I watched Brindle do.

I did terribly compared to him, and my head stabbed me with pain.

Please be enough….

I screamed and thrust my hands onto the Omoxilian, forcing in the souls. It was a rough go, pushing the different souls in awkward directions, and I cried as I forced things to move in different directions.

Three seconds until my brain exploded.

Kyro…

Kline…

Suddenly, a beast flew past me in two pieces in slow motion. Then came another boom, and the ground shook slowly. I thought I would be sick.

Please!

I broke apart the souls when I could not handle it anymore, allowing the rest to randomly fill tendrils rapidly and then snap them together. And, to my shock, when I looked at the Omoxilian with my channel visualization spell—I had done it. I could fill it. But… it wasn’t moving.

I eyed it up and down and then remembered—

—I didn’t activate the array.

I stumbled forward, but before I touched it, Hephaestus hit my brain with his mythological hammer, and I hit the ground. Every roar and sound felt like a flash bang, and my vision grayed out. I coughed on the ground as hell broke out around me. I could hear all of it. The booms of the guardian and the cracking tree and Kline fighting creatures that kept hitting the Bramble and dying. And then I blacked out.

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2.

“Get up!” Elana screamed as she watched Mira struggling on the ground.

“Calm down, the kitty’s handling it,” Kori said confidently. Kline wasn’t the cat he was three months ago. His attacks cut second-evolution beasts the size of boars in multiple pieces and he could attack at lightning speed. He blinked into shadows and bit through a beast’s leg before they even realized he had moved, and then he pounced another. For the larger beasts, he jumped onto their backs and ripped out their cores and swallowed them.

His power purity was through the roof.

Still, more and more mindless, soul-corrupted beasts were ripping through the soul forest surrounding the place and bringing with it poisonous plant matter. Mira had set up a water bowl of Diktyo water and put it in the shade so Kline could drink it, but it was still a menace. If Kline didn’t have an ethereal form he would’ve died by then.

“It’s not the thugs,” Elana said. “It’s that…”

An aerial shot showed a true colossus in the distance. It was two hundred feet tall, towering over trees as it pushed through the forest. It was a fourth evolution beast—a peak specimen—the equivalent of the River Guardian. The worst part was that it wasn’t a colossus by nature. It had an ethereal body like Kline, making it even more difficult to kill. If Mira didn’t activate that fucking statue, she was dead.

But no.

Mira had fallen on the ground at the last moment as if her weak and feeble body didn’t know how to handle an extra three seconds to drink water. She had a straw to Diktyo water on her backpack, for fuck’s sake.

“She’ll be fine,” Kori said calmly. He wasn’t even drinking. His eyes were cold and focused.

It gave Elana time to pause as she watched the hell break loose around Mira.

3.

When I blacked out, I was transported back to a memory, something familiar, a time when I was speaking with a teacher at the FoCo cafe after class one day. It was a restaurant where people could literally pay anything—or nothing at all—that operated on the generosity of some people. My teacher paid thirty dollars for our meals in some weird gesture, and I found myself outside, wondering how the place truly stayed in business.

He opened his mouth to speak—then I woke up and found a war zone around me.

Things set in, and my heart raced and I wanted to activate the Omoxilian—but my mind was the mental equivalent of a windshield that had spiderwebbed with cracks. I cried out and closed my eyes and went back to that outdoor patio where my teacher was preparing to speak.

It was Professor Lakely and we were talking about me potentially pursuing a master’s degree in botany. I had just told him, “Yeah… but I don’t want to work in a lab. I want… to do horticulture. Not… CRISPR.”

“But that’s where the money is,” he said.

“That’s where the money is,” I said.

“Well, I think you’re looking at things the wrong way. The question isn't whether it’s right or wrong to do something. It’s a question of consequences.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know that pursuing your master’s won’t lead you to financial security if you don’t chase that career, so if you do it, you’ll face the consequences. The question’s whether the thing you do want, the thing you love, is worth what it takes to protect it. It’s that simple.”

“So being broke.”

“Yeah.”

“And suffering my mother’s judgment?”

He shrugged. “Yes.” I paused, and he smiled. “You already know the consequences, Mira. You know that if you do this, it’ll be a hard road. But you’re here right now despite that. I think what you really want is to know whether you can.”

I looked him in the eye. “Can what? Suffer?”

“No. Not suffer. I think you wanna know if it’ll be worth it. Whether you can do whatever you want and still enjoy your life like you are now.”

I swallowed. “Do you think I can?”

“Well, you’re going to have to get creative.” He chuckled and shook his head. “But… if there’s anyone hard-headed enough to… brute force it. It’s you.”

Emotions welled in my heart, and my body heated up, and the sounds of screams and cries and howls surrounded us. I watched fog consume the cars and pedestrians, and the sun disappeared. Then I watched my teacher disappear in the milky abyss, and my head exploded with pain—and it all really pissed me off.

I slipped on blood as I pushed myself up and then looked at the Omillian in front of me. It had geometric arrays within it that I had never seen. I stumbled forward as the ground quaked, and the looming visage of a true giant cast shade on the area, barely visible in the mist. It was coming to kill me and Kline and Kyro—and almost had. It put its foot up above me, preparing to stomp.

“Fuck you!” I screamed as I thrust against the arrays. My mind scrambled, and my channels burned and I cried out in pain—but I pushed past my limitations and churned my cores, making all the arrays in the monster glow a vibrant pink color. Then the foot descended on me.

4.

Elana pushed Kori as he laughed and cheered. Kline had barely ripped Mira away when the foot stomped down, blowing away the statue and part of the crypt.

“Hey!” Kori cried. “She did it!”

“Not yet, you fool!” The misty silhouette of a giant turned to Kline, who had returned to his water bowl and prepared to stomp her again.

“Yes, you fool,” Kori huffed, pulling a green bottle of certain poison out of his bag along with a glass. “You needa stop looking at Mira. Ever since you’ve returned you’ve become obsessed.”

Suddenly, dozens of massive tendrils wrapped around the giant’s leg. It wasn’t much to start, but dozens and then hundreds of tendrils followed, preventing it from lifting its leg. If that wasn’t enough, all the roots that comprised the crypt—or what Elana thought was the crypt—unraveled and turned into massive limbs of a creature a hundred times the size of the silly statue.

As the soul forest and crypt unraveled, the tendrils shot higher and higher on the beast’s legs, pulling it down.

“See?” he mused. “She succeeded. Question is—is it gonna let go? That’s one freakish creature.”

5.

The Omoxilain wasn’t what it appeared to be. It wasn’t even what Brindle suggested it would be with his illusions. It didn’t just pull into the forest—it unraveled the entire crypt’s root network and shot tendrils into the mist like a deranged Kraken far off at sea.

I watched as I washed Kline’s feet with Diktyo water. He was suffering from poisonous barbs that other beasts tracked in, and his poor feet were bloody stumps.

“Come on, come on, come on… “ I whispered frantically.

More beasts called out in the mist, running fast, rumbling the ground like a thunderous landslide of yapping hyenas. The soul forest was missing, and the giant was fighting and pulling out roots from the Omoxillian, who was supposed to get it to hold off but was now trying to kill it.

Suddenly, the beasts tore through the most, some at us and most toward the beast. That’s when it happened. The giant suddenly lost its size as if a balloon had popped and disappeared. A moment later, an explosion of wind shot through the tendrils, blowing plant matter to pieces as an animal the size of a grizzly bear charged out of them. It took three running strides before ballooning in size again, becoming a tank before swiping a hand at a mass of creatures.

The hand didn’t hit, but the beasts all blew up in a gust of terrifying wind that blew crimson liquid and meat chunks everywhere.

That’s when the beasts reached us. Kline was still healing, so I unsheathed my machete and—without Moxle Dilation—started cutting through them sloppily. It wasn’t enough, but Kline used his claws and made up for the rest. But the swarm kept coming, and I thought we were lost.

But Brindle’s explanation came true.

The first moment it got, the guardian barreled toward us, slamming away the beasts and tearing their flesh and sending them flying. It was already twenty feet again, the ideal size for jumping away from the tendrils, and that was more than enough to treat the beasts like toy dolls. This wasn’t a third evolution creature—it was a fourth, and it brought death like a natural disaster.

Kline pulled me on and ran, but it teleported beside him, glaring at him with massive eyes.

I was certain we were dead but then it looked at me and then jumped away, attacking other beasts.

“Come on,” I said, turning to the area where the crypt was before the Omoxilian stole its roots. “Let's go.”

Kline looked at the plant monster wringing a dozen beasts dry like anacondas and hesitated.

“I said, let’s go!” I yelled.

He thought about it for two seconds before teleporting into a nearby shadow. The area had a wood floor with a staircase. “There!” I yelled.

Kline jumped inside without hesitation, plunging into the abyss as vines closed the entrance and left us in darkness.