The holy mana was like a heartbeat, coming and going in regular intervals. It also felt a bit like footsteps, ones that matched the thundering sounds that the titan’s feet of stone had once made. The mana pulsed.

Camilla and Kagriss looked around, looking for the source.

Once again, the hall seemed to get brighter with the ambient holy mana, yet the other hunters did not seem to notice. They went about their business, doing their best to treat the hunter that had been struck by the head of the reflected mace.

“What’s going on?” Camilla muttered. “It can’t be that no one else is noticing.”

“I don’t really get it either. Why are we the only ones to notice anything?” Kagriss replied. Although she wasn’t scared of whatever was coming, as long as she could fight it, she was also bad with mysterious, formless threats like that one that was descending upon them.

Camilla was so grateful that she had Kagriss with her, because if she had been alone and no one noticed such an obvious increase in holy mana, going way past the threshold of detection by people without the right affinity, she might’ve suspected that she was going insane.

One person might be insane, but there was a much smaller chance that two people had the same hallucinations at the same time, unless it was intentional…

“Intentional…?” Camilla voiced her thoughts. “Could this be an illusion targeting us only? What kind of magic can cause such an illusion, though?”

Kagriss shook her head. “I don’t think it’s an illusion. No illusion that I know of can replicate the feeling of mana. Besides, what would be the point of targeting just us?”

There were several, actually. For one, they were undead in a place filled with holy energy. That was a good enough excuse to target them. However, Camilla kept the thought to herself. No doubt that Kagriss knew the answer to her own question and simply didn’t want to say it out loud.

Kagriss had been joking when she accused Camilla of foredooming them, but Camilla no longer wanted to risk anything by opening her big mouth.

Like approaching footsteps, the pulsing of holy mana grew more and more prominent, yet the other hunters still did not move. One of the mages, a vampire, performed first aid on the crushed hand of the hunter and now stood up, wiping the sweat off of his forehead.

Cadaelia was investigating the formations on the gate now that her subordinate was in no more danger. She was talking to the other arcanist that Kagriss pointed out for Camilla, and they were both shaking their heads, probably coming to the same conclusion that Kagriss came to—that it was impossible to safely open the gate from the inside.

Frustrated, Cadaelia went back to investigating the metallic ball, hoping to find some clues from it on how to open the inner gate. She even invited Kagriss to join her and combine their knowledge.

However, Kagriss refused. “I’m sorry. I don't feel very well,” she said, offering an apologetic smile.

Cadaelia frown at the reply she got, but it quickly disappeared. “That’s understandable. You shouldn’t force yourself. Forcing yourself will never give good results for this line of work.”

She still looked disappointed, though.

Kagriss nodded in agreement, and then turned back to Camilla. “It looks like she really doesn’t feel anything.”

“You made it so obvious too. Did it seem like she was hiding anything?”

“Unfortunately not. Her intentions were for me to help her unlock the secrets and nothing else. But in this situation, I’d rather her be trying to trick us…” If the whole thing turned out to be an elaborate ploy and all the Trista hunters were pretending to be ignorant to the change in the mana, then at least then the strange behavior would have an easy explanation.

Sadly, it wasn’t the case. “It was worth a try. I guess it was a pipe dream after all. Now what?” Camilla asked. “Wait, I know! Let’s go look for the source. It’s hard to tell since the mana feels ubiquitous, but there has to be an origin for the change. I think it’s most likely that way.”

She answered her own question and pointed at the inner gate. “There.”

“It’s worth a try.”

With their next actions agreed upon, they rose into the air through their respective means and flew toward the inner gate. Although Cadaelia looked up in curiosity and followed them through their flight with her eyes, she ultimately lost interest when she saw that they were just looking at the inner gate.

It wasn’t all that different from what she herself was doing, which was finding a way to get past that unmoving gate… at least, that’s what she thought.

However, Kagriss didn’t even spare a glance at the formations. The whole time, she was paying attention with Camilla to the intensity of the holy mana pulses, trying to see if there were any difference in rhythm when they moved closer or farther away.

After about a minute of testing, they came together to share their findings.

“I think it’s from the door, but it’s really close. I’m not sure if it’s just me imagining…” Camilla broke off as she realized that she was falling back to her habits again. She coughed and corrected herself. “I find that the source is most likely from the door.”

Kagriss hid a smile at her mistake before speaking up. “I found the same thing. The margins are small, but there is definitely a difference.”

“Definitely? How did you know?” Camilla asked. She had been too absorbed in trying to match up the intervals that she did not look at what Kagriss was doing, and when Kagriss revealed her process, Camilla wanted to hit her own head against the wall to hopefully cure her idiocy.

Kagriss’s method was simple. She simply made two weak clumps of undead mana and placed them on the floor. Since the ambient holy mana was dense enough that it was burning Camilla and Kagriss’s skin, it was obviously dense enough to eliminate small bits of undead mana.

Kagriss demonstrated, producing two small flames in the interval between two pulses. She placed them on the floor about five meters apart, and no sooner did she break her connection with the two flames, the next pulse of holy mana came.

When the pulse arrived, putting all of Camilla’s hair on end and making her skin tingle, the two flames went out, one after the other. The one closest to the door disappeared, followed by the second a split second after

“Amazing… It's such a simple method too. You’re a genius, Kagriss!” she said. “A genius!”

If Kagriss was a genius, then she wasn’t stupid. Just normal.

Kagriss smiled and bathed in the praises. Unfortunately, the scenario didn’t allow for too much merry-making and the smile disappeared as quickly as it came. “But so what if we found the source, or the direction it’s in? It’s still behind the gate.”

“You’re right… Urgh.” Groaning, Camilla walked up to the gate. “By the way, Kagriss, what kind of formation does this have? Anything dangerous or out of the ordinary?”

“I don’t know about dangerous, since the scariest thing on there is the same countering formation that was on the outer gate, but there is one set of formations that I can’t identify,” she admitted.

Camilla’s mouth dropped. “One even you can’t identify?”

“Who do you take me for? I don’t know everything; far from it. More important is that the formation is made with holy magic.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She had put too many expectations in Kagriss, totally unaware of how much pressure that put on her. A bit absentminded, Camilla reached toward the door.

If there was really just a countering formation, then just a light touch won’t hurt her. She might even be able to try out the holy magic formation and see what it did. Better her than Kagriss.

She reinforced her whole body, and then touched the gate with the tip of her fingers with as light a tap as she could. Instead of her finger being bounced away like she saw happen to one of the other hunters at the outer gap, the spot she touched rippled with holy mana.

Shocked at the sudden, unexpected change, Camilla tried to pull back, only to find that she was unable to. Her hands were stuck to the formation, even being pulled in. “K-Kagriss? I can’t…hyahh! What is that?” she yelped.

“What’s wrong, Milla?” Kagriss asked. “Are you hurt?”

“N-no, but something’s touching me!” Camilla asked, staring back at Kagriss, trying to not shiver.

Kagriss grabbed her shoulders and began pulling her, only for her arm to not budge. “Touching? Aren’t you touching the door?”

“No! Well, yeah, kind of, but…” Camilla’s words cut off as she failed to resist the shivering. It was like a dam holding back a huge river was broken and her whole body shuddered from head to toe. There was something touching the tips of her finger, and it wasn’t the door.

It was thin and flexible, brushing up against the tip so gently. Worse, there were many of the mysterious things wrapped around her finger. Camilla bit her lips and shut off her sense of feeling at her fingers, only to find that it didn’t work. She briefly contemplated cutting off her hand and regenerating it.

Suddenly, one of the invisible feelers drew back, and before Camilla could relax and resume trying to break away again, the feeler struck forward and pierced through her skin. Yet, she felt no pain. She felt nothing except the slippery, wiggling of the feeler that dove into her flesh.

“Ah!”

“Milla! What’s wrong?”

“It’s…it’s inside of me!”

“What? Calm down, Milla. Take a…um…deep breath.”

Taking Kagriss’s advice to heart, Camilla took a deep breath and tried to chase away her panic, but it was difficult. How can she ignore feelers moving around in her finger? She only managed when she tried to stop thinking about the weird feeling itself and focused more on what the feelers were doing.

“Are you okay now?” Kagriss asked. When Camilla nodded, she continued. “Okay, now describe to me what it’s doing.”

“Okay. Um… It’s inside my finger. For some reason, I can’t not feel it even when I cut off my sense of touch. I think it’s messing with my mana…” She closed her eyes. “My holy mana? It just detected my holy mana, and it seems to be collecting it…”

As she described the actions of the feeler made of mana, the feeler finished whatever it was doing and retreated out of her finger. As it shrank back into the formation, something changed, and the rippling grew even stronger. Instead the ripples from a leaf landing on still water, the patterns on the formation looked more like someone tossed a rock.

It became more and more violent until the whole formation glowed golden, scalding Camilla’s flesh. She winced and this time, she didn’t hesitate to cut her fingers off at the first joint. Grabbing Kagriss off with her free hand and shielding Kagriss with her body while creating a shield of holy mana herself, she jumped back.

“What is that light?” she growled after she got far enough that the light no longer burned her. She put Kagriss down and glared at the inner gate.

“What’s going on?” Cadaelia asked, popping up behind them. “What light?”

“You can’t see it?”

“See what? And what happened to you? Did something attack?” Cadaelia asked in a worried voice.

Camilla looked at the elf in disbelief, but she could find no sign that Cadaelia was lying. It was almost like Cadaelia really couldn’t see that light, even going so far as to ask the answer to an obvious question.

She shook her head. “Nothing; don’t worry about it. Kagriss, can you see it?”

Kagriss nodded. She stared at the light, eyes wide open and unblinking. Cadaelia followed her glance and gasped.

“The formations are changing. What did you two do? It looks like…”

A thundering voice interrupted her, at least for Camilla and Kagriss. Cadaelia continued to speak—her mouth continued to move—but her voice was drowned out by the new voice that came from the sealed inner door.

The voice was ancient and sexless. It sounded like countless other voices speaking at the same time, melding together into the spoken word of a single being.

“Welcome, child of the feathers. We’ve waited long for you. Come and reclaim what is yours.”

The whole world became filled with light that would’ve been gentle for any other race, but Camilla felt nothing but pain. Her eyes saw nothing but endless gold.

Lost in the vibrant color, she reached to her side for Kagriss and felt her lover’s familiar cold hands latch onto her. Their fingers intertwined as the golden light overwhelmed everything else before bringing about darkness that creeped from the edges of her vision.