At first there was too much happening for Kas to make sense of it. He ducked instinctively behind Lazlo, who stepped forward just as instinctively. One of Lazlo’s many armbands unfolded itself into a shield, and he took in the fight at a glance.

Kas took a bit longer to adjust. He’d rarely been in a conflict with more than eight or ten individuals, and it looked like half the teams had congregated here. The Silverheart’s team was here, as were several others he hadn’t met or only knew by reputation. Arrayed against them were a dozen… people? No, not quite.

What were they? Kas thought they were guards at first, but there was something off about them. An overly angled form, inhumanly smooth motions. Then Kas took in the actual fighting and his blood chilled.

Whatever they were, they were winning. The speed and flexibility of the constructs was enough to push even the veterans back. The Silverheart was losing ground, being pushed back toward the area of the Blud’s Delusion trap.

Kas remembered his AutoSlash taking over in the fight, and imagined this was what would result if you were to make an entire person guided by combat enchantments instead of just a weapon. Experimental and certainly illegal, but that did Kas and his team no good if they couldn’t survive the encounter.

Was it these constructs that they’d been sent to steal? Or perhaps the secrets of their construction?

Kas flinched as something pinged off Lazlo’s shield, close enough to Kas’s cheek he felt the wind of its passage. His injured arm throbbed in painful memory and he reached up, fingers coming away red in blood.

Agneza’s relay orb pinged urgently from her pocket; chiming a missed call and drawing Kas’s attention to her. She crouched by the wall, frantically tearing at the air with her tools. Kas focused mana to his vision, squinting against the glare, and saw the faintest outline of the trap they’d stumbled into. If he hadn’t been looking straight at it, he’d have missed it.

Tiny spiderweb threads spread out from the centre, an area encompassing the entire base of the stairway, halfway up it, and out into the space behind. If he took his eyes off a thread for even a moment, he had to start back at the centre to follow it.

It wasn’t destroyed. All the surge Lazlo had pumped into it had disabled it, but only temporarily. Kas could see it trying to reassert itself, flickers of energy mending itself where the threads had been torn, the edges of reality beginning to warp.

Agneza tore it apart almost as fast as it rebuilt, but he could tell she wasn’t going to be able to keep ahead of it for long.

Kas passed her a recharge and knelt beside her. “How can I help?”

She crushed the recharge capsule, barely pausing to point to the right side of the central mass of webbing. “Break that if you can.”

Kas nodded and pulled out his favourite tool, a well-worn but still functional manual SpellComb, pushing mana into it until it hummed with barely-contained power. He crushed a recharge, passed another to Agneza, then flinched as another projectile slammed into the wall beside his head.

“Help or get out of the way,” Agneza snapped.

Kas’s heart pounded. He knew this might be the most important spell breaking of his life, and certainly the most important for immediate survival. He had to blink away afterimages, the haze of distant protection wards trying to overlay itself on his reality even now.

He tried to pretend he wasn’t in the heart of a deadly battle, focused on the threads in front of him and how to best dismantle them. His MajEye would have been very useful right now. He didn’t have concentration to spare on mana sight, but without it he’d be fumbling blindly. He pressed his comb’s prongs against the spot Agneza had indicated.

Feedback buzzed up his arm immediately, the trap resisting his attempt to twist it out of shape. He teased the comb back and forth in tiny motions, slipping it between the threads, then clamped it tight and yanked, severing the connection and breaking loose one tiny fraction of the trap. Even as he passed another recharge to Agneza and took another for himself, the trap began to repair itself, the thread ends growing out toward each other.

“No you don’t,” Kas growled, snatching the nearest broken end and crushing it in his tool’s grip. It twitched feebly, but couldn’t reorient itself toward its other half. He tore it away, tossing the detached thread away to the side, then attacked the next.

A pained shout impressed upon him the urgency of the moment, the temptation to stop and check on the others almost unbearable.

Agneza moved fast and relentlessly, breaking threads as fast as they reformed, moving steadily toward the core of the central mass of the trap. Meanwhile, Kas could barely handle a single thread of it. Never before had he realised exactly how wide the gap was between his current skill level and that to which he aspired.

The sounds of battle faded, the trap beginning to reassert its effect on his perception, and Kas jabbed blindly at the mass of mana threads he knew were there even though he could no longer detect them. Too slow. They’d never get out this way.

A thought struck him and he grabbed a handful of surgers from the pocket storage.

Agneza’s head snapped up. “Wait!”

He slammed them down onto the trap’s heart, and the world whited out again.

“Idiot! You think a trap sophisticated enough to adapt its illusion perfectly to what we think we’re doing isn’t going to learn from its mistakes?”

“Whaa-- how?”

It had absorbed the unstable energy from the surgers somehow, reasserting complete control over their imaginary surroundings.

Worse, it had expanded its reach. Kas, Lazlo, and Agneza weren’t the only ones in the strangely empty false room with its alluring table covered in concealment and protections. Three others who’d been pushed back toward the trap stood uncertainly, weapons ready, glancing around for enemies they could no longer see.

Kas’s heart sank as he realised what he’d done.

“Don’t sit there moping, help me!” Agneza shouted. “Recharge. And get to work.” Her fingers danced in a quick hex, and faint red lines appeared hovering in the air. “Imprecise, but it’s the best I can do.”

She took the recharge then attacked the indicated area, the makeshift guide marking the spot they entered. Kas joined in, no longer trying for finesse, grabbing at the empty air and tugging until he found a spot that resisted. They were running through their recharges at a terrifying speed. Kas silently thanked Ziv for having him grab so many.

Then Lazlo uttered a startled gurgling grunt, and collapsed to his knees.

“NO! Laz!” Agneza half stood, one hand clenching into a fist, then turned away back to the trap. “Help him,” she ordered, voice breaking as she went back to work with hardly a pause. “I’ll hold it for now.”

Kas swallowed and ran to Lazlo’s side, already pulling patches from the pocket storage. They’d help seal up wounds and bolster natural healing, but one glance at Lazlo and he knew they wouldn’t be enough. He tore open the package to try anyway, but something jolted against him and his surroundings flickered to a slightly different angle. Heat spread down his arm, followed by a chill. He’d dropped the patch, its contents scattered on the too-pristine floor. Blood ran from his shoulder.

He fumbled in the pocket storage and pulled out another patch, which he tore open and poured over his shoulder. Then another for Lazlo, though he wasn’t sure how to get at whatever injury had brought him to the ground. Lazlo’s many items blocked his way.

Lazlo grunted and shook him off. “Recharge.”

Kas hesitated, but at his urgent hand flick passed him the recharge. Instead of absorbing it himself, he pressed it against a thin crystal plate at the centre of his chestplate, power flickering for a moment before it was absorbed. “More.”

Kas pulled them out, then suddenly Lazlo was further away, though Kas’s surroundings didn’t seem to have changed. Something must have collided with him outside the illusion.

There wasn’t a complete separation between the deception and reality. Not entirely. Earlier, their movements hadn’t been reflected between reality and the lie. Kas wasn’t sure if it was Agneza’s continual efforts making the difference or whether the snare was changing as it tried to adapt. Damaged spells did that, sometimes. Maybe they could use it somehow - though, from the way the trap’s new hostages were exploring the surrounds and not getting smacked around, it couldn’t be as simple as a one-to-one mirror even now.

Even as he watched, one of the trio, an enchanter he’d vaguely encountered around the office by virtue of having a desk in the same general vicinity, dropped to the floor with a cry clutching her leg. The outside world could get at them, but with the exception of Agneza’s relay they couldn’t return the favour. And no one would be picking up a relay while fighting for their lives.

The two uninjured hostages had joined Agneza; maybe they had some safecracking experience. Kas sprinted over to Lazlo, raining recharges into his palms as fast he could. The infiltrator’s hands were shaking, but he continued pressing them to the crystal plate.

If he could only make an opening. With his spare hand, Kas tapped out his own relay orb and called - he didn’t want to catch any of his team off-guard at a critical moment - Jarom, his last active contact. He passed Lazlo yet another recharge and activated mana sight, turning his head so he wasn’t staring into the swarm of blinding enchantments still lingering along the far wall.

The orb lit up immediately with a clear glow. Not enough. Kas pushed more mana into his eyes, feeling them water in response. A hazy thread blurred into view, snaking towards the holes Agneza was tearing and readjusting every second or two as the encasing spell repaired itself. The signal wasn’t getting through.

A hand stopped him as he tried to feed Lazlo another recharge. “That’s enough,” the big man declared. “I’m putting myself into suspension. I’ve taken too much damage.” He tapped the breastplate softly. “This should buy me a sand. Two, if we’re lucky. Any more and the overload would kill me more surely than those things out there.” He tapped the crystal again, which flared up in Kas’ mana sight, sending a shield-like dome over the infiltrator’s form. “It’s on you to get me out of here. But if I don’t make it -” He paused, eyes darting towards his partner still methodically working her way through the snare. “Tell ‘Neza not to blame herself. Or you, kid. We all know the risks. Now go deliver your supplies where they’re needed.”