In the seemingly infinite sprawl of the liminal space, there’s a door, and it’s our path out.

“Any last minute whatever?” My eyes are on Rei. “We can’t really know how effectively we backlashed whoever is behind the scenario.”

“The Author.”

“The Architect!”

“The Bind!”

I keep my eyes on Rei, ignoring the interjections by Amber, Stella, and Tim. He nods at me slowly, and starts pulling his hair back into a ponytail. “I think,” he says softly, “ye should talk targets. We don’t want ta overlap overmuch.”

“Amber’s on tank duty. Zidanya?”

“Shall do the same, belike; we’ve flankers and mages aplenty, but nary another shield.”

I blink at her twice, and then nod, choosing to trust her instead of arguing. “I’ll be dispelling, counterspelling, and buffing, I think.”

“Punching.” I mock-glare at Stella, and she chuckles throatily. “Worked, though.”

“Stella,” Rei says, making a show of ignoring her, “will be going for spellcasters, ‘special if one of them’s healer or aegis. Knives, flanks; Tim’ll do his thing, Sara flex.”

“And you?”

“Eh.” He smiles brilliantly. “Can’t let yer companions have all the dancin’.”

I don’t argue with him, either; he doesn’t have a shield, but I don’t know what his build is, and even if it’s a bad decision, his life is his own to risk. Instead, I walk over to the door, and fasten my hand around the knob. “Who’s in first?” I’m looking at Amber, but Zidanya answers.

“Give me a three-count, Magelord. The Lord Mayor after me.”

“Knives, Stella, Tim, you’re after me. Dame Ashborn, then Sara, then you, Adam.”

“Three.” It’s not an order that makes immediate sense. Amber being that late in the sequence is strange; she’s probably the hardest person to kill across both parties. “Two.” Then again, if Stella was left in the same room with me, I might wonder if they thought they didn’t need me anymore. “One.” Sara seems safe enough, and I guess that explains the order.

I turn the knob and pull, flaring [Insight] and putting everything I have through [Manipulate Mana]. The understanding of exactly how to move my mana in order to activate the door clicks in my mind, and I dump mana into the reservoir as hard as I can, racing the drain from Insight’s activation.

Zidanya’s through. The others take it at a sprint, blades out, Knives and Stella visibly starting to fade from sight as some sort of stealth or invisibility takes hold of them. There’s a white-blue glow wafting in Rei’s wake, a color that I suddenly realize is the same color as his eyes, and it seems to almost yank Tim forwards, as an intense heat starts to spill out from him.

Amber kisses me, hard and fast and fierce, and then she’s through the door too, sword and shield at the ready, and at the last it’s me and Sara.

“That Skill you used was the Insight you spoke of, correct?”

“Yeah. And before you ask, yeah, that means I’m zeroed on mana.”

She looks at me, eyes a little bit unfocused, stepping up to the door. “After this, show me your bound spells.”

“Uh, what?” I’m a little late to say it, or maybe it doesn’t matter; she’s through the door, and I’m cursing quietly. I’d been assuming that my Motes and orbs were sufficiently subtle as to not provoke any notice, which was reinforced by Stella not noticing when they took effect during the fight against the… the two, but Sara had obviously figured out something.

I stop dawdling and step through into cacophony and chaos.

The smell, rot and blood and sweat and something else I can’t identify, is the first thing to hit me. One particular sight and one particular sound are hot on the stench’s heels, though; the roar has me stumbling back, instinctively trying to go through a door that no longer exists, and the sight, well. There’s a bear.

The bear is more than twice my height at the shoulder. It takes up my entire field of view, because my field of view has narrowed to just the stars-blessed titanic bear, and I stagger and half drop to the floor as its roar echoes, deafening even in the vast throne room that it looks like we’re standing in. It lunges and barrels through two armored guards on its way to someone who’s clearly a mage of some sort, pointy hat and robes and all; there are two panes of light in its way, but it doesn’t even slow down.

I look away hurriedly. I’ve never seen the consequences of a multi-ton animal happening to an unprotected mage, and I’m not in any hurry to get that seared into my brain. There’s plenty to look at, anyway; enough that my brain blanks for a moment amidst the noise and the motion.

My orbs fire, and it jolts me out of my momentary daze. In a heartbeat, the dozens of prepared rune effects with which I walked through that door have expended themselves; the only surprise there is that they didn’t vanish as a result of the translocation. This is fine, I tell myself, nothing is entirely on fire, and someone’s swinging a sword at me.

There’s a crunching sound as Rei punches the side of the woman’s head with the pommel of his sword, and she more or less flops to the ground, leaking … fluids. I nod to him in thanks, but he’s already gone, and with that I refocus on getting my bearings.

I break the place down into sextants, which helps. We’re in a throne room, so I immediately dub the front-back axis as being upstage and downstage, which also helps, because now I have a way of describing the areas. Down left and right have doors leading to corridors, upstage in the center has a door that’s currently closed along with the throne, and there’s a headless corpse on the throne, with a crown a couple meters away, separated by the head by about half a meter.

The room is… mildly full of soldiers, but they’re in three clumps, and from the looks of it the Amber-Knives duo has just gotten enough of a dose of Sara to turn that into two clumps in a few moments. There’s easily two dozen corpses on the ground, not that I can make a careful count, and I’m looking around for something, anything I can do to help my companions when the yell comes through from Tim and I’m flattening myself on the ground.

Lightning magic, it turns out, isn’t particularly like anything I’ve read in a story or seen in a rig, Aug or otherwise. It’s not a spark, moving from point to point, and it’s not a stream or a bolt. It’s a web, a crackling tree whose branches shoot horizontally just above head height across the room, each branch letting out little tendrils downwards. As each of those connects, there’s a bright flash and an almost impossibly loud sound, and after those are done hammering through my eardrums there’s only one clump of soldiers standing, nine strong.

The mage in that group lowers his hand, and the iridescent soap-bubble effect from around them fades. The group is backed up against the downstage center wall, blocked off from each of the corridors by the combined strength of our parties. My unpracticed eye picks out Tim shaking as he holds onto a small table, like he’s about to collapse, and Knives has one of his shoulders obviously dislocated, but my heart skips a beat only when I see Amber’s hand. It’s... her shield hand is crushed and mangled, gauntlet discarded, and her sword hand is just a little bit unsteady; still, her spine is straight and her body poised, and there’s a low growl from the bear that pads over next to her, covering her open side.

“Parley!” The man in the center of the squad’s line calls it out, eyes traversing and alighting on me. “I call for a parley. Adventurers, I don’t know what brings you here, but I have no quarrel with you.”

I look at the man, evaluating. I’m actually not sure whether stalling here is to our benefit or not; there might be elites coming in to reinforce the throne room, but narratively here is where the elites should have been in the first place, and Amber will be able to heal her hand sooner rather than later. “State your name, then.”

“Lim. Lim Roderick, rightful heir to the Sky Throne.”

My eyes narrow. “Are you really.” There’s something about him that seems right, something in the way he speaks that has me wanting to like him. “I’m Adam Levi James, Outsider, and I don’t think I have anything to say to someone who hails from the Sky Kingdom. After all, this is the Temple of Godforsaken Wanderers, and the Sky Throne you claim to be heir to is an imagination of a diseased mind.”

His face goes blank. Their faces all go blank, just for a split second, and then all hell breaks loose again.

It’s over fast. I throw a Dispel with a single Mote of boosting at Lim, and the shield he raises in the bear’s way - Zidanya, of course the bear is Zidanya, somehow shapeshifted into a multi-ton beast - dissipates into mana. He reacts by taking a two-handed grip on his sword and it goes into Zidanya’s, the bear’s, chest to the hilt, but she’s moving afterwards and he isn’t.

The entire front line is dead in the first moment of the clash, Amber taking a gruesome wound to the face in exchange for killing her target and Knives lying on the ground with his hands pressed around what must be a wound in his leg, but Rei is still up and pushes forwards, cutting down one out of the three remaining targets.

“[Grand Aegis],” the barrier mage chokes out, and everyone is shoved backwards as the shield slams into being, a thing of triangles made of triangles in a vaguely near-spherical latticework dome.

“My dear, dear love.” The last remaining person breathes the words out. I’m already working on my next round of Motes to bring down the shield, and I see Tim shivering as he tries to do the same. “Ah, to have met in brighter days. [Return to the Source].”

The Skill isn’t a whisper or a ripple. It’s a scream, a torrent, and it takes everything I have not to black out in the split-second it’s active.

When my sight returns, when the blinding whiteness fades, there are six corpses at downstage center, and no sign of the two who were living.