As we drew closer to the wall of worldstriders, I quickly explained my plan to Sallia, Anise, and Felix via the friendship bracelets.

I couldn’t communicate very efficiently with the parents of the group, but I still managed to write that I had a plan in the letters of light I had created. The last thing we needed was people panicking.

The only blessing was that the horde behind us wasn’t moving that quickly anymore. They seemed to be more focused on making sure that we had nowhere to escape, rather than closing the distance between them and us.

That didn’t give us a ton of wriggle room, but it meant that I could ease up on my alteration essence consumption.

I checked the amount of alteration essence I had left, and tried not to grimace.

I was at a tenth of my maximum reserve. My three keywords, {Ocean}, {Duality}, and {Alteration} were working overtime to boost my regeneration and help replenish my reserves - but even so, the flight to this area had cost me a huge amount of essence.

Luckily, my plan didn’t require too much alteration essence - it was mostly reliant on Sallia, my absorption essence, and a little bit of alteration to handle any emergencies. At least, if everything went perfectly - which it almost certainly wouldn’t. 

I would have liked to be at full essence reserves, but it was impossible right now.

Since the enemies behind us were slowing down, I signaled for the group to also slow down a bit - there was no reason not to regenerate as much essence as I possibly could. But even though the horde pursuing us had slowed down, we still needed to maintain a good pace.

<Are you sure about this?> asked Sallia. <They’ve already seen me do a little bit of airborne combat.>

<I’m hoping they won’t have transmitted all of that information to the groups now chasing us,> I said. <We’re much faster than them, so the original group chasing us should be gone by now. It’s unknown how much information they’ve managed to transmit to the groups ahead, but I doubt they had time to explain everything. I hope.> If the worldstriders had given the new groups enough information, then we might all die here today.

<If you’re sure…> said Sallia, sounding uncertain. Then, her mental voice grew steadier. <I guess we don’t have any better options. All we need to do is push forward and do our best!.>

We continued running. Finally, we reached the blockade of creatures. The chasing groups hemmed us in, and they looked ready to crush us against the wall of other worldstriders.

It was time.

I sent a quick message to the parents of the group, with the message only containing a few words.

Close your eyes and cover them. Now. We gave the parents a few seconds to protect their eyes, and then we got started.

Anise was the first one to take action.

In moments, she threw out as many magic missiles as she could. They zoomed into the endless void around us, illuminating our surroundings like dozens of flickering candles.

I extended my alteration essence outwards, and felt myself touch each of them. I spent a moment closing my own eyes and covering them. If this wasn’t bright enough to totally ruin a regular human eyeball, it wouldn’t be good enough.

Then I tweaked the magic missiles, making them all detonate into as much light as I could. Despite the fact that my eyes were covered, I still saw a sickening flash of white, and prayed that I hadn’t just fried my retinas. I could always fix them later, but I didn’t have enough essence to heal them right now.

I blinked away tears, and a few moments later, confirmed that I could still see. My eyes were a little bit more blurry than before, which might or might not be permanent - but right now, I could still understand what was happening around us.

I grinned as I noticed that the worldstriders seemed stunned by the massive light show. Since their biology was so different from ours, it had been a bit of gamble whether light would work against them at all - but our light blasts had done exactly what I had hoped they would.

Next, Felix quickly created a large metal platform. It was incredibly thin, and would barely stand up against more than the lightest of impacts - but that was enough for our purposes. He quickly glued it to my umbrella with his essence, trying to create a small metal platform that wouldn’t easily detach from my weapon.

Sallia grabbed all of the slower members of our group using a burst of absorption-essence fueled speed, before dragging them all onto the platform, before using her essence to help reinforce the thin sheet of metal. It needed to be strong enough to hold everyone’s body weight, and right now it was barely capable of doing that. With Sallia’s help, it shouldn’t collapse, which was good enough for our purposes.

Finally, I stuffed as much absorption essence as I could into my umbrella, activating a function I had barely had a use for before now.

Flight.

My umbrella, now glued to a metal platform carrying our group, lifted into the air. While the worldstriders were certainly capable of flight, most of them were still situated near the ground to better catch us. It looked like we had lucked out.

A moment later, I realized that I had celebrated too soon.

Many of the stunned worldstriders were recovering from the bright flash of light far more quickly than expected. I had hoped to take the nearby worldstriders out for several seconds, perhaps even a few minutes. If we had gotten truly lucky, perhaps the creatures would have had some sort of biological weakness to light that would have rendered them all dead or seriously injured after the flash of light.

Instead, less than five seconds after I had nearly burnt my retinas to a crisp, the worldstriders were already shaking off the effects of the bright flash of light. Some of them were already turning towards us, and in a few seconds, we would probably all die.

Sallia, seeing the situation, sighed. We would need to fall back on our emergency plans. I quickly used my new skill to drag Sallia, Anise, and I into the sub-dimension that the worldstriders resided in. Felix remained in the regular layer of space, to keep steering the umbrella - but the three of us fell into the same layer of reality as the worldstriders. A moment later, Sallia caught us with a smaller disc of metal. I felt the laws of reality in this subspace start to tear at my body, but it was slow enough that I could last for a while.

<I declare an end to my swordsmanship journey,> Sallia said, sounding a bit regretful.

Her {Robe of the Wandering Swordsman} glowed with pure mana for a moment, before a great deal of it seeped into Sallia’s body.

At the exact same time, Anise pulled out her own sword, and then stabbed herself in the heart.

The final effect of {Sword of the Lost Pheonix’s Embers} activated, and Anise entered {Pheonix’s Last stand}.

A cocoon of flames formed around her body for a few seconds, burning even in this soundless, lightless void as though they were in the midst of the city.

<Gimme… couple seconds…> Anise slurred. Her voice sounded incredibly drowsy and unfocused, even through the mental communication of the bracelet, but she still sounded coherent.

At the same time, Sallia swung {Mirror’s Edge}. For one of the first times in this life, she had been forced to use one of the abilities of her sword.

A massive amount of stored-up sunlight and darkness erupted from her blade, almost as if it were an exploding star, and I blinked in surprise, shortly before my eyes completely collapsed.

I had thought that the burst of light Anise and I had created was bright, but compared to the light erupting from {Mirror’s Edge] and its light-storing ability, it was like the difference between a candle and the sun.

I knew with certainty that my eyes were totally ruined, but subconsciously, I reached for all three of my rune abilities again.

The strange, out-of-body mental experience returned in full force, but without any hope at all of seeing through my regular eyes, and in the middle of this sub-dimension, the experience felt… different.

I felt like I had touched on something I had never been fully aware of before. It was like I was splitting apart and coming back together, again and again. I had always hated the way my dimensional abilities, when layered on top of each other, made me feel like I was having a warped, out of body experience. But this time, I realized that I wasn’t completely losing who I was.

It was just that I was more than before. The original me was like one drop of water in a vast, endless ocean. This ocean transcended space, time, and reality itself.

It wasn’t the ocean of souls - at least, not entirely. It felt like I had latched onto a very small fragment of the underlying mechanics of the ocean of souls. Not very much of it, but a tiny, tiny little speck of it. Like a mote of light in an endless sea of stars.

I barely had time to process this information as my real eyeballs collapsed under Sallia’s friendly fire, right before Anise finished activating her {Phoenix's Last Stand}. The cocoon of flames disappeared around her body just as I started watching the entire battlefield again.

Anise’s eyes flickered red and orange, like someone had implanted tiny suns inside of them. Broken, mangled feathers of flame flickered in and out of existence around her body, creating a haze of heat that burned even in this world with no fire.

Anise took one look at my ruined eyes, and then gazed at the horde of worldstriders that was already starting to surge towards us.

The three of us prepared to hold off the horde.

acaswell

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