“Is that really the best monster Tlara has left?” Daniel asked, a little aggrieved, as the group traveled at a half run through ancient hallways. Stealth was a lesser concern now that they knew someone at least partially sentient was hunting them. “I know she has a shock runner in there.”

  “I think she likes fliers more,” Willow called back, having a harder time staying close to Tlara’s new host. “But the iridescent whitespring moves too unpredictably by itself to stay near me. We can’t summon another for an hour, so there’s no point arguing.”

  The monster that had once been the bane of Daniel’s existence during the first few days in Roost’s Peak flew above them, large enough that its back talons could poke them in the head if they weren’t careful. He wouldn’t have chosen the spark pterodactyl if he were Tlara since it was still a little too big for the area, weaker than other options which would pose a risk for Willow, and it was a stupid gatekeeping reptile bird. Still, he couldn’t give Tlara too much grief considering what had happened to her favorite monster.

  That, and they were racing against the clock before getting stuck here. Soraso would look for them, surely, but that would increase the threats spawning to face them. He may also just not find them in the maze these ruins were proving to be.

  An empty maze, so far. Despite her avowed ambivalence to loot, Shuni had watched along with the rest of them when they’d paused to open the first real door they’d come across, only to find an empty room. Time or other factors had gotten here first, it seemed. The doors were practically the only thing left, and the almost bank vault-like mechanisms on them to open them just added to the eventual disappointment. At least in Daniel’s case.

  They’d yet to find another monster after half an hour of moving, and Daniel both did and did not hope that the only fixed astral rift in the area was behind them. That wasn’t to say they’d covered a lot of ground, as they continually had to turn and try to find ways back toward the exit while staying close to the rail line.

  Khare was proving invaluable, understanding the simple system Daniel proposed after a few tries. They kept drawing one line when they were heading in the right direction, added one in parallel every time they turned right, and subtracted one for every left turn. It helped to avoid them getting lost, as even enhanced minds could be misplaced when the surroundings were otherwise featureless. Daniel had the map on his phone constantly recording new areas of course, but it wouldn’t help if someone got separated from the main group. His other locational tool, the pathfinder, failed utterly in its moment to shine as the one linked to his room in Pinion’s Point was just doing the perpetually spinning thing.

  Khiat, as expected, had things the worst. She’d worked out sort of a stumbling gait akin to crouch running where she extended and retracted her legs one at a time to help improve her range of motion, but she was still the slowest of them. Daniel had almost wanted to put her in Khare, but wanted everyone out at all times in case a monster did find them.

  It could happen at any moment. Shuni was keeping a brave face, but her head was moving far too quickly to be called relaxed. Relegating the task of scouting to her felt odd now that the pressure was on. Hunter’s senses, and then his own, had always been the backbone of the team’s detection capabilities. Now that monsters that could subvert traditional detection were on the field, things got more difficult.

  At least they were on somewhat equal footing. The weight Divination Aegis was pulling hadn’t occurred to Daniel until the corrupted avianoid had seemingly responded to them getting physically spotted. He kept it shrouding the team by default and had added Sigron to the white list as a matter of course. That would have been a problem considering they had a Fate as an ally, but Silora could still target him with Far Speech even if she couldn’t find him. If it was keeping them from facing every nearby spawning monster, that was another win for the oddly prescient Soraso… and another reason to avoid using Beast Mode.

  He was starting to miss the self-confidence he got while changed. Fearless didn’t make him heedlessly careless, that was the oath bond and the rage power to a lesser extent now that he had a handle on it, but it might stop him from holding his breath each time they hit an intersection.

  Needing to settle his nerves, Daniel decided to call for an ammo check. “How is everyone on mana?”

  It was a more complicated process to get answers from his team than he’d imagined most leaders would face. Sigron and Khare’s nonverbal emoting, an unbothered shrug and a thumbs up respectively, were at least better than Tlara ignoring him. Willow and Khiat had used some against the crawlers, though Shuni’s answer was the most surprising.

  “I’m at full.” There was an odd inflection to her voice, mild surprise tainted by how alert she currently was. It was as if a radar operator had noticed a shiny bug on their display before flicking it off. He could only think of a few things that would be surprising about that and tasked Quick Mind with evaluating his mana supply. He hadn’t nailed down empiric usage costs on all of his abilities, some had scaling mana costs or other factors that would throw off nice clean numbers, but he could estimate off of what he’d already done today.

  The count was off. What mana he’d reserved after heightening features was consistent with past use, but the remaining free mana was slightly higher than it should have been. Is my Spoke giving me a trickle of recharge? It has an insane amount of mana stored in it, and this difference is subtle enough that… no, that’s not it.

  A 1 or 2% per day recharge was something he could overlook usually, but Daniel had truly run empty several times, including after Hammer resealed his Spoke. “We’re slowly regaining mana in these ruins.”

  “Are you sure?” Daniel just nodded at Willow’s question, though the Spirit Master didn’t seem too convinced.

  She hasn’t used too much, and maybe the mana regen scales to level? Her seventh sense should be weaker than mine too. “It’s nothing dramatic, but it’s there. I wonder if there’s some kind of relic saturating this entire place with a weak mana regen field.”

  “Could be that purple stuff too,” Shuni muttered out of the side of her mouth, still focused. “Couldn’t tell what that was.”

  “Lograve would know,” Daniel sighed, missing the Arcanist. “At least he could sense if it was putting off mana.”

  “Light,” Khare called out suddenly, arresting the two lines they were drawing and pointing with one of the paintbrushes now caked in multiple colors as they began to run out of individual ones.

  His best guess as to their immediate area was that it was some form of low-income housing block. This being the bottom of the ruins made a kind of sense, considering how massive the footprint of this place was. With some form of high speed rail, servants quarters the size of a small city could easily accommodate whatever was above this floor. It fit with them not having found any stairs up yet, and the general monotony of the area so far, but that made the mural an odd touch to add. Octyrrum society was elitist, one look at how Aurus or Aughal could tell you that. It didn’t mesh with what he would expect from a New York subway equivalent, not that he’d ever physically been to the original.

  Still, this was a preserved slice of life before the Collapse, whether the first natural disaster or the artificial ones since. Things could have changed. Either way, Khare’s callout brought attention to the first real change up in their surroundings since leaving the tunnel. That a faint purple light was spilling from one of the paths of the latest intersection was only one sign of that.

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  Forced further away from the tunnel than they’d gone before due to the layout of the ruins, Daniel and his team found themselves in front of a wide hallway several other passageways fed into like smaller contributories merging into a river. Like the previous astral rift this was against the direction they wanted to go, but this time Daniel could justify going there.

  “All these small hallways keep spiraling around,” he observed, keeping to the low voice he’d been nearly constantly using. “It’s like they built neighborhoods against the transport line with most of the inner connections farther from it than where we are. Could have been for security, since even we’d have a hard time digging through these walls.”

  “If these monsters are intelligent, or have people guiding them, won’t they have guards for the rifts?” Willow asked. To her credit, she hadn’t shown any signs of breaking from either almost getting run over or being trapped in the ruins, though there was hesitation in her voice now that they might be consciously moving toward danger. Not only was Tlara’s new form weaker, it was smaller, and the effective range of her damage absorption bond power had been more than halved.

  “I’ll scout ahead, see what’s up there,” Shuni said, though it came out more as something she would do rather than an implied offer.

  Daniel looked down the wide hallway, only able to make out the distant, low light and nothing else. “Are you sure? If you get caught, I don’t know if we can support you quickly.”

  “‘If I get caught?’” Shuni sounded incredulous as she turned around, fixing him with a hooded head tilt. “You’ve only ever seen as much of me as I’ve let you. Since this place is being so generous with mana, I might as well put mine to use.” Saying that, she vanished completely from every single sense he had.

  Damn, Daniel thought. My Spoke needs to give me more Rogue powers.

  …

  While Daniel was still hesitant to make entirely new walls appear from nothing with his magical powers due to mana concerns, passive regen not-withstanding, throwing up a few trip lines was well within reason as far as conservative defense measures went. While on the move it wouldn’t help against stealthed enemies, but the crawlers were too big, even in this hallway, to navigate around the mini Spinner-web they’d thrown up in front of and behind them.

  There was enough time for him to enchant a few ammunition pieces while they waited, though he kept the blast bow out and against the wall just in case trouble found them before Shuni got back. No one bothered him, but the rest of the team didn’t keep silent either.

  “You fought with Daniel in the Thormundz, right?” Willow asked Sigron. They’d done quick introductions of course, and Daniel had told them about Sigron, but there’d been little time for anything else since Soraso had wanted them in the ruins as soon as the Knight was ready. “Khare and Tlara too, if I remember correctly.”

  Sigron’s eyes moved behind the faceplate of his helmet to where Tlara was suspended on one of their trap wires, and nodded. Even with some kind of remnant of his curse keeping him mute, he’d had practice getting by on expressions alone. The fact that those in the know paid closer attention to his nonverbal cues, and that this individual in particular had traveled with Khare for some time, helped.

  Not that Willow was jumping to answer the implied interest. “My mother killed her.” Sigron took a half step back, a half sound escaping him. “She- it was a nightmare. I’d always wanted to find monsters that held spirits in them, like Wisp, to see if they could be convinced to help us against the Crest.” She held out a hand expectantly, but the spirit refused the call. Sighing, Willow closed her hand. “Some form of cursed weapon killed her when I was young, and it brought her back as this… thing. She’d played off my beliefs, all the while trying to destroy our home. When I told her my sister had dominated a monster with a spirit, Spinner, you’ll meet her back in Pinion’s Point, she was interested. I think it was only because she needed part of her to make more of those weapons. Tlara objected, obviously, and, well.” Willow slouched, and Daniel could tell Tlara was pretending not to listen. “We have her body in a bag of holding. There’s no magic we know of that heals dead things, but the hope is the rift Shuni is scouting can help. If it can spawn monsters outright, that isn’t too hard to believe, is it?”

  “You thought you were doing the right thing,” Khiat called over from where she’d taken a seated position to relax, head just under the ceiling’s height. Her bow also had to be propped at an angle to fit against the wall. “When I chose to get my class, I thought I was doing what the Octyrrum’s wanted. My family, the village, they were all so excited. It was everything I wanted, but it all went so wrong.” She shuddered for just a moment before shaking her head. “But even though I needed so much help to get better, I never stopped trying to do the right thing. You haven’t either, you just found out someone was lying to you.”

  “That doesn’t change what happened. But, the worst thing? I still loved her.” There was a sheen to Willow’s eyes now. “Twisted, cursed, evil, it was still her. I’m not saying she shouldn’t have been stopped,” she added, glancing at Daniel who averted his own eyes under her watery gaze. “But I lost my entire family that day. I didn’t know Tlara was alive until we found her, and with the state she’s in?”

  Daniel had seen Willow like this before, though not in front of so many people. She was a politician’s daughter and could reign in her grief, normally. In the impromptu camp they’d set up, however, they were all taking a moment to decompress after being on edge.

  Before he could decide on whether to use Reassure or not, Sigron placed a hand on her shoulder. It was a fairly innocuous gesture as a whole, made less presumptuous by his nature, but rapidly grew alarming. Two spectral hands formed around his, solidifying into an illusion that looked practically real until where it faded around the wrists. Both hands were initially human and elderly, from different people it seemed, but when they joined Sigron’s on Willow’s shoulder they changed.

  Mind on his own support power, Daniel wasn’t immediately inclined to think of this as some kind of Kahvin-brand hostility. He didn’t interfere, but watched as the two hands grew leathery, turning into the kind an avianoid would have. As this happened, a third appeared from the same nowhere the others had and, reluctantly, joined the tangle that had formed. Everyone, including Sigron himself if his surprised intake of breath wasn’t feigned, had been startled by what had happened, but Tlara fell off her rope as she saw the third hand appear.

  Sigron let go a few seconds after the last hand had joined, the illusory ones disappearing soon after. There was silence after that. Daniel didn’t know what to make of it himself. Most of the powers he’d seen were cleaner, the majority not having any extraneous visual effect. The ones he knew from Lograve’s encyclopedias didn’t account for this, certainly. One of the restricted ones awakened post-Collapse? We will start to see more of them as time goes on, and not just from Willow. “Are you ok?” He asked eventually as Willow rubbed at her shoulder.

  “I think… was that real?” she asked, redirecting her attention to Sigron who was now standing farther away self-consciously, out of reach. The Knight returned with a careful nod, hesitant at first but more assured toward the end. “Thank you,” Willow said to him, a catch in her voice. “I don’t know if it makes me feel better or worse, but knowing, at least I know.”

  Seeing Khare angle in on Sigron, perhaps to investigate the sighting of a novel way to communicate, Daniel decided to act on his curiosity as well. “What was that?”

  “I felt them. My parents, Tlara.” There was a half laugh at the end, as if the joke had been on her. “Their love. I knew my sister’s heart wasn’t completely black, no matter how bitter it seems her affection is for me.”

  Daniel immediately realized he’d asked after the wrong person of the pair, a crushing sense of homesickness hitting him. “Was that what you meant by being glad to know the truth?”

  “No,” Willow answered, strange melancholy on her beak. “My father, it was like he was holding me up. Trying as best he could to make a better future for me. I was never certain if his confession had been true, but I believe you now.” He could tell by how she looked away that that hadn’t been the true revelation. “But my mother? Her hand was strong. It held me as tightly as his did, but with her, it was like she was refusing to let go of something. Not because I was her daughter, but because I was hers. A possession she wasn’t willing to lose.”

  Fuck. Maybe I don’t want to have that power used on me. “I’m sorry.”

  “It hurts. It makes me wonder if she ever loved me. But I have my sister, and my father’s memory.” Her talons scratched the grayer material the housing section was made from but failed to leave a mark. “I just wish I wasn’t here right now.”

  “We’re getting out of here, and if you don’t want to come back-“

  “I have to, don’t I?” she cut him off. “For the same reasons you do.”

  Daniel couldn’t help but continue to be bewildered that Willow and Tlara had grown up together. “Maybe we should ask Sigron to use that power on Tlara. I’m sure it would do her so good to have a little empathy once in a while.”

  “No!” Willow denied sharply, before her voice softened. “No. Whatever that was, it shouldn’t be used frivolously, or by someone that doesn’t want it. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel sighed, “You’re right. Let’s just focus on getting out of here.”

  “‘Bout that,” Shuni said, appearing in the middle of their staked out hallway camp. “We may have a problem.” As he prepared for more bad news, Daniel couldn’t help but notice she’d gotten in without disturbing a single one of their tripwires.