One strand of Valen's probing consciousness brushed against something that was not stone, not root, not mana.
His tracing spell had been following the root network like a patient hunter, mapping branches and intersections through Iris's tireless processing. Thin lines of perception extended through the labyrinth, searching for the doppelganger's passing.
Then one of those lines crossed an unseen threshold.
For an instant, Valen felt as if he had dipped his thoughts into ice-cold water.
Then the strand died.
Not snapped, not cut—killed. Whatever it had touched snuffed it out, and the death spread along the spell like rot.
"Master," Iris said sharply. "One of the search threads just—"
Another strand touched the same illusory point.
It died as well.
The sensation that flowed back along the connection was nauseating. Not pain, not backlash, but a heavy, suffocating weight. As if something on the other side of that barrier belonged to a place where thoughts were not meant to reach.
Valen cut the spell.
Too late to save it. The decay was already racing along the remaining branches, unraveling the structure faster than he and Iris could isolate segments.
For a heartbeat, the world around him dimmed.
Then the spell collapsed entirely, leaving only the faint echo of that foreign chill in his mind.
He exhaled steadily.
"The Dawn Forest is not that simple," Valen said quietly.
Dust still clung to his cloak from the earlier clash. The cracked stone beneath his boots trembled faintly with distant impacts from the surface battle above.
"This threat," he continued, "is beyond my current capabilities."
Iris did not argue.
"Master," she said instead, voice tighter than usual, "the entire search matrix is dying. If we insist on rebuilding here, we risk exposing more of your mind. We should withdraw."
Prudent.
Valen crouched, pressing his palm to the fractured stone.
"Agreed," he said. "We are leaving."
He cast the familiar spell.
The column that surged up beneath his feet was narrower than the earlier ones he had used with Amber—space was tighter here—but the principle was the same. Stone responded to his will, coalescing into a thick pillar that launched him toward a crack in the cavern ceiling, the path carved by Raylan's earlier fall and ascent.
Rock scraped against his boots and shoulders as he passed through the ragged opening. He landed on the cliff and repeated the spell again, moving skillfully through tight pockets.
He emerged into air that tasted of blood, smoke, and Chaos.
The battlefield roared around him. The sky above remained fractured, the great eye still half-pressed against reality, its gaze now narrowed, more watchful than probing.
Valen did not look at it directly.
"Iris," he said, straightening. "Expand the search network. Find Amber."
"Already doing so," she replied. Relief colored her tone; surface-level tracing was safer, simpler. "Using line of sight from high points and known mana signatures. Give me three breaths… there. Eighty degrees to your left, two hundred and thirty paces. She is engaged with a mixed group of students and Blights. Her mana reserves are critically low. Physical strain indicators are high."
Valen was already moving.
The ground blurred under his boots. He did not use full earth propulsion this time; the terrain was crowded with retreating and advancing fighters, and throwing himself through that chaos at full speed would have been an invitation to collision. Instead, he used subtle ridges of raised stone to lengthen his stride, each step angled to carry him faster.
The sounds of clashing steel and snarling beasts grew clearer.
He crested a small rise and saw her.
Amber stood at the edge of a beleaguered knot of Academy students. Her saber arm still moved with precision, golden mana flickering weakly along the blade, but her left leg dragged with each step. Blood darkened the tear in her leggings at the thigh, and more cuts marked her arms and side.
Her aura burned low, like a lamp on its last oil.
She pushed forward anyway, intercepting a lunging Blight before it could reach a student whose mana reserves were too low to complete his spell in time.
Her saber carved a calculated line through the creature's neck. The follow-through nearly made her stumble.
Valen crossed the remaining distance without announcing himself.
He slipped behind her in the moment after her latest strike, one arm wrapping around her waist, the other bracing her shoulder to steady her.
Amber tensed for half a heartbeat, instinctively ready to strike whoever had caught her from behind.
Then she recognized the presence.
Her weight sagged back against his chest with a low, breathless exhale.
"You took your time," she murmured.
Valen did not answer that.
He closed his eyes briefly, focusing inward. The thin link between their Spirits—the Spirit Channel he had woven once before—was reforged again.
Dark blue light, visible only in the inner world, flared along the channel as he poured mana through it. The connection hummed with power as endless mana flowed through the link into her core.
Amber shuddered.
Her aura swelled as mana flooded back into her empty channels, first as a trickle, then as a surging stream. Color returned to her face. The tremor in her sword hand steadied.
She did not waste the gift.
Her free hand clenched, summoning the familiar pattern of a warrior's self-reinforcement spell. The technique flared to full potency for the first time since the battle began, drawing hungrily on the mana Valen supplied.
Golden light ran along her limbs, knitting torn flesh, sealing deep muscle cuts, flushing poison traces from her blood. The wound in her thigh closed from within, leaving only a faint line under the drying blood.
Her breathing eased.
"I should not have taken so long," Valen said quietly beside her ear.
Amber snorted, the sound weak but genuine.
"Did you succeed?" she asked.
"In my main goal, yes," he said.
"And the 'bad one' you mentioned?" she pressed.
"He escaped," Valen said. "For now."
Amber huffed out a low, rough laugh.
"That is quite heroic," she said. "Saving friends from shadows. Saving the beauty in the nick of time."
"Hearing that from you," Valen replied, "it almost feels worth the effort."
She tilted her head just enough to glance back at him, eyes narrowed.
"Since when did you learn to sweet-talk?" she asked.
"Since I realized it keeps you from charging on a broken leg," he said.
Amber's lips curved.
She pushed off his chest, testing her weight on her healed leg. It held.
A roar cut across their brief calm.
A Blight, larger than most, barreled toward them through the thinning line—some twisted cross between a bear and an insect, plates of bone overlapping across its back and shoulders. Its maw gaped wide, spewing a cloud of greenish vapor that corroded the grass in its path.
Poison breath.
Valen's gaze flicked to the forest floor around them.
Roots crisscrossed the ground here—some belonging to ordinary trees, others to deeper networks tied to the forest's older, stranger structures.
He reached down with his will and grabbed one.
Mana flowed into the living wood.
A mass of roots erupted from the soil in front of the charging Blight, weaving themselves into a barbed cage in the space of a heartbeat. The beast slammed into the tangle at full speed. Thorned tendrils punched through its flesh, anchoring deep.
The Blight screamed and thrashed, poison cloud billowing uselessly inside its new prison.
Valen clenched his fist.
The roots tightened.
There was a series of wet cracks as bones snapped and plates of bone-armor shattered. The cage constricted further, strangling movement, then dragged its struggling prize down into the soil.
The ground swallowed both.
After a moment, something small and hard was spat back up—a glimmering shard of condensed, twisted energy that tumbled onto the blood-streaked grass.
A Chaos Crystal.
Amber watched as Valen flicked a finger, sending a small slab of stone up from the earth to intercept the remaining wisps of poison before they reached their position.
"You have learned a diverse array of spells," she said.
"I just like spells," he said. "They are reliable."
"Stay near me," Amber said, saber rising again as more lesser demons circled. "We will complete the mission in no time."
"That is the plan," Valen said.
She made a small sound in her throat that might have been agreement.
***
The battlefield shifted.
Far above them, at the center of the ritual's ruined site where the original circle had burned itself into the mountain's flesh, something stirred.
The man who had led the ritual stood within a crater of scorched stone and dried blood.
He had once been merely human—albeit a powerful Rank 6, already standing on a peak few ever reached. Now his body trembled as purified Chaos Energy poured into him from the still-glowing remnants of the ritual.
The circle's lines no longer held form. They had broken, burned, shattered under the strain. But the conduit they had opened remained for a little longer, thin and flickering.
The ritualist drank from it.
His mana core, already swollen near its limit, cracked and expanded under the influx. Old scars along his arms and neck lit from within, channels forced wider to carry more power than they had ever been meant to bear.
Pain should have broken him.
He laughed instead.
Raw sound tore from his throat—a jagged, ecstatic noise that had little to do with reason.
"At last," he shouted to the broken sky. "At last!"
The Chaos Energy he absorbed was no longer wild. The ritual had strained it, refined it, stripped it of some of its madness. What reached him now was a purer tide, more compatible with mortal structures.
Enough.
His aura surged.
Rank 6 boundaries shattered as his core was forced open to a new threshold. Mana flooded into the newly carved space, condensing into a denser, heavier presence.
Rank 7.
For a moment, the world around him seemed to tilt.
His eyes blazed with power—and something else. Hairline fractures spiderwebbed through his irises, small flecks of unnatural color that did not belong to any human bloodline. His mana roared, but beneath it ran a faint, discordant note.
His mind and core bore the mark of what he had consumed.
He rose into the air, lifted by raw force, cloak snapping in the turbulent field around him. Lightning-like arcs of compressed mana danced across his arms and shoulders.
He threw his head back and laughed again.
"Do you see?" he yelled at the cracked sky. "Do you see, all of you who doubted? I stand at your level now! No—beyond!"
His gaze swept downward over the battlefield.
Adventurers. Academy instructors. High-ranked fighters. Each one carried a core, refined over years of cultivation.
He wanted them.
"If I take your crystals," he muttered, more to himself than to any audience, "if I pack your lives into my core, this power will not slip away. I will not crack. I will not fall."
He raised a hand, forming a spear of condensed, refined Chaos-tinged mana, aimed at one of the forward commanders.
The ground interrupted him.
The earth shuddered in a new rhythm, different from the tremors of combat. A deep, resonant pulse rose from far beneath Dawn Forest, old and slow.
Cracks that had already been torn open by the ritual widened.
From those depths, a chill rose.
Death.
Thick, murky death aura poured from the widening fissures, rolling out across the battlefield like a black fog that did not obscure sight but chilled souls. The temperature dropped. Breath misted in the air despite the season.
The weather turned.
Clouds already heavy with invasion's pressure darkened further, thickening into a dense ceiling that choked off daylight. What little light remained dimmed until the world resembled late dusk instead of day.
All across the field, fighters paused.
Some shivered.
Aelindra's forest spirits slowed, green eyes narrowing as they felt the new presence rising from the depths. Adventurers shifted stances unconsciously, as if their souls could slip out any moment.
On the slope where Valen and Amber stood, even the Blights hesitated, some snarling uncertainly, instincts clashing between demonic command and self-preservation.
From the largest crack near the ritual's core, something vast began to climb.
Bone.
A spectral skeletal hand, large enough to wrap around a house, emerged from the depths as if pushing through thick water. Its bones were translucent and pale, edges blurred like mist. Death aura clung to it in thick, dripping coils.
It rose, fingers spread.
Then it closed around the newly advanced Rank 7.
The man jerked as the hand's grip locked around his aura rather than his flesh. The spectral fingers sank into his soul-light, not his skin.
He snarled.
"You dare—"
He flared his newfound power.
Mana exploded outward from his core in a violent pulse. The spectral hand shuddered. One of its finger-bones fractured under the strain, shards of ghostly matter flaking away.
With a roar, he tore one arm free, then the other.
"Know your place," he spat, and hurled a spear of compressed, refined energy downward. It burned through the spectral wrist, severing the hand from whatever lay below.
The detached limb dissolved into drifting motes of dark light.
On the ground, reactions were immediate.
"What now?" someone shouted near the guild lines.
"A lich?" another voice whispered, horrified. "There is a lich under the forest?"
Instructor Aelindra's face had gone very still.
"A sealed one," she said under her breath. "Or it would not bother with a single soul."
Her forest spirits raised their arms defensively as more cracks opened, death aura rising in choking waves.
Valen watched the spectral hand shatter from his position on the slope.
Not a full attack. A test.
The thing below is chained, he thought. But not sleeping.
Before the Rank 7 could reclaim his earlier triumph, more hands emerged.
A second skeletal hand pushed up from another fissure, this one thinner but with longer fingers. A third followed from yet another crack, then a fourth. Each bore the same ghostly bone, the same clinging death aura.
They did not reach for anyone else.
All four grasped for the man who had just broken one.
He blasted two apart. The third reached through his defenses and closed around his chest. The fourth brushed his head, and for a heartbeat, his eyes rolled back as if something was tugging at the very core of him.
His body arched.
His soul-light flickered, half-drawn from his flesh.
He screamed—not in triumph this time, but in a raw, dragged-out sound that had little of language left.
Then the sky changed.
The dim dusk overhead shifted from miserable grey to a deep, suffused orange, as if some enormous lantern had been lit above the clouds.