Broken Lands

Sophia cursed softly as the hawk slipped out of the way of her Mana Spike. It was entirely too agile and she didn’t have anyone able to hold it in place on this delve. She’d figured out a way to mislead the bird a couple delves back, but she hadn’t actually tried the new method yet.

Sophia tugged on the mana around her. It swirled around a new Mana Spike as she formed it near the eye of the gigantic Wind-touched Rough-Legged Hawk that served as the final boss for the Cliff Dungeon’s first area, the top of the cliff. If it saw the attack, it would dodge out of the way again, but the swirls in the ambient mana should conceal the nearly invisible missile.

This time, it worked. The hawk didn’t see the Mana Spike flying towards it until it was too late. It crunched into the bird’s eye, exactly the way it was supposed to. She watched the hawk fall bonelessly to the cliff top, grateful that she didn’t have to try to do it again. Managing atmospheric mana at the same time as she cast a spell through a Path Skill was not easy; in fact, it was one of the hardest things to master she’d ever tried.

Sophia glanced around. The Tier Zero she was escorting through the Tier One dungeon was still holding off some of the smaller birds that accompanied the Wind-touched Rough-Legged Hawk. She only saw three, now, which meant that he and the three offworlders must have dealt with the other seven.

Why was he fighting alone? Sophia frowned and looked around as she started to manifest a Mana Spike to kill another of the small birds, now that the great hawk couldn’t bat it out of the way with its wind magic. Three bird bodies littered the floor near where the Tier Zero fought; all three had injuries that could easily have been from his sword. If he’d managed six of them for even a short time on his own, Sophia was impressed. She wasn’t certain she could have done the same at Tier Zero, at least not with the well-made but mundane equipment that was all he had.

Sophia killed one of the last three birds as it flew at her charge, but her attention wasn’t as focused on the fight as it should have been. Where were the others?

Her eyes caught on a bird corpse, then a second. The trail led away from the fight. Sophia shook her head with a frown and turned back as the rookie skillfully smacked one of the small hawks out of the way. Another Mana Spike easily handled the last.

“I know I said it earlier, but I still want a spar after we’re done here,” Sophia proposed. “You’ve clearly had a lot of training and practice. What happened to the others?”

“They ran,” The Tier Zero said as he looked in the direction where Sophia saw the dead birds. “It wasn’t fear. It was like it was planned; they waited until I was distracted by the birds and you were busy with the big one. They disappeared that way, through a wall.”

Sophia glanced at the gigantic hawk for a moment. If she wanted to follow quickly, she wouldn’t be able to harvest any of the bird’s feathers.

It was worth it to Sophia. She wanted to know what they were up to more than she cared about the feathers. She was already being paid for the delve, anyway, and the feathers should have been split five ways. “If we go after them, we won’t get the feathers,” she warned, “but I want to know what they think they’re doing.”

He took a moment to clean his sword, then sheathed it to get it out of the way. “A choice. Sure, why not? Sounds interesting.”

Sophia frowned at him, but his agreement was clear. She turned and hurried after the missing mercenaries. The trail of bird bodies led to the boss arena’s exit; it looked like they’d waited there for Sophia to kill the boss, then hurried through while the small birds were handled. That was possible, but it was pretty rude.

The exit was a door; they’d clearly closed it after they went through. Sophia pushed on it, but it stopped after less than an inch of travel. That wasn’t right; they had to have blocked it. Sophia wasn’t about to let them steal the end rewards; they weren’t great for the Cliff Dungeon but they did exist. She put her shoulder to it and slammed it open.

A startled “Oof!” from the other side of the door told her that the blockage was one of the three unscrupulous delvers. That was too bad for him.

Surprisingly, they hadn’t opened the reward chest yet. Sophia paused for a moment; had she guessed wrong about what they were up to?

A glance around the room told her it was worse than she’d realized: the leader of the three foreigners had already removed the instance core from its pedestal.

“Don’t you dare break that,” Sophia threatened him. “We need all the low-Tier instances we can get.” He should already know that; it wasn’t allowed without prior approval on any planet that properly managed its dungeons, and they’d arrived with cards from the off-planet Mercenaries’ Guild.

The leader snorted. “Who’s to stop me? A Tier Zero and a soft mixedblood mage? You’re getting the blame for this; the only question you need to ask yourself is if you’re going to live to accept it or not.”

There were so many things wrong with that statement that Sophia actually stopped for a moment. She was a mage, yes, and she was a half-dragon, so mixedblood wasn’t wrong but it was definitely an insulting way to put it. There was no way she was going to take the blame, however, and she was certain she could win if it came to a fight, even with three of them against her. She wasn’t soft. No matter what she looked like.

“What, do you think being human will help you at the Adventurer’s Guild?” Sophia snorted as she shoved the door into the mercenary behind it again. “They don’t know you and they do know me. We don’t judge that way.”

Sophia didn’t mention her father’s position with the Adventurer’s Guild. The mere fact that they were so insistent on calling her a mixedblood as if that mattered meant they wouldn’t believe it.

“Maybe not,” the leader grinned wolfishly at Sophia. “But no one will contradict us.”

A hand gesture from the leader brought Sophia’s attention back to the third bandit, the one that wasn’t on the other side of the door. A lightning bolt darted towards her at far less than the speed of lightning; Sophia hastily dispelled it with her Spellbreaking Skill. Little fragments of false-lightning jittered in the air; some sparked the distance to Sophia and made the arm she’d unconsciously extended to stop the spell cramp painfully.

Before she could recover, something hit her from behind.

No, someone. Sophia twisted as she fell and discovered that the push came from the rookie she’d been escorting as he pushed her out of the way of a sword blow from the one she’d shoved out of the way with the door.

He was close and dangerous to both her and the man she needed to protect, the man who’d just been in the right place to protect her. She yanked a talisman off her belt; it was the only one she had on her, but this was the right moment to use it. It was far more powerful than a Tier Two like her could afford on her own merit, but her family insisted she carry some precautions.

She tossed it to the floor and carefully told the mana that erupted from the shattered runic talisman that it was to protect two people: her and the rookie. A shimmering translucent dome quickly expanded from the point where the talisman shattered. It parted cleanly around them, but when it reached the nearest mercenary, it knocked him backwards. An arrow from the leader and another lightning bolt from the mercenaries’ mage impacted on the surface moments later with no effect.

Sophia relaxed a little. The talisman was supposed to protect against everything her father could think of, while allowing her to protect the rest of her team and attack from the inside. This wasn’t what it was for; it was supposed to protect her and her group from monsters if something went badly wrong. She hadn’t used one in years, but neither its age nor its planned purpose meant it wouldn’t work here.

Sophia turned to the rookie. “Do you have magic? Any way to attack at a distance?”

Another spell splashed harmlessly on the protection, then the nearby swordsman threw everything he had into a haymaker aimed at the shimmering bubble. It didn’t even make any sound.

The Tier Zero shook his head. “No, not yet. I haven’t figured out which way to go yet. I definitely want magic.”

Sophia nodded and half turned away, towards the mage. He was the most likely one to have a way to break the bubble; it wasn’t made to prevent counterspelling. “Stick with the sword for now. You’re good with it, and a Path that lets you channel mana through your sword is a good first step. After that, you can head into a more mana-focused Path, especially if you practice with mana. I can help you with that if you want after we’re out of here.”

Another lightning bolt showed Sophia that if he did know how to counter spells, he hadn’t thought of it yet. He probably assumed the bubble was weaker than it was; anything a Tier Two could normally afford would probably be about to fall from their attack.

Sophia didn’t wait for him to figure it out. She could cast through the bubble, and he was not paying any attention behind himself. She formed a Mana Spike above and behind his head, then slammed it into his skull before he could react to the mercenary leader’s shout of warning.

Sophia didn’t have time to make another Mana Spike before the leader pulled a metal-lined cloth bag out of a pocket and used it to crush the crystalline shard that anchored the dungeon instance. Unlike the mage, he must have realized that he had a way to cancel Sophia’s protection: it would evaporate when the instance did.

Normally, there was time to escape the collapse and collect additional rewards, but whatever the item he used to destroy the shard was, it clearly also removed that time. Sophia suspected that it also forced the additional rewards to form in the pocket created by the crushed instance core; in fact, they might even be the rewards he was after. It was a dirty device and Sophia already hated it even before the world seemed to warp around them.

Sophia felt the dungeon’s Essence whirl around her for a moment. She braced herself for the return to the outside world, but before that could happen, she felt something yank her sideways. She couldn’t describe it any better than that; it was sideways to reality.

The world seemed to glitch for a moment. When it settled, she was looking at everything and nothing, all at the same time. Monsters and people flew past her, devils and saints and sinners and voices and colors and smells and taste all blending into a whole that made complete sense and no sense at all. She steeled herself; she recognized the feeling. She was in the Origin; everything she saw and felt, heard and smelled, sensed in any way, was both true and false. It was a could-be, not something that was.

A couple of blinks later, she floated in a sea of darkness, shielded from the insanity that was the Origin by the simple fact that she was a child of the Origin; it was only her surprise that made it overwhelming for even a moment. It wouldn’t harm her, though it might harm others.

The thought made her glance around, seeing without using her eyes. The mercenaries seemed to be trailing behind her, but they were growing farther and farther away as they struggled. A closer presence felt like the Cliff Dungeon’s essence; it was snuggled up against her as if it was hiding. On the other side of her, the rookie floated. He screamed silently; she didn’t know if it was in fear or joy, but in any case he certainly shouldn’t watch the Origin.

Sophia moved to envelop the man in her arms, to hide his eyes and ears from the chaos that surrounded them. He didn’t resist.

It was forever and no time at all later when reality seemed to tear again and Sophia found herself falling alone in darkness.