Magical Soul Parade

Finn snapped his eyes open immediately. Right in front of them, a section of the slowly encroaching chaos deformed and distorted wildly. It vibrated and thrummed with energy, giving Finn a very familiar feeling of wrongness.

"A breach is forming here!" Althea gasped and glanced at Finn with a veiled intrigue coloring her face. She looked as though she wanted to ask how he knew a chaos breach would form at this specific location, but after a brief hesitation, decided against it.

"Do you know how to stabilize a breach?!" Finn yelled over the intense energy waves billowing out. The chaos breach was destabilizing the already unravelling space around it, making it look like two contrasting versions of spatial chaos were clashing against each other.

"Look carefully!" Althea replied, "It's already being stabilized from the other side!"

Finn squinted his eyes, frowning. Because of his lack of experience, he couldn't really tell what Althea pointed out, no matter how he looked at it, to him, it was just a tear trying to form a hole between this reality and their world.

But just to be safe, he called back Syf into his shadow. Letting Althea know about Syf was one thing, but Finn wasn't willing to reveal his Storm Prowler's existence to whoever might come from the other side of the breach.

After calling Syf back into his shadow, both he and Althea watched in silence, waiting tensely as the breach very slowly stabilized. As they waited, they couldn't help but glance back at what the white-haired figure in the sky was up to. But they found that he was no longer there. In his place was a steadily growing black void that sucked in every single thing it touched — Even light was not spared.

An increased sense of urgency filled Finn immediately. He stared intently at the slowly stabilizing chaos breach — their only exit out of this disintegrating world — willing whoever was on the other side to finish the stabilization process faster.

Thankfully, as if his urgency had been sensed, the billowing energy waves stilled, and the chaos breach stabilized.

Without wasting any time, Finn and Althea dashed forward, just as the silhouette of another figure stepped in.

"Micah?!" Finn exclaimed in shock, noticing the figure's familiar features.

"Urgh. I still hate the icky feeling of these chaos breaches—" Micah was muttering under his breath as he emerged, when he suddenly heard Finn's familiar voice and stopped abruptly.

First, an astonished look flickered across his face. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the surroundings, his astonishment morphed into a shocked, wary frown. All traces of his usual playfulness disappeared immediately, and in the blink of an eye, his giant hawk soul mass — Freddy — rose out of his shadow.

He was not the only one to step inside, as right after him, a woman who Finn had never seen before followed a few steps after. Her face went through a similar range of expressions, except for the familiar recognition when she noticed Finn and Althea.

"What in the entropic damnation is this place?!" The woman exclaimed in shock.

"We need to leave!" Althea yelled at Micah and the woman as she and Finn closed the distance. "This is beyond anything we can handle! We need to leave!"

Micah frowned even more, his eyes were trained solely on the expanding black void in the sky. He moved to climb onto Freddy, acting as if he hadn't heard a word Althea yelled. That was when Finn snapped.

"Micah!!" His voice came out in a roar that finally drew the Caretaker-ranked Ossuarist's attention. "No offence, but you can't do shit here! Every moment we waste will cost us dearly! Let's. Fucking. Go!!" By this point, Finn and Althea had reached the chaos breach and were practically screaming, desperate to make their words understood.

But just like the way Althea's worldview had been shattered by the show of spatial magic by the white-haired figure, Micah and the other woman, especially because they were higher ranked Ossuarists, were extremely shaken by the chaotic spatial unravelling happening before their eyes. They tried to reconcile what they were seeing with anything similar within their frame of experience, but from the distressed and confused looks on their faces, this couldn't be explained by anything they knew.

Micah clenched his jaws and looked back up at the sky with a conflicted look, before cursing out loud and dispersing Freddy back into his shadow. "Let's go!" He ordered immediately, despite the unconvinced frown on the other woman's face. "We're leaving, Yvonne!" He made his point clear to her, shutting down the words she was about to say.

A look of relief crossed Finn's eyes, and without hesitation, he sped right through the stabilized breach, followed closely by Althea and then the woman, before Micah also stepped through.

Finn felt the change in the air first before he even took in his surroundings. Instead of the bleak, gray world with its stale, unmoving air, he felt a normal cool wind blow across his skin before anything.

"Woodhaven?!" He blurted, slack-jawed that they had skipped the exotic plane entirely.

"Whatever happened in there totally overrode the space of the original exotic plane," Micah explained immediately as he stepped out. "Everyone inside was expelled violently. Yvonne and I were the closest caretakers to the event. We got a report—"

"What about the others?!" Althea cut his words short anxiously. Now that she knew there was a possibility they were safe, she really wanted to be sure they were.

"They are mostly fine… They are all passed out, but they are fine. All except for Neda and Brock," Micah assured softly, before his voice took on a dangerous air. "We also found a group of Master rank Arcanists passed out too… What exactly happened in there?"

Before Althea or Finn could speak, a voice suddenly snorted from behind them. "Hmph! Caretaker. From your tone, one would think you are accusing our Master Rank Arcanists of attacking your little Grade 1 Initiates. Such an accusation would not be tolerated without—"

"Did he say you could speak?" Yvonne snapped with a cold voice and deadly look in her eyes, stilling the speaking Arcanist immediately.

He was a lean, well-dressed, middle-aged man, surrounded by other Arcanists, who didn't seem to take Yvonne's words too kindly.

"I wonder where your confidence is coming from? Just because you're Caretakers doesn't mean you can speak anyhow you please," a broad, hugely-built Arcanist spoke with a sneer. He stepped forward and spread his arms widely, addressing both Yvonne and Micah specifically, "In case you haven't noticed, we are all Grade 3 Adepts, and our numbers more than triple yours…"

Micah shrugged, "So? Your point exactly? Come at me if you're so sure of yourselves. I'm standing right here aren't I?"

"Tch! Cocky bastard," the man cursed under his breath. He exchanged glances with the other Arcanists as if trying to spur their courage, but unlike him, they seemed content to be angry from a distance. They averted their gazes as his eyes passed over them, save for a few who shared his hot-headedness.

But just as he gave a final look, knowing who was with him and who wasn't, Finn broke the silence.

"Uhm, guys… is the chaos breach supposed to do that," he called out shakily, drawing everyone's attention away from the rising tensions and to the chaos breach which had begun to pulse and vibrate with increasing intensity.

"So it really isn't going to hold…" Micah muttered grimly, as if his fears had just been actualized.

He summoned Freddy in a beat, beckoning Finn and Althea to climb onto its back quickly, and immediately took to the skies, followed in tandem by Yvonne, who also took to the skies unhesitatingly on her smaller-sized, but equally majestic shadow hawk. Together, they left behind a stunned group of Arcanists and charged into the distance speedily.

Without needing to be told, the group of Arcanists knew something was utterly wrong. They naturally could not sense anything from the chaos breach like Ossuarists could, but seeing as it thrummed with increasing intensity, and the abrupt reactions of even the Caretaker-ranked Ossuarists, they knew something was terribly wrong.

Like a slow-motion sequence, they all turned, scrambling madly to widen the distance between them and chaos breach, but it was already too late. The huge, broad Arcanist who had run his mouth earlier realized this fact and simply stood, accepting his fate.

And with a final erratic thrum, the chaos breach reached a breaking point before his eyes…

"Fuck."