Witchbound: My Power Grows With Every Trial

Light poured in around Ren until the world rebuilt itself into a field that looked both ancient and new at the same time. He couldn't even tell.

A vast courtyard stretched under his feet, and although it might have looked traditional at first glance, it was broken in several places by cables coming out of the ground and all sorts of mechanisms carefully displaced on the walls. He didn't recognize the place, but even so, he could tell it belonged to some noble family or Clan.

Red banners hung from poles bearing, true enough, Clan insignias. They were blackened... by fire, it seemed.

Above, a cliff rose steep, lit in places by paper lanterns which emitted too bright a light to be generated by regular fire.

Ren stood in the middle of it, surrounded by movement. Dozens of figures pushed past him. They looked like fighters wearing ceremonial coats with sleeves that had more glowing crests. Some of them carried blades, others firearms modified with Glyph channels marked into their sides.

No one looked at him. No one even saw him standing there at all.

The vision treated him as one more body in the chaos.

An explosion sounded somewhere nearby. He moved to the side and dodged a ray of energy that flashed right next to his ear. It scorched the stone where he had been standing seconds earlier.

He didn't waste time asking anyone what side he was supposed to be on. There was nobody to ask anyway, no familiar faces at all. The field was pure violence and clashing of weapons in such a brutal manner that everything seemed to have no meaning.

He then looked toward the ridge above.

Kagami stood above the fight, her silhouette contrasting with the red of the sunset and the light of the paper lanterns. Only this time she was human. Even so, Ren recognized her right away as her. He couldn't explain it. Maybe it was because he had seen her previously in dreams, but just as before, there was no warning. No words spoken. Nothing to confirm it. He just knew.

She wore a dark coat with long sleeves that moved in the wind. And she was watching directly where he stood.

Relief hit him the moment he recognized her, but it lasted only a moment before unease took its place. Something was wrong. He couldn't tell exactly what that was. Either she was the one in danger, or he was the one in danger himself, and she was watching it unfold from above.

Ren moved through the chaos, trying to keep her in view at all times.

The fighters barely paid any attention to his presence there. They just pushed forward like currents in a storm.

Suddenly, he saw Kagami raising a hand. Somehow, in this vision, he recognized the gesture. He couldn't form the thought properly in his mind, but he knew it was a spell she was building up. Something powerful.

Another blast shot past him, shattering a wall nearby. He shoved a fighter to the side and moved on, trying to reach her.

Kagami's other hand then rose.

The breath left Ren's chest. If she unleashed it, the fire would destroy everything in its path and everyone standing in it. And everyone was oblivious to it, fighting for god knows what reason, he had no context for. And there were dozens of people here.

He tried to ignore the noise of the fighting around him and only focused on her movements up on that ridge. Maybe this was part of the trial: not surviving the field itself, but facing what it meant to be bound to her power, the cost that might come with it.

Above, for a moment, her silhouette blurred against the sunset. Then her hands moved downward fast.

A streak of red and orange light opened across the ridge and spread into the sky. The battlefield stilled for just a moment, and then it all came crashing down. The wave stretched from one end of the cliff to the other, like a wall of fire so large that it seemed to erase everything around it.

He shouted her name, but it only vanished into the noise. She couldn't hear him.

Fighters around him screamed as they vanished into the flames.

As the wave got closer to where he was, Ren braced. The ground shuddered as everything around him broke. As fire engulfed everything, the fighters, the cliff itself, he snapped away from the vision in an instant.

He staggered for a few moments, trying to reorient himself to where he actually was.

The ground beneath him steadied into the tatami chamber he knew. Everything inside it was just as calm as he had left it, just as though nothing had changed at all. Only he was the one battling his own breath as he made an effort to calm himself down.

He looked ahead. The two doors were still there where they had always been.

The first door had shown him victories without purpose, a life stripped bare of anyone to share it with. The second door forced him into the sight of Kagami losing herself to her own power.

He had wanted answers, but instead he only had these two apparent choices, both of wich couldn't fully accept.

Reason and emotion. Both felt right, but equally wrong.

"This can't be it," he whispered, though the words reached no one in the chamber.

He kept pacing through the chamber, kept turning the thoughts over in his mind. The keepers were not impatient or rushing him in any way. They had all the time in the world.

Then, suddenly, a memory surfaced.

"If none of the pieces on the board fit, then stop trying to play by their rules. Change the pattern and see how the pieces fit there."

It was a memory from long ago. He was back on the floor of some room with a puzzle board on his lap and small wooden shapes scattered around him. Haruki stood beside him with his warm smile he always had when he wanted Ren to keep trying.

Ren felt the tears clog his eyes, but pushed them away and drowned the thought.

He now knew what he had to do.