"Oh," Lucid said. "That's subtle."
Arthur gritted his teeth, stepped directly in front of Ayame, and raised his sword above his head. He was actually going to try and block a fifty-ton sky-blade with three meters of steel... which was brave, adorable, and entirely fatal.
"Move," Lucid grunted.
Lucid summoned his Pierce Spine, feeling the cold red energy lock his vertebrae into a rigid iron column. He jumped — bare feet leaving the wet cobblestone with a sharp crack — and positioned himself five meters above the ground, directly between Arthur's helmet and the falling white hand.
He threw both arms wide and called out the Chain Lattice.
Thin, white-hot links of fate essence erupted from his forearms, weaving together in mid-air to form a dense, layered net of interlocking metal across the street. The lattice locked into place just as the ethereal blade hit the grid.
The collision didn't make a sound. It was too loud for sound.
The white hand pressed down against the lattice, and Lucid immediately felt something break inside his chest.
It wasn't a rib this time. It was a clean, sharp snap in the central thread of his core—that delightful little consequence that always showed up whenever he tried to punch above his weight class. His strongest moves always left him weak, or flinching, or just very weak in general... a design flaw he really needed to take up with whoever invented fate essence.
His arms shook. The crimson mist around his jaw evaporated instantly, stripped away by the sheer heat of the overhead pressure.
Then he heard her.
'Gah—!'
Alice's voice rang in his skull, but it wasn't her usual cool, sarcastic commentary. It was a sharp, jagged gasp of pure physical pain, vibrating through his inner ear with enough force to make his teeth rattle.
She was taking it.
The backlash from the lattice — the crushing, spiritual weight of Mother Alisia's little orbital drop — was bypassing his physical nervous system and dumping directly into whatever mental partition Alice occupied behind his eyes. She was acting as the heat sink for his mistake.
Lucid's jaw hardened.
He didn't offer a silent apology. He didn't waste mental energy asking if she was okay, or telling her to let go. This was an exchange—a simple, brutal transaction of burden, just like Mercyros had taught him in the golden vault. She took the heat; he held the line.
No time for sympathy.
"Hold the grid!" Arthur yelled from below, his voice sounding miles away through the ringing in Lucid's ears.
"I am holding it!" Lucid shouted back, his bare toes dangling five meters above the wet cobblestones.
The ethereal white hand pressed down another two inches. The white links of his Chain Lattice groaned, shedding sparks of red light that rained down onto Arthur's armor like hot ash. Lucid felt the blood vessel in his left nostril give way, a warm drop of red dripping down his lip and falling onto the orange nylon of his vest.
In his head, Alice let out a low, ragged hiss between her teeth.
'You... owe me... an entire domain for this...' she strained out.
'Put it on my tab,' Lucid thought back.
He twisted his wrists upward, forcing the last twelve percent of his remaining essence into the lattice weave. The white chains thickened, locking their edges against the descending light-blade with the grinding screech of two ships colliding in a harbor.
Below him, Ayame managed to get one knee under her, her pale fingers digging into the gaps between the paving stones as she looked up at the glowing ceiling of chains.
"Can you break it?" she called out.
"Working on it!" Lucid grunted.
He couldn't push the hand back up into the clouds — he wasn't a Monolith, and he certainly wasn't mother fate. But he didn't need to defeat the sky; he just needed to break the anchor.
He looked down past his dangling feet toward the fish crates twenty meters away.
The young acolyte was still lying there in the slush, his amber eyes wide as he stared up at the glowing white hand he had called down. The boy's hands were trembling, his pale fingers clutched around a fresh parchment scroll he had pulled from his belt.
The priest was guiding the descent.
"Arthur!" Lucid yelled, his voice cracking as the lattice dipped another inch toward his nose. "The guy in the mud! Kick him!"
Arthur didn't ask questions.
He dropped his defensive stance, turned his feet toward the gutter, and charged across the ground.
He reached the pile of fish crates, drew his right leg back, and planted a heavy, steel-toed boot directly into the young acolyte's ribs.
The kick sounded like a sack of turnips hitting a brick wall.
The priest folded over with a choked squeak, the parchment scroll flying out of his hand and landing in a puddle of fish guts.
Up in the air, the white hand flickered.
The geometric edges of the blade blurred, the intense light turning dull and grey as the signal from the ground cut out.
Lucid didn't wait for it to stabilize. He dropped his elbows, let the Chain Lattice dissolve into thin air, and let gravity take him.
He hit the wet stone feet first — slap — his knees bending deep to absorb the fifteen-meter fall. His life jacket bounced against his chin as he landed, the cold harbor water splashing up over his shins.
Above them, the giant ethereal hand broke apart into a million tiny flakes of harmless white light, drifting down over Port Vexis like dry snow before melting into the puddles.
Lucid stood up straight, wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his thumb, and took a long, shallow breath. His ribs ached, his marrow felt like lead, and his head was pounding with a dull, rhythmic thrum from Alice's side of the brain.
'Alice?' he thought.
A long, irritated silence stretched out between his ears.
'I am going to ignore you for three days,' she informed him coldly. 'Do not speak to me. Do not ask for analysis. Die in a ditch if you must.'
'Love you too,' Lucid thought.
He walked over to the fish crates where Arthur was currently standing over the wheezing priest. Ayame limped along behind him, her dark coat trailing through the grey slush, her dagger still held out at waist height.
The young acolyte lay curled on his side among the broken cedar wood. He looked up at Lucid with muddy, unfocused eyes, looking less like a holy messenger of Mother Alisia and more like a dockhand who had lost an argument with an iron anchor.
Arthur walked past Lucid, his steel-shod boots crunching on splinters of fish crates. He wiped a mixture of rainwater and blood from his chin and offered a slow, sarcastic clap with his gauntlets.
"Congratulations," Arthur said flatly. "You have just killed a priest."
"He is still breathing," Lucid pointed out, gesturing toward the boy's ribs. "Mostly."
"And," Arthur continued, ignoring the correction, "you have made an enemy of one of the biggest churches in the Scattered Realms. Possibly the biggest religion in existence."
Lucid threw his hands up in the air, flailing his arms in a dry, celebratory wave.
"Yippie," Lucid said.
Arthur snapped back instantly, his blue coat swinging as he turned on his heel. "That is not something to be proud of! We could be hanged for this!"
He paused, glanced around the open stalls to see if any guards were listening, and then lowered his voice to a grim rumble.
"Or we are gonna be hanged anyway," Arthur exhaled. He ran a gloved hand over his matted blue hair. "Elara does not seem like her usual self lately."
Lucid lowered his arms.
That comment hit a little harder than the had intended.
Queen Elara was supposed to be their sponsor, their shield against territorial commissions and foreign courts. If she was acting strange back in the capital, their margin for error in Port Vexis had just shrunk to zero.
'Great,' Lucid thought. 'We survived a Monolith just to get executed by our own employer.'
Arthur looked back toward the center of the avenue.
The strange devotion that had gripped the crowd was completely gone. Celeste and Fennwick stood near the merchant awnings, looking shaken and drenched. The townspeople were moving around again, their unnatural smiles replaced by shock and confusion. A small group of dockworkers and bakers had gathered around the severely injured laborer by the timber wall, trying to bandage his shattered ribs with strips of dry canvas.
At least the locals were paying attention to their own problems now.
Lucid looked down at the muddy pile of cedar where the acolyte was resting.
"Let us tie him to a boat and burn it," Lucid suggested. "Standard sea burial. Very respectful and leaves no evidence."
Arthur turned back toward him, his expression serious for half a second before common sense caught up.
"Great idea, and," Arthur started, then stopped cold. His jaw dropped slightly. "He is gone. How?"
Lucid blinked and looked down.
The broken cedar crates were still there. The puddle of grey harbor slush was still there. But the priest in the white linen robe was gone.
In the spot where the young acolyte had been curled up five seconds ago, there was nothing left except his long brass-tipped staff and a neat, dry pile of pale white particles that looked like sea salt.
"How the hell," Lucid muttered.