Sometime earlier.
"Has it been completed. How much more time."
A female villager stood watching another crouch over the cave floor, drawing yai symbols across the stone carefully with deliberate strokes.
"It is done, step back."
Everyone moved back. The one who had drawn the symbols straightened and began to chant.
"Clomoterezzz."
The runes lit up across the floor and the rest of the villagers appeared, stepping through from wherever they had been, filling the passage in a body.
Fredo was among them.
"Are you certain they went this direction, Impeline."
"I am certain." The woman named Impeline held up a piece of cloth. "It's Sera's. we found it left behind somewhere back there. He must have dropped it without noticing."
Fredo looked at it for a moment, his jaw tight.
"Then we move."
No further discussion.
They picked up the trail of footprints in the snow and followed it at pace, the full group moving together through the passage in near silence.
Atiya had known about the trail. He had simply had no time to do anything about it, and no choice but to run and hope the distance held.
He had predicted they could only chase him so far before some limit caught up with them. The barrier, their numbers, the terrain.
He had to outrun them before he found out whether he was right.
They gave chase and spotted the two figures standing far ahead in the cavern, motionless.
"We found them. But why are they just standing there."
"Look behind them."
Above the lava river the Hingcha Sangai hovered, its blue crystal spikes catching the orange light below, its eyes glowing steady and cold. Every villager stopped moving at the same moment, the front line pulling up short, the ones behind them pressing to a halt.
If an immortal could be killed then something like the Sangai was what would do it. Nobody moved.
Atiya noticed the pursuit stop abruptly.
'Something is behind us.'
He turned.
The Sangai was there, hovering above the lava river, its gaze not on him but past him and tensed.
'It came back. Is it in cahoots with Kallar.
Then the ground shook.
Shapes erupted from beneath the lava surface, fast and sudden, things that looked like compressed rock forcing themselves upward through the molten surface, the lava displaced and spraying outward in wide arcs.
Atiya moved, reading the trajectory of the spill, staying clear of it as the stone shapes broke through and settled, one after another, until the entire surface of the lava river had been paved over.
Solid ground have paved it above creating a pavement where there had been none.
And the he Sangai was gone, vanished between all the transformatio that just occurred.
And at the far end of the newly paved ground, where the passage continued into the dark, something else was waiting.
Hundreds of them. Shapes in the dark, packed together, every one of them radiating the signature Atiya had learned to read over the last several hours.
'They are C rank yai beasts, every single fucking one of them.'
He looked at them and looked at the villagers behind him and looked at the passage ahead and arrived at his assessment quickly.
"I am really having the worst days of my life."
Several hundred villagers stood at one end of the passage, staring. The wave of yai beasts rolling toward them from the other end was the kind of sight that made immortality feel like a curse rather than a comfort.
They knew what C rank beasts did to things that got in their way. Knowing it and watching it approach were two different experiences entirely.
Atiya and Leishna stood at the center of the front row.
Short, thin, dressed in a woman's robe, a flowing white cloak that caught the lava light and did nothing to make him look like someone worth following. Sajibu in his right hand.
.....He was scared shitless.
Sera's severed head in his left, gagged, her eyes darting between the approaching horde and the man holding her like a bag of groceries.
His face said calm and calculating.
'Fuck me sideways, doggy style and in every position...Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.'
The horde kept coming. Hundreds of them, the sound building in the enclosed space, the floor trembling faintly under their combined weight.
He did had a plan. It had come to him about thirty seconds ago and he was not proud of it but it was what he had.
'Let them get close, then run straight at the villagers. Both forces crash into each other and do the work for me.'
He watched the distance shrink and said nothing and held Sera's head a little tighter.
*They are not cute at all. I wonder how they taste though.*
Atiya threw Sera's head aside, grabbed Leishna, and ran straight at the villagers with a grin on his face that had no business being there.
"Fredoooo! My dear, save me!"
The expression on his face was so aggressively cringe that several villagers in the front line physically recoiled from it before their brains caught up with the situation.
"Was he not just running away from us?"
"No time, grab him and run!"
Fredo had already moved, leaping forward to intercept, yai orbs summoned and sent toward Atiya in quick succession.
Atiya dropped sideways, rolled, came up on his feet and immediately veered away from Fredo toward the mass of villagers behind him instead.
He had pushed almost everything he had left into his body. Every remaining percent of his reserve poured into physical reinforcement, temporary and burning through fast, a last ditch effort to move faster than he had any right to move in the state he was in.
He swung Sajibu and started cutting through anyone in arm's reach, wild and committed, with no particular target.
"Pin him down!"
Yai infused attacks came from multiple directions simultaneously. He dodged them, barely, his body running on the reinforcement and nothing else.
His reserve was so low now that the portals were gone entirely, it was not worth attempting, the cost was too high for what he had left.
he could only believe in the staff and his legs and whatever time remained before the reinforcement gave out.
The villagers were in disarray. A thousand years had passed since anything had looked like this inside their ranks, and it was pretty visble.
Behind them the yai beast horde had arrived, crashing into the back of the group, and the two forces found each other exactly as Atiya had planned.
He stepped back from the center of it and looked at the chaos spreading through the cavern.
"Let's dance, shall we."
****
"Yes, trim it a little and dye it silver please."
Zelaine sat in the parlor chair and let them work.
After that she found a good restaurant and ate six kilograms of barbecue. After that she bought herself several sets of new clothes.
If Atiya had any idea what she was doing with his card right now he would have frozen the account before she finished the first course. She was aware of this and did not let it slow her down.
Taking people's cards to fund her food was less a habit and more a lifestyle at this point.
She came back to the apartment, bathed for half an hour, put on light makeup, and stood in front of the mirror.
Her hair, formerly scarlet, was now silver white, long and straight, falling past her shoulders with side swept bangs covering part of her forehead.
She had put on a grey ribbed sleeveless mini dress top with an asymmetrical hemline, an oversized white puffy jacket draped loosely off her shoulders, wide sleeves, black straps.
Black shorts visible beneath the high slit of the top. Glassy black thigh high boots with gold accents and cutout details at the knees. A black choker. Hoop earrings.
She looked at herself for a moment.
Then she went to the Odd Jobs office.
Everyone in the room went quiet when she walked in.
Why was she dressed like this. Did she have somewhere to be. Was this a blind date situation.
"You look more beautiful today," Ngamba said from the couch, his voice completely flat. "Yesterday you looked like a boar. Today you look like a pig."
A translucent cube snapped through the air and caught him in the head before he finished the sentence. He went backward off the couch with his limbs doing several different things and hit the floor with a crash.
"Stop it." Zelaine smoothed her silver bangs with two fingers. "You are all embarrassing yourselves. I can tell you are crazy about me."
Mavine stood at the side of the room, eyes moving up and down the outfit with open admiration.
"Miss Zelaine, do you have a date?"
"I do not." Zelaine waved a hand. "I already have a permanent date waiting for me at home."
From the floor, Ngamba's face did something complicated as his one eyebrow climbed.
"I bet that date of yours is a complete nutjob."
"He is, in the truest sense, a nutjob," Cale answered for her. "They are quite compatible. Alike in more ways than either of them would admit."
"Enough about this talk. Wasn't there a job request earlier? Let's get on to it," Zelaine asked, her voice cutting through the office chatter.
she had now joined the odd jobs and due to shortage of rooom she had to shar her room with mavine.
It had been only a day after the incident, and a job request had already come in.
This would usually be an opportunity, but they had completed a quest just a day earlier and received massive rewards—even if Zelaine had already blown through half of it on food.
They didn't lack money for the time being, so the others were reluctant to take on a mission.
However, Zelaine was getting bored. More importantly, she needed to earn the trust of the old man and Ngamba, and doing a job was an efficient way to do that.
"You didn't listen to a single bit of it, did you?" Cale blurted out, remembering that Zelaine had been yawning while the customer explained the details. "The job request is for midnight, in a parlour."
"Ah. Then call me before we go."
Saying that, Zelaine turned on her heel and headed back to her room, the gold accents on her boots clicking against the floor. However, she didn't plan on sleeping that day.
The door clicked shut, leaving her in the quiet of her room. She sat at her bed.
'It's been a while since I last practiced or coded. I should do it, although my Yai replenished only half...Well, it's understandable; I am out of Time too. What a bore.'
Zelaine had used thirty percent of the time she had saved up in her last battle, so she wasn't even using it to accelerate the replenishment of her Yai. The two types of Yaicraft she possessed were different, and both held different levels of Ascension.
Her time-related Yaicraft was only a Stage 6 ascension yaicraft while her crystal yaicraft was ascension 2 stage five because she was constantly low on its fuel: Time. She refused to forcefully extract time from people, as it was dangerous and immoral, making the process of replenishing it extremely difficult.
Sitting in the quiet of her room, Zelaine summoned a cube, its surface etched with intricately carved symbols that hummed with a faint, dark light. This was her Yai circuit.
Every Yai user possessed a unique circuit where they coded the codes to modify their craft.
Their shapes and appearances varied greatly; for example, Atiya's circuits manifested as rotating concentric glyphs, while Zelaine's was a perfect, dense cube.
She intended to work on her Chronokinesis. Currently, her skills allowed her to alter the cause and effect of actions, rewind time on specific parts of her body, and accelerate the recovery rate of her Yai.
Now, she focused her mind on completing a skill she had been coding for four years. In lower Ascensions, acquiring and coding a single skill could take decades, but Zelaine was a genius in Yaicraft.
Even if she slacked off, she could typically complete a skill in five years.
'If I complete this skill, I will directly advance to Ascension 2 stage six from stage five. Well, the skill is Precognition.'
Zelaine focused her mind, the dark surface of the black cube pulsing as she weighed the logic of her architecture.
'There are two ways to see the future. One is to literally see the future prepared by fate, which is often the absolute future. However, that skill is very rare and requires high aptitude and immense talent to code.'
'The second method is to calculate countless possibilities and strings of events to predict a future. It extremely stresses the user's mind.'
'I am choosing the latter. It would undoubtedly stress my mind, however, I will modify it so that it only activates when I am in danger or in the middle of a battle.'
Zelaine's fingers twitched in the air, tracing the invisible lines of the algorithm as she worked. The silence of the apartment was only broken by the faint hum of the Yai circuit and the distant sounds of the city outside. Zelaine continued on coding, her eyes fixed on the black cube, all the way to midnight.