The march through the snow was pure torture.
Every step Ilya took felt like lifting a heavy rock. The snow was up to his knees. The wind screamed in his ears, sounding like angry ghosts. The three other young soldiers walking with him looked just as bad. They were all shaking, their faces pale and scared.
Ahead of them, the huge man with the purple electric hammer—the Electro Vanguard—walked easily. The deep snow did not seem to bother him at all. He was like a tank moving through a playground.
'I cannot keep this up,' Ilya thought. His lungs burned.
But the cold was not his biggest problem right now. The biggest problem was strapped to his chest. The green stone—the Anemo Delusion.
As he walked, Ilya looked down at it. Using his new, strange power, he did not just see a dull green rock. He saw the magic glowing inside it. And it looked terrible.
In his past life, Ilya had been a guy who fixed broken businesses. He would look at papers, see where a company was losing money, and cut out the bad parts. His brain loved finding patterns and fixing mistakes.
Right now, his brain was doing the exact same thing to the magic stone.
He could see bright, light-green lines of wind magic—Anemo energy—trying to spin inside the metal circle. But the circle was poorly made. The energy was getting stuck. Because it was stuck, the clean magic was turning dark and dirty. This dirty poison was leaking out of the back of the metal circle, right through his heavy coat, and into his chest.
'It is like a blocked water pipe,' Ilya realized. His mind flashed with numbers and ideas. 'The energy is flowing at twelve percent. But the metal ring holding the stone is too tight on the left side. It is choking the magic. If I do not fix it, this poison will stop my heart in less than an hour.'
He did not want to die again. He thought of little Katerina, waiting for him back in the freezing city. She loved sweet candies. She needed him. He had to survive.
He did not have tools. He just had his thick metal gloves.
Ilya reached up with his right hand and grabbed the metal circle on his chest. He kept walking, trying not to let the big guy with the hammer notice him.
He focused his eyes. He watched the glowing green lines of magic. He saw exactly where the energy was hitting a wall.
'Just a little push to the right,' he told himself.
He squeezed his metal glove around the edge of the stone's metal case. He pushed hard. His fingers ached. He was so cold he could barely feel his hands, but he forced his muscles to work. He imagined he was at his old desk, deleting a bad line of numbers from a computer screen.
Creeeeak.
The cheap metal shifted just a tiny bit. It moved maybe half an inch.
Suddenly, Ilya heard a sharp click.
He held his breath. For a second, he thought he had broken the stone completely.
'Please do not explode,' he thought. If it exploded, it would blow a hole right through his chest.
But it did not explode.
Instead, the dark, dirty poison leaking into his chest completely stopped.
Ilya blinked. He looked at the magic lines again. By turning the metal case, he had opened the blocked pipe. The bright green wind magic was no longer getting stuck. It was spinning fast and smooth, like a perfect little tornado inside the stone.
Then, the magic flowed into him.
It did not hurt. It felt amazing. A rush of warm, clean air filled his lungs. The heavy, tired feeling in his legs suddenly vanished. The freezing cold around him did not feel so deadly anymore. It felt like a gentle summer breeze.
His eyes went wide. 'Wow.'
This was the power of Anemo. The power of wind. Even though it was fake magic from a cheap Delusion, fixing the flow made it work the way it was supposed to.
He felt lighter. He felt faster. He took a step forward in the deep snow, and his foot barely sank. The wind magic was wrapping around his boots, pushing him up slightly.
'Energy output: Forty percent. Poison leak: Zero percent.' His brain happily read the new numbers.
He had done it. He had not just survived; he had made himself stronger. He had taken a piece of trash equipment and made it work perfectly just by understanding how the magic flowed.
A small smile crept onto his frozen lips. 'If I can do this with a cheap stone, what else can I fix in this world?'
"Halt!" the big Electro Vanguard yelled from the front.
Ilya stopped immediately. The new wind magic in his body made him stop perfectly balanced, without slipping in the snow.
They had reached the camp.
Through the blowing snow, Ilya could see a few large, dark tents set up against the side of a massive mountain wall. There were a few fires burning, giving off a weak orange glow. Around the fires were dozens of other Fatui soldiers. They all looked tough, mean, and dangerous.
This was the Wyrmrest Valley checkpoint.
But something was wrong. The camp was not quiet and resting. Soldiers were running around in a panic. Someone was screaming in pain inside one of the tents.
Standing in the middle of the camp was a man wearing a long, fancy black coat. He did not wear a mask. His face was sharp, and he had a nasty scar across his cheek. He held a glowing red sword made of fire.
This was Captain Bracing.
The big Electro Vanguard walked up to the Captain and saluted. "New meat is here, Captain. Four fresh recruits."
Captain Bracing did not look happy to see them. He looked at Ilya and the other three scared boys like they were dirt on his boots.
"Good," the Captain spat. His voice was mean and sharp. "Give them weapons. The monsters just broke through our west wall. If these new boys cannot fight, let them act as meat shields."
Ilya's heart beat faster. He had just fixed his magic, but he did not know how to fight. He did not know how to swing a sword or shoot a gun.
But as a Fatui soldier tossed a heavy, metal gauntlet onto the snow at Ilya's feet, his special eyes saw something else. He saw the glowing red lines of fire magic all around the camp. He saw the cold blue lines of ice magic coming from the dark woods.
'I am at the very bottom right now,' Ilya thought, staring at the metal glove in the snow. 'Just like a terrible sports team back in 2011, starting with nothing but a bad roster and a dream.'
He did not know how to fight like a soldier yet. But he knew how to rebuild. He knew how to take a losing team and turn them into a dream team. And right now, he was the whole team.
'I know how to read the board. I know how to win.'
Ilya stepped forward and picked up the heavy metal glove.