"Seir. Now—"
—Ah— / —Ah—
The same word, in two different minds, for the last time.
And both Aim's eyes and Vine's snapped to the source of the current — followed it up, and up, toward where it came from, before the light could finish reaching their pupils—
"Ouhh..."
A white-haired man flicked Aim on the cheek.
"They've got a real sadistic streak on you eh?"
He snapped his fingers.
In that instant the light-threads slid back into motion, pouring through Aim's pupils and Vine's once more.
What in the hell is going on—?
"So they stopped everything except perception."
Const dug his hands into his trouser pockets.
"Mess with time too much," he said, to the entity's face "and the world will come to punish you. You big thing."
"R̷̛͝Ȃ̴̧A̶͟H̸̛҉H̢H̷̕H̸̛̕—̴" A sound answered — a low, glitching, broken-channel snarl that did not come from any throat built for speech.
Const scooped Aim up off the floor — princess-carry, no ceremony — slung Vine across his back, hooked Isolde under one arm to drag along the ground, and ran.
He ran through a world where everything had stopped. Dust hung frozen in the air. The two Entities and Const were the only things left moving in all of it.
And he was slow. Of course he was slower than usual — he was hauling three bodies, and even he had a limit. Behind him the larger Entity moved, and where it set its weight the floor split, the whole vault shuddering, stone dust shaking loose from the ceiling in still, frozen sheets that his passage tore apart. The second one came behind it, lower, faster.
Const ran anyway. A blur through the frozen dark, weaving, cutting corners, three people and all — and even loaded down like that, he outpaced the thing chasing him. Barely. He hit a sealed side-chamber, hauled the door, and folded all of them inside.
Heavy footsteps. Two sets of them. Enormous, deliberate, shaking grit from the walls with every fall — they came down the corridor, slowed at the door, paused—
—and passed.
The thunder of them faded down the far passage and was gone.
[ Time resumes. ]
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT, CONST!"
"..." Lady Vine remainded silence.
"Uuah—" The sound came out of Isolde.
"Shh."
The whole chamber went still enough to hear the last of the footsteps die away.
"So I guessed right." Vine pointed out.
"Heh." Const folded his arms. The look on his face was nothing short of triumphant.
"...The hell's wrong with you.. Sigh..."
Thmp. Thmp.
Const pressed a hand to his own chest, his face tightening with a flicker of pain.
Under Aim's lens — what is that... why are the threads coming off him, and why are those things being torn apart so fast—
Const's eyes slid over to him.
"You've seen it now, haven't you."
"...Nevermind. Take the lens off first. Wear it too long and your head'll split."
"A-ah..."
Aim gathered Isolde back into his arms.
Vine drew a shard of mirror out from inside her coat.
"Wait — wait, what's happening?"
"Orenthel's lost," Vine said. "I have to go do what I still can.. Incase it will work.."
"Wh—what?!" Aim's voice cracked. "Wh-what do you mean, why—!"
"If what that woman said is true, the Western and Eastern reaches won't hold. The main food supply, and the district closest to Central..."
"..." Aim pulled Isolde tighter against him.
"Why, though...?" he said. "When we could just run. The four of us, we could just—"
"It's a long story, kid."
Aim was shaking now, faintly, his eyes not quite focusing — sitting just a little outside himself.
Const reached over and rapped him on the head. A small light sparked at the contact.
Aim's thoughts began, slowly, to settle back into line.
"That's about all I can do for you," Const said.
"What did you — w-wait, then can you do the same for Sol?!"
"I'm close to my own limit too."
"You... did you make some kind of contract? That thing?"
"I did."
Const palmed his face. "Dumbass.."
Const crouched and laid two fingers to Isolde's forehead.
"...Oh my."
"Ten thousand times over, huh."
He touched her brow.
Isolde coughed — hard, wet, alive.
"SOL! SOL!"
"Intervene too much and the world punish it," Const said, drawing his hand back. "Or they'll call it a breach of contract, and you both die. This much is fine. This is enough."
"...Thank you. Really."
A voice cut in from the tall woman behind them.
"Const."
"Yes?"
"Just how strong are you—"
"I can wipe out a country with a snap of my fingers, ma'am—"
"Fake." Aim replied
"...Hah~"
"Then.." She paused. "Can you go help someone I know, at the palace?"
Const went quiet. His face settled into something heavier.
"The things here are too dangerous to leave loose. Someone has to hold them until they arrive, and close it out."
They...?
"Well.." Vine's voice soften to mere quiet desperation
"...In the Western reach, I'm probably the only one who can handle what's there," She said.
"Tch." Vine bit at the edge of a nail.
"I can do it," said Aim.
"I can do it."
"..."
"You sure about that?"
"Yes!"
"Thank you.." Vine looked at him for a moment. "Help me out, and I'll get your friend back to normal.. I promise."
"R-really?! What do I have to do?!"
"Help the people on the other side of that mirror. Then find a way to get her to the mountains in the northern reach. Just tell her — she'll know the place."
Vine tossed a handful of artifacts to Aim.
"If you run into Claude," she said, "kill him."
"...Why?"
"I don't like his face."
"...Uh." Sweat beaded at Aim's temple.
"Well then. We split here."
"...We've got things to talk about, Const."
"Fine."
Vine took Aim and Isolde and toss them bodily into the mirror.
"Good luck. Boy of the hour."
"Yes, ma'am~"
Vine stepped through the glass after them.
"All right." Const turned on his heel toward the door.
A pair of glitching snarls answered from the dark — two of them, close — and the door tore off its frame and went spinning into the black.
Orenthel. Eastern District. 4 AM.
The indoor drill field of the Military Office.
"Sorry to drag eleven hundred of you out here in the middle of the night," Marcus Hale said, and looked like he meant it, and looked like he'd been awake for three days running.
"So sleepy, senior..."
"...Emil."
"With the way things have been — Thalassia, the cults, all of it — it seemed wise to get you all trained up on the new equipment sooner rather than later."
"Is it a catalyst, or—?"
"Heard the Deputy couldn't get hold of any. We're getting some kind of special firearm instead."
"This is a weapon Her Majesty has never permitted anyone to field before now," Marcus said. "And we've been granted the right to—"
A flash of white tore across the night sky beyond the high windows, brilliant as a second noon. An instant later the shockwave hit — a wall of wind that came through the field and put the entire battalion flat on the floor, eleven hundred men driven down at once.
The whole company scrambled up and ran for the doors, for the windows, for the night outside.
"The hell is that?!" a blond man shouted — and then his eyes went wide, wider, with something past disbelief.
The wall.
The wall was gone.
Where the eastern wall had stood, a section was simply gone.
Not broken. Not blasted. There was no rubble, no smoke, no fire — only a clean, impossible edge where the rampart ended, the cut running straight and geometric through stone, the surface left smooth as cut glass. Past that edge: nothing. As though that length of wall had never been built at all. The stars showed through the gap where stone should have been.
The field below it had become something out of a nightmare.
Greycoats and blackcoats of the RMO were deployed across the open ground in their companies — and along what remained of the wall, the Standing Army held the high line. Whole stretches of the rampart were missing the same way, sheared off in flat clean planes, sections of the great wall reduced to absence between one breath and the next. And the cuts did not stop at the stone. They ran on — through the rampart, through the ground, through whatever stood in the plane — the same flat geometric edge carried clean across the field, slicing wall and earth and men alike along one single seamless line, as though a sheet of glass had been passed through the world and everything on the wrong side of it had simply ceased. Rifle battalions formed up in ranks across the field below. Officers shouted into the dark.
Along that line, the soldiers showed where it had passed. Some were gone entirely, nothing left but the flat clean ground where they had stood. Some had been taken in half — sheared through the chest, the waist, the skull, the cut face level and smooth and bloodless, the missing portion not fallen but absent, ending in the exact same plane as the wall behind them. One man stood screaming from the stump of an arm that ended in that same impossibly flat surface, the limb just not there below the cut, as if the air itself had decided where he stopped. Another was being dragged backward by his collar, one leg ending clean at the knee in that seamless edge — no blood, no ragged wound, only a surface, level as polished stone, where the rest of him used to be.
A snarl — vast, wet, wrong — rolled up out of the earth in a distant not so far away from the scene.
And then they came: corrupted beasts, things the size of hut, their bodies bent and broken into shapes no living thing should wear, erupting up out of the ground in their dozens.
One RMO captain coughed a mouthful of blood across his own gauntlet.
Damn it — they've already taken the Commander—!
"Captain Renfield! What are your orders!" A soldier hauled himself across the broken ground on a ruined leg.
Renfield's eyes swept the field once — the gap, the beasts, the rifle lines, the dying.
"RMO still standing, hold the front! Military Unit covering fire!"