I understand what she's insinuating without another word. They're all missing their anchors. Every single person that's inside that holding room.

"Gnash?" I whisper.

Pearl scrunches her face with focus. Her eyes dart around as if taking in everyone past the torn fabric-like barrier. Recognition lights up her face, only to be overwritten by professional certainty.

"He's okay. A little banged up, but it looks like most of it is self inflicted," she relays. "Freesh welts around his wrists, old bruises on his shoulders and elbows–all signs that he tried his hardest to escape. Rina and Dani kept him alive for a reason."

I set my teeth together. She just had to go and say that. "What about his Class Card? Any reason he hasn't been answering?"

Without a moment's hesitation Pearl shakes her head. "I can't tell that from here. He's missing his plastic anchor, though–just like the rest of them. Unless I'm blind to something, they aren't being kept there with the prisoners."

"It'd be damn stupid if they did," I mutter. "C'mon, messenger guy. Speed things up a little."

"He's trying. Fore's asking a lot of questions, though. …It barely sounds like the person we got attacked by," Pearl says with a frown. "He's way more cautious–almost paranoid. Like some major part of him is missing."

His Class. Which, if true, would mean that Nose and Eyepatch were telling the truth. I don't know if that complicates or simplifies things, but one thing's for damn sure; this'll make fighting Fore so much easier. However, it'll make getting inside way harder. All we can do is hope the messenger won't say anything that'll set Fore off.

Pearl leans forward slightly, her eyes slowly widening. "It's turning bad. Fore is accusing the messenger of… um… wow, that's just plain stupid. No, he's going to shut the way in! We have to move!"

I summon a relocation and drop it at my feet. Then I turn to Jumble, eyes wide and expression grim. She tenses for a moment before spreading her fingers and nodding that she's ready.

"How long?" I hiss.

"No time!" Pearl jabs a finger in the messenger's direction. "Go go go!"

I flare my relocation coin. Everything shifts as cloth explodes outwards from the force of my emergence, shredding the messenger's pocket to ribbons and splitting his pants all the way down one leg. He yelps in surprise and stumbles to the side while clutching his leg, blood and cloth trailing down his leg in unison.

"YOU?!" Fore screeches. "I knew it was you!"

I shrug and palm a projectile. "Sure was."

He lunges. But not at me–for the shredded entryway. I surge forward, my hand wrapping around his shoulder with a bone-pulping crunch. A strangled gurgle of pain hisses out of the Fore-construct's mouth, and with some insistent pulling, he creeps away from the slashed portal. All the while his claws scratch uselessly at my skin.

"So you don't have your Class," I say cruelly. With a little more force than necessary I slam him against the wall. "Didn't want to believe your buddies were right, but I guess the truth is the truth no matter how little I like it. Want to make this easy or fun?"

The construct whimpers and tries to shield its face. "Easy! Easy, please!"

I can't hold back a derisive snort. "Pathetic. Jumble! I'm going in–you stay here and watch this asshole. Just in case he has some way to disable the passage from this side."

Wind shears past as Jumble sprints to my side. The messenger's eyes widen for some reason, but instead of looking scared, he seems… comforted by it. Assured, even. If he's tricking us he's doing a damn good job of it.

Jumble slams her fist into the Fore-construct's head. He crumples to the side, breathing but severely hurt, as static pours away from the impact to coat his entire head in a thick layer of Jumble's magic. She grins and gives me a thumbs-up to go ahead.

"I've got it covered here," she assures me. "If this jerk knows anything about where everyone's anchors are hidden, I'll get the info out of him."

That'd be a damn huge help. "Alright. Be back in a minute."

She flashes the coin I'd dropped in the shop as I turn to the tear, then leans down at the construct's side and starts whispering static to him. The messenger shies away to give her some space, but can't take his eyes off the scene. There's a morbid curiosity in there that'd be very at home in the mind of a professional killer.

I shake my head and put that out of mind for now. Jumble's got all this covered, so now it's my job to get everyone in here safely out. Then we move all of them to… wherever we can make safest, teleport to wherever Dani is through Clutter, and try to put an end to all of this.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

'Course, that's ignoring the elephant in the room that is the armies the horizonguard both supposedly and obviously has. It's only a matter of time before this set of districts becomes a warzone when the people who were sent to attack our tower migrate back–and connect with the rest of the horizonguard loyalists. So I have to move fast.

Faster than my internal monologue, at least. I chuckle to myself as I scratch my neck and side-step through the largest of the tears, planting my feet on unfamiliar ground. It smells like someone lit a hundred campfires in the dankest underground cavern the world has ever seen, yet looks like any other part of the city. I glance around at the surprisingly empty place in an attempt to find Gnash, yet… nobody's here.

Unease worms its way into my heart as I probe away at the empty space with my awareness. It comes back empty, too. "Pearl? Didn't you say there were people in here?"

She slowly nods as she surveys the room. "They were here until you walked through the tear. This must be a phasing thing. Or a spell that hides them whenever an outsider comes in."

"If it's a spell, I can deal with that," I say and summon a purification. "Point me to where you saw Gnash."

Pearl points at a spot along one of the stone walls with perfect certainty. I start walking towards the exact spot… but it doesn't get any closer. My feet clack against stone, the walls and floor seem to move, yet my place in space doesn't change at all. A trickle of blood and sweat trails down from the mangled skin of my neck as I latch onto my awareness and try to feel things out.

I have moved. There's distance between me and the tear's entrance that's one-to-one with how much I've walked–so that isn't the problem. I look over my shoulder to confirm it. Even though my awareness says there's distance there, my eyes tell a very different story; to my normal senses, I'm still standing just after the tear. Only my awareness seems to properly register how much I'm moving.

"Weird security for a place like this," I mutter under my breath. "Is this spell obscuring all the people in here from us too?"

Pearl shakes her head. "If it were, our awarenesses would be able to see them. My best guess is that they layered a bunch of spells on top of each other that only activate when someone without permission comes in."

"Without permission? That sounds a hell of a lot like we're in their tower complex right now."

"What if we are?"

I blink, then look up at the ceiling. Just because our tower shifted the rooms to be above the massive walls… doesn't mean it started out that way. So yeah, there is a damn good chance that we're in one of the horizonguard's tower's room rewards right now. Probably a prison if I had to hazard a guess.

"So there's a chance this is system magic, not one person's," I sigh in annoyance. "Great. Pearl, you think my purification is strong enough to break system magic?"

She raises an eyebrow. "There's only one way to find out, right?"

"The answer is no," I correct her. "But just in case…"

I snap my purification between my thumb and forefinger. Salty mist emanates out into the room, hanging in the air like ice crystals on a cold winter morning. I can feel it struggling against the room's magic through my awareness–the same way a bucket struggles to empty out an entire ocean. Yet… little by little… my spell rips bucketfuls of magic away. Nowhere near enough to empty the ocean of the system's power.

But just enough to hint that, if I could somehow make the bucket big enough, I could. The thought sends an anticipatory shudder down my spine as I bear my teeth in an unspoken threat. Someday. Not if, but when.

Unfortunately, not today. I wave a hand through the mist to dispel it and look back at Jumble–who seems like she's already finished. She's staring at me with her head tilted to the side and a furrowed brow. Like she can see everyone that I can't… which gives me an idea.

I splay my hands to the side and motion towards where Pearl said Gnash was. Jumble's expression turns even more confused as she shakes her head in disbelief and waves me further down. I back up step by step, her waving growing more intense with each second I look like a bumbling idiot. Suddenly she holds up a palm to get me to stop.

Meaning Gnash should be right here. I bend my knees without looking away from Jumble and carefully swipe my hands through where Gnash is. Jumble's eyebrows shoot to her forehead at what I assume is the sight of me waving my hands right through Gnash. She turns to the messenger, who also looks flabbergasted at the sight, and says something that just barely doesn't make it to here.

After a moment, Pearl laughs. Then she clears her throat. "They're both confused about what's happening. Apparently so is Gnash. According to Jumble, Gnash looks like he just 'smashed face-first into a brick wall of disappointment mortared with confusion'. That's pretty good; she should be a writer or something."

The visual is pretty vivid, I'll give her that. Eventually I'll learn to read lips with my awareness so I don't have to rely on Pearl for this. "Is the messenger throwing any solutions out there?"

"Nope," Pearl says without hesitation. "He's just as in the dark about this as we are. Apparently he's never actually been in here since they… oooh. They converted it into a holding facility from a theater."

A theater? Of all the rooms they could choose, they chose a theater? Shit, they really were ready for this quest to take years if that was one of their choices; or maybe the system just gave them a room addition after every subquest. Blatant favoritism should be against the rules, but obviously it isn't.

"So does this being a theater help us at all?" I ask, motioning at the seemingly normal walls around us. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing about movies or plays that'd put us in a different reality than Gnash and… everyone… else. Shit."

Pearl nods in agreement. "I can't say for sure, but I bet that's the right track. We're marked as spectators and they're marked as performers, and apparently that means we can't interact with each other. Fore's construct must know how to undo this."

Makes sense to me; he's the guard, so there's no way he doesn't know how this works. Question is; does he have the permissions to actually change anything? Because if he doesn't…

I look down at the empty spot where Gnash apparently is. Without permissions, I have no idea how to set anyone free.

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