Color drained out of the world as enemies were highlighted in red, my mind watching everything in slow motion and flagging items of interest while my ghost prepared to fight and I called out targets. We'd made it all the way to the building we were looking for, the one that supposedly contained a device that was locking down planar travel, but as soon as the doors closed behind us the trap was sprung.

In a way I was glad - I'd been a bundle of nerves, thinking that this fight was around every corner and worrying that the next intersection would be an ambush, no the next one, no the next... it was exhausting, and part of me was relieved to have the worst happen. A throwing knife hit one Halenvar soldier directly in the eye, a fork of lightning tore through a hooded member of the Brotherhood of the Ebon Maw and an Empire knight, and Errod... well, Errod stumbled and almost fell down as his sword hit the ground.

He swore and whipped it back up, but as a Knight of the Storm launched towards him he once again fucked up, almost hurling himself across the room sword-first as if he had no control over his muscles. Meanwhile, I threw another knife and then simultaneously shoved a spectral fist into someone's brain and kicked another soldier in the knee so hard something loudly snapped. I'd fought some in Storm's Keep, of course, but the frantic brawl that was forming was something else - something, it turned out, Hugh had prepared me very well for.

Normally it would all be happening too fast for me to think about anything, but with one mind on overwatch I could feel thoughts flowing through - giddiness at just how much ass I was kicking, this feeling of pride and power. There was also, somewhere in there, a complex thought about how these people were being mind controlled and didn't deserve to die. I tried to ignore that part, and was helped along by the constant reminders of what would happen to me if I lost this fight.

I was just heading towards Errod to keep him from being absolutely dogpiled when someone magically hurled me across the room - since that was one of Hugh's favorite moves I was able to flip mid-air and hit the wall feet first before launching off, doing a super cool flip, and landing perfectly. Nobody saw, which was bullshit, but also it meant I was never going to get to Errod in time. Turned out it didn't matter, as he finally seemed to figure out what he was doing.

His sword swung in a wide arc, and for a split second I thought it had turned intangible because it didn't slow down at all despite passing cleanly through one person in full plate mail, one in laminated cloth armor - they'd had some in the training room I used with Hugh, and that shit looked fake but was every bit as strong as hardened leather - and one in chainmail. Three guys, all armored, and as Errod pivoted to face someone else they all just... fell in half.

I thought again about how unnaturally light the sword had felt, and how Katrin hadn't been able to budge it. Much like the Segozertze, those bear-bat monsters I'd fought right after arriving, the sword could clearly alter its density. Well, not its actual density, not really, but its magical substance - it was like it had a layer of ephemeral matter that could be made of something as dense or buoyant as it wanted, which was also presumably why Errod had been able to stab a Granch with it. His stumbling earlier had been him making it too heavy, too dense, whatever, before it was properly in motion. Instead, he needed to swing it while weightless and then at just the right part of the arc lend it a thousand times its expected mass and violate both the laws of physics and any unfortunate bodies in the way.

Sweet Jesus that was cool. It might not be the Sword of Destiny, but... oh. Oh. The words weren't similar in Imperial, but the Jake Ross books were written in English. Fuck you, Marjorie West. Of course you changed the Sword of Density to the Sword of Destiny. Motherfucker.

Distracted by this thought, I didn't see the incoming hammer soon enough. Probably it had been hurled by the same person that flung me across the room, because it had way, way too much momentum behind it. Time slowed, the hammer flashed red, and then time ramped back up - I'd learned that below a certain speed my reflexes were actually worse since I had to wait for my muscles to respond. Not having time to dodge, I flung myself backwards and twisted my head in an attempt to turn it into a glancing blow rather than one that shattered my skull.

It worked, as far as I could tell, but I had to shut off awareness of pain as a supernova seemed to go off inside my skull. I sprinted in the direction the hammer had come from, but kept low so I could weave between people without being seen. This would have been easier if those people I was using for cover weren't also trying to kill me, but most were focused on Errod or Katrin at the moment and the others got a quick jab to the heart with a ghost fist which seemed to stagger them.

I burst through to the one with the force powers and felt something unclench as I confirmed it wasn't Hugh just before slamming a knife into his throat and a spectral swipe all down his spine. I - and everyone around him that was trying to converge on me - got thrown back in a huge undirected wave of force, but again my training let me land properly and I suddenly had a dozen prone targets. It didn't go well for them.

With the room finally clearing, I looked around and realized there were a ton more in the hallway being held back by Katrin. Her shields weren't the most durable normally, but she had been tapping into the mana battery and was slowly increasing how much she could safely draw on while casting. One of the Tindelus drones pushed to the front, war hammer in hand, and prepared to try and break the shield - he was the biggest guy I'd ever seen aside from the Behemoth, and had clearly been... modified. His skin was reddish, and horns were sticking out from his shoulders; it could have been some cosmetic surgery by someone with Enhancement, or he could be from a plane I didn't know much about, but I thought it most likely he'd bonded with an avatar spirit that had granted him... well, strength, presumably.

He swung downwards, the war hammer glowing slightly, and I saw Katrin's shield shatter. It didn't go the way the brute had hoped. She'd been casting Katrin's Atmospheric Hammer, and it had been primed to go - getting punctured just guaranteed it was pointing right at him, and in a flash the hallway was cleared as they were all rocketed backwards. With an open space behind them it should have been non-fatal in theory, but she had to have really put some oomph into it because when I looked down the hallway they all resembled me upon my arrival in this world - ears and eyes bleeding freely from the sudden pressure change, either unconscious or dying.

Katrin threw up.

"Can't make a sandwich without dropping a lemon," I said, and then hesitated. That hadn't been quite what I meant to say. Whatever. "Get one, we'll use him as a pig. A test. Pull his Duminere off."

Errod gave me a strange look, but grabbed one of the survivors and restrained her before finding the Dumine on her hip. As expected, the gold shapes had turned blood red. Katrin handed me the throwing knives she'd recovered and then readied a healing spell, as Errod carefully - but quickly - carved away to get the Dumine off. It wasn't as easy as it should have been, with the skin around it resisting far more than I would have expected. I could see Errod getting stressed out, and I was sure he didn't want to use the kind of force that was needed, but just before I yelled at him to just do it he finally built up the courage on his own.

The second it was off, Katrin healed the woman.

I hauled her over my shoulder and we hurried deeper into the building, still worried about reinforcements - but really we'd need to establish if this had worked before we could properly run away. We found a room that was a bit off the main hall, and I flipped her down onto the floor for questioning. Instead, she started talking right away.

"I can't feel it. Is it gone? Is it gone? Oh, gods. Gods save me. It's gone but now I can feel the hole, like a missing tooth. And my magic! I'd only just visited the Duminere and agreed to the contract. Oh, gods why? It's over, it's all over, I've lost everything. And they're all dead, they're all dead or taken."

She was rambling, and I was a little tempted to slap her - it was what they did in movies, right? But I wasn't so sure it would help in real life, and anyway the rambling didn't feel like it had with Tindelus so we probably had our answer. We could free them, at a cost. Errod was trying to calm her, asking her her name and telling her we'd get her out of here, but she was a fucking mess.

"Lady, we have to get moving. The little German woodwind guys are going to be right beside us in a minute."

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Errod looked at me, brow furrowed. "What did you say?"

"Tindelus' kids are right in the next street, they'll be here any mile. Come on." I hauled the woman up, pulling her along with me, and after a second she got her feet under her and I let her go.

"Calliope, you're speaking... strangely."

I left my body running and turned to him with my ghost. "I know," I hissed, hissing being kind of the natural way of speaking for ghosts, "but it's fine. I'm just tripping over my tongue a little. I'll be fine in a second. The question is, do we try to find the planar thingy or just bail on it and head to an exit?"

"We need to be able to bring people here, to strike back," Errod said.

"Sure, but also... what if that lets Tindelus drag a bunch of people back here to take over?"

He didn't have an immediate answer for that one. We kept running, but there were a lot of dead ends and it didn't feel like we were getting far - plus until we found either an exit or some sign that said 'planar seal thingy this way' we were just fucking around. After a few minutes we came to some stairs and had to make an actual decision, since going up would for sure take us further away from the exit unless we got lucky with finding a good window to climb out of. Speaking of windows - or lack thereof - there were also stairs going down, which had to be even riskier since we were already on the ground floor.

"We have to turn around," the woman said, looking around in a panic.

I tried to reply but I was having a little trouble controlling my mouth so I had to keep using my ghost to talk. "You don't get a vote," I hissed, "since we just met you and you were trying to kill us ten minutes ago. Also before that, I guess, since it looks like that's a Halenvar uniform." I turned to Errod. "Personally I'd rather go for the exit, but that's probably blocked. So my next vote would be upstairs, I guess, and then maybe Katrin can do something magic to... float us down, or something."

Katrin didn't look confident, but without a better idea Errod sighed and nodded. We turned towards the stairs, and heard a deep voice from higher up as someone spoke into the stairwell.

"You want to go down, actually. There's a passage under the building, it leads all the way around the outer ring of the city."

It was the mystery bodyguard, and he was several stories up. As always, his magic helmet hid his face and he was too far away for divination. "Who the fuck are you? Are you following us?" I hissed, but ghosts weren't known for their volume. I tried with the body again, and it looked up at him and opened its mouth but no words came out. Great.

Errod shook his head. "We have no choice," he muttered, "there's no time to worry about who we can trust." Much louder, he yelled up at the figure. "We're looking for the planar seal, that makes it hard to get into Brinkmar. Do you know where it is?"

"It's strapped to my back - it's smaller than you might expect. I'm going to put it somewhere Tindelus can't find it; he has access to everything, he can bypass all the Clockmaker's protections. Hiding it is the only option. That also means he can grant any of his people access to the portals, so anything I do that will let me bypass it will also let him bypass it. Right now the best option is to leave it as restrictive as possible and hide it."

"We need to bring people here, to fight back!"

That deep voice chuckled. "Good luck. Things aren't going to work out the way you think, you're not going to just tell people what happened and have an army behind you. You're not wrong to want it, or to try, but there's no point in me leaving the door open."

"But if I can do it," Errod said, "if I... I have connections, and we should move quickly if we want to -"

"No. It's non-negotiable, unfortunately. Some things... you just have to accept. This is for your own good. You should go now, to the tunnel I mentioned. If you go left you can get to the Assembler Forge, it doesn't work anymore but there are valuable scraps - it's where most of my armor is from. If you go right, which you probably should, you can leave at the second exit and cross the way to the old monastery. There's an exit under there, though it's a bit... hard to find."

With that he vanished, and I saw Errod's grip tighten on the railing. He wanted to chase after this guy, bad. Part of me did too, and I also wanted to go raid this Assembler Forge. Katrin decided to be the voice of reason instead, taking Errod by the hand and gently pulling him closer. "Errod, maybe we just go. We've learned a lot, and we... we can't fight them all ourselves, nor do we want to kill them if we can find a better way. We're out of food, we're out of healing potions - you know that spell doesn't heal everything - and we're massively under-prepared in general. Let's... let's go. We'll tell everyone - I can tell Lute, he's a... an important person. Come on."

We might have stood there arguing, but noises started to reach us from down the hall and the woman we'd kinda saved bolted downstairs. After very little hesitation we all followed, and gave up on retrieving the planar seal or making any changes to it. By the time we found the tunnel the sounds had gotten closer, and so we did the sensible thing and turned right so we could head for the exit. The tunnel wasn't like the subway we'd trekked through before, it was a cluttered space filled with old crates and debris, divided into basements and storage rooms by walls that someone had randomly blown holes in.

It kept us from moving quickly, and made it hard to say what "the second exit" was - there were plenty of signs of people adding or boarding up doorways, but they all appeared to be blocked in one way or another. If we'd taken the second possible exit it would have been extremely close to where we started, and would have required us to dig our way out. Instead we passed doorway after collapsed doorway, and sure enough we finally arrived at something that was clearly an actual deliberate exit. If this was what we were looking for, and it had to be, then we were unlikely to miss the second one.

Feeling much better about ignoring the smaller doorways, we picked up the pace and almost made it before Tindelus' goons found us. Instead, just as the exit came into view - a crumbling but still majestic stone archway wide enough to drive a car through if you weren't worried about scratching the side mirrors - someone came flying out of the darkness at us. I went to throw a knife but it dropped limply from my hand instead. Inconvenient. Errod swung but lost his sword, sending it flying by mistake - it did cleave the poor asshole attacking us in half, but then carried on and embedded itself in the wall. We weren't off to a great start, and more were coming.

I retrieved my knife, and was surprised to see it was completely clean - I'd assumed that I dropped it because it was slick with blood from that last battle or something. Peeking through a wall with divination, I could see more coming - I tried to call out a warning, but all that came out was a low moan and so instead I just threw myself into the fray as they rounded the corner. My coordination was off, maybe something wrong with the tether connecting me to my body? It wasn't stopping me completely, but I was for sure missing way more than I should be. I finally found my voice, and yelled loud enough for Katrin and Errod to hear.

"Dancing retreat! Not dancing, dancing!" Fighting, I meant. God damn it. "Zoey, collapse the hallway!"

I managed to disengage enough to run for the exit, and sure enough Katrin targeted the ceiling of the tunnel behind me. She put some extra mana from the battery into it, I was pretty sure, and almost immediately several tons of stone crashed down onto our pursuers. While impressive, it was only a temporary distraction - they could dig it out, or maybe even slowly squeeze through some open gaps, or hell - just use whatever hive mind communication they had to come at us from the street above. We had to fucking move.

I tackled someone from behind just as they let loose with a blast of lightning, and thankfully that was enough to make them miss. Before I could try to finish them off, a soldier from Erathik grabbed me by the leg and tried to swing me into the wall, but I was able to kick his hand free and then throw a knife into his face. I wrote that knife off - I'd barely lost any somehow, but it was obvious I wasn't going to get out of this mess with a perfect record - and I scrambled up to start running again.

Katrin covered our retreat with shields, most of which shattered into arcane fragments under the onslaught but still absorbed enough to keep us safe. She tried to collapse the exit behind us like she had with the tunnel, but only managed to scatter some debris around. Still, it would at least be a minor inconvenience to them. After chugging up some stairs and kicking a huge set of doors right off its hinges, we were back out on the street and headed towards a building that was, almost certainly, the monastery we were supposed to be looking for.

This was, probably, where Tantek had been living. I was so, so tempted to search through it - but as we entered I could see a crowd of Tindelus goons rushing down the street towards us. We moved quickly through the first room, but then as we all entered the second area everything went gray once again and a dozen forms were highlighted in red - hiding behind barrels and overturned tables, mostly. It was an ambush, and we had nowhere else to turn.

"Serpent protocol!" the woman we'd been dragging with us yelled as soldiers jumped out, and when they hesitated she added, "I can prove I'm safe! They cut my Dumine out, please!"

The Halenvar soldiers looked nervously to the back corner of the room, where the Behemoth stepped out of the shadows - he wasn't in Hulk mode, but was still about seven and a half feet tall. He raised an eyebrow at my ghost, which I was regretting having on display - without it, he would have only seen Helma which may have been the better outcome. "Well, well, well. It's you two. You told me once that there was a secret entrance under this place; if you lead us there, I might be willing to let you live with most of your limbs still attached. Not you," he said as he pointed at Errod, "you have to fight me. With one hand behind your back, I think the deal was?"

Was he joking? Well, he wasn't immediately attacking, so that was something. In a second we were about to get attacked, and surely they would be motivated to fight on our side. After that... well, it would depend on how the fight went. Yeah. This... this was a good thing. Or a less bad thing, anyway. "Every clown has a silver lemming," I muttered to myself, and then thought about what I'd just said. "Huh. I may need a shepherd. Not a shepherd, a shepherd. Fuck."

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