LinieBaru: Chapter 32: That Time the Mages Faced LinieBaru's Clone and Regretted It Instantly (Patreon)

This chapter wasn’t even supposed to exist. But due to too many requests, I ended up writing it.

In this chapter:

LinieBaru's Clone VS All 10 mages.

LinieBaru's Clone VS Frieren.

Fair warning: This chapter is the largest one till date. 22K words, focused on a single confrontation. It originally had 12K words, but I decided to go all out. It was really tough writing it, took me a month. Hope you like it.

Alternate Titles:

1. CloneBaru VS Mages

2. LinieBaru Without A Heart

Happy reading!

Land was three hundred kilometers away from the dungeon and he would remember that distance for the rest of his life, because it did not save him from anything.

He was sitting in a chair by a window in a rented room above a bakery, and the chair was the reason he had cheated in the first place. It was a good chair. The seat had worn into the shape of him over the years, the arms were smooth where his elbows rested, and it stood in exactly the right place to catch the afternoon light without putting the glare on a page. A book lay open across his knee, a thick novel with a cracked spine that smelled of vanilla and old paper. A cup of tea sat on the sill beside him, gone cold an hour ago, a thin skin forming across the surface. The bakery below was pulling the last loaves of the day, and the smell of it came up through the floorboards, warm and yeasty and ordinary.

This was the shape of his life and he had arranged it carefully. Land was a second class mage with a talent that was, in the eyes of every examiner he had ever met, wasted on him. He could make himself. Not illusions, not projections, not puppets of straw and mana. Copies. Whole ones, with his weight and his blood and his bad knee and his ability to cast, copies that walked out the door and lived their own hours and came back to him with everything they had seen still warm in them. Other mages who learned the technique used it to work harder. Two of you meant twice the study, twice the patrols, twice the coin. Land had looked at the same technique and seen the opposite door. Two of you meant one of you could sit down.

While he was still a third class mage, he attended a magic school in the Imperial Capital. Within three years of his time at the capital, he advanced to a second class mage specializing in clone and illusion magic.

So when the notice for the First Class Mage Exam came, he had read it in this chair, and he had thought about the roads north, which were long and full of bandits and weather and inns with lumpy beds, and he had thought about the examination hall, which would be stuffy and full of people asking him questions, and he had thought about his novel, which was at the part where the detective finally goes into the cellar. Then he had made a copy of himself, given it his clothes and his coin and his glasses, and sent it to Äußerst.

It was not the first time. It was not even the tenth. He had been doing this for years without consequence, and consequence is a thing you stop believing in when it fails to arrive for long enough.

The bond between him and the copy was a thin one. It was not sight and it was not sound. If he closed his eyes and let himself go slack, he could feel the copy the way you feel your own hand behind your back in a dark room, a sense of position and mood without detail. Mostly he ignored it. It was a background hum, like a neighbor moving furniture two floors down. On the second day of the exam he had ignored it through an entire chapter of his novel while the copy fought its way through a sealed forest. On the fourth day he had eaten a whole plum tart while the copy waited out a fight it wanted no part of.

On the day the dungeon opened, he stopped being able to ignore it.

It started as a pressure behind his eyes, the beginning of a headache that never quite became one. He shifted in the chair and turned a page he had not read. The hum from the copy had changed pitch. It had gone thin and high, and under it there was something Land did not have a word for yet, a feeling like standing at the top of a staircase in the dark and finding that the first step is not where your foot expects it.

He put the book face down on the sill. He told himself he would look in for a moment.

───✧───

The copy was walking down a corridor that seemed to breathe.

Call him Land, because he did. He had never been anything else to himself. He had the original's memories up to the morning of his making, the original's caution, the original's fondness for chairs, and a body that had been alive for eleven days. He did not think of himself as a copy any more than a man thinks of himself as a Tuesday. He was simply Land, and he was in a place that wanted him dead.

The walls of the corridor were a slick gray that was not quite stone, and they held a moisture that never gathered into drops and never dried. When he touched one with two fingers, out of a curiosity he immediately regretted, the surface was warm. Not the warmth of sunlight on rock. The warmth of the inside of a mouth. He wiped his hand on his cloak and did not touch the walls again.

Sounds reached him from far off and refused to resolve into anything. A rhythmic knocking that might have been footsteps or might have been water. A long low grinding that could have been the foundations settling, except that it happened at intervals, and settling does not keep time. Twice he heard what he was almost sure was a voice, a single syllable, cut off. He did not go toward it. He had a rule about that.

His instruction was to reach the innermost part of the dungeon. The proctor had delivered it in a voice with no weather in it, and it had sounded simple in the hall, the way things do when there is a ceiling and daylight and other people standing near you. Down here it had come apart into a hundred smaller problems, and all of them had teeth.

The dungeon's trick was not a secret. Everyone had been told before they went in, which Land now understood was part of the cruelty. The dungeon made copies of intruders. Perfect ones, with the same reach, the same reflexes, the same mana capacity, the same decade of training in the fingers. What the copies did not have was any interior. No pain to make them flinch, no fear to make them hesitate, no anger to make them sloppy. They fought until they were dust or until you were meat, and they did not care which. A man with a shattered forearm keeps fighting with the other hand and the broken one swinging loose at his side, because the broken arm is a fact and not a feeling.

Land had a private opinion about this, formed in the first hour and refined since. A copy without fear was not a stronger version of you. It was a version of you that had stopped being a person. He was himself a copy, and he had fear in abundance, and he had begun to hold onto that fear like a man holding onto a railing. It was proof of something.

He had been lucky so far and he knew the exact shape of his luck. He had kept to the edges. He had followed the sound of fights rather than the fights themselves, arriving in rooms after the mana had gone stale and the dust had settled, stepping over the powdered remains of dungeon clay and reading the scoring on the walls to learn what had happened. Someone had used lightning here. Someone had frozen a corridor solid there, and the ice was still melting, dripping into a channel it had cut in the floor. Once he had found a boot with nothing in it and had walked a long way without looking at anything.

He had not faced a single serious threat. He had planned it that way, and the plan had worked, and he was beginning to suspect that plans working was not the same as being safe. There is a difference between a road with no bandits on it and a road the bandits have left on purpose.

Two passages back he had done the sensible thing, which was the only kind of thing he did. He had found a crevice in the wall, a vertical slot barely wide enough for a shoulder, and he had made another copy of himself and put it in there. It had his memories up to that moment and his instructions after it. Stay. Wait. If you feel me go out, come after and finish the exam. The copy had nodded at him with his own face, tucked its knees up, and gone still in the dark.

It had been a comfortable thought at the time. He had carried it down the corridor like a coal in a pocket. Even if this body ended here, some continuation of him would climb out into daylight and go home to the chair. Death became a paperwork problem. An inconvenience with a workaround.

He would learn, before the hour was out, that some things do not care whether you have a workaround. A workaround is a promise you make to yourself about the future, and there are things in the world that eat futures.

The corridor widened without any warning at all. One moment the walls were close enough to touch on both sides, and then they pulled back and away and the ceiling went up into a darkness his eyes could not find the top of. The air changed too. It became still in a way that felt deliberate, as though the room were a held breath.

Ahead of him, at the far end of that space, nine people stood in a loose half circle in front of a door.

The door was the first thing that told him he should turn around. It was enormous, easily four times the height of a man, banded in thick strips of dark metal and studded with rivets the size of fists. It had no handle and no hinge that he could see. Dungeons build what they need and nothing more, and this door had not been built to be opened by the people on this side of it. It had been built to keep something in.

Even at forty paces he could feel the cold coming off it.

He knew them all by sight. He had spent the orientation studying faces instead of listening, because faces were more useful than speeches. Denken, the old man, straight backed in a way that cost him something. Methode, whose expression never moved far from where she left it. Edel and Ehre standing close together the way people do when they have already decided who they will save first. Wirbel with his shoulders squared and his jaw working. Lawine and Kanne, who had spent every day of the exam sniping at each other with the effortless meanness of old friends. Richter, slow spoken and careful handed. Laufen, who could never stand still, shifting her weight from one foot to the other even now.

Nobody was talking. Nine mages in a room with a ceiling that went up forever, and not one of them was saying anything, and every one of them was facing the same direction.

The lazy clever part of Land, which had been steering him competently for eleven days and for thirty four years before that, told him to stay in the shadow of the passage mouth and watch. Let them open it. Let whatever happened happen. Step over the results.

Then Methode's head turned, unhurried, and she looked directly at him.

She had not heard him. He was certain of that. He had made no sound. She had simply known, the way she seemed to know most things, and the others followed her gaze one by one until nine faces had found him in the dark.

He came forward. His boots were loud now in a way they had not been a moment ago. He had the sudden humiliating awareness of being watched walking, of his own arms, of the way his cloak hung. He stopped at the edge of their half circle and cleared his throat.

"What is happening?" he said. It was meant to come out casual. It came out quiet enough that he was not sure it had carried.

"There is an adorable threat behind that door," Methode said with a serious face.

She did not turn to say it. The words dropped into the room and lay there. Wirbel's eyebrows went up. Lawine glanced sideways at Kanne with an expression that asked whether she had heard that too. Methode lifted her shoulders once and let them fall, as though the sentence had arrived in her mouth from somewhere else and she had only agreed to deliver it.

Richter was the one who explained, in the low even voice of a man who reads instructions aloud before following them. "The copy of the demon is in there," he said, and moved his thumb toward the door. "We have been standing here for a while trying to think of a way to kill it."

The gesture was so casual that for a moment Land's mind tried to file the whole scene as a joke, a set piece, a thing that could be laughed at and walked away from. Then a draught came off the iron and touched the sweat on his neck, and his body understood before his mind did. The cold was wrong. A cellar is cold and it feels like a cellar. This cold felt like the inside of a box that had been buried.

The demon. Of course.

He had seen her on the first day, in the hall with the high arched windows, and he remembered her the way you remember a wrong note in a familiar song. The proctors had brought her out with a kind of brittle cheerfulness, as though presenting a curiosity, and the whole room had gone silent at once.

She had been small. That was the first thing. The top of her head would not have reached Land's shoulder. Her eyes were a dark purple, the color the sky goes for about six minutes after sunset, and they had been enormous and slightly anxious, flicking around the hall, cataloguing exits. Her hair was pink, a soft dusty pink, cut to the chin and tied into two tails with black ribbons. Two small horns curved back from behind her hair, and they were not the horns of anything Land had seen in a bestiary. They were young horns, short and slightly dark at the tips, like the first growth on something that was still growing. She had been wearing a frilled dress with layers and lace and small bows at the cuffs, an absurd garment, a garment for a girl sitting at a table with a doll and a teapot.

And she had been nervous. That was the detail his memory kept returning to and could not make sense of. She had stood up there with a hundred mages staring at her and she had fidgeted. At one point Frieren in the crowd had summoned a staff and she had actually flinched.

Land had thought about it for approximately four seconds. He had wondered why Serie, who had by all accounts never done a kind thing in a thousand years, would issue a direct order permitting a demon into a human examination. He had wondered what that meant about the demon, or about Serie, or about the state of the world in a year when such a thing could occur. Then he had adjusted his glasses and stopped wondering, because the answer was very obviously none of his business, and business that did not belong to him had a way of becoming his problem the moment he picked it up.

He was standing in front of an iron door now, and the cold was coming through his boots, and he understood that he had made a small error of judgment eleven days ago in a warm room.

"Any plans?" he said, pulling his cloak tighter. It was not really a robe. It was a traveling cloak with an unreasonable number of pockets, and it had never once made him feel less exposed, but he kept pulling it tighter anyway.

Denken answered. His voice had gravel in it, and something else underneath, a kind of careful flatness that men use when they are describing a thing they have not stopped seeing. "She is an archmage. I fought the original, in the forest, in the first phase." His hand drifted to his side without his noticing, and Land saw the tear in the fabric there, the edges of the cloth fused and blackened. "She is fast. Faster than her size suggests and faster than she should be. And she pulls weapons out of the air. Not summons. There is no casting time that I could see, no gathering of mana, nothing to read. The weapon is not there and then it is in her hand and then it is in you."

"How long did it last?" Land asked.

"That is the part I keep returning to." Denken looked at the door. "It did not last. She was not trying to kill me. She was trying to get something from me, and I was standing in the way, and she moved me." He paused. "I walked away from it. I have been alive for a long time and I have walked away from a number of things, and that one I did not walk away from. That one let me go."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"All right," Land said. "So what is the weakness?"

He said it because it was the question you asked. Every monster had one. That was the rule you learned in the third class syllabus, that every defense has a seam and every attack has a wind up, and the whole art of being a mage was finding the seam before the wind up finished. He asked the question expecting the answer to be a list.

"I do not know," Denken said.

"There has to be something."

"Then I did not find it." The old man's eyes came off the door and landed on Land with unexpected weight. "Understand what I am telling you. I was not overpowered. I was not outcast. I was not beaten by a stronger spell. I was standing in a forest with thirty years of combat experience and she did something I did not have a name for, and then she did a second thing, and by the time I had processed the first one she was already gone. You cannot find the seam in something if you cannot keep up with it enough to look."

Laufen made a small impatient sound. She had been shifting from foot to foot for the whole conversation and now she came up onto the balls of her feet, and her whole body was in that posture people have when they cannot stand being told a thing is impossible.

"Then we all go at once," she said. "All nine. Ten now. A demon cannot hold ten directions. That is not a matter of being strong, that is a matter of having two hands and one head. And I am faster than anything I have ever met. I can be behind it before it has finished looking at the front rank."

She said it the way you say a thing you have never had disproved. Land looked at her and felt a small ache. There was a particular kind of confidence that belonged only to people who had not yet been broken against a wall, and she had it in full, and it was lovely to look at the way a lit candle is lovely in a draught.

Richter nodded slowly, testing the idea. "It is sound," he said. "Volume beats precision when precision has to divide itself. If we overlap the timing, something gets through."

There was a shifting among them, the small physical consensus that comes before an agreement is spoken. Staves tilted. Wirbel rolled his neck and the joints in it popped like green wood in a fire. Lawine and Kanne looked at each other and did not say anything sharp, which was the most alarming thing Land had seen all day.

Land's own mind had gone to a different place entirely. He was thinking about the crevice two passages back and the copy folded up inside it. He was thinking, with the particular coldness that came over him at moments like this, that whatever happened in the next hour would not be final. That was the whole point of him. He was a man who had arranged his life so that endings did not apply.

He held that thought against his chest like a warm stone, and it comforted him, and later he would think about how it felt to be comforted by it, and he would be unable to remember the sensation at all.

Methode's hands moved in a small pattern in front of her. Land could not tell if it was a ward or a prayer. He was not certain there was a difference in a place like this.

Then they pushed the door.

───✧───

The iron swung inward without a sound.

That was the first thing that was wrong, and it was wrong in a way Land felt in his molars. A door of that weight should groan. It should shriek on its pins and shed rust and announce itself. Instead the two leaves parted smoothly and silently, as though they had been oiled that morning, as though they had been waiting on a hair trigger for someone to lean on them.

The chamber beyond was enormous and lit by nothing. There was light, a flat gray light with no source and no direction, so that everything in the room was equally visible and nothing cast much of a shadow. Land had spent his life in rooms where the light came from somewhere. His eyes kept searching for the window and not finding it, and the small failure repeated itself over and over at the back of his mind like a stone in a boot.

The floor was smooth and dark and went on for a long way. In the center of it rose a statue.

It was seated, and it was huge, forty feet at least from its base to the crown of its head, carved from a stone several shades paler than the walls. Its legs were folded and its hands rested in its lap, palms up and cupped, each palm large enough to hold a hay wagon. The face had been worn away. Not defaced, not broken. Worn, the way a river stone is worn, smooth and blank and gently rounded where features had been, as though the statue had spent ten thousand years in a current no one else could feel. Land did not recognize the god. He was not certain it had been a god. There was nothing devotional in the posture. It sat the way a man sits when he is waiting for someone to bring him something.

And in the cup of those two great hands, something was sitting.

Land saw it and felt his stomach go down and keep going.

It was the demon girl. It was exactly the demon girl, down to a level of detail that his mind rejected before it accepted. The twin tails, chin length. The ribbons. The two small horns with their slight forward curve. The frilled dress with its layers and its lace and the little bows at the cuffs, every fold and pleat reproduced, every ruffle laid where it would have lain on cloth.

All of it was clay. Gray brown, the color of a riverbank after rain, matte and slightly damp looking. There was no pink in the hair and no purple in the eyes and no white in the lace. Whoever or whatever the dungeon was, it had copied her with a patience that was not sane. It had counted the ribbons.

The copy was sitting cross legged in the statue's palms with one elbow on its thigh and its cheek resting on its fist. It was a bored pose. It was the pose of a child on a long journey, looking out of a carriage window at fields, waiting for the trip to be over.

It was not moving.

That was what got into Land and stayed there. Not the weapons, which came later and were worse in every measurable way. Not the deaths. The stillness. A living thing at rest is never actually still. A cat asleep on a hearth moves constantly, breathes, twitches an ear at a sound three rooms away, adjusts. Even a man holding his breath in hiding is a riot of small motion, a pulse in the throat, a tremor in a held muscle, the slow drift of a hand toward comfort. Land knew this because he had spent eleven days hiding and had become intimately familiar with how badly a body wants to fidget.

The clay girl did not fidget. The clay girl did not breathe. Its chest did not rise. Its fingers did not settle. A strand of its sculpted hair hung across its cheek and did not stir, because nothing inside it was warm enough to make air move.

It had been sitting like that in an empty room, in the gray light, with its cheek on its fist, waiting.

How long? Land thought, and immediately wished he had not, because there was no answer that was not terrible. The exam had started eleven days ago. The dungeon had been here for centuries. But the copy was made from the original, which meant the copy had been made when she walked in, which meant it had been sitting there for hours at most, and somehow that was worse. It had been sitting there for hours, doing nothing, wanting nothing, without boredom, because boredom is a form of suffering and it did not have the equipment.

The head turned.

It was a small movement. Perhaps twenty degrees. The chin came off the fist and the face came around toward the door, and the whole room seemed to tilt underneath them, and Land heard someone behind him take a breath and not let it out.

Then it came down.

It did not jump and it did not climb. It simply left the statue's hand and descended, upright, at the speed of a leaf, its skirts hanging straight down and unstirred. Land watched the clay boots drift toward the floor and thought, with the flat clarity of a man whose mind has stopped protecting him, that of course it could do that. Every account of every demon he had ever read mentioned it. They did not respect the ground. Something in the way they were built had never agreed to the terms.

The boots touched the stone. There was no sound. Twenty paces separated it from the group and it did not close any of them.

It looked at them and tipped its head to the left.

The gesture was birdlike and almost sweet, the small inquisitive tilt of a sparrow considering a crumb, and on the blank clay face it was the most obscene thing Land had ever seen. A tilt of the head means something. It means curiosity, it means I do not understand, it means tell me more. Under it there is supposed to be a mind wondering. There was no mind here. There was a body that had inherited a gesture from a girl who used it, performing it into an empty room, at people it was going to kill.

Nine staves came up. Land felt the mana gather around him, sharp and clean, the smell of it like the air before rain. His own magic stirred in his chest, a small warm coil he desperately hoped to keep.

The clay girl raised one hand.

There was no gathering. Denken had been right and Land had not really believed him until this second. No glow, no pull on the ambient mana, no tightening of the air that a trained mage feels the way a sailor feels weather. The hand came up empty and closed, and when the fingers finished closing there was something in them.

It was small. It was silver and gray, perhaps the length of a forearm, and it was put together out of shapes Land's eye could not organize. There were flat planes and shallow curves and a slot along the top and a piece that looked like a hook guarded by a loop. It was machined. That was the word his mind eventually found, days later, and even then he was not sure it was a word. It had been made by something that valued exactness for its own sake, in a place where things were cut rather than grown.

He reached out with the sense he had been training since he was nine years old, the sense that reads the charge in a thing and tells you what it will do, and he found absolutely nothing. It was as inert as a doorknob. It might as well have been a rock.

The clay girl pointed it at them.

Nine mana shields came up in the same half second. They overlapped in a ragged wall of blue and green and pale gold, and Land threw up his own at the back, a thin film of a thing that he had never had much cause to improve.

Nothing happened.

The copy did not move. The mages did not breathe. The air pressed in and got heavier, and Land became aware of his own heartbeat and then of the sweat running down the inside of his arm, and he thought, with a kind of desperate practicality, that if this was a weapon it was a very poor one, that the thing was clearly a ritual focus, that she would need to charge it, that they had time.

Then the sound happened.

It was not a roar. Roars were things Land understood. A roar came out of a chest and it swelled and peaked and fell and it told you something was alive and where it was and how big. This had no swell and no fall. It was one flat crack, an event rather than a noise, and it arrived complete and left a hole behind it where the world's other sounds had been.

In the rented room three hundred kilometers away, Land came out of the chair.

He was on his feet before he knew he had stood, and the book went off the sill and hit the floor open and broke its spine the rest of the way, and the cold tea went over and ran along the wood toward the wall. His hands had come up in front of his chest, palms out, defending himself from a room he was not in. His heart was going at a rate that made his vision pulse at the edges. Downstairs the baker was singing something tuneless while she scraped a tray.

He stood there with his hands up in the afternoon light and he could not get his breath.

The connection was not supposed to do this. It was a thin line. It was a sense of position and mood. It had never once carried sound, and it had not carried sound now, not really. What had come up the line was the copy's body deciding, all at once and without consulting anybody, that it was going to die. That decision had traveled the whole three hundred kilometers in less than an instant and had arrived in the original's chest, and now the original was standing in his own room with his tea soaking into the floorboards, afraid of something that had happened to someone else.

He should have cut the line. That was the sensible thing and he was the most sensible man he knew. He had done it a hundred times, pushed a copy out to arm's length and let it get on with being uncomfortable somewhere while he read.

He did not cut the line. He sat back down on the edge of the chair, slowly, with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face, and he listened.

───✧───

The copy had gone flat against the floor without any conscious decision. He came back up onto his knees behind the fallen pillar he had chosen the moment he entered, because he had chosen it the moment he entered, because he always did.

Richter's barrier had a crack in it.

That was all. That was the entire visible result. A web of hairline fractures ran through the blue plate from a point just left of center, and a chip of the light broke off it and fell and shattered on the stone with a small clear ring, like a dropped glass in another room.

Richter was staring at it. His face had gone the gray of dishwater and his staff had slid halfway out of his fingers before he caught it. A slug of metal the size of a thumbnail lay steaming on the floor in front of him, flattened into a shape like a coin someone had chewed.

Land looked at the crack and did the work. Richter was a barrier specialist. His shields had held against an ogre's charge during the second phase, Land had watched it happen from a rooftop, had watched two tons of muscle hit that blue plate and come to a complete stop as though it had run into a hill. And a piece of metal the weight of a button had cracked it.

The speed. It had to be the speed. Force is mass and speed together, and if you have almost no mass then you need speed that has no business existing in the world, and the sound had told him how much. That crack. That was not the sound of a thrown thing. That was the sound of air being shoved out of the way faster than air agrees to move.

There was no counter for that. You could not dodge a thing that arrived before the sound of its leaving. You could not read the wind up, because there was no wind up, only a finger closing. You could not deflect it, because deflection required time in which to steer. There was only the shield, and the shield had cracked.

The chamber came apart into motion.

The mages went outward from each other, fast, keeping their faces toward the center, their heels scraping as they took the distance they had all just decided they needed. It was not a retreat. It was the spacing you take when something has a lethal cone and you want to stop being in the same cone as your neighbor. They fanned into a wide arc around the clay girl, twenty paces out, staves lifting.

Land stayed exactly where he was. He had no intention of joining anything. The copy had not looked at him. He wanted very much for that to continue.

Wirbel went first, with his teeth showing in an expression that had nothing to do with humor. He drove his staff forward and a chain of yellow lightning went across the dark air in a long jointed crawl, the way lightning does, finding its way. It was a good spell. Land had seen it put a hole through a hardwood door in the second phase.

The clay girl did not turn her head.

She raised one hand and a flower opened in front of her.

That was the only word for it. Seven petals of pale pink light spun outward from a point in the air, unfolding in a slow spiral, each petal a curved blade of brightness, and they turned lazily around their own center like something growing in a time lapse. The lightning went into them and stopped. The petals flared white along their edges, held, and then folded back down to the center and closed. There was no discharge. There was no smell of ozone, and lightning always leaves a smell. The spell had not been blocked or grounded or dispersed.

It had been eaten.

Wirbel stood staring at the place where his magic had ceased to be. Land watched the muscle jump in the side of his jaw.

Lawine came in next, low and singing, drawing the moisture out of the stone itself. Spears of pale blue ice came up out of the floor in a curving rank, each one as thick as a man's leg, aimed at the knees and the chest. The clay girl moved two fingers. One of the objects orbiting her, a flat black disc Land had not consciously registered until that moment, unfolded itself like a beetle opening its wing cases and became a hexagonal wall of orange light.

The ice broke against it into powder. Not shards. Powder, fine as flour, falling in a curtain around her feet and drifting.

Lawine's breath fogged. Land saw her fingers shake once before she closed them tighter.

Then they stopped going one at a time, which was sensible, and it changed nothing.

Kanne pulled water from the cracks in the floor and from the sweat on her own forearms and shaped it into a ribbon that spun faster and faster until it made a high singing note. It came in from the left. At the same moment Denken sent a column of fire from the right, a roaring barrel thick rush of orange that lit the whole chamber and made the statue throw its first real shadow.

Two attacks. Two directions. The timing was good, better than good, they had been training in these rooms for a week and a half and their instincts were meshing.

The clay girl raised both hands. In the left there was suddenly a small round shield of polished white bone, no bigger than a dinner plate, with a boss in the center. In the right there was a rod of dark iron with a shallow cup at one end, and out of the cup the seven petaled flower bloomed again.

Denken's fire hit the bone plate and split. It did not spread around a barrier. It split, cleanly, the way a river splits at the prow of a rock, and went past her on both sides, and the heat of it lit her clay face from beneath and did not mark it.

Kanne's water ribbon touched the flower and was steam before it reached the clay.

Land had spent his adult life around magical defenses. He knew barriers, wards, absorbing lattices, redirection fields, the whole taxonomy. The flower was none of them. It moved. Not the mechanical rotation of a construct. It moved like a thing that had decided to, adjusting its petals a fraction as the water arrived, tilting into the impact. The back of Land's neck went cold and stayed cold.

Edel and Ehre worked together and did it well. Edel tore a slab of floor loose with a grunt that Land heard from forty paces, a piece of stone the size of a cart, and hurled it. Ehre sharpened the air around it as it flew, wrapping it in a wind edge that screamed.

The clay girl did not step aside. One of the silver spheres at her waist rotated once, and a curved shell of orange light appeared between her and the stone.

The impact made a sound like a mountain clearing its throat. The shell buckled inward, actually buckled, the light deforming visibly, and for one hot second Land's chest filled with something dangerous and stupid that was almost hope.

Then the shell snapped back to its original curve and the slab came apart into a dozen pieces that tumbled away harmlessly across the floor.

Edel said a word under her breath. Ehre's face had gone the color of old milk.

Richter planted his staff and tried to pin her.

It was the right idea and Land respected it. You cannot out shoot a thing that shoots faster than sound, so you take away its ability to stand up. Richter's specialty was weight, a crushing field that made the air into a stack of stones, and he was good enough at it that Land felt the edge of it from behind the pillar. His shoulders sagged. His knees wanted to fold. The dust on the floor around the clay girl stopped drifting and lay down.

The clay head tilted. To the right this time.

A small triangular prism turned somewhere above her shoulder and made a soft chime, a pleasant sound, the sound of a spoon against porcelain.

The field burst. Land felt it go the way you feel a rope part under tension. Richter made a noise and dropped to one knee, and a line of blood came out of his nose and hung and fell.

Laufen was the only one who reached her.

She did it beautifully. She simply stopped being where Land's eye had her and was behind the clay girl instead, closing the twenty paces in the time it takes to blink twice, her short blade already coming around in a flat arc at the back of the clay neck. It was a perfect strike. No shout, no wind up, no tell.

One of the silver spheres was already there.

That was the detail. It had not moved to meet her. It had been waiting where she was going to be, hanging in the air behind the clay girl's neck at exactly the height of her swing, before she arrived. A field of crackling yellow light unfolded around Laufen's forearm and her blade stopped an inch from the clay, and she hung there with her whole body's momentum caught, and Land watched her shoulder try to keep going and her elbow try to stay and he thought, quite clearly, that she was about to come apart at the joint.

The clay girl made a small motion with two fingers, the gesture you make at a fly.

The field let go and threw Laufen backward across ten paces of floor. She hit and rolled and came up on her hands with no air in her.

Methode was already moving among them, quiet, her hands full of soft white light, closing the small cuts the flying stone had opened, steadying a man here and a woman there. She did not speak and her face did not change. Only her eyes gave it away, the strain gathering at the corners of them.

And through all of it the copy stood in the middle of the floor with its feet planted and its arms loose, and it did not move from that spot. It shielded in every direction at once and it never hurried. Some of the objects hung around it in slow orbit, turning, drifting, keeping their own distances like moons around a dead world. Others it held. The flower. The bone plate. The black discs. The silver spheres.

None of them made any sense. They were too clean. They had the wrong kind of exactness for a world with magic in it, no ornament, no runes, no craftsman's mark, nothing but function cut into metal by a process Land could not picture. They were things from somewhere that had never needed a spell for anything, and they were being used by a girl made of mud in a room under a mountain.

Every time an attack came in, the nearest object was already turning toward it. The clay chest never rose. The clay face never tightened. It was not fighting them. It was doing something more like housekeeping.

They tried once more, all together this time, on Denken's shout, hoping that nine spells arriving in the same instant would find a gap that three could not. Fire from the front, ice from the left, water from the right, lightning through the floor, stone from above.

A black disc unfolded over her head into a honeycomb of orange light and the fire spread across it and found no way through. The bone plate turned and Lawine's ice went to powder. The flower spun and Kanne's water went to steam. A silver sphere dropped to the ground, released a ring of blue light, and Wirbel's lightning went back down into the stone and was swallowed whole. The curved shell caught Edel's second slab, which was bigger than the first, and cracked it in half without so much as flexing.

Land watched the despair settle over the group like dew. You could see it land. You could see the exact moment when Kanne stopped choosing her targets and simply started casting, and when Lawine's face changed from concentration to something more like grief, and when Ehre's shoulders came up around her ears.

Laufen tried again anyway. She came from three angles in the space of one breath, and the spheres were at every one of them before she was, blocking with flat flashes of yellow light. She was faster than anything Land had ever seen in his life. It did not matter. Speed is a way of arriving before the answer. There is nothing speed can do about an answer that is already there.

On the fourth pass a sphere clipped her shoulder and put her down on the floor and she did not get up immediately.

Denken raised a hand and made a fist.

"Enough," he said, and his voice sounded like something being dragged. "We cannot harm it. Not with this. Fall back through the door. We will find another way in, or another way to the center, or we will fail the examination, and I will take failure gladly today."

The word fell over them and nobody argued, because there was nothing to argue with. Every spell they had brought into that room had been met and undone by an object that no one could identify, wielded by a thing that had not moved its feet.

They began to walk backward toward the iron door with their staves still up and their eyes still forward.

Land watched them go and a small part of him, the part that had kept him alive for eleven days, said wait.

It said: it let you all come in. It sat in that statue's hand for hours and did nothing, and it let you open the door, and it has not taken one step in any direction. Watch what it does when the food tries to leave.

They reached the door. Denken had his hand on the iron. Richter and Laufen were at his flanks, Lawine and Kanne just behind, Edel and Ehre at the sides. Methode came last, walking backward with her staff held out in front of her.

For one clean second Land believed they were going to make it.

Then the clay girl raised something new.

It was not like the others. It was curved, and it was dark purple, and it was made of a metal that had been shaped in long organic lines, so that it looked less manufactured than grown. Two glowing red tubes ran along the underside of it. There was no blade and no point, only a thick barrel at one end and a smooth grip at the other, and when she lifted it a hum began, low and rising, the note you feel in your teeth before you hear it in your ears.

She pointed it at the door.

A red line crossed the chamber. It did not travel, as far as Land's eyes could tell. It simply existed, from the barrel to the iron, all at once, a rod of scorching light the width of a wrist.

The door did not glow. It slumped. Four inches of banded iron ran like tallow, the metal sagging out of its frame and coming down in thick orange drops that pooled and spread across the threshold. The stone around it began to bubble and spit. In less time than it takes to draw a breath the doorway was gone, replaced by a curtain of molten metal and glowing rock, and the heat came across the chamber in a wave that made Land throw his arm across his face and cook the moisture out of his eyes.

The mages stumbled back from it. Nobody made a sound.

The purple weapon faded out of her hand like breath off a window. The red light died. The hum stopped, and the only noises left in the room were the tick and hiss of cooling metal and the breathing of nine people who had just watched their exit close.

It had not shot at them. That was the thing Land could not get past. It had thirty feet of clean line to every one of them and it had shot the door instead.

Then she raised both hands again.

The next thing was large. It took two hands and it sat against the clay shoulder as though it had been built for a shoulder, a heavy tube of dark iron wrapped in coils of copper wire, with a stock and a long barrel and a trigger guard. Blue white electricity ran along the coils in slow crawling arcs. A thrumming filled the room, so low that Land felt it come up through his kneecaps before he heard it, and it rose steadily in pitch, and the hair on his arms lifted and stood.

The air around it smelled like the inside of a thunderstorm.

She pointed it at the group and then began to turn.

She turned slowly. That was the part Land would not be able to explain to anyone afterward. She rotated on the spot through a full circle, unhurried, with the barrel level, sweeping it across every person in that room in turn, and she did it at the speed of a man looking for his hat. There was time. There was so much time. Every mage in the arc had four full seconds to understand what was coming for them and to decide what to do about it.

Denken's barrier flared orange. Methode's came up white. Richter threw a wall of blue in front of Lawine before he made his own. Wirbel raised a crackling dome. Edel and Ehre pulled stone and wind into a single slab. Laufen simply ducked behind Richter's wall, which was the smartest thing anyone did.

Kanne was reaching for water.

She had been reaching for it since the door melted, pulling it up out of the cracks in the stone, her hands already shaping the screen she meant to put in front of herself. Land could see her mouth moving with the shape of it. She was two thirds of the way through the casting. She had her chin down and her brows together and the absolute concentration of someone doing a difficult thing well.

The barrel came around to her and the weapon fired.

There was a sound like cloth tearing, if the cloth were the sky and the tear went from one horizon to the other. A slug left the barrel and Land did not see it, at all, not as a streak or a blur or a suggestion of movement. It simply was not in the weapon anymore.

Kanne came apart.

There was no impact to watch. There was no moment where she was struck and then reacted. In one frame she was standing with her hands raised and her brown hair blown back from her face by the pressure wave, and in the next frame there was a hanging pink mist in the shape of a person, and then there was not even that, only a fine warm dampness settling across the stone, and her robe, empty, drifting down on top of it like a dropped towel.

It took less than a heartbeat. She had not seen it. She had not felt it. She had been in the middle of a spell and then she had stopped being anywhere.

Nobody had time to turn their head.

Lawine turned her head.

She was six feet away behind Richter's blue wall and she turned and looked at the empty robe and her face came apart in a way Land felt in his own chest from forty paces. It was not a scream. It was lower than that and it did not have any words in it, an animal sound out of the bottom of her lungs, and she took a step toward the robe with her hands out as though there were pieces on the floor she could gather up and put back together.

Methode caught her arm.

"Keep your shield up," Methode said. Her voice was flat and low and perfectly level. "Mourn after. Not now."

Lawine nodded. It was a jerky ugly movement of the head, up and down twice, and she pulled her ice barrier tight around herself and her tears kept coming down through the dust on her face, but her hands stopped shaking.

Land, behind the pillar, was thinking about something he did not want to be thinking about.

Kanne and Lawine had bickered for as long as he could remember of the examination. They had bickered in the queue on the first morning. They had bickered through the forest phase, about who had eaten the last of the bread, about whose fault it was that they had circled back to the same stream twice. They had bickered on the stairs down into this place, in whispers, out of nerves. Land had found it tiresome. He had actually, at one point on the third day, moved to a different part of the hall to get away from it.

Eleven days of a sound, and then the sound stopped, and there was no moment in between. No last words. No turn of the head. She had been in the middle of a sentence her hands were saying and the sentence would never have a second half.

The great weapon dissolved out of the clay girl's grip and she let her arms fall to her sides. Then she raised one hand.

Every person in that room waited to find out what would be in it.

That waiting was the worst thing in the world. Land had been in fights before. Not many and not by choice, but enough to know the rhythm of them, the way fear comes in a wave when the enemy commits and then drains off while you work. This had no rhythm. This was a series of unrelated endings delivered at intervals decided by something that did not experience intervals. You could not predict the next one from the last one. Nothing she had used had anything to do with anything else she had used. There was no pattern to learn and no repertoire to exhaust, and so there was no floor to the fear, no point at which a person could say, all right, now I know what it does.

An axe appeared in the clay hand.

It was nearly as tall as she was, double bladed, with a haft of dark wood and a head of black iron, and lightning crawled over it in blue white threads that reached out and touched the air and snapped back. The smell of scorched metal rolled off it across the whole chamber.

She raised it above her head and rose off the ground with it, lifting a foot, then two feet, until she hung in the gray air with the weapon high and her skirts hanging still.

The lightning left the axe and went into the room.

It came out of the ceiling first, three bolts at once, and then it was in the walls, running in the cracks, and then it came up out of the floor. There was no aiming to it. It went everywhere, in jagged branching lines that found the stone and the fallen slabs and the wet places, and it found the mages through their shields.

It went around the barriers rather than through them, up from the floor at their feet, in at the gaps between overlapping plates, through the metal on Wirbel's belt and Edel's bracers. For three seconds the chamber was white. Bodies went rigid and jerked. Smoke came off cloth. Somebody screamed, a high sound cut into pieces by the convulsing of the lungs that made it.

Land felt it from behind the pillar as a dry crawling kiss on his skin and every hair on his body standing to attention, and his back teeth ached, and something in his left hand cramped and would not let go for a full minute.

Then it stopped and the chamber was dark again and eight people were on the floor.

Methode got to them. She went from body to body on her knees, hands glowing, pushing life back into hearts that had gone into that stuttering flutter that kills a man three minutes after the lightning leaves him. The smell in the room was cooked meat and burnt wool and the sweetish tang of scorched hair. She made a small involuntary sound each time she laid her hands on someone, as though the healing hurt the healer, which it did.

That kind of work is not free. Everyone in the examination knew what Methode was and what she was spending. Healing of that speed and that depth does not come from mana. It comes out of the life of the one doing it, a direct and irreversible transfer, hours off the end of her span for every heart she restarted. She restarted seven.

Her face when she stood up had aged. Land could not have pointed to what had changed. Something in the skin. Something around the mouth.

And the clay girl, hanging in the air with the axe, turned its head and looked at her.

It was the first time it had singled out any individual in the room.

Land's stomach dropped into cold water.

It had been ignoring them. He understood that now. It had been responding to attacks the way a man swats at flies in a field, without deciding anything about any particular fly. And then someone in the room had done a thing that mattered, had undone in twenty seconds all the damage it had spent thirty seconds doing, and something inside that gray head had noticed, and had assigned a priority.

It threw the axe.

It crossed the distance in a line of blue light, spinning end over end with the lightning shrieking around it. Methode was fast. Land would think about this for years, about how fast she was, about how her hand was already up and the white dome of her own mana already forming before the axe had covered half the ground.

The dome shattered like a dropped bottle.

The axe did not slow. It took her right arm off just below the shoulder, and the arm went up in the air, turning, and the blood came out of her in a bright arc that painted six feet of gray stone red.

Methode did not fall. She did not even stagger, which Land thought afterward was the single most frightening act of will he had ever witnessed. Her face went the white of bone and her left hand was already moving, tracing, and she caught the falling arm out of the air before it hit the floor and pressed the cut end of it back against the cut in her shoulder.

Mana flared at the seam, white and then blue and then nothing. There was a wet sound. She flexed the fingers once, twice, testing, watching them move. Then she raised her shield again with that arm and did not take her eyes off the thing in the air.

The axe came back. It turned in the air twenty feet from the ground and returned to the clay palm with a solid smack of wood against clay, and then it faded, and the clay girl came down to the floor.

Land pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the pillar and tried to make his mind produce a plan.

He had a good mind. It was a lazy mind, but laziness had made it efficient, and it had solved every problem he had ever put in front of it by finding the angle that other people were too busy working to notice. It was the only thing about himself he was proud of.

It gave him nothing.

There was no angle. He ran through it and ran through it and every road ended in the same wall. You could not out damage a defense that erased what it touched and could cover every direction at once. You could not out last a thing that did not breathe. You could not out range it, because one of the objects it had pulled out of the air had melted four inches of iron at thirty paces. You could not out think it, because it was not thinking, and thinking is only useful against something that has a plan you can be ahead of. You could not even out survive it in the way Land had built his entire life around, because it had already proved that it could erase a person from the world between one heartbeat and the next.

He was, for the first time since he was a boy, completely out of clever.

───✧───

In the room above the bakery, the original had not moved for a long time.

The tea had reached the wall and stopped. The light through the window had gone from yellow to orange while he sat with his hands over his face, and the sounds from the street below had changed as the day ended, carts going home, a dog, two women arguing pleasantly about a price.

He was aware of all of it. That was the obscenity of the thing. He was sitting in a warm room in a town where nothing had ever happened, listening to a dog bark, and inside his own chest a person with his face was watching people die in a hole in the ground, and the fear arriving up that thin line did not care in the least that it had no business being in this room.

He had built a life on distance. That was what the copies were for. Distance from danger, distance from discomfort, distance from the long walk and the lumpy bed and the risk. He had believed, in a way so deep he had never once examined it, that distance was a kind of wall.

It was not a wall. It was a length of string, and something was pulling on the other end of it.

He thought about the crevice. He thought about the second copy folded up in the dark two passages back from all this, patient, waiting for a signal that meant its brother was gone. He had made it in a moment of good sense and he had been pleased with himself.

Now he sat in his chair and thought, with a clarity that made him ill, that if this body in the dungeon ended, the other one would unfold itself out of the rock and walk down that corridor and open a door into a room with a gray girl in it, and it would have all of his memories, which meant it would have this hour, which meant it would walk into that room already knowing exactly what was going to happen to it.

He had not built an escape. He had built a queue.

───✧───

They were going to try once more. Land could see it happening before anyone said a word.

It was in the way Denken squared his shoulders, which cost him visible effort. It was in the way Wirbel spat on the floor and wiped his mouth. The first attempt had failed because they had been careful with their mana, the way you are taught to be, saving reserves for a long fight. The second had failed because they had been afraid for each other and had spread their attention. There was only one thing left that they had not done, which was to stop saving anything at all.

Denken raised his fist. Nobody needed the explanation.

They split into two ranks without a word passing between them. Wirbel, Denken, Ehre and Laufen forward. Richter, Methode and Lawine back, already weaving, laying down a lattice of hardened mana in overlapping plates like scales on a fish, blue over green over white, each layer humming at a slightly different pitch so that the whole thing made a chord.

Land felt the pressure drop in the room the way it drops before a storm, and his ears popped.

Then they let go of everything they had.

Denken's fire was not a column. It was a flood, a rolling waist high river of orange and white that poured across the stone floor and made the air above it shiver and bend. Wirbel's lightning came down into it and through it in a hundred thin branches, chasing along the surface, finding the wet places. Ehre put a screaming wind into the whole mass and gave the fire teeth, and the flames stretched forward and sharpened and roared.

The noise was immense. It was a continuous physical thing that shook dust out of the ceiling in sheets and made the floor buzz under Land's kneecaps and took away his ability to hear his own thoughts. Laufen went in and out of the edges of it, a dark flicker, looking for a gap.

The clay girl did not move and did not retreat and did not raise a shield.

Something came out of her.

It came out of every part of her at once, not from a wound or an opening, but from the whole surface of the clay, welling up the way sweat comes up on skin. It was black. It was a thick, slow, glossy liquid, and it flowed upward against gravity, sheeting over her shoulders and her arms and her face, and in the time it took Land to understand what he was looking at, it had shaped itself into a smooth dome over her, taller than she was and perfectly regular.

The fire hit it and vanished.

Not dispersed. Not deflected. The flames rolled up against the black surface and went into it and were gone, and the surface did not glow or ripple or discolor. The lightning went in and did not come out. The wind struck it and the dome did not even register the pressure, no flattening, no shiver, nothing.

It was not a barrier. Land had watched enough barriers in the last ten minutes to know the difference. A barrier resists. Even a perfect one takes the blow and you can see it take it. This thing accepted. Everything they threw went into it and became part of it, and it was not even full.

Where an attack was weak the black surface thinned. Where an attack was strong it thickened, in the same instant, faster than reaction, before the impact rather than after. It knew what was coming.

Laufen went for it anyway. She came in from the left with her blade and a tendril came off the dome like a whip and she had to throw herself sideways to keep her arm. She came back from the right and a second tendril cracked the stone where her head had been. On the fourth attempt one caught her ankle and put her down hard, and she rolled away from a strike that left a crater.

They kept casting. They had committed and there was nothing else to do. Denken burned until his hands shook, Wirbel until his staff was smoking at the grip, Ehre until she was on one knee still pushing wind out of her palms, and the black dome sat there and drank it, patient as a full stomach.

Then a gap opened in the top of it and a small clay hand came through, palm up.

The fire kept pouring. The lightning kept branching. And in that upturned palm, something appeared.

It was a sphere the size of a child's fist and it was black, and Land had thought a moment ago that the slime was the blackest thing he had ever seen and he had been wrong. The slime was a color. This was an absence. It did not reflect the fire that was washing over it. It did not have edges so much as it had a place where the world stopped being available.

Everything stopped.

The fire did not so much die as forget to continue. The lightning went out mid branch. The wind fell over. For a second that had no proper length, every person in that chamber simply looked at the orb, and it looked back in the only way a hole can.

Then it began to pull.

It took Land's cloak first, a gentle tug at the hem that stretched the fabric out toward the center of the room. Then it found his hair. Then it found the moisture on his lips and drew it off, and his eyes began to dry, and he heard, from somewhere far below the floor, a deep grinding groan of stone being asked a question it could not answer.

The clay hand opened and let go.

The orb did not fly. It hung exactly where it had been released, three feet above the floor, and the pull stopped being a tug and became a scream.

Dust came off the ground in sheets and went in. Loose stones skittered across the floor, gathered speed and went in. The rag of Kanne's robe slid, lifted, and went in, and that was the thing Land found himself unable to watch, that even the last piece of her was taken.

The air itself bent. Land could see it bending, the room warping around a point like a picture with a thumb pressed into the middle of it, and he felt himself sliding forward on his knees behind the pillar with his boots scrabbling on stone that was also sliding.

In the open it was much worse. They dug in. They threw down anchors, and Richter shouted something and put a spike of force into the floor and grabbed Lawine's belt with his other hand.

Wirbel came off his feet.

He did not scream. Land was close enough to see his face and there was no scream in it. There was surprise first, a plain honest flash of it, and then a second thing that was much harder to look at, which was understanding. He had time to understand. He had perhaps a second and a half of being carried through the air toward that point, and in that second and a half his expression changed from surprise to something that had accepted the situation entirely.

Then he reached it and he was not there.

There was no flash. There was no sound of tearing, no blood, no burst. He went into the absence the way a stone goes into a well with no bottom, and the orb winked out, and the pull stopped all at once, and every loose thing in the room that had been in the air fell down.

The silence afterward was worse than the roar had been. Land could hear people breathing. He could hear the wet rattle in it. He could hear a piece of stone finish rolling somewhere behind him and come to rest.

Wirbel had cracked his neck before the door opened. Land kept coming back to that. He had rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck the way a man does before a job of work, and now there was no body, no ash, nothing to carry home, nothing for anyone to bury. There was a gap in the room shaped like a person who had been there.

The black slime flowed back down into the clay and was absorbed, and the girl stood there with her arms at her sides as though she had put down a cup.

The mages were finished and they knew it. Land could see it in the slump of them, the gray under the grime, the way Ehre's staff was shaking so badly she had to grip it with both hands to keep it still. Methode's work had closed their skin but nothing closes a spent mana channel, and burning out is not like being tired. It is like having the inside of your chest scraped.

They had nothing left and the thing in the middle of the floor had not so much as lost its balance.

Denken turned and threw fire at the wall.

It was the last coherent thought any of them had and it was a good one. Not a river this time, no breadth, no show, a single compressed spear of orange spinning so tight it hurt the eye, and he put it into the wall thirty feet from the ruined door. The wall came apart. Stone blew outward into darkness and cold air rushed in through the hole, carrying the smell of wet rock and, very faintly, rain.

"Through the hole," Denken said. His voice had nothing left in it but grinding. "Now. All of you."

They went for it. They went badly, stumbling, slipping, Laufen dragging Lawine by the sleeve. Land came up from behind his pillar and began to move too, but he moved the way he had moved all eleven days, sideways along the wall, in the deepest part of the shadows, quiet as a mouse in a house where there is a cat. Running draws the eye. Everyone runs, and the eye goes to the fastest thing.

A green ring appeared on one of the clay fingers. A thin band of emerald light that pulsed once, twice, at about the speed of a resting heart.

The air did not pull this time.

It pushed.

Every mage in the room came off the floor at once and went backward through the air, arms and legs turning, staves spinning away, and they came down twenty feet past where they had started, on the far side of the chamber, and rolled and tangled and lay still.

The clay girl walked.

It was the first time she had used her feet. She crossed the floor to the hole in the wall, unhurried, and turned around with her back to it, and stood there facing them with the cold outside air stirring the hem of her clay skirt, and the green ring pulsed steadily on her finger.

She had put herself in the doorway.

Land, flat against the wall in the dark, understood three things in quick succession and each one was colder than the last.

The first was that she had let Denken blow that hole. She had been standing in the middle of an open room and had allowed a spent old man to make an exit, and had waited until every one of them was running for it.

The second was that she had never been trying to kill them efficiently. She had a weapon that had erased Kanne without her noticing, and she had used it exactly once, on one person, and then she had put it away.

The third was that the door melting had not been a tactic either. It had been the first move in something, and this was the second, and the shape of the thing between them was a fence being put up around a field.

She raised her other hand and two objects came into it.

The first was a sword with no metal in it. A grip, a crossguard, and then a straight bar of solid blue light about three feet long, humming on a high thin note that got into Land's fillings. It was not a spell. It made no draw on the ambient mana at all. It was simply a machine that made a blade out of light, the way a lamp makes light out of oil.

The second was bulky and dark and had two prongs at one end and a row of small steady lights along its side.

She came forward.

They were still getting up. That was the thing. They had been thrown twenty feet and slammed into stone and they were on their hands and knees, and she walked into them while they were rising.

Lawine died first.

She had got to one knee and her ice barrier was already up, a good one, a foot thick, thick enough to have stopped a stone slab earlier in the day. The blue blade went through it without slowing and went through her in the same motion, one flat horizontal sweep at the height of the hip. There was no blood, only a brief hiss as the wound closed itself with heat in the instant it was made, and Lawine was in two pieces on the floor, and her face was still wet from the tears she had cried for Kanne about four minutes ago.

Edel was still coming up. The pronged tool swung toward a chunk of broken floor near her, and the chunk of floor lifted itself off the ground and left at a speed that made the air scream, and it hit her in the chest and did not stop. She was dead before her shoulders touched the stone behind her.

That was the moment the shape of the thing changed in Land's head, and it never changed back.

Up until then it had been a battle. A terrible one, an unwinnable one, but a battle, a thing with two sides. Now he watched her walk into a group of people who were trying to stand up, and he understood that they had never been fighting her. They had been doing something else. They had been in a field, and she had been going up and down the rows.

Laufen, Richter, Methode and Ehre reached for their belts at the same instant without looking at each other.

The tubes were small, four inches of fired clay, sealed at both ends. Sense had handed them out at the mouth of the dungeon with the air of a woman distributing umbrellas, one per candidate, no explanation beyond a short instruction to break it if things became unreasonable. Most of them had forgotten about it entirely.

They crushed the tubes in their fists and threw the pieces down.

The golems came out of the broken clay the way a thing unfolds out of an egg, growing as they came, stone and old black wood and joints of some pale bound material, twice the height of a man and broad as a doorway. They came up out of nothing in the space of a breath and each one reached down and scooped up its maker, and then they turned and ran for the hole in the wall, and the floor shook under them.

Land's heart came up into his throat. It was going to work. They were huge and they were fast and there were four of them and the distance was only sixty feet, and something in his chest actually lifted.

The clay girl lunged.

She was faster than they were. She was not a little faster. She crossed the room in the time it took the leading golem to take its second stride, a blur of gray and blue, and two new things came into her hands as she moved, chained weapons with long jagged heads that spun out and around her in overlapping circles and made a sound like a mill wheel in a flood.

The first golem lost its head and went down, spilling Richter across the floor.

The second was cut through at the waist and Laufen tumbled free out of a body that was still running with no top half.

The third put up an arm to shield itself and the chains curled around the limb and crushed it into gravel, and it fell with Methode still on its back.

The fourth carried Ehre almost to the hole. It got within ten feet. A chain wrapped its trailing leg and snapped tight and pulled it backward off its feet, and it came down like a dropped water jar and broke apart across the stone, and Ehre was thrown clear and skidded.

The falling body of the first golem came down on Richter.

He did not cry out. That was all. He was there under the shadow of it and then there was a sound that Land heard very clearly, a single compressed sound, and then Richter was a shape under a great weight of stone, and one of his hands was visible, and it was not doing anything.

Three of the four riders got up off that floor.

Laufen had been thrown clear of the second golem and had turned the fall into a roll without deciding to, and she came up on her feet thirty feet away with her forearm laid open from wrist to elbow and her legs still willing to hold her. Methode was on her side, pushing herself upright with an arm that had been severed and reattached ten minutes earlier. Ehre lay on her back where she had skidded, winded, bleeding from the scalp, whole.

Denken got to the three of them before the dust settled. Land had no idea where the strength came from. The old man crossed the floor at a speed that had no right to belong to a body that age and pulled all three of them up by their collars and put himself between them and the room.

The chains faded out of the clay hands. The blue blade faded. The green ring on the finger dimmed and was gone.

She was just a small clay girl again, standing in the middle of a broken floor with her arms at her sides and her head level, and she looked at the four of them with a face that had never once shown effort or anger or pleasure or anything at all.

Land counted, because his mind insisted on counting.

Nine mages had gone through that door and five of them were finished. Kanne was a warm dampness on the stone. Wirbel was a hole in the world with nothing at the bottom of it. Lawine was in two pieces. Edel was against the far wall with her chest gone. Richter was under a golem with one hand showing.

Four were still breathing, and Land made himself put the names in order so that he would have them later. Denken. Methode. Ehre. Laufen. Himself was a tenth thing standing behind a pillar, and he did not know what to call that, since he had not cast a single spell since the door opened.

Four minutes. He was almost certain it had been four minutes.

───✧───

The chamber went quiet in a way that was much worse than the noise had been.

Dust from the broken golems hung in the gray air and would not settle. The bodies lay where they had come to rest. Cold outside air came in through the hole in the wall in a slow draught and moved across the floor and did not clear anything.

Denken stood with his back to the hole and his hands on his staff, and Land could see that the staff was the only reason he was upright. Methode, Ehre and Laufen were behind him, breathing in the wet ragged way of people whose lungs have been squeezed. Methode's reattached arm hung wrong at the elbow, and Laufen was holding her own forearm shut with her other hand and losing the argument with it.

The clay girl had not moved from where she had stopped.

Land was flat behind a second pillar now, with his cheek against the stone and his glasses fogging and clearing with his breath. He had seen a great deal in the last quarter of an hour and he had expected the worst of it to be the blood.

It was not the blood. It was the way she waited. Between every one of those deaths there had been a pause, and in every pause she had stood perfectly still with her hands at her sides, not gathering herself, not recovering, not deciding. Waiting the way an object waits. A hammer left on a bench is not impatient.

Denken turned his head just enough to speak over his shoulder. His voice came out low and scraped raw.

"I am eighty one," he said. "My wife has been dead for a long time, my homeland has been a frozen gold city for longer than either of you has been alive, and everything I have done since has been an argument with that fact, and I have run out of argument. There is nothing waiting for me on the other side of this room."

"Denken." Methode said.

"You three have years." He was not looking at them. He was looking at the clay girl and he did not blink. "I will hold its attention. You go through the hole and you keep going and you do not turn around, whatever you hear behind you. Whatever you hear."

"Let me stay." Methode's voice was steady and there was a crack running the whole length of it. "I can keep you standing. Between the two of us we could last long enough to"

"No."

Ehre had hold of Methode's sleeve with both hands like a child in a crowd. She had not made a sound in several minutes. Laufen, who had not stopped moving once in eleven days, was standing perfectly still, and Land found that harder to look at than the bodies.

Denken turned a little further and for a moment his face was not the face of the man who had been giving orders. It was much older and much gentler and very tired.

"Go," he said. "That is not a request, and I am the ranking mage in this room, and it is the last order I am going to give anyone."

Methode looked at him for one more breath, and it was Laufen who ended the argument, because moving before anyone else had finished thinking was the only talent she had ever been given. She took Methode by the shoulder and Ehre by the wrist and had both of them halfway to the hole in the wall before either could put a word together. They went stumbling over broken stone and they did not look back.

Denken faced the clay girl and raised his staff.

There was almost nothing left in him. Land could see it, could feel the thinness of the mana he was gathering, a fraction of what he had poured into the flood earlier. But an old man who has decided a thing is a particular sort of engine, and he put every remaining drop into the first attack without hesitation.

A lance of orange fire crossed the room.

The clay hand came up and a shield appeared in it.

It was not impressive. That was almost funny. After the flower and the discs and the spheres and the great copper wound tube, what she raised against Denken was a round shield about two feet across, dark iron bound at the rim with black leather, and across its face were carved runes that held a faint blue light. It looked like something a soldier might carry. It looked, if anything, old.

The fire touched it and was gone.

Not blocked. Not absorbed with a flare, not turned aside. The flames arrived at the surface and stopped existing, and the runes brightened by a degree and dimmed again, and the shield sat there in the small clay hand as though nothing had occurred.

Denken sent a second attack, and a third. A spear of heat. A whip of it. A rolling ball of white orange that took the moisture out of the air in a line as it traveled. Each one reached the shield and each one simply ceased, the way chalk ceases under a wet cloth.

He changed approach. He slammed the butt of his staff on the floor and a ring of fire went out from him in every direction, a wall of flame rushing inward on her from all sides at once, a spell you use when you have decided the enemy cannot be allowed a direction.

She turned the shield a few degrees.

The whole circle of fire broke against that two foot disc, all of it, from every angle, and went out, and there was no smoke at the end of it because there was nothing left to smoke.

Denken was on his knees for the last one. He called a column down out of the dark ceiling, a white hot pillar the width of a wagon, and it fell on her like a dropped sky. The shield came up. The column split against the rim of it and spilled down both sides and made two burning pools on the stone, and the clay girl stood between them and was not touched, and the runes on the shield glowed so brightly that Land had to look away, and then they went dim.

Land understood then, watching from the floor with his fingers dug into the base of the pillar, what he was actually looking at.

She was not defending. Defense implies effort, implies a calculation of what is worth stopping. She had brought out an object that removed things from the world, and then she had held it up, and then she had waited for a very tired old man to run out of fire. She had not moved her feet during any of it. The whole time he had been burning the last of his life, she had been standing there the way a person stands in a queue.

And then she turned her head away from him.

Denken saw it happen. Land saw him see it. The clay face came around, unhurried, toward the hole in the wall where Methode and Ehre had gone, and every remaining thing in the old man's body went into the next three attacks, a desperate spraying fan of fire thrown at her without aim.

She did not look back at him. The shield caught them without being directed. And with her other hand she brought out something new.

It was a long tube of dark metal with a wide flared mouth, heavy enough that she braced it against her shoulder. There was no trigger that Land could see, only a row of small lights along the side blinking in a pattern of red and green that meant nothing to anyone in the world except the machine itself.

She pointed it at the hole in the wall and fired.

The sound was not a crack this time. It was a deep wet chug, like something enormous swallowing a thing too large for its throat. A ball of pale green light went out of the mouth of the tube trailing vapor, moving slowly enough to follow with the eye, which was somehow the most horrible detail of all. It floated across the chamber almost lazily, passed through the hole, and went out into the dark.

Land shut his eyes.

He heard it land. It made a wet slapping sound, the sound of a hammer coming down on a full sack, and he pressed his forehead into the stone and thought about Ehre holding onto Methode's sleeve with both hands.

Denken stopped attacking. He was on both knees with his staff across his thighs and his head turned toward the hole, and his face was doing something that Land could not stand to look at either.

The dark outside the hole flickered silver.

Denken made a sound.

They were not dead. They were standing just beyond the opening, all three of them, inside a dome of shimmering silver light, and the green ball had burst against the outside of it and left a black scorch on the stone and had done nothing else at all. Methode had her arm around Ehre. Laufen had put herself in front of both of them with a short blade she could not possibly have used. None of the three had cast that dome.

Beside them stood someone small, with white hair, holding a staff of plain polished wood.

She stepped through the hole into the chamber, and the room changed.

Land felt it happen and could not have described it to a proctor afterward. The dust in the air, which had been hanging for minutes, began to settle. Not because the draught had stopped. It settled the way things do when a heavy weight is set down nearby, pressed out of the air by a presence that took up more room than its body did.

She walked forward across the broken floor and her boots made no sound, and she did not look at the bodies. Her eyes were on the clay girl and there was nothing in them that Land recognized. No fear. No anger either. It was the flat unsurprised attention of someone who had seen this shape of thing before, long ago, and had hoped not to see it again, and was not shocked to be disappointed.

The clay head tilted toward her, to the left, birdlike.

"So I was right," Frieren said.

Her voice was quiet and it carried into every corner of that room.

"You are the one." She kept walking. "The thing capable of mass destruction. All that clumsiness, all of that fumbling and blushing and apologizing in the hall, and it was a lie the whole way down, the way it is always a lie." The stone at the tip of her staff began to glow, pale blue, and the temperature in the chamber dropped several degrees. "Denken. Get out."

Denken went.

He got up off his knees in a way that should not have been possible and he ran, and his boots slapped the broken stone in a fast uneven rhythm, and he did not look back once. The hole was forty paces away and he crossed them like a much younger man. Land, watching, understood that the old man had spent the last ten minutes deciding to die and was now being asked to stop, and that this was its own kind of violence.

A small black object came into the clay hand, something that fit in a palm, with a single red lens at one end.

A thin red line went out of it at Denken's back.

Frieren's staff came up and a wall of pale blue light stood in the air between the two of them, and the beam struck it and came apart into a spray of sparks that burned little pits in the floor where they landed. Denken reached the hole and threw himself through it and Laufen and Methode caught him and dragged him away into the dark.

Inside the chamber the clay girl turned to face Frieren, and something happened in the sculpted eyes that had not happened all day. A faint red light came up deep in the sockets, like a coal breathed on.

Land felt his skin crawl right up the back of his skull.

It had not done that for any of them. Not for Denken, not for Laufen at full speed, not for the combined assault of nine trained mages. It had fought all of them with the blank half attention of a woman doing dishes while listening to someone talk in the next room.

Something in it had just woken up and started paying attention.

The air between them tightened.

The clay girl moved first. Two objects came into her hands, long and black and angular, with thick short barrels and curved magazines hanging beneath them, and Land, who had by now abandoned any attempt to understand what he was seeing, thought only that they looked like crossbows built by someone who hated crossbows.

Both of them fired at once.

The noise was a continuous hammering roar that filled the chamber wall to wall, a sound with no gaps in it, and Land clapped his hands over his ears and felt the floor jumping under his chest. Hundreds of slugs left those barrels in a few seconds, chewing a line across the stone, throwing up chips and dust and sparks where they struck the statue.

Frieren was not in any of the places they went.

She was moving before the first round left the barrel, a pale streak across the chamber, and the storm of metal followed her and arrived always a little behind, tearing up the floor in a line that traced where she had been. She ran along the wall. She ran up a broken pillar and across three feet of ceiling. She had a thin skin of mana turning aside anything that came too close, and she was fast enough that most of it never did.

The clay girl rotated on the spot with both weapons firing, arms level, and swept the whole room.

Land pressed himself as flat as a man can make himself. Ricochets went over him and into the wall above him, three of them, four, and stone chips came down in his hair. This was not aimed at him and it would kill him just as dead, and for the first time it occurred to him with real force that he could die here in the next four seconds as an accident, as a thing that happened next to something else.

Then the weapons were gone and there was a hammer.

It was short, no longer than a forearm, with a heavy squared head, and she spun it in her fingers until the head was a ring of blur, and then she let it go. It flew across the chamber and began to turn.

Turn, and turn again. It followed Frieren. Whatever it was and whoever had made it, it knew where she was, and it came around her dodges in long curving arcs, whining like a wasp in a jar, and it was getting closer each time. She went up the wall and it went with her. She cut back across the middle of the floor and it cut with her.

Then Frieren was behind the clay girl.

Land did not see how. There was no blur and no flicker. She had been running along the far wall with the hammer three feet off her heel, and then she was standing at the copy's back with her staff already up and the stone at its tip white hot.

She fired before the head had finished turning.

The zoltraak took the clay body from the left hip to the right shoulder. The left arm went. The left leg went. A third of the torso went, blown out in a spray of gray dust that hung and drifted. The hammer, whatever had been guiding it, dropped out of the air and clattered on stone.

What was left stood there on one leg.

It did not sway. It did not fall. It balanced on a single clay foot with one arm hanging and a hole through it that Land could see the far wall through, and the face was exactly as blank as it had been while sitting in the statue's hand an eternity ago. Not pain. Not surprise. Not even the dumb animal shock of a body that has been badly hurt.

It conjured a sword in the hand it still had.

The thing was longer than the girl was tall, a great flat black blade that did not reflect a single thing, and she swung it one handed in a wide horizontal cut that did not appear to be aimed at anything in particular.

The cut opened the room.

It went through forty feet of floor, through the far wall, through however much rock lay beyond the far wall, and at the end of it, at the end of all that stone, a thin gray line of daylight appeared. Outside air came in through the slot in a rush that smelled of rain and wet earth and living things, and Land, lying on the floor of that chamber, actually tasted the outside world on his tongue, and the contrast almost broke something in him.

Frieren spun her staff and the air went solid.

The gust hit the clay girl square in the chest, a wall of compressed air so dense that Land saw it distort the light, and it carried her backward across the whole chamber and put her into the far wall with a sound like a collapse. Stone cracked and came down in slabs. Dust rolled outward.

She stood up out of it and conjured a fruit.

That was what it looked like. Round, green, with a textured surface of small raised squares, small enough to sit in her one remaining hand. Land stared at it and could not make it mean anything.

She put it to her clay mouth, bit off a small metal pin, spat the pin aside, and threw the fruit.

The explosion took the center of the room. It was orange and white and it bloomed outward to twenty feet across and it was hot enough that Land, thirty paces off, felt his exposed skin tighten and his eyebrows crisp.

Then it began to shrink.

The flames curled inward. The whole burning mass drew back toward its own center, compressing, brightening, the roar of it climbing in pitch as it went, and through the glare Land could make out Frieren standing with both hands raised and her staff floating unsupported beside her and her face rigid with effort.

She squeezed it down to a point the size of an apple and threw it back.

The clay girl had something gold between her fingers. A small circular device, no bigger than a pocket watch. She spun it.

Two golden portals appeared in the air at the same instant. One in front of her, and one directly behind Frieren.

The compressed explosion went into the first and came out of the second, and it detonated against Frieren's back at a range of eighteen inches, and the whole chamber went white.

Outside the hole in the wall, Denken and Methode and Ehre and Laufen saw the light come out of the opening and flood the corridor, and they believed it was over. Land learned that later. They stood in the dark with their hands over their eyes and understood that the only person in the world who could fight that thing had just been killed, and they waited to hear the footsteps coming for them.

The glare faded.

Frieren was on her knees. Her robe was burned black across the back and her hair was wild and there was blood at one ear, and her skin was unbroken, because in the fraction of a second available to her she had coated her body in mana and taken a point blank blast on a layer three inches thick.

She got up.

"An arsenal with no bottom to it," she said. She was not talking to the clay girl. Land, flat on the stone, had the strange conviction that she was talking to herself, working something out aloud the way people do. "The original could never use them like this. She does not have the mana. She has to choose, one at a time, and pay for each one."

She raised her staff.

"The copy does not have to choose."

She attacked, and the chamber became something Land could not follow.

A spear of white light crossed the floor and the clay girl rose off the ground and let it pass beneath her feet. Frieren threw lightning and the copy twisted around it in the air with a dancer's economy and hung there, one legged, one armed, already lifting the hand for whatever came next.

It did not see the statue coming.

The black sword's cut had gone through the room at chest height and the seated figure had been standing in the way of it. Forty feet of ancient stone had been severed at the waist some seconds ago and had been leaning ever since, slowly, the way big things fall, and the clay girl was hovering directly beneath it.

The upper half came down.

The impact went through the floor and through Land's ribs and out the other side. Dust exploded outward in a wall and rolled over him and filled his mouth and his nose and his eyes, and he choked into his sleeve and wept grit and could see nothing for several seconds.

When it cleared, the copy was underneath it. Pinned flat, a small gray shape half visible beneath a hundred tons of god.

Frieren leveled her staff at it.

"Zoltraak," she said.

The stone moved.

It did not shift or settle. It was thrown, the whole upper half of that statue, launched sideways across the chamber to crash into the far wall, and the shockwave of its going picked Frieren up and rolled her thirty feet across the floor like a dropped bundle.

She came up on one elbow and looked.

The clay girl was standing.

It had no arms. Both were gone, torn away entirely at the shoulder. It had one leg. The whole of the torso above the hips was missing, simply absent, so that there was a head and a neck and a pair of shoulders connected to a pair of hips by nothing at all, balanced upright on a single foot in the middle of a ruined floor.

And as Frieren watched, it began to fill in.

Gray clay came from nowhere. It did not flow in from the ground and it did not gather up from the dust. It accumulated in the empty space where the body should have been, layer over layer, forming the curve of a ribcage, the fall of a skirt, the small bows at the cuffs, the ribbons at the ends of two hair tails, every detail restored with the same unhurried patience that had built them the first time.

Frieren threw an omnidirectional attack, a ring of white light that went out from her in every direction at once, a spell with no aim to dodge.

The beams stopped twelve feet short.

They hung there in the air, trembling, held against something with no surface and no shimmer and no sign that it existed at all except that a spell that could cut through a castle wall had been stopped by it in mid flight.

Land saw Frieren's eyes widen, and that broke something in him more thoroughly than anything else that had happened in that room.

She had not been surprised by the shooting things. She had not been surprised by the portals or by her own explosion coming back through them or by the black sword that opened a mountain. She had been unsurprised for the entire fight, the way a physician is unsurprised by a disease.

Now she was staring at the regenerating thing and her mouth was slightly open, and Land could see her thinking, and even from across a wrecked chamber he could read the thought.

She had already fought one of these today. Somewhere else in this dungeon, in another hall, she had met the dungeon's copy of one of the participants and had destroyed it, and it had stayed destroyed. The copies did not regenerate. That was a fact about the dungeon and it had been a fact ten minutes ago and it was not a fact anymore.

The clay girl lifted its newly finished hand, palm up.

A light began to gather in it.

Land had watched a great many things gather mana in his life. This was not that, and it was not like the weapons either, which had been inert and dead and machine made. This was something in between and worse than both. Dense, white, and growing, a point of brightness in a small gray palm, and as it grew the room began to hurt.

The light did not illuminate. It stabbed. Every crack in the floor threw a black knife of shadow across the stone, and the shadows stretched and moved as the thing in the hand swelled, so that the whole room seemed to be full of long thin creatures trying to get out of the way.

Loose stone on the floor started to tremble. Then to slide. Then to lift, floating up off the ground and turning slowly in the air, caught in something the shape of a slow whirlpool with the clay girl at its center.

The edges of the hole in the wall began to glow.

Land felt the heat of it from thirty paces through a pillar. He felt his own eyes drying in their sockets and the inside of his nose burning and the moisture going out of his mouth. He was aware, in a distant way, that he was making a small sound, over and over, and could not stop.

This was not a spell. He was as sure of that as he had ever been about anything. It was a conclusion. It was the end of a sentence somebody had begun a long time ago, and if it were allowed to be spoken, then this dungeon and the mountain above it and every living thing within a distance he did not want to estimate would become a layer of ash with a glass floor underneath it.

Frieren knew it too.

Her eyes went wide for a fraction of a second and then narrowed down into something hard and very old, and Land watched her make a decision and hated the look of it, because it was the look of a person who has just agreed to pay a price that does not have a refund.

It came up in her the way an old wound aches before rain. There had been a time when the world was larger and darker and the sky over the northern lands burned for whole human lifetimes, and she had learned things in that time that she had spent the centuries since hoping not to need. The cost of this one was not mana. Mana she had in abundance, a thousand years of it, stacked up in her like water behind a dam.

The cost was something else and she paid it without any visible ceremony.

She pressed a nail into the pad of her thumb until a drop of blood welled up.

She let it fall, and it did not reach the floor. She spun her staff once over her head, fast enough that the wood became a hoop of blur, and the drop stopped in midair and unspooled into a red thread that wrapped the spinning staff and became a fine mist, and the mist went out from her in a perfect ring.

Frost cracked across the stone in every direction. The temperature in that chamber fell far enough that Land's breath became visible and then became ice on his lips.

Then she put out her hand, palm open, fingers spread, toward the clay girl.

Black mana gathered in front of it.

It was not the clean blue of her zoltraak. It was not the absence that the small orb had been, either. It was a darkness with weight and movement in it, a churning that grew from a point to a ball to a howling vortex the height of a man, and it made a sound like a river going through a broken dam in a cave somewhere underneath the world, and Land's stomach dropped as though the floor had gone out from under him.

The clay girl released its light.

The beam that came out of that small hand turned the world into a negative of itself. Every shadow became white and every lit thing became black. Land shut his eyes and saw it anyway, burned in red and green on the inside of his lids, and the floor under the beam did not crack or melt so much as it simply gave up being solid, running away to either side in glowing streams.

Frieren released hers in the same instant.

It was not a beam. It came out of her palm as a flood, a rolling black tide as wide as a wagon and getting wider, swallowing the air in front of it, and where it passed there was nothing at all, not even ruin.

They met in the center of the chamber.

For one frame of time, they simply stopped. White on one side and black on the other and a sphere of perfect gray between them where the two had agreed to a truce that lasted less than a heartbeat.

The pressure of it went outward in a ring. Every stone in that room cracked along its length at the same moment. The fallen half of the statue split again, and again. The broken golems came apart into gravel. Land felt his own bones ring in him like struck rods and felt something in his left forearm break cleanly, and he did not notice it for another two minutes.

Then Frieren pushed.

Land could see her doing it. Her feet had not moved, but her whole body had come forward over them, and her face had gone the white of a bled thing, and her hair was standing out around her head in the pressure, and her outstretched hand looked very small and very thin against the river pouring out of it.

A thousand years of mana went down her arm and out through her palm.

The white beam began to flutter.

It was not a contest of skill any longer and it had never been a contest of will. It was a question of accumulation. On one side was a thing that had existed for a few hours, that had been scraped together out of dungeon clay in the shape of a girl, and on the other was a woman who had been gathering power since before the language they would have argued in existed.

The black tide came forward a foot. Then three. Then it rolled over the white light the way night rolls over a setting sun, and the point of contact moved steadily back across the floor toward the small gray figure, and then it reached her.

The whole chamber went black.

Land could not see his own hands. He could not see the difference between his eyes being open and closed. There was a blackness so complete that his mind began, in those seconds, to invent things to fill it.

Then there was an explosion with no sound.

That was the part he would never be able to make anyone understand afterward. He tried, twice, years later, and both times he stopped in the middle because he could hear how it sounded. There was a blast. It picked him up off the floor and threw him back into the pillar hard enough to knock the last of the wind out of him and slide him down it in a heap.

And it made no noise at all. Not a muffled noise. Not a noise he was too deafened to hear. Sound simply did not occur, as though whatever was in that black tide had eaten it along with everything else, and the absence of it pressed on his eardrums like depth.

The darkness took a long time to fade.

When it did, there was no demon.

The floor where she had been standing was empty. The stone there had been glazed into black glass, smooth and slightly dished, and it reflected the thin line of daylight coming in through the slot the sword had cut.

There was no clay. There was no dust that was different from the other dust. There was not one thread of gray hair, not one bow, not one fragment of anything that could be pointed at and named. The weapons were gone. The orbiting discs and spheres were gone. Whatever the thing had been and wherever the objects had been coming from, that door had closed.

Only Frieren was standing, and then she was not.

She swayed once, like a tree deciding, and her knees folded and she went down straight, not sideways, her body collapsing into itself like a dropped coat. The staff came out of her hand and rolled and clicked to a stop against a piece of statue.

Methode came through the hole at a run.

Her boots slipped on the black glass and she did not fall, and she went down on her knees beside Frieren with her hands already glowing. She put one palm on the chest and one on the forehead and her face closed with concentration, and she worked in silence, her lips moving through one diagnostic after another, checking and checking again.

Frieren's breathing was shallow and slow and it was there.

Land came out from behind the pillar.

He had to do it in stages. First to his knees, which was where he discovered the break in his forearm, and then to his feet with the pillar under his good shoulder, and then a first step, which almost put him down again. His legs had gone stupid. They would hold weight and they would not do anything clever with it.

He walked out across the floor of the chamber and the chamber was not a room anymore. It was a cave with a broken ceiling and a wall opened to the sky and a great split running the length of it, and gray daylight came in at two angles and lit the dust. Cold air moved through, and the smell it carried was rain on grass, ordinary, indifferent, the smell of a country afternoon happening somewhere above all this without having noticed any of it.

He stepped onto the black glass where the demon had stood.

The cold went through the sole of his boot and into his foot and up the bone of his leg. Not the cold of stone that has never been warm. It was worse than the air around it by a margin that made no physical sense, and he stepped off it quickly, and afterward he could not have said whether that chill had been real or whether he had brought it with him.

Denken and Ehre and Laufen were near the hole in the wall. The old man was propped on his staff with his robes burned through in three places and his face the color of ash. Ehre stood beside him with her arms wrapped around her own body, gripping her elbows hard enough to leave marks, and her eyes moved constantly around the room and landed on nothing. Laufen sat on a block of fallen ceiling with her opened forearm across her knee, and she did not swing her feet, and she did not shift her weight, and she did not get up.

None of them said anything. Land met Denken's eyes and found the same thing sitting behind them that was sitting behind his own, which was the flat hollow knowledge of people who have been let go rather than saved.

Land looked around the chamber and did the count again, because his mind would not stop doing it.

Kanne. Wirbel. Lawine. Edel. Richter.

Five names, and behind each name the small irrelevant details his memory insisted on producing. Kanne complaining about her boots. Wirbel cracking his neck. Lawine and Kanne hissing at each other on the stairs. Edel eating with her hands. Richter reading the examination rules aloud to himself on the first morning, slowly, his finger under the line.

None of that was in the room anymore. Some of it was on the floor and some of it was under a golem and one of them was not anywhere at all.

And the thing that had done it had not been trying.

That was what would not leave him. He stood in the ruin and turned it over and could not find any way to put it down. It had been playing. Not in the sense of enjoying itself, because it had not been capable of enjoying anything. In the sense of a machine running at a fraction of its output because a fraction was sufficient for the load. It had erased Kanne with one shot from one weapon and then put that weapon away and never used it again, though every person in that room had been standing in the open for another four minutes afterward. It had melted the door, then fenced them in, then walked into them with a blade while they were on their hands and knees.

It had killed five trained mages the way a man clears a table.

And then a real threat had arrived, and it had woken up, and it had very nearly won. Land ran the last minute back and made himself look at it honestly. If Frieren had been one second later through that hole. If her hand had not been on her thumb already when the white light started to gather. If she had spent even a little more of herself on the copy of herself she had destroyed in some other hall earlier in the day.

There would be a crater here. There would be nothing left of this mountain but a shallow burned bowl with glass at the bottom of it, and nobody in the towns below would ever have found out what had done it.

He looked at the black glass and wondered, in a dull exhausted way, what the original was doing at this moment.

The girl with the purple eyes and the ribbons and the nervous hands, who had flinched in the hall when someone summoned a staff. Was she somewhere in this dungeon right now, three levels down, fighting a copy of something? Was she sitting with her back against a wall catching her breath? Did she have the slightest idea that a version of her had spent the last quarter of an hour doing this, with her face and her hands and her weapons?

Or was the copy simply a device, wound up and set down at the deepest door with one instruction, to stop whatever came?

Land did not know. He found he did not want to know, and that the not wanting was itself a kind of answer about what he had become in the last hour.

Frieren stirred under Methode's hands. Her eyes came open to a slit, pale and unfocused, and they moved around the chamber, checking each shadow in turn, and only then did they close again. Her lips moved. No sound came out of them.

Methode leaned down and then sat back on her heels.

"She needs rest," she said. Her voice had almost nothing left in it. "She has gone far past what a body is built to spend. I have closed what I can close. The rest is time." She looked at her own hands for a moment as though they belonged to somebody she used to know.

"I can feel mana," Ehre said.

Everyone looked at her. She was still gripping her elbows and her eyes had finally settled on something, which was the split in the far wall.

"From somewhere not far," she said. "A great deal of it. It has been building for a while and I did not notice because of. Because of everything." She swallowed. "It is more than this was. Something new has come up out of the bottom of this place."

Nobody responded to that. There was nothing that could usefully be said.

"We leave," Denken said. "Before the ceiling makes the decision for us."

They went out through the hole in the wall. Laufen took the front, because she could go ahead and come back before anyone noticed she had left, and she did it at a walk. Denken and Methode carried Frieren between them. Ehre followed with one hand out against the dark, and Land came last, because he had spent eleven days learning that last is the safest place to be and could not unlearn it in an afternoon.

The green haired girl stepped in, eyes scanning the place. “Well, I'll be damned.” 

He did not look back at the chamber. He kept his eyes on the thin gray daylight ahead and walked toward it holding his broken arm against his chest, and behind him the silence of that room pressed on his back the whole way like a palm between the shoulder blades. 

───✧───

Three hundred kilometers away, a man sat in a chair in the dark.

The light had gone entirely. The bakery below had closed long ago and the street outside was quiet. His tea was a dried ring on the floorboards and his book lay where it had fallen, face down, spine broken, at the part where the detective goes into the cellar.

Land had not moved for a long time.

His left forearm ached. There was nothing wrong with it. He had checked it four times with his hands and twice with a spell, and the bone was whole and sound and perfectly ordinary, and it ached exactly along the line where a copy of him three hundred kilometers underground had broken his.

He was cold. The room was not cold.

He sat with his hands loose in his lap and tried to locate the man who had made a decision eleven days ago in this chair, the clever one, the one who had looked at a dangerous road and a stuffy hall and a good novel and found the angle that let him keep all three. He could remember being that man. He could not seem to get back inside him.

The sums had always been so clean. One of him goes and one of him stays, and the one who stays is safe, because safety is a matter of where your body is. He had believed that the way he believed in floors.

But the copy had his memories and his caution and his tired knees and his fondness for this chair, and the copy had crouched behind a pillar in the dark for twenty minutes with his heart going like a bird's while people it had eaten meals with came apart in front of it, and everything the copy had felt in that room had come up the line and arrived here, in this chair, in him. Not as a report. As an experience. He had been there. He had not been there in any way that would satisfy a proctor or a court or a widow, and he had been there completely.

He thought about the second copy in the crevice, folded up in the rock, waiting for a signal that had not come.

He thought about how close that signal had been. Twice. Three times. He thought about what it would have meant. Another one of him unfolding out of the dark with this whole hour already loaded in its head, walking down that corridor toward a door, knowing exactly what was behind it, and going anyway because that was the instruction he had given it.

He had made a queue of himself and pointed it at a room where something was standing with its cheek on its fist, waiting.

The exam had another day to run. His copy would climb out of that mountain tomorrow and there would be a certificate at the end of it, or there would not, and either way there was going to be an evening in some hall in Äußerst where proctors read out the names of the candidates who had not come back. Five of them, at least. He knew the order they would be read in. He knew what each of them had been doing at the moment it stopped mattering.

He reached down in the dark and picked up his book and put it back on the sill without opening it.

Then he sat in his good chair in his warm room in a town where nothing had ever happened, three hundred kilometers from anything, and shook.

Can you find out how many weapons and techniques were used here? Can you name all of them? I shall give a hint: Half of them are from games.

Also, this story is having it's first anniversary next week! I'm hosting an art contest and winner gets steam gift card. So far, we have only one submission.

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Hope you liked the chapter. Possibly no chapter next week, still, I will try.