"How much is that?" A scruffy looking man in dirty rags and worn armour asked.
"Enough for a few days." Another similarly clothed figure answered.
"We should change places. The Shogunate will react fast, their patrols have doubled already, that doesn't bode well."
A rag-tag group of armed deserters spoke to each other in the damp hollow of a remote cave, far from any main road and far from the trampled paths that led to the villages they had spent the last week tormenting.
"To the Abyss with the Shogunate, but you are right. How about the cave system we used two years–"
RUMBLE
The cave cracked and shook, cutting off their chatter.
"Earthquake?"
The terrified group abandoned their loot and rushed toward the exit in a scramble of cursing and colliding shoulders.
"Argh– Noooo!"
One of the poor men tripped and fell. Or perhaps he was purposefully pulled back.
Crack
The rest trampled him without slowing, the sounds of cracking bone dwarfed by the chaotic scene.
They ran until finally seeing daylight creeping in at the entrance ahead. They were going to make it. A thin, involuntary wave of relief washed over them.
FWOOOOOOSH
It hadn't time to settle.
Agonised screams erupted as a wall of blazing fire blanketed the entrance from above, consuming skin and bone in seconds.
The symphony of guttural sounds ended with the entrance collapsing on whatever remained.
Clap. Clap.
Dusting off his hands in slow, deliberate motions, Alexander stood at the ridge's edge and watched the last of the screaming stop, the fire he had called down settling into a low, satisfied burn across the collapsed entrance. Below, a clean line of scorched rock traced all the way down the hillside. Nothing moved.
"Very impressive," Yae commented, punctuating it with a yawn.
"Why is it that you always have to say something?" Alex chuckled because her words contradicted her behaviour so completely. "I would rather have dealt with them face-to-face, but then again, there would be no point…"
"No, no. I mean it truly." Yae gently knocked on her own head and pulled an exaggerated expression, mimicking the particular stern set of Ei's brow with uncanny accuracy. "The fact that you learnt anything at all from that blockhead is a testament to your ability, Mr. High and Mighty."
Alexander's chuckle broke into full laughter. He reached out and pulled at both of Yae's cheeks as she attempted to swat his hands away.
"Yuu blute. Stawp it." She bit down on one of his fingers hard enough that he shook her off with a grimace.
They descended the hill in high spirits, goofing around the whole way down and on the path back home. Yae orbited close, never letting a moment of silence settle between them, however she could still feel the way he never quite leaned into her the way he once had.
'Tsk, he would have tackled me to the ground previously' Not that it truly bothered her, instead it felt like a challenge and a matter of time.
This had been his life for a while now. Training with Ei, which was electro / lightning refining and mastery and identifying precisely which part of his form would get him killed and leaving him to correct it.
An occasional task from Makoto like tracking down a group of misbehaviours and making them… well... stop.
And in the quiet spaces between, spending time with Yae when she wasn't swamped with the work of a missing Guuji.
Xianyun and Saiguu had been absent for much longer than previously stated and although Alexander was itching to travel once again, he patiently waited for the return of his master while counting the remaining places he wished to visit.
Snezhnaya was on top of the list. By all accounts the Tsaritsa was still very much herself in these years, a gentle soul, her radiance warming land that would otherwise be uninhabitable. No Fatui. No experiments. He was curious what she was like before the weight of what was coming found her.
Khaenri'ah was more complicated. He had drawn a quiet parallel between it and the Dwarves of any other Fantasy. Just like the Dwarves, these humans lived underground and divided by castes. They collectively held the same flavour of ambition, the same conviction that the rules governing everyone else simply did not apply to them and the same overwhelming greed.
Not to mention that since his encounters with the spawn of the Abyss, that opinion had only calcified. The corruptive pull of those things was not random and the fact that Abyss research and usage was an open secret of the Khaenri'ah… Well.."
"It is a wonder Celestia is yet to step into their affairs." Yae had once spoken her mind while they spent some free time in her newly constructed library. It was the best way to summarise the whole ordeal.
This also helped the young man prepare and anticipate the Cataclysm that would happen. Although previously believed to be an accident. It seems that the whole disaster was a combination of poor choices.
.
.
.
Back in the Narukami Shrine the duo separated, Yae had to make a report to the Shogun, while Alexander moved to cook up a quick lunch of their favourite dishes.
When finished, he carried a few trays of delicious smelling food through the decorated halls of the Grand Shrine and slid open the door to the Guuji's seat.
Yae Miko was sitting with her chin in her hand, scrolls stacked beside her with the disordered energy of someone who had been trying very hard to look busy. The moment she registered somebody's footsteps, she straightened her back with dignity and made a busy-looking face.
"Oh, it's you…" She deadpanned when Alexander walked in.
'Still cannot get used to the fact that he no longer walks with an assassin's silence.' Yae tapped on her luscious lips while staring at his home-clothed visage.
His messy black hair had a tendency to fall in front of his eyes which he regularly blew away which always looked cute and funny. He had no problem with the hair during fighting though, which she always found interesting.
They ate in comfortable silence while Alexander read a book Yae had pointed out when they visited her new publishing house.
"Is it good?" Miko had finished her food fast and busied herself in papers once again, casting glances at the young man while he read.
"It's alright." He turned a page without looking up. "There's too much smut though." He checked the title page to see the author. "Kadenokouji Kenzaburou. Of course. Self-insert of a man." He shook his head but continued to read nonetheless.
Poor Miko went very quietly red, retreating behind her scrolls, praying that he wouldn't notice her state or hear her pacing heart.
Flip
Each page turned seemed to require her to concentrate harder on looking composed.
"Do you like the female lead?" She had calmed herself enough to ask the question she most wanted answered.
"Yeah." He turned another page. "Her past kind of reminds me of you, actually."
Yae Miko pulled lightly on one of her ears and let out a slow, controlled exhale through her nose. Her eyes did something that was not quite composure and not quite its absence.
She said nothing and returned to her scrolls with the focused energy of someone who had just been handed a great deal to think about and intended to do all of it privately.
'Fwooh, that's good, I can work with that.' Her mind had never worked so hard before, making plans for future interactions, trap questions and other ideas.
Tick-tack
Time passed with the soft clicking of a clock.
Tick-tack
"They are coming back soon." Miko said, having returned to normal some time ago.
He stopped turning pages. "When?"
"Soon." She paused."Morax as well."
He raised an eyebrow.
The God of Contracts, the most powerful Archon, there's no way he wouldn't want to meet him. In fact he could probably ask about Geo mastery which would help him further the control over the Earth element.
"Can't wait to show Xianyun my progress, even I can notice it's staggering compared to what I could previously do with just wielding weapons."
Yae watched the shift in his expression and felt, without wanting to, a small irrational twinge at how easily a name could produce it.
"Aaaaaaah. I have been run absolutely ragged in that old hag's absence, you understand," she said, recovering smoothly and changing subjects. "The administrative burden alone is criminal. I intend to make my suffering known at great length and volume." She raised her chin and put her hands at the waist.
"You know, when you change your tone and match your words to sound… so… majestic and authoritative…" Alex let the words simmer as she waited eagerly to hear a compliment.
"It just paints you an even bigger fool than usual."
Fwoosh
A hand fan was sent flying towards his forehead.
Crack
And it broke.
Silence
"...I liked that fan."
Alexander was already collecting the empty trays, the ghost of a smirk visible in profile but he said nothing.
.
.
.
Bird chirping
Soothing sounds of a wonderful morning accompanied Alexander while he climbed the mountain as a part of his warm-up before training.
Sniff
He paused.
Sniff, sniff
He turned his head, face already pulling into a grimace.
"The Abyss."
The two words left his mouth and he was already moving, the sentence barely finished before his feet found the faster path down. That foul, sourceless wrongness was unmistakable to anyone who had felt it before.
FWOOOOOOH
Alexander was already moving through the forest, the mountain past him. Trees bent from the pressure as he passed in unmatched speed while enhanced by the element of wind.
He could see it with his sensory ability now. Not a stray creature. Not residual corruption bleeding from old ground. A fracture. Something had torn open the space and whatever lived on the other side of it was spilling through with no resistance.
The sky changed before he reached the coast. The colour drained from the air as if consumed. He crested the final ridge and saw the beach below.
Wide. Grey sand at the base of a sea cliff, sheltered on three sides by jutting rock, the kind of place that had gone undisturbed for centuries. In the centre of it the earth had split open, pulsing with a cold sourceless light, and from that split the messy and shadowy shapes poured outward in silence.
They were already below the ridge, climbing upward. Everything they touched seemed to rot in seconds, black sand, dead plants and trees lost all of their vibrant colours as these Abyss creatures consumed the essence of life with alien greed.
Alexander exhaled slowly and raised both hands.
Cackle
Fire spilled from his palms in broad curtains across the beach, slamming into the leading edge of the mass and driving it back.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEECH
The monsters were no easy prey. He had fought them previously a number of times, but those were small batches of conjured and weak corrupted fauna. There was no way he could don his armour and dispatch true creatures of Abyss with his mace in such huge numbers.
Alexander's ears were barely keeping up with being self-healed, streaks of blood dripping from the torturous screeching.
Crash
He poured more into it. The temperature climbed. The sand at the fire's base started to melt and run in dark rivulets. Still the mass pressed forward, adapting, consuming the heat and growing resistant to it by the second.
Crack
But it seemed even more and more ineffective. The glass that was formed below them from the massive fire cracked and shattered to no avail.
"Aaargh!"
He strained his muscles and forced the element of wind into his torrent of fire to his will with a shout, trying to drown the disgusting spawn with even more destruction.
BOOM
A tide of superheated air and fire rolled forward and across the beach, consuming everything in its path and pushing toward the fracture at the centre with the relentless force.
FWOOOOOOOOOOOOSH
The shapes at the front finally melted. The ones behind compressed inward, pressing toward the fracture as if trying to retreat the way they had come.
Alexander did not let them.
He drove the wave forward, the wind feeding the fire that was feeding the wave. Sand fused into glass in a spreading front as the heat passed over it. Even the fracture was visible now through the thinning mass of creatures.
He focused past the remaining creatures entirely but the fracture resisted with almost wilful quality He pushed the fire directly into it, concentrated now rather than broad, and poured the wind in behind it as a driving force, and kept pushing until something gave…
WAIL
Crack
An… emotion… more felt than heard and the fracture sealed with a crack that drove stone outward in a perfect radius.
Thud
Silence
Finally there was nothing left but cooling glass and the smell of scorched earth,salt and rot of the Abyss.
Alexander shuffled his sweaty hair with his sizzling, from the fire spells, hands.
The headache arrived immediately, the way it always did when the mana ran dry. A pressure behind the eyes that started dull and intended to get worse.
He breathed through it.
His body was fine. The rest of him was not quite finished paying.
He looked at the beach.
The entire beach was glass. Smooth, faintly iridescent, holding the washed-out sky above it like a mirror laid flat.
He blinked slowly against the headache and thought, distantly, that it was rather beautiful for something that had not been intentional. That's when he heard movement behind him.
He turned.
Saiguu was looking at the beach with an expression that had no performance in it. Whatever she had been about to say had stayed unsaid somewhere between the ridge and here. Her eyes moved from the glass to the sealed fracture to Alexander and the silence she held was the particular kind that meant she was recalculating something.
Beside her, Xianyun's gaze moved across the scene in a single comprehensive sweep. Tracing cause to effect and to consequence. Her expression did not change although her worried glances felt soothing to the young man's heart as he gave back a reassured smile.
And beside them stood a figure Alexander had not encountered before in this world. Broad-shouldered, unhurried, with the settled stillness of someone for whom patience had long since stopped requiring any effort at all. The man looked out at the glass beach for a long moment before his gaze settled on Alexander with calm and thorough attention.
"You contained it," Morax said. Not a question. His voice carried the way you would imagine an old stone would.
Alexander turned back to the beach. "I don't think the location was accidental. The fracture was angled toward the cliff road. Something was trying to come through close to the path."
"Mmm." Morax said nothing further, his gaze returning to the beach with an expression that gave nothing away.
"Aya, it seems we are a tad too late, dear sister." The regal figure of the current Raiden Shogun appeared before the group with her usual entourage.
After greeting each other, Alexander moved to talk with Xianyun, seeing as he was not questioned by anybody.
The Archons of Inazuma and Liyue seemed to have a lot to talk about however.
Shuffle
Alex hugged his teacher, "Welcome back!" he said in a jolly mood with a silly smile, already putting the whole ordeal behind him and focusing on what he felt important.
Already used to his antics and tactility, Xianyun returned the gesture with a smile as she looked up at his face, "Have you grown taller?"
"Eh? No idea teacher…" He scratched his head.
The glass beach stretched behind them, cooling in the evening air. Dark and smooth and faintly luminous, holding the grey sky on its surface like still water.
It would still be there centuries later.
By then, no one would remember what had made it. Only that it had always been beautiful, and that something about it had always felt like a warning.