The abominations hit the villagers like a wave.
None of them belonged to any natural animal. Things with too many limbs, proportions that made no structural sense, bodies that moved in ways that suggested the rules applying to everything else did not apply to them.
The large ones led, clawing and pounding through the front line, sending bodies flying against the cave walls.
"Hold your ground. Hold on."
The villagers answered.
Yaicraft flared across the cavern as they deployed, slicing through the creatures, impaling them mid charge, cutting down anything that got close enough to reach.
They were in disarray, confused, the situation nothing like anything they had faced in a thousand years of sealed existence.
But they were not scared.
Every time a creature brought one of them down they got back up. Clawed apart, pounded into the stone floor, it did not matter.
They stood again. Every time.
Because they were nigh immortal. Pain and damages registered had become foreign.
Death did not registered too, not in the conventional sense, not unless something found the head specifically and shut everything off from there, making them passed out.
The creatures did not know that.
Atiya did. He had figured it out the hard way earlier and used it agaisnt the siblings.
But yai beasts operated on hunger and instinct, not tactical analysis, and they would keep doing what was not working for as long as their hunger told them to keep doing it.
Which meant the villagers could hold.
Which meant his plan had legs.
The battle was ferocious and completely without order.
Bodies moved in every direction simultaneously, villagers and beasts tangled together in the cramped passage, no clean lines, no clear front.
It was impossible to track who was where or what was happening more than a few meters in any direction.
"It is too cramped in here."
Fredo moved through it like a current, the strongest fighter in the village by a considerable margin, his yaicraft firing in continuous bursts, bringing beasts down one after another without breaking stride.
A monkey shaped creature with a mace like fist swung directly down at his head. He raised his right hand, a ball of yai shot upward and destroyed the fist and the head behind it in the same motion. He stepped over what was left and kept moving.
"Where are you, esteemed guest! Show yourself!"
He pushed through the chaos, searching deliberately, until he found him.
Atiya was swinging Sajibu in wide arcs, not elegant, not precise, just moving and swinging and staying alive inside the mess of it. Leishna stood behind him in a daze, eyes bright, grinning like someone watching a festival.
She was laughing.
"You are beautiful! Swinging without a care in the world!" She threw her head back. "It would be even more beautiful if there was more blood! Hahahaha!"
Fredo looked at Atiya and something stopped moving in his chest.
Those blood colored eyes.
"Same as my father."
His brows pulled together, his jaw tightened, something old and unresolved rising through his expression all at once.
And Atiya danced through the dark cave between the humanoids that wanted him captured and the beasts that wanted him eaten, Leishna laughing at his back, neither of them looking particularly concerned about which side won.
Atiya had stabbed a beehive and everything had stirred at once.
Getting close to him through the chaos was still dangerous but the villagers were not warriors in any true sense. A thousand years of existence poured entirely into rituals and survival, not combat.
Their skills were underdeveloped and the curse itself had kept them from ascending beyond a certain point, none of them reaching even Ascension 2. They had numbers and immortality and not much else to bring to a fight like this.
"Heh."
Atiya ran, clearing the villagers coming at him, pushing through them, Sajibu swinging.
Then yai balls caught him from behind, two of them, straight into his legs.
"Uggghhh."
*Crap.*
He went down hard, the cave floor coming up fast, and stayed there.
"It hurts."
Leishna dropped beside him and did not get up either. She lay on the ground looking up at the cavern ceiling with her smile completely intact.
"Is this the end."
Fredo was already cutting toward them through the horde, slashing the yai beasts gnawing at him from every side, his path deliberate and direct.
Atiya's yai sat at four percent. His vision had gone blurry at the edges, the frostbite and the wounds and everything else the last several hours had done to his body arriving all at once in a single collective toll.
He could feel all of it now that the movement had stopped.
A yai beast fell to the ground beside him, sliced apart by a passing villager. It hit the stone and lay there for a moment. Then it turned its head and found him.
Its eyes fixed on him with immediate clarity.
'Fuck.'
'I cannot even open my eyes properly. There is no way out of this. I did everything I could and in the end it was not enough.'
The yai beast dragged itself closer, maw opening, angling directly toward his face.
Blood hit him before the pain did.
Warm, immediate, and spattering across his face and chest, the smell of it thick, nauseatting and very close.
The reason he could smell was because he was still alive.
The beast's head was gone, separated cleanly, and Fredo stood over him with the blade still raised, the yai beast's body collapsing sideways onto the cave floor.
Atiya lay there and looked up at the cavern ceiling.
'Mom.'
The thought came quietly, the last thing his mind produced before it gave out completely after the body exhausting almost evrything it could produce.
His eyes closed.
And this time they stayed closed.
****
*She acts more like a child than me.*
Mavine stood at the side of the bed looking at Zelaine. Drool on one cheek, dried snot on the other, the blanket pulled entirely to her side of the bed and wrapped around her like a cocoon. Snoring.
*So unladylike.*
Mavine had woken up, brushed her teeth, eaten breakfast, and it was now past ten. Zelaine had not moved once.
She weighed her options. Wake her up or let it be.
"Missy. Missy." She poked Zelaine's forehead once, twice, several more times. No response. "You missed your job. And you pulled all the blanket to yourself last night. Please wake up so I can sleep."
Nothing.
Mavine stepped back and thought about it.
Her life had changed considerably since Zelaine appeared in it. She had expected to spend the rest of her days depressed or slowly going insane, carrying everything she carried. But Zelaine had some kind of oil, something she applied without explaining what it was, and whatever it contained had taken the sharpest edges off the weight. She was not fine. But she was not drowning either.
It was more than she had expected to have.
"What." Zelaine's voice came out flat and half assembled. One eye cracked open a fraction.
"Wake up. You did not even change your outfit last night."
The eye closed.
Mavine had one card left. She played it.
"The food is getting cold."
One eye opened again, slowly.
"What is it."
"Pork cutlet."
Zelaine was out of the bed and through the door in under five seconds.
Mavine closed the door behind her, climbed into the warm spot Zelaine had left, pulled the recovered blanket over herself, and went back to sleep.
Zelaine stood in the kitchen looking at the table with a disgruntled expression.
No pork cutlet.
'That girl. Who did she learn to lie from.'
She turned the question over for a moment.
'I am not that bad of an influence on her. Am I.'
She shuddered and pushed the thought aside and went through everything available in the kitchen. When she was done she stood back and assessed the damage.
"It is not even enough to keep me awake."
She went to find Cale and found his room empty. She checked the common areas and still nothing.
*Where could he be.*
She pulled out her phone and went to search for his number.
She stared at the screen for a moment.
"This is my new phone, so I do not have his number."
She twirled a strand of silver hair around one finger, standing in the corridor in yesterday's outfit with no money, no contact, and no pork cutlet.
Then something else surfaced.
"Crap."
The job in the midnight at a parlour.
She had slept through it entirely and they were probably already there.
Several days past just like that.
Zelaine had become a ghost in the house.
Nearly all of her free time, which given her lifestyle was most of her time, was spent shut inside her room. She emerged for jobs and for food and nothing else. Even for food she followed a pattern, appearing in the kitchen exactly half an hour before meals like a spirit that had learned the schedule and optimized around it.
The skill was the reason.
Precognition was not a small coding project. To build something that could see the future, even partially, even conditionally, required stacking mountains of data into the architecture, constructing algorithms complex enough to process variables before they manifested.
She had been working on it for four years. It was finally close enough to feel the end of it, which only made her push harder.
Two hours after lunch she was back on the floor in lotus position, staring at a cup of noodles she had just filled with hot water.
'Did Nongban plan all of it from the beginning. The lab infiltration, Sajibu, selecting specific people to transmigrate to Ellejort.' She turned it over. *'No. He was surprised by what Atiya did. That part was unplanned.'
The three minutes were up. The noodles were ready.
'I should eat this before it gets soggy.'
She inhaled the cup in one sustained motion. The entire thing, gone. It did nothing meaningful for her hunger.
Slurp. Slurp.
'All this thinking and coding. My energy is completely gone.'
Beside her on the floor a small mountain of empty cup noodle packets had accumulated over the course of the week, a quiet record of her seclusion.
She looked at it, sighed, and picked up her phone. Pulled up a bulk order for instant food, filtered specifically for cheap and tasty, and placed it without checking the total.
'The pact has never been broken. Well....I broke it and Nongban broke it too.'
'Wait! Could it be...Did Nongban plan all of it from the start too. He is planning something against Ellejort! But how. He came to Ansep looking for something! What was in Ansep.'
The answer came before she finished forming the question.
'Ten years ago, on an expedition, Correl found a box. It became the power source for a branch of Ansep and Nongban became Correl's partner around the same time. What if he was after the box from the beginning. What if everything else, the partnership, the lab, the silver alien, all of it, was just the path to the box.'
The implications landed one after another and did not stop landing.
If the box was the goal, and the box was what had transmigrated her here, then her arrival in Ellejort was not collateral damage.
It was a consequence of something Nongban had been building toward for a decade. Which meant Cale's arrival was too.
And Atiya's and wherever Shilial had ended up.
'Cale does not know any of this.'
Her brain felt like it was running too hot, the weight of it pressing from the inside, secrets large enough to ignite a war between belts sitting in her head with nowhere to go.
She had been carrying this alone for days and the load had not gotten lighter for being carried.
Zelaine gave up.
She let out a long unsteady breath, dropped onto the bed, and closed her eyes. She needed the gears to stop. They did not stop. Nongban's name kept moving through her thoughts like something that had gotten in and did not know how to leave.