The flare rose into the sky like a spear of red fire.
It burst above the treeline in a sharp bloom of light, then held its shape, hanging unnaturally steady against the roiling clouds gathering above the valley. Each pulse of crimson pushed faint ripples through the ambient mana, a pattern that any guild member would recognize.
Guild distress magic. Standard-issue for registered parties, and rarely used.
The five adventurers sprawled on the slope outside the cave watched it with drawn faces. Torren lowered his hand, the last motes of spell-light fading from his fingers. His breathing was controlled, but his shoulders shook faintly.
"It is done," he said. "Pattern three. Any stationed representative will see it."
His companions exchanged looks.
No one suggested it might be unnecessary.
The answer came faster than they expected.
The ground trembled.
A shadow crossed the ridge to the west, a blur that moved too quickly to be a beast or ordinary warrior. Air buckled in its wake. The flare's light shivered once as if acknowledging the newcomer.
Something slammed into the hillside twenty paces away.
Soil erupted in a rough wave. Pebbles and chunks of stone skittered across armor and boots. Dust billowed outward, then thinned, revealing the figure at its center.
He looked like an aging mercenary.
Thick cords of muscle pushed against the worn leather of his armor. Scars crossed his forearms and neck in pale lines. His beard, shot through with grey, framed a jaw like chiseled stone. Iron-grey hair, tied back in a rough knot, whipped slightly in the lingering turbulence.
A heavy greatsword rested in a sheath across his back. The metal of the hilt was dull with use, the leather wrapping darkened by sweat.
But the mana around him throbbed like a contained storm.
Rank 6. The air itself reacted to his presence, the ambient flows bending slightly, as if making way.
The old man's eyes swept across the five adventurers. They were sharp, cold, and very much awake.
"Distress pattern three," he said. His voice was rough, like gravel scraping over steel. "I am the appointed representative of the Guild State in the Dawn Forest. Report."
Torren swallowed once, then straightened, pulling his shoulders back despite his exhaustion.
"I am Torren of Ironvale," he said. "Our team was searching for our missing senior, Henrik. The spirit tracker led us into that cave." He pointed to the dark opening behind them. "We found an ancient tomb. Draugr. Spirits. And deeper, a ritual."
The old man's gaze narrowed.
"Ritual," he repeated. "Describe it."
Torren's words tumbled out in clipped fragments as he fought to keep them precise. The others added what details they remembered: the blood-inscribed circle, the bound man at its center, the robed figures chanting, the pressure of mana building with each heartbeat.
"A Rank 6 stood at the heart of it," Mara said quietly. "And others of Rank 4 and above. They noticed our divination. Sent three cultists up. The Academy pair—Valen and Amber—stayed behind to hold them while we climbed out."
The old man's expression did not change at the mention of another Rank 6. His eyes, however, sharpened further.
"Something related to convergence, you say?" he asked.
"Yes," Mara said. "At least, that is what the Academy boy said."
The old man's jaw tightened.
"So we finally have it," he muttered. "The main ritual node."
A harsh grin cut across his face, fierce and almost young in its intensity.
"We have been chasing shadows for too long," he said. "False circles. Empty tunnels. And you children stumble into the true nest while searching for a single missing warrior."
He drew a deep breath. When he spoke again, his tone was all steel.
"Names afterward. If the ritual is in its critical phase, we are past the point of careful disruption."
He turned toward the cave.
Mana surged.
"Clear," he barked.
He did not bother with finesse. The earth in front of the cave mouth heaved as if struck by an invisible hammer. Rocks tore free, roots snapped, and the half-collapsed entrance ripped open in a shower of dirt and stone.
The hillside groaned.
Valen felt it coming before the stone moved.
Pressure built above, a dense knot of mana gathering on the other side of the ceiling. Instinct, honed through two lives and supported by constant analysis, screamed in unison with Iris's sharp warning in his mind.
Impact from above. Rank 6 or equivalent force. Brace, Master.
He moved without thinking.
Valen seized Amber's arm and pulled her in, turning his back toward the ceiling. Mana flooded into his hands and layered barriers formed around them in quick succession. Each one as think as his Mana Core could support.
Amber's breath hitched as she felt the constructs snap into place.
Then the world above them detonated.
The tunnel ceiling screamed as it tore open. A wall of debris crashed down, stone shards and packed earth and splintered roots hammering into the layered barrier.
The first shield flared and shattered, its structure dispersing in an instant. The second flexed, runes flaring along its surface, taking the brunt of the impact. Cracks spiderwebbed across it.
The third layer held.
Dust blasted inward, filling the passage with choking grit and the raw smell of torn earth. For a heartbeat, everything was noise and pressure and grey haze.
Then the force passed.
Valen dismissed the barred segments of the barrier, letting the dust flow around them instead of trapping it inside. Broken stone clattered to the floor around their feet. A fist-sized rock bounced harmlessly off the fading remnants of the last shield and rolled to a stop.
Amber coughed once, then steadied herself, eyes wide.
"That was—"
"An ally," Valen said.
The overhead mass had not carried the flavor of hostile intent. Just an impatient Rank 6 doing demolition.
Light spilled down from above, harsh after the tunnel's gloom.
At the newly widened mouth of the cave, someone shouted.
"There! They are coming out!"
The five adventurers had fired their signal and waited with their backs to the cave. The explosion nearly knocked them off their feet. When the dust cleared enough to see, two figures stood framed in the torn opening.
Amber's Academy cloak was instantly recognizable. Valen's grey attire and composed expression followed.
Mara reacted first.
"Hold!" she cried, raising both hands. "They are the Academy pair we mentioned!"
The old man had already shifted his stance, preparing to leap into the darkness. At Mara's shout, he paused mid-motion, boots grinding shallow furrows into the stone.
His eyes flicked from the adventurers to the two students below.
He had reflexively begun gathering mana for a secondary impact, an instinctive response to unexpected movement. Now he reined it in with visible effort.
His gaze settled on Valen.
For a heartbeat, the old man saw only a young mage in worn but neat Academy gear, calm despite the dust and chaos. Then he registered the barrier fragments still fading around them, the precise structure of the shield remnants, the fact that both students stood without a scratch despite having a mountain's worth of stone dropped on their heads.
His brows rose.
"You blocked that," he said.
Valen met his gaze evenly.
"We survived it," he answered. "The mountain did most of the work."
Not denial, not false modesty. Just a redirection of focus.
The old man snorted once, a sharp, amused sound.
"Later," he said. His attention cut away without lingering. "Ritual?"
"Still active," Valen said. "They were seconds from the tipping point when we left. The circle is anchored to all three Convergences. They have already sacrificed one core component. The energy is looking for a path."
"Then we are almost out of time," the old man growled.
He bent his knees.
"Stay up here," he said, more command than suggestion. "If you go back down now, you will only add to the body count."
He launched himself downward, vanishing into the tunnel in a blur of motion. The pressure of his mana swept past like a cold wind.
Stone shuddered in his wake.
The Rank 6 ritualist stood at the ritual's edge, robes plastered to his frame by sweat. Veins bulged at his temples. His jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his neck stood out like cables.
The array beneath his feet blazed with a light that was no longer entirely mana. The blood that traced its lines had stopped behaving like any known liquid. It flowed upward and outward, suspended in patterns that defied gravity, forming twisting, shifting runes in the air.
The Convergences above screamed, their rhythm no longer stable. The pulses came faster, overlapping, feeding into the ritual.
The ritualist felt the change as a spike of pressure behind his eyes.
"Hold!" he snarled at the surviving assistants. "We are past retreat. Any break now, and we are all ash."
They clung to their positions, hands shaking as they forced mana into the ritual magic circle.
The array reached critical saturation.
Then the energy moved.
It did not simply rise. It tore.
A pillar of distorted light speared upward, not along a straight line, but along a path that felt old—worn into reality by some forgotten precedent. Stone did not shatter as it passed; it twisted aside, the world itself making way to avoid direct contact.
The pillar broke through the cavern's ceiling, through the mountain's flesh, through the air above the valley.
Then it reached further.
Reality cracked.
The sky above the valley split along invisible seams.
Lines of darkness spread outward from the point where the ritual's spear met the world's skin. They etched themselves across the firmament, branching and curling, forming a jagged lattice that made the heavens look like thin glass struck by a hammer.
From each line, thin rivulets of blood dripped.
The air went still.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the first portal opened.
It tore itself into existence above the valley floor. The edges were not clean. They frayed and wavered.
Within the oval of darkness, nothing could be seen at first. No distant landscape. No foreign sky. Just black.
A second tear yawned open to the west. A third flickered into being to the east. More followed, scattered around the triangle formed by the three Convergences, some small as doorways, others vast enough to swallow towers.
The largest portal formed directly above the ritual line connecting all three.
It did not rip open so much as unfold, revealing layer after layer of blackness that retreated just enough to show what lay beyond.
Something leaned close.
An eye stared through.
It was not merely large. It was scale-breaking. The visible portion alone dwarfed the valley, yet some stubborn part of the mind insisted that what they saw was still only a fragment, a single facet of a larger structure that remained firmly anchored in its own realm.
Colors churned in what should have been the sclera, a swirling, muted storm that hurt to look at too long. Lightning of absolute black crawled through it, splitting and recombining in patterns that suggested intent, not randomness.
The iris was a ring of molten gold, segmented into plates that moved independently, shrinking and expanding as the gaze focused. Around that main ring, thinner circles rotated at varying speeds, inscribed with symbols too complex to parse at a glance.
The pupil was a void.
Not darkness. Absence. Light that struck it did not bounce back. Mana that brushed its edge did not return.
The eye did not cross fully into this world.
Filaments of alien energy anchored its edges to the other side, threads extending backward into the unseen. It hovered just beyond the boundary, pressed close enough for its gaze to flood through, but careful not to allow more of its bulk to pass.
The Rank 6 ritualist stared up, chest heaving.
"We... have done it," he whispered. There was awe in his voice now, and terror. "The gaze of the Multi—"
The eye did not seem impressed.
It shifted, its focus sliding over the ritual circle, the chanting cultists, the bound corpse of the sacrificed warrior, the cracking stone.
For an instant, its gaze sharpened.
Then, with no visible spell and no theatrical gesture, one of the lesser ritualists simply ceased to exist.
One breath he was there. The next, there was nothing. No ash. No blood.
The remaining cultists faltered.
The Rank 6 snapped his head down, forcing his voice steady.
"Hold!" he roared. "Do not break! To falter under that gaze is to die. You knew this when you took the oath."
They flinched, but the chant resumed, more ragged now, threads of panic woven into each syllable.
Above, the smaller portals pulsed.
Something began to push through.
From one tear, a horned figure stepped, its body a black silhouette limned in dull crimson. Its limbs were too long, joints bending just a fraction past what human anatomy allowed. Its fingers ended in claws that dripped a plasma-like glow.
From another portal, a cluster of insectoid creatures spilled out, chitin glistening as if perpetually wet. Their eyes were facets of onyx. Their wings did not flap; they flickered, leaving afterimages in the air like torn pieces of space.
A third tear vomited forth a crawling mass that defied easy categorization—limbs and mouths and eyes arranged according to a logic that had never heard of symmetry.
Partial invasion.
Enough to wound. Enough to test.
The eye watched.
On the slope outside the cave, the adventurers and the Academy pair felt the shift almost simultaneously.
The air changed flavor. Mana twisted. A weight settled on the valley, pressing down from above.
Torren stared upward, jaw slack.
"What... is that?" he breathed.
The sky was no longer a simple vault of cloud and color. Cracks marred its surface. Dark lines like ink in water spread from a point above the valley's heart. Between those fractures, foreign light seeped through.
And at the center of it all, the eye hung, gazing down.
Amber's hand found the hilt of her saber without conscious thought. Her knuckles were white, but her posture remained straight. Her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.
"It is looking at us," she whispered.
"At the valley," Valen corrected. "We are not important enough as individuals."
The observation did not make the sensation less uncomfortable.
Valen could feel the difference between the Convergence's chaotic pressure and this new presence. Chaos mana was wild, unfocused, like a storm without a will. The gaze from beyond, by contrast, was measured.
Assessment phase, he thought. Measuring resistance, cataloging assets. Efficient.
On the edges of his perception, Iris hissed softly.
That thing's vantage point is... strange, Master. It does not perceive space the way we do. My attempts to model its sight-lines are failing.
Do not look back at it too deeply, Valen replied. We have enough problems on this side.
The Guild State representative burst out of the cave mouth an instant later in a blur of movement, landing hard enough to crack the stone.
His face was set in a grim scowl now, all earlier fierce excitement burned away by what he had seen below.
"Too late," he grated. "The ritual has punched through. The path is open enough for them to send scouts."
He glanced up at the largest portal. His lips peeled back from his teeth in something that was not quite a snarl and not quite a smile.
"Can it be closed?" Amber asked.
His jaw tightened.
"With enough Rank 6s, prepared arrays, and time, or a high Ranker" he said. "We have none of those in the measure needed. For now, we hold."
He jerked his chin toward the valley below.
"Move. The front line will form whether you stand in it or not. Better to do so where you have some chance to survive."
The five adventurers had already started running, boots thudding against the grass, weapons bouncing at their sides. They angled down the slope toward the broader grasslands where forces were gathering.
Valen watched them go for a heartbeat.
He glanced at Amber.
Her gaze was still drawn to the eye above, but her breathing had steadied. Her aura, which had threatened to flare wild for a moment, now settled into a tight, controlled burn.
"We are going down," he said.
She blinked, refocusing on him.
"You have a better plan?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Only a faster way."
He turned his back to the valley and crouched.
"On," he said simply.
Amber stared at him for a moment, then huffed out a short, almost disbelieving breath.
"Again?" she muttered. "This is becoming a habit."
She climbed onto his back with more efficiency than the first time, arms locking around his shoulders, legs tightening at his waist. Her weight settled into place.
Valen planted his feet.
Earth mana surged.
He drove power downward into the slope beneath them. The ground responded, a thick column of stone heaving itself upward like a rising platform. It launched them with a jolt, sending both into the air.
Wind tore at cloak and hair. The slope dropped away beneath their feet.
At the peak of their arc, the world seemed to hang for a heartbeat.
Valen twisted his wrist.
Wind mana gathered around them, not in a broad blast, but in a controlled cushion. Air thickened beneath their falling bodies, slowing their descent and redirecting it subtly forward.
They touched earth again in a running step rather than an impact.
Valen did not stop.
Another stone pillar erupted beneath his feet on the next stride, angled this time to hurl them further down the slope. Each column rose and fell in sequence, forming a rough stair of raw earth and rock.
The scenery blurred.
Amber's grip tightened once, then steadied. She did not waste breath on commentary.
Wind cushions, earth launches, brief contact, repeat.
Crude, but effective.
In a handful of heartbeats, they had crossed the distance that would have taken the adventurer party ten times as long on foot. Valen dismissed the last column and let the ground under his boots return to its natural state as they reached the flatter grasslands.
He straightened, lowering Amber back to the ground.
She landed lightly, knees bending to absorb the motion, hand immediately settling on her saber again.
The field before them was no longer empty.
An army had gathered.
Guild adventurers formed the bulk of the lines—ranks of armored men and women, weapons bared, faces set. Their gear varied wildly in style and quality, but the way they stood in formation told its own story. These were not green novices. They were accustomed to standing on the edge of death.
Banners fluttered weakly in the disturbed air, each bearing symbols of different guild branches and independent companies. Colors and emblems mingled, but the line they formed was solid.
Interspersed among them stood the Academy contingent.
Students in grey cloaks clustered around more experienced figures in colored trim. Instructors occupied nodal positions along the line, their mana signatures distinct and heavy. A few individuals carried presences that pressed even against Valen's senses—those would be visiting elders or high-ranking combat faculty.
At their center stood Instructor Aelindra.
Valen recognized the set of her shoulders even from a distance. Her white hair was bound back, her staff grounded at her side, not raised yet but ready. Her gaze was fixed on the oncoming threat, not the eye above.
Her expression was calm. Not peaceful. Focused.
She knows fear will spread fast enough without seeing it in her, Valen thought. Reasonable choice.
The Guild State representative had already taken position near the forward command cluster, speaking in curt fragments to other high-ranked individuals. Orders flowed outward. Runners dashed along the rear lines. Hands moved in practiced signals.
Behind them, the mountain rumbled again.