The corridor was cracked. It was obvious that at one point in time there had been intricate carvings that lined the walls, but now there was only webbed lines and shards of stone scattered across the tiling in the floor. It was not even possible to see the marks that littered the tiled floor anymore, there was just too much rubble. Nonetheless, Laurence could still see the doorway. It was barely within eye-shot and stone from the walls and ceiling obscured him from being able to see it clearly, but he could feel that this was his target. His blood and bones were screaming that part of someone’s Manifestation was nearby. With every step he was getting closer.
They scrambled over the debris and continued down the path, with Quentin looking concerned as he took up the rear guard. “It was not like this the last time I came here. Do you reckon that man did this?”
“I honestly would not be surprised,” replied Jim as he climbed on top of a large chunk of rock that had fallen from the roof. He brushed the scattered debris off his hands and began to gingerly make his way down the boulder. “I may not be a master of Creation or Destruction, but with how thick the dust is in the air, it’s pretty obvious that this is new damage”.
“That eye was terrifying,” Quentin replied, quickly following after Jim, “Honestly I could probably go the rest of my life happily without seeing that thing again. What do you reckon it even was?”
“There are records of it in the Mephisto clan library. Or at least something like it... I think it could be her,” said Peter.
“Her?”
“You can’t seriously think that we just encountered the Lady herself right?” Jim guffawed.
“It’s possible, or at least an ancient creature near her level.”
“Even if we believe that for a second, why here? And why now?” Quentin sighed before sliding down the boulder. At the bottom he brushed himself off before continuing the short way left towards the doorway.
“That man did cry out for his mother...” Jim left the sentence hanging as Laurence ushered the group to be silent. The door was open and there was light coming from inside. Thanks to an array placed upon the door they could not see inside the room, but that would not stop Laurence. He raised his hand and dragged it palm first down the edge of the door and slowly, as the mana melted into the odd bubble before them revealed the world within.
Inside was a room filled with twenty people garbed in leather and bone. Most were moving about at high speeds around the edge of the room, but several were vibrating within, just sat near the middle of the room. The big thing that caught Laurence’s eye, however, was the plinth in the heart of the room. Sat upon the plinth was a small metal hammer, identical to the one that he had carried with him unknowingly since childhood. Seeing the hammer he stopped moving, blinking or even breathing. He had a target now. He needed that hammer.
Giving the bubble a cursory gaze with his truesight he quickly came to an understanding of what lay before him. Scores of symbols and glyphs sat before him, directing the flow of mana around the room and twisting imperceptibly through the wear and tear that had struck the region less than an hour before. “It’s a time trap,” he whispered to his companions, “The core of which is the plinth in the middle of the room.”
“So do we go in or what?”
“Are you brain-dead, Jim?” Laurence snapped back, “We go in and we set off the trap. What we need to do is shatter the trap and grab the hammer before the people inside realise what has happened.”
“A couple of the people in there are injured,” Quentin said. He gazed into the room for a moment before turning to Laurence, “It seems like they took injuries about a week ago and never had any sort of doctor or Life practitioner look at them.”
“They took injuries an hour and nine minutes ago. It’s just what is going on within that bubble is one hundred and forty four times faster than outside. I think they’ve been in there for about three weeks in their time, because the trap was set off about three hours ago.”
“So why are they still in there,” Peter said, “Can they not leave the time dilation?”
“They can leave, but not with the hammer,” Laurence replied.
“Which means we have competition,” Jim said, grinning widely.
At the mention of competition Laurence felt a small hand grip against his shoulders. He looked back and saw Fen, smiling nervously, an excited glint in his eyes. Laurence could tell that he was excited about actually taking part in something with Ruko for the first time. The two children shared glances across the backs of their woefully ill-equipped caretakers as they jittered with excitement. They knew that they would likely have little impact upon a fight in comparison to the Immortals that surrounded them, but they were still excited to witness it together in the flesh for the first time.
“The moment the bubble pops, we go in, grab the hammer and leave. There is no need to tangle with these people, they have nothing else we want or need. Clear?”
“In and out as soon as possible. Clear as glass,” said Jim. Peter and Quentin both nodded in unison, and so Laurence began his work. Thin threads of mana, invisible to all but the most scrutinous eye weaved their way throughout the body of the trap, encompassing the time displacement nature of the bubble itself, before subverting it and placing it under Laurence’s control. With a simple rush of mana the soft yellow wall before them shattered like glass, cascading down upon the people stuck within the room. Laurence burst through the door and was swiftly followed by his friends. In shock, the group that surrounded the hammer were a beat late in reaction, but the woman who sat nearest the hammer reacted immediately. She sprung to her feet and swept up the small hammer, before turning to face Laurence and his invading friends.
“So the invaders finally arrive,” she said, her voice rich with indignation and pride. “Why do you seek that which you should not?”
Immediately, Laurence summoned his hammer and pointed it at her. “If I can’t seek it, then there is nobody in this blessed Tower that can. My birthright is not for others to toy with.” Coils of mana began wrapping around him as his anger at this woman built up. She was the one stopping him from being able to heal Cleo. She was the one obstructing him from breaking the cycle of rebirth. She was the one who was in his way.
Black coils of mana began streaming off Laurence’s body like a hurricane, before collecting and spreading on the ground as spiderwebs. With each step he made the momentum within him built and his mana became darker and darker. Before it was dark, but as the moments became seconds that darkness became void. His mana was no longer just absorbing the light, but instead it was absorbing everything that went near it, material or immaterial. As his momentum rose, and the woman stepped back, the void-mana shrank back towards Laurence before moving up his skin and collecting on the tip of his hammer. It compressed and compressed until all that was left of the fearsome energy was a tiny dot, and the tracks in the dirt that showed its path of movement.
“Give me the key, or you and every person following you dies right now,” he growled.
Before the woman could even move, however, three of the men who had been standing at the door when Laurence walked in barreled into his back, chords of white dust following their every movement.
“Kimbramancers!” Quentin yelled, before grabbing the door beside him and ripping it off its hinges. “Unless you have a tool made by the Hephaistians, you’ll need an object without mana in to fight them!”
“You maybe,” Jim said, smirking at a figure in the back of the crowd, “But not me.” He pointed his hand and suddenly one of the Avalonians in the back of the crowd sprung towards his ally and tackled him over.
As Jim began causing dissent between companions, Peter tutted and threw several small packets into the air before bursting them and letting them scatter upon several nearby soldiers. In seconds their flesh began rotting off their bodies and their barely formed screams gargled impotently in the back of their throats. “Poison doesn’t need mana.”
A man, seemingly the leader of the group, moved and stood beside the woman as Laurence stared her down. There was a muted moment between the three of them as Laurence waited for the woman to respond, but instead of the answer he was expecting, the woman squinted at him and said, “I know you. Didn’t you used to have a dog?”
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