Ian and Euryphel met in the morning to talk strategy over breakfast. An hour before the demonstration, they took a private hovergloss to the chosen site. The hovergloss soared through the sky, giving Ian an excellent view of the territory below.

“You weren’t born here, but this territory now belongs to you just as surely as it does to me, or any other citizen. What do you think of it?”

Ian scratched his head. The SPU’s wilderness was untamed and largely unpopulated, hot, humid, and bursting with animal life. “It’s a decemancer’s paradise.”

Euryphel gave him a strange look. “That’s all you can say?”

Ian looked out the window again. “It’s green.”

“...”

He turned around and chuckled. “I’m kidding. It’s beautiful.”

—

The hovergloss decelerated rapidly, touching down on a landing strip blasted out of the landscape. The smoldering pathway was like a black scar on the otherwise brown and green terrain: Euryphel could feel the residual heat through the soles of his boots, and clumps of embers were scattered sporadically over the pathway.

Must be the work of Mo’qin, Euryphel mused. The jungle chosen for the demonstration site was a rotational training area, allowing recruits to experience different kinds of terrain. The SPU had several jungle reserves for this purpose, though not all of them were in constant use. This site in particular was nearly abandoned, so Euryphel had expected the pathways and buildings to be swallowed by overgrowth.

“I’ll be around,” Euryphel said, waving Ian off. The decemancer walked away toward the barracks from where he’d be escorted into the jungle, while Euryphel headed for one of the viewing boxes towed in from Zukal’iss.

As he walked, Euryphel traced the arrow extending from his shoulder to Mo’qin. He squinted his eyes, just barely able to make out the man’s gnat-sized form in the distance. Guardian Por’sha was next to him, keeping the two of them aloft in the air with her wind elementalism. Without warning, a column of blistering light erupted from Mo’qin’s hands, carving into the ground like a laser.

The prince looked down at the smoldering pathway again. Can Ian defend against something like Mo’qin’s blasts? He should have a way...right? He had given Ian a lengthy dossier on the guardians, but after their morning conversation, he still wasn’t sure if Ian was ready to face all of them together. Ian had tried his best to internalize information about the guardians, but it was a lot to absorb...

Euryphel sighed and directed his attention to a team of earth elementalists smoothing down a set of earthen stairs leading up to one of the viewing boxes. Another team was busy reinforcing the jungle’s barrier perimeter with dense sun-baked clay, with Guardian Zuliman assisting by sealing gaps with viscous mud.

Euryphel walked toward one of the viewing boxes that was already positioned and anchored. He bypassed the earthen column of stairs leading to the entrance, flying up directly into the sleek chamber of glass. Thankfully, his sapphire hair ornament kept his long bangs held back, even as the wind rippled through his garments and hair.

A few minutes later, Urstes joined him in surveying the dense canopy below.

“You’re not worried at all, are you?” Urstes said.

Euryphel shook his head. Just a bit. “Not at all.”

“You’re having him go up against all of us,” he continued, frowning. “It’s a bit insulting, prince.”

“I’m not insulting you,” Euryphel replied, his voice cold. “Have you ever faced a 99% affinity decemancer before?” The prince waited for a response. He exhaled and looked skyward. “I haven’t stuck my neck out for him on a whim.”

“...Very well.”

Euryphel inclined his head toward Urstes. “You know I’m right: affinity doesn’t scale linearly. The difference between 85% and 90% affinity is like night and day, not to mention 95% and nearly 100%.” Euryphel felt like he was also convincing himself as he spoke. Everything he was saying was true, and he’d already seen Ian’s incredible displays of raw power...so why was he still so nervous?

Urstes frowned, but remained silent.

“All of you will be working together soon enough,” the prince continued. “Isn’t it normal for you to test new recruits? Consider this exercise that test.”

“He isn’t my recruit,” Urstes replied, flashing a wry smile. “He’s yours. I know you’ve already tested him, in your own way.”

“I was unable to touch him, no matter what I tried,” he added bitterly. “Utterly outclassed.” 83% End and 96% Regret versus 99% Death...the latter was undeniably stronger.

“I’ll see for myself in a short while,” Urstes murmured. “Until then, Prime.”

“Later, Guardian. Make a good showing out there.”

Urstes dropped down from the viewing box, his landing producing a small cloud of dust. He looked behind and gave Euryphel a small nod before heading for the barracks.

—

To Ian’s senses, vitality saturated the air, flora and fauna filling every possible bit of space that he could perceive. Ian couldn’t tell if this setup was intended to help him; from what he could gather, other decemancers had difficulty extracting and converting Life energy into Death energy on the fly. This was why decemancy was generally unable to directly attack the bodies of living things from the inside. For him, however, the vitality was a swell of potential.

Ian eventually muddled his way over to where his opponents were assembled: a metal barracks with low ceilings, outfitted with cooling arrays.

Almost as soon as he walked in the door, the once-lively conversation ground to a halt. Self-conscious, Ian backpedaled, leaving the cool building to go back outside.

“Don’t be cocky,” a voice whispered in his ear. Startled, Ian jerked his head back before clearing his throat. He checked the surroundings, but nobody seemed close by. Euryphel?

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he muttered, unsure of where to place his eyes.

“You’re going up against the Guard, so you’re going to need to finish things quickly.”

“It’s not flashy that way, though,” Ian said, his voice low. “It’s not as intimida–”

“Don’t make a spectacle,” the prince said, cutting him off. “These aren’t common regs you’re impressing, but practitioners. They’ll understand what they see.”

“But–”

“And like I said earlier: don’t kill anyone!”

The wind by Ian’s ear died down, and with it, the voice disappeared.

A woman headed in the direction of the barracks walked past. She tilted her head, lips curving up into a shy grin.

“Trying to talk to the first prince?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“Well,” she replied, laughing softly. “Unfortunately, communication only goes one way.”

She turned around, then ducked into the building. Ian frowned, trying to place a name to the woman’s face. After a few seconds, he remembered: Farazad Zuliman, a Moon and Mountain practitioner.

Ian sighed: there were so many guardians that it was difficult keeping them all straight. Euryphel’s lengthy brief had outlined the Guard’s general strategies, but if he couldn’t identify guardians on sight, he’d be unable to properly prepare for their attacks.

The crux of the Guard’s strategy was to break up into three groups of five, six, and four members, respectively. The first group, headed by Urstes, preferred mid-range to close-quarters combat.

Euryphel had specifically warned him to be wary of Othello Urstes and a woman named Clarabella Nixia. If allowed to get in close, the woman in particular was a potent Remorse practitioner who could ensorcel opponents in lifelike nightmares. That she was also a Light illusionist didn’t help.

Group two was a quintet of support surrounding the central Jorin Mo’qin, a celebrated fire elementalist backed by compounding Sun and Light affinities. Euryphel had warned him that a single plasma blast from Mo’qin was five times more powerful than that of the defensive cannons stationed around Menocht.

In other words, Ian definitely couldn’t afford to take a hit, at least not without some kind of defensive aid, like an aegis-mode glosSword...which he didn’t have. He’d have to plan for avoidance.

The third group was a flexible coterie of agile damage dealers, opportunistically attacking and providing support.

A few minutes later, a proctor dressed in white and light-blue robes approached Ian. He noticed three more enter into the barracks to fetch the guardsmen.

Without mincing words, she led him into the jungle, keeping the two of them surrounded in a bubble of water that shielded out any insects or falling debris. She deposited him in a small clearing and left after informing him that the training exercise would begin with the sounding of a horn.

Ian closed his eyes, letting his awareness of the surroundings expand. There was boundless life, but beneath it, under the verdant canopy, were brown, crinkled leaves and sunken bones. Ian recalled the first page of Hercates’ grimoire, a simple quote: “Life is because of death.” The growth of the jungle demanded many victims.

The jungle was vast enough that Ian wasn’t able to detect the energy signatures of the Guard. They had likely been placed at the other end of the enclosure. This definitely put him at a disadvantage and made it more difficult to finish everything quickly, like Euryphel requested. However, Ian felt himself growing increasingly excited by the challenge: He finally had a justification to go all out.

When the horn finally sounded, Ian was taut with anticipation. His eyes flashed open and the world around him seemed to crack, as though the ground was giving birth to a massive chasm of lightless black. The black inferno raged around Ian, the Death energy potent enough to be visible by even non-practitioners.

One of the main shortfalls of decemancy was its lack of discretion: to any vivimancer, Death energy was clearly visible through physical objects, even at a significant distance. At high enough potency, Death energy even became visible to mundane sight. To call its cold, oily, unnatural appearance eye-catching was a gross understatement.

Rather than futilely try to hide his presence, Ian elected for a different option, finding a bit of inspiration from the loop leviathan: He hid himself within a massive cocoon of undulating Death. And within that defensive, bone-reinforced energy cocoon, he began to manufacture bone constructs. Every few seconds, new waves of resurrected animal skeletons bounded forth, their fleshless paws stepping swiftly over the ruined, lifeless ground. Each had a single low-grade soul gem for an eye, socketed unnaturally, perhaps in the nasal cavity, perhaps within the ribs. Anywhere would do. With it, they could go long-past Ian’s range to both scout and attack.

This was important, as Ian kept his cocoon in constant motion, following the jungle’s vitality with depthless hunger. Everywhere Ian rode the cocoon, the trees withered, while terrified animals fled out and away, seeking shelter. The bone constructs ventured in every direction, scattering further and further.

When Ian was completely serious, he disregarded gestures; they were mere showmanship, perhaps at worst visual and physical crutches. Within his cocoon, he was utterly and completely still, the energy around him just barely tugging at his clothes and hair. He was like the calm eye at the center of a maelstrom.

When Ian felt the thrumming energy reach a critical point of mass, he let it rupture outward, like countless sacs of eggs releasing their young. Except in this case, what came forth were horrible, screaming spirits, not human, not animal, not anything. Which was exactly right: they weren’t real spirits. But they were unnerving, like the stuff of nightmares.

Each pseudo-spirit was a mass of energy with a gaping maw that concealed two grinding bones. If one bone was reinforced with energy to be particularly smooth, while a jagged bone sawed into it, the resulting sound was atrocious. The spirits also had two sets of wicked claws they could use to swipe and rend. At their centers were tiny, weak soul gems, required only so that Ian didn’t need to manually control their movements.

Ian didn’t consider himself creative enough to think up the illusion-like display; instead, he drew his inspiration from the cruise ship’s captives. Their desperate screams, their stilted movements, all of it was recreated, as though the pseudo-spirits weren’t invented constructs, but the materialized souls of the tortured dead.

Despite his preparations, Ian still found himself battered after a surprise first shot from Mo’qin. The Guardian’s fiery lance of hot, white light ripped through his cocoon like a knife through paper, leaving angry gashes and tears on its way out. The damage repaired itself in an instant, and Ian rushed in the direction of the attack.

Another blast soon came again, this one from a different angle, almost shearing off an entire corner of Ian’s undulating sphere. Ian felt several of his skeletons nearby begin to melt and crack, their bones charring. But Ian pushed through, and in seconds, he soon felt the vitality of his adversaries.

At that point, it was over. He smiled grimly as they froze, their bodies beyond their control. He noticed that one of them, the only decemancer among the Guard, used his dual-Life-Death affinity to resist. The man went for Mo’qin and began to pump him full of vitality, trying to stave off Ian’s enervating grasp. Ian realized that the Life-Death practitioner would succeed if given another second, so Ian promptly knocked him out by ramming the man’s head against a tree.

With a contemptuous snort, Ian drew the group into his cocoon, leaving the screeching pseudo-spirits to surround them. As the chill of Death energy began to suffuse through the guardians, they became enervated and despondent; soon enough, Ian required almost no effort to keep them in place.

The next group to attack was led by Urstes. Ian felt the ground swallow up around him, like a giant, gaping maw. Frowning at the speed of the surging earthen jaws, Ian drove the cocoon to the side. He nimbly reshaped its spherical form into a stretching, sinuous serpent, keeping his captives arrayed around him like a shield. On the reduced surface area of the serpent, the pseudo-spirits packed even closer together.

Ian knew that Urstes and his group had to be close by, even if they were just beyond his range of perception. Many of his nearby skeletal minions were being destroyed, giving him no good indication of where the enemy was waiting. Rather, they just confirmed what he already knew: He was surrounded.

But if he remembered correctly, there should only be three more ranged damage-dealers. Unless the others had a method to approach without falling to his screeching, clawed spirits–a fact he highly doubted–then the only threat remaining were those three.

Suddenly, he felt his head begin to ache. He closed his eyes as a jolt of pain pierced through his skull, hot, like what he expected Mo’qin’s laser to feel like if it kissed his skin. His entire world began to feel like it was burning, like everything was awash in an agonizing light. Like the end of the world had come, the sun exploding and taking everyone with it.

Ian felt with distinct clarity how his teeth began to crystallize and shatter, how his bones began to carbonize beneath his papery skin. At this point, he was beyond pain; in fact, he didn’t seem to feel anything at all.

He felt lost.

Ian bellowed, but nothing came from his mouth, his tongue and vocal chords long since destroyed. He couldn’t move. He was formless, yet aware. He was alone in the void, and he could sense none around him.

It was so cold that even the familiar warmth of Death was beyond him.

But in that infinite, resolute darkness, he thought he could maybe see the faintest of far-off lights, perhaps the light of an almost-dead star, its dust just starting to settle. As he fixated on that light, he found that it was really an impossibly long thread of gold, like someone had taken a golden bar and stretched it across the entire universe. The glow from that gold was so resplendent that it shone for an unthinkable distance. It raced faster and faster, the glow soon coming to fill the entire sky.

As the light finally came close enough, he noticed that it wasn’t light at all, but a series of golden arrows packed so tightly as to be a wall of teeth. One of the arrows pierced him through, scattering whatever vestiges of him remained into the void like smoke.

Ian returned to the serpent-form cocoon, his breathing slightly ragged, his pulse racing.

How formidable, he thought. She must be at least 90% Remorse affinity. Clarabella Nixia was a practitioner worth respecting: She had fully incapacitated him for a minute, at least. Thankfully, so long as he remained within the refuge of his cocoon, his constructs could autonomously continue on without active direction.

Nixia had timed her strike carefully, attacking just as he shifted the cocoon from a sphere into a long, less-defensively-oriented snake. The maw of Earth had actually managed to swallow him, Ian gathered, noting the long, gaping holes bored into the ground. He wondered if Nixia and Urstes had thought, at that point, that they’d won.

Ian could guess what happened next. The reinforced bones undergirding the Death serpent had protected Ian–and his captives–from being crushed. Then, the hunger of the serpent had propelled it toward the surface. Ian wasn’t sure how it had excavated its way free, but after emerging, it had rampaged, tearing up the ground, absorbing energy, and harassing the remaining Guard.

In the minute following his awakening, Ian was able to incapacitate Nixia. She tried to encompass him in an illusion again, but this time, he kept the scene of the arrows in his mind. The resplendent, captivating image caused her illusion to quickly melt away. While Nixia was changing her position, likely expecting him to be incapacitated for a while longer, he nabbed her, locking her bones and muscles and depositing her with the other captured guardsmen.

It took him another fifteen minutes to wear down the rest. Particularly annoying were Urstes, a wind elementalist, and a water elementalist who seemed to anticipate his every move, likely a Beginning or Regret practitioner. Only after cornering her between numerous skeletal monstrosities and the nimble serpent-form Death cocoon did she finally join the others.

Having achieved victory, Ian began condensing down the Death energy around him, simultaneously forming it into chains of inter-linked soul gems around his belt and a thick energy mantle that stretched several yards behind him, bearing the semblance of a long wedding veil or an emperor’s coronation cape. As soon as he had the time, he planned to convert the energy into soul gems; until then, he would carry it behind him.

As he retracted the energy, his mind wandered to how it felt to be struck by the golden arrows, instantly vanishing into cosmic smoke. In some ways, that had been the most interesting development of all.

To onlookers, the fifteen members of the Guard suddenly appeared in the depleted, yellowed jungle, no longer hidden by the oily blackness of the bone-strewn cocoon. As one, they appeared fatigued, but also dissatisfied.

Ian wondered if they were the type to be sore losers.