“Skai’aren,” Lanhui called out, grunting as he pushed through the undergrowth. “Found you.”

Ian turned to face the guardian, his face devoid of emotion. “Lanah’we.”

Lanhui snorted and joined Ian in sitting on a capsized log. From their vantage point, the ocean peeked out through a copse of trees, cyan and scintillating in the harsh light of the sun.

“We’re alone; just call me Voren,” the guardian grumbled.

Ian’s mouth curled into a frown. “Same to you, then: Call me Ian.” He hadn’t expected Lanhui to come and find him, though he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised given the guardian’s Beginning affinity: He’d probably found it easy to track his path through the jungle.

Lanhui sighed. “The general’s been waiting for you to return.”

Obviously. Ian picked at a piece of tree bark. “Does she need me to terrorize more citizens?”

Ian realized he was probably coming off as confrontational, but he was emotionally exhausted: He didn’t want to deal with Lanhui, the general, or Ko’la for at least a few more hours. While everyone else was just as exhausted from traveling into Godora, seizing the glosSword plant, and storming Zukal’iss...none of them bore the mental burden of forcing Coronus Byrrh to surrender.

Not to mention that none of them took a shot to the heart, Ian thought dryly. As far as he could tell, he’d managed to successfully coax the cardiovascular tissues to grow and repair the damage, but a savage, circular scar on his left pectoral remained as a reminder of what had almost been.

If I wasn’t here, Godora wouldn’t have fallen, not so quickly. Goroda had declined in the time of peace, its best warriors growing old, the next generations unable to rise to the level of their forefathers without the spectre of war over their heads. Even so...the coronuses were still alive and powerful, and Godora’s infrastructure and technology trailblazed the West’s way forward. The development of the glosSword in particular pushed beyond even the innovation of Selejo, threatening the technological dominance of the East.

Ian figured that the only other western innovation on the same level was the Infinity Loop.

Lanhui narrowed his eyes, his lips thinning. “You ran off.”

“I finished all my tasks,” Ian retorted. “I asked the general to give me a list of things to do, then completed all of them. What’s the problem?”

The guardian sighed and grumbled something under his breath. “You finished the entire list of tasks in an hour,” he protested.

“Am I being punished for efficiency?”

“Ian...” Lanhui murmured, trailing off.

“I created the Deathseed as the general asked, then locked the few bodies of those unwilling to surrender so that they could be chained. I’ll repeat my question: Is there a problem?”

“We’ll see if you can assuage the general of the following concerns. If someone were to attack Corvid, she presumes that you’d be too far away to respond immediately. The most you’d get is possibly a one-minute warning if the Crowned Prime is actively monitoring Corvid from afar; else, you’d have scarcely a half-minute’s warning from Wolfien.”

Ian held out his hand, a length of bones spilling out from his sleeve to coil around it. “I don’t have access to the node in Zukal’iss, but I do have control over the Deathseed in Corvid.” When the thin, snake-like construct distended its mouth, a small, white, square slate fell into Ian’s hand. Across its surface flickered inscriptions, so small as to be barely visible.

“It’s simple, but effective,” Ian explained. “You’re all lucky I started experimenting with remote construct control before the Fassari Summit.”

“What does it do, exactly?” Lanhui asked. “How can you control the construct with that plain piece of gloss?”

“The one in Zukal’iss is significantly more complex; for this one, you send commands by touch.” Ian rubbed the slate’s surface. “It’s simple. If Corvid came under attack, I could activate the Deathseed’s engagement mode.”

“...And how would that prevent friendly fire?”

Ian frowned. “It wouldn’t. The Deathseed is a scavenger; the real worry is its constructs. By setting the Deathseed to engage, its child constructs would attack any practitioners in the area.”

Seeing that Lanhui was growing increasingly confused by his explanation, Ian groaned and tried to frame it in a different context.

“The point isn’t to fight alongside the constructs, but to send them out to replace sending people. If we deploy a self-replicating force that acts autonomously, we’ll be able to station our real forces more effectively.” They’d considered giving their own soldiers some kind of item that would prevent friendly fire, but they’d abandoned the idea. Even if they made said item tied to the user’s vitality, and even if they instructed it to explode upon the user’s death...Selejo and its allies would find a way to exploit the vulnerability.

“If that’s what the war council decided on, I’m not going to argue,” the man replied gruffly. “Look, we need to go back, or the general’s going to be pissed. Are you done here?”

Ian returned his gaze to the water. “...Fine.”

—

The two of them traveled back over the jungle, Ian giving them a lift on a bone wyrm; due to the wyrm’s speed, they returned to Corvid in only a few minutes. The sun was just starting to set, casting everything in a golden glow.

Ian disassembled the Wyrm when they reached the periphery of Corvid, choosing instead to walk the rest of the way to its center where they’d built up a barricade. I might’ve been called back, but I don’t need to return directly, Ian thought. According to Lanhui, the general wanted him to be close to respond if the city came under attack. Now that he was in the city, she wouldn’t have any cause for complaint.

Against expectations, the streets weren’t empty. Ian supposed people had errands to run and places to go. After all, for most regulars, war was something they had little say in. What would staying home accomplish? Outside the city’s center, there was little to remind the citizens of their occupation: The SPU had only arrived three-or-so hours ago. While the first of the SPU’s platoons had secured the city’s perimeter and taken charge of the practitioner captives, none of them were actively patrolling Corvid’s streets.

“Have you ever been here before?” Ian asked. He knew that the SPU had sent periodic diplomatic convoys to Godora, but wasn’t sure if the guardian would’ve been chosen to leave Zukal’iss.

“They don’t recognize us,” Lanhui murmured, ignoring Ian’s question.

“We’re not exactly in uniform,” Ian said, looking down at their black combat vestments.

Lanhui gave him an exasperated look. “It shouldn’t matter. You’re famous.”

“Maybe you’re overestimating how much regulars watch the Fassari Summit,” Ian snorted. “I sure didn’t.”

Lanhui exhaled and rolled his eyes. “They certainly know we’re practitioners.” He gestured with his hand toward the nearest group of passersby, their heads all lowered toward the street. They gave them a wide berth, the distance tinged somewhat with fear, but mostly the healthy respect regulars typically gave practitioner guards on patrol.

“Stop over-analyzing everything for threats,” Ian admonished. Lanhui had been trying to find inconsistencies everywhere. Ian could understand the paranoia–they were the occupying force in a foreign city–but he didn't think most of the guardian's specific concerns were warranted. “It's not odd that they don't recognize us. Wolfien will say if anything happens.”

Lanhui gave him a dark look, but didn’t offer a retort.

Ian gave the man a lopsided smile. “Since you never responded, I'm going to assume that you haven't been here before.”

“Once, almost a decade ago–before I joined the Guard.”

“What was it like then compared to now?”

The guardian shrugged. “Relatively unchanged. A few new buildings but nothing significant. Unlike Selejo, Godora isn’t dealing with a population problem.”

Phrased differently, Godora was the one with the problem, its younger population slowly declining. In contrast, Selejo’s youth were on the rise, her cities building both up and out to account for swelling numbers of people; a healthy dose of industrious immigrants helped to fuel the expansion.

The two of them continued forward until Ian paused before a shop that was selling precious stones for use as elementalist reagents.

Lanhui tugged at his arm. “You’re not an elementalist; let’s go.”

“This storefront reminds me of a place in Selejo,” Ian murmured. “You don’t see many shops selling natural reagent stones.”

“They’re mostly just shiny baubles,” the guardian asserted. “Those kinds of things are useless to anyone on our level.”

Ian shook his head slowly. “Remember Zilverna?”

Lanhui seemed to consider this. “He did utilize reagent stones to empower his attacks, didn’t he?”

“That’s what I thought. Though you’re right, most people don’t build up strategies around consumables.” And even if they did, they wouldn’t use natural stones, but uniform, mass-produced varieties.

Though Ian tried to prolong the inevitable, they eventually found their way back to the city’s center.

“Skai’aren, just in time,” Por’sha called out. “General Var’dun’a is requesting your presence in the new command hut. Lanhui, can you go and check in on the captives? Try and make sure they’re not doing anything untoward that others failed to notice.”

Ian stood up a bit straighter as he walked over to the command hut, a thick, rough-looking earthen rectangle. As he approached the hut’s exterior, part of the wall fell away. Ian walked through the door and found himself facing Var’dun’a, Wolfien, and a few soldiers that had come with the platoons sent in after the blitz team. The Deathseed had also been brought inside. In its inactive state, it sat on the ground like an upside-down bowl tightly wrapped in black twine.

The general’s face was expressionless as she took him in, assisted by the fact that the lower half of her face was wrapped in a scarf. “Skai’aren, a pleasure to have you return from scouting.”

She seems to be playing nice, Ian thought. Providing me a convenient “explanation.”

“I have nothing to report. Has anything happened?”

“Nothing of significant interest. There’s a new task for you, though: We’d like you to go with Wolfien and Arima to scout the land around Corvid for hidden enemies. Specifically, we suspect that Kyeilans have tried to enter the country underground to evade the forces we’ve set up on the border.”

“What do you think they’re planning to do?” Ian asked. “They wouldn’t come here unprepared.”

Var’dun’a’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “Kyeila knows we are expecting an attack. They’re probably planning to perpetrate some kind of attack that our Regret practitioners will not easily detect.”

“Like spreading poison?” Ian offered.

The general nodded. “That’s a possibility. I don’t think it’s likely to be a large group, which only contributes to the difficulty of tracking them down before they can do lasting damage.”

“And you think that being able to see vitality and fate arrows will be enough to track them down?”

“My thoughts are that if they do have a slow-moving weapon, you and Wolfien will be able to save yourselves from death and hopefully help Colonel Arima.”

Ian blinked. That’s not the worst assumption to make, Ian reasoned. But if the attack does work, I’ll be dead. That’s the worst case scenario for the SPU.

She doesn’t expect us to find anything, Ian realized. Rather, she’s probably trying to send us away to invite an attack. She’s expecting this conversation to be overheard, otherwise she’d be conveying this information through Por’sha. Ian glanced around the room. We must have sent some powerful people in the platoons that swept East. Now they’re here posing as normal soldiers.

Ian didn’t know if his intuition was right, but he recognized that there was something else at play than simply scouting for Kyeilans in the surrounding area. Ian did a small salute, nodding his head. “I’ll get to it at once.” He turned to face Wolfien, the man’s face screwed up in concentration. Scenario looping, Ian thought, immediately feeling sympathetic.

“Wolfien,” Ian said.

The guardian snapped to attention, his expression serious. “Arima is just outside.”

—

Ian, Wolfien, and Arima sat within the bone wyrm’s reinforced ribcage. The wyrm traced a serpentine path over the predominantly level ground, the cool air rushing through its bones a great relief to its passengers. Now that they were further inland, the heat was increasingly stifling. Traveling by exposed aeropoint erased much of the heat-fueled discomfort on the way in, but even as the sun began to fall, the temperature remained fairly constant.

I hope this doesn’t mean it’s going to be even hotter tomorrow. The SPU was at a similar latitude to Godora, but Zukal’iss sat at a slightly lower position than Corvid; additionally, something about the air coming off of the Bay of Ramsay coupled with the elevated, sheer shoreline helped to keep that stretch of the country a bit cooler.

“I see a few arrows up ahead,” Arima sighed. He glanced at Wolfien. “What happens when we approach them?”

The Life and Regret practitioner looked miserable as he rubbed his head, sweat beading down his temple. “They’re just our own soldiers,” he muttered.

Ian felt mildly useless as they wound around Godora, but stuck to the plan. Var’dun’a must know what she’s doing, else she wouldn’t be sending away her most powerful Regret practitioner and myself. As for Arima...he and the general were in the habit of communicating over quantum channel. He’d be able to inform them when Corvid’s situation changed.

“I spot some human-shaped vitality over there,” Ian said, pointing towards the right. “It’s a bit obscured.”

Wolfien froze. “Shit.”

“What?” Arima asked.

Wolfien shook his head, a sense of urgency fueling his movements. “It’s impossible for them not to have End arrows, and even I can’t see them with my vital vision from here. You said that they’re a bit obscured, Dunai?”

Ian chuckled. “A bit.” His eyes narrowed. “What does it mean for Arima to not notice them?” If the SPU had a way to hide End arrows, we’d have a leg up on the Eldemari.

Arima’s lips tightened. “It means they’re not really alive.”