They'd had some time to rest within the Mundhin school, so his soulhome had refilled with cantae, but that didn't mean Theo felt better. His skin was still scoured thin by the wind, his chest hurt where he'd been kicked, and his mind insisted he should lie down and sleep. Yet there was no choice but to rush to the end, because they had no idea how far ahead of them Magnafor was.

Nauda led them wordlessly to one of the special gondolas that took them directly into Myufuru Landguard Village. There was a Farmguard on duty, but she smiled her way past him, then they were off. Theo took the final moment to stay off his feet and ensure that his soulhome was filled with cantae, while he saw Nauda twisting her hands around her staff and Fiyu peering over the edge.

There had been a slight hope that they'd gotten far ahead of Magnafor and that all their haste had been unnecessary... but as Theo looked down, he let that possibility slip away. Demons crawled throughout the village and he saw only a few students in desperate fighting retreats. He didn't see any second stage demons and they hadn't yet spilled over into the city at large, but it was obvious that normalcy had been broken.

"It looks like the Farmguards are keeping the demons in," Fiyu said as they reached the wall. Theo looked back down and saw that she was right: they'd formed a perimeter at the main gate. A group of guards and students fought together to keep the demons from entering the main city, and they seemed to be holding their own.

"Is that him, by the tree?" Nauda leaned over the side of the gondola to get a better look. Theo had been looking at the tree itself, trying to determine if the barrier had already been breached or was only approaching failing, but lowered his gaze. A small group of soulcrafters gathered near the base.

"I don't see Magnafor, but I think I recognize some of them. It might b-" Theo cut off as their gondola lurched violently.

Fiyu realized it before he did, launching a burst of light into the sky. It illuminated part of a dark carapace as a demonic dragonfly swept toward them. Instead of targeting any of them, it ducked underneath another burst and sliced through the second rope holding the gondola up.

Even though Theo threw an inverse gravitational field over all of them as quickly as possible, he wasn't fast enough to stop them from falling. He desperately tried to apply two inverse fields at once to reverse their direction, but couldn't do anything more than slow their descent before they crashed down atop one of the houses surrounding the main courtyard.

Fortunately, they'd all soulcrafted defensive rooms, so the hard landing didn't break anything except the roof. The gondola had smashed below with great speed, breaking open one of the houses and crushing a lesser demon before it rolled to a halt.

Demons crawled all over the courtyard, swarming toward the entrance, but Theo ignored them. Either the Farmguards would stop them, or they wouldn't, but either way he couldn't get distracted. Magnafor was already near the tree, and if he'd been prepared for every other step in the process, he definitely had a way inside.

"Can you bind all the demons while we run through?" Nauda asked. One demon crawled up onto the roof beside them, but Fiyu eradicated it a moment later.

"I don't have any way of exempting you from the field," Theo said. "But I suppose I could make us all weightless and we could jump to the tree?"

"No." Fiyu pointed skyward and he saw another dragonfly flicker at the edge of his vision. "They will attack anything that goes too high."

"Then I'll just temporarily flatten everything ahead of us. Save your strength as much as possible, because Magnafor seems to have mercenaries and other allies."

They didn't have more time to plan, so that would have to be good enough. Theo jumped off the roof first, clearing as many of the demons in the courtyard as he could. As they raced up the first staircase, he extended a gravitational field ahead of them.

Fortunately, first stage demons were no more immune to gravity than anyone else. Some of them fell to the ground, pinned, but he was surprised how many struggled to rise. He held off on applying a second field because he needed to conserve his strength too, but the demons scrambling to their feet behind them made him nervous.

Without warning, a beastly demon burst from underneath the body of one of the others, lunging for him. Theo desperately started to switch his fields to bring it down, only for it to freeze in midair. Nauda held it fast, then Fiyu shredded it a moment later. They nodded to him and the group rushed on.

Working together, they easily cut through the dwindling demons and leapt up the next set of stairs. Theo barely noticed when they snapped through a thin barrier, one apparently designed to dissuade the demons. That was nothing compared to the barrier past the courtyard above, the flow of its power beginning to tremble more violently.

But first, Trathis stood in their path, blocking the way up the final stair. Their former teammate was carrying a new sword, and as soon as he saw them, he grasped the hilt. "So you decided to show up after all. If you think I'm letting you get in the way of-"

Nauda's binding hit him in the stomach, lifting him into the air with his sword partially drawn. Theo didn't bother to slow down, just marched past him - Trathis was nothing but a distraction. As they passed, Fiyu leaned closer to his face.

"You are an inept sex merchant," Fiyu said, then continued on with a pleased smile on her face. Theo glanced at Nauda, but she just tossed Trathis into the demons behind them and shrugged.

"Well, she's trying."

He smiled, but his amusement died as soon as they reached the top of the stairs.

There were eight soulcrafters standing in their path, mostly Fithan mercenaries, and that wasn't the worst of it. Magnafor knelt down just beside the final barrier, working at one of the stakes... and Kuber stood beside him. That was enough to make all of them pause, everything briefly growing quiet enough to hear the sounds of the battle against the demons behind them.

"That's inconvenient." Magnafor glanced over his shoulder and sighed. "You're too late to stop me, if that's what you're trying to do. But if you're willing not to make trouble, then I can cut you in on the sublime materials."

"No thanks." There wasn't really anything else to say, since he didn't trust Magnafor and wanted them all for himself, if he was going to take such a drastic step.

"Kuber, what are you doing?" Nauda asked. She took a step forward and all the mercenaries immediately tensed, but she held her staff loosely at her side. "You were fighting alongside your family this very morning, why would you turn against us?"

"He gave me the answers no one else would." Kuber gripped his armament tighter, his eyes shifting away nervously. "And if there's really so much inside, I... I won't need this family anymore. I'll be able to reach Archcrafter and beyond without any of you."

"And you really believe that he won't just abandon you as soon as he has what he wants?"

That made both Kuber and the mercenaries nervous, but before they could press the point, Magnafor stood up and turned back to them. "You know the flying crane can carry all of you, so if you just defeat them like you're supposed to, it will be easy to take you with me before the Landguards arrive."

And as he finished speaking, the full barrier came down. Theo's eyes widened as he understood: it hadn't been smashed through, but manipulated to enter a repair cycle. That was a trick he'd never learned, and he couldn't guess how it had been done... but most likely it wouldn't stay down for long. Magnafor didn't wait for any responses, just stepped over the line and began to ascend the tree toward the vault.

"Stop them!" Kuber cried out. The mercenaries charged, but there was no more time to play games.

Theo brought double fields down on them, sending them stumbling in triple normal gravity. Just as they'd begun to recover, he reversed it, negative gravity sending them into the air. This was the trick that had made gaining two fields so essential: the mercenaries fell directly upwards, accelerating all the while until they left his effective range.

When they reached the apex of their flight, he reversed both fields, sending them downward at triple normal gravity. Even several seconds of that acceleration drove them into the ground at such speeds that he was surprised they didn't splatter. Many exhausted their cantae surviving the impact, and even those with heavy defenses were stunned.

They didn't get a chance to recover, because Fiyu and Nauda struck without hesitation, Nauda binding them together and Fiyu flooding all of them with bolts. In a handful of seconds, the mercenaries' soulhomes had been devastated.

Unfortunately, there was one person standing in their way who was able to resist the technique: Kuber only grimaced slightly at all of the gravitational fields, his body now surrounded by a soft orange glow. There wasn't going to be any easy way to take him down, not with that Archcrafter armament. Theo stepped forward, intending to ignore him and go after Magnafor, only to throw himself backward the next moment.

The garnet blast carved a furrow through part of the courtyard, leaving a line of burning air where he'd been standing. When Theo started forward again, Kuber swept the rod in an arc, creating a widespread shockwave that pushed them all back. If Theo had been a few steps closer, he might have been blown to pieces just like Navim had.

If there was any way to fight Kuber, it would be exhausting his cantae, but they didn't have time for that. Not with Magnafor having nearly disappeared in the massive tree, and more importantly, not with the barrier about to return at any time. To stop him, Theo needed to get inside the barrier immediately.

Since Kuber wasn't wasting his strength unnecessarily, they had a moment to rest. Theo glanced back to the others and saw the same thoughts in their eyes. "Fiyu, I need you to distract him. Nauda, I'm going to jump... I need you to make sure I don't die in midair."

With that, they attacked, Fiyu beginning by raising both hands and flooding the courtyard with bolts of light. They scattered harmlessly against the orange sphere that lit up around Kuber, and he raised his armament to release another devastating bolt. Fiyu threw herself out of the way just in time, and Theo chose that moment to reverse his own gravity and jump toward the tree.

As soon as he was in the air, he was helpless, and he saw Kuber immediately target him. The beam of destruction would come at any moment...

Force binding him came first, striking his back and freezing his entire body in place. As Nauda redirected him, Theo was suddenly flung in a completely different direction, dodging the beam of destruction. The force released him on the stairs well above the barrier. It had worked better than he'd hoped, and with Fiyu raining more destruction, Kuber was too distracted to target him again.

Yet, instead of going after Magnafor as he'd planned, Theo found himself hesitating and looking back. If the barrier came back up while he was inside, he could stop Magnafor, yes, but he probably wouldn't be able to get back out. And as he saw Nauda and Fiyu struggle against Kuber, he didn't like what that would mean.

Just when it seemed like Fiyu had him pinned down, Kuber released another widespread shockwave, and the edge of this one struck her. She let out a pained cry and tumbled back across the ruined arena. Worse, Kuber was aiming directly at her for a finishing shot. Theo threw out a hand, trying to pin him down, but from the distance he couldn't establish the gravitational field firmly enough.

Nauda thrust out and her staff's force seized Kuber's hand at the last second, pushing it just to the side. His beam shot out into the village instead, demolishing one of the houses... but he grimaced and began forcing his hand back toward Nauda.

Her eyes widened and she struggled against him, but then his armament flared brighter. She tried to disengage, a moment too late to escape the rush of cantae flooding back at her. Nauda slammed her staff down on the ground, barely defending herself.

Theo saw her staff rupture in half and found himself running back down the stairs.

The breaking of her staff sent Nauda sliding back, and Kuber began to aim at her, but a fierce assault of bolts slammed into him from the side. Fiyu was barely on her knees, targeting him with both hands, failing to penetrate the aura around his body but making him stagger.

Before she could get through, the spherical barrier lit up again and the bolts began dissipating harmlessly. Worse, Kuber was turning to target her, and it looked as though Fiyu might have twisted her ankle in the previous fall.

With few other options, Theo cast a reverse field around Kuber... not aiming for him, but instead affecting all of the fragments of stone around him that had been created as the courtyard broke apart. They shot into the air, accelerating with reversed gravity, and Kuber turned back to look at him.

"You already know that can't touch me. Why are y-" Then normal gravity took over and the rubble slammed down all around him.

Though some of the fragments burned away against his shield, most of them slammed down into the courtyard, shaking his footing. Kuber actually staggered and fell to one knee, but the barrier around him remained steady. Still, it was the most weakness he'd shown yet.

Behind him, Theo heard the barrier thrum back to life. The last he'd seen of Magnafor was him disappearing into the upper boughs near the vault... but he'd made his choice.

He saw that Fiyu had retreated to a safe distance and Nauda had retrieved the top of her staff, neither of them willing to surrender. They needed an opening, and he intended to give it to them.

Theo created two reversed fields underneath Kuber's feet, targeting the shattered courtyard instead of him. A large chunk of the stone broke and began to rise into the air, nearly making Kuber lose his balance. That actually might have been the smarter move, getting back to the ground, but instead he merely swung around, sending another beam at Theo.

Having expected it, Theo leapt aside without even making his fields flicker for a moment. He'd planned to send Kuber straight into the stratosphere, but the orange sphere crackled to life around him and it was growing. As it encompassed the rock beneath Kuber, the gravitational fields faltered.

Fiyu released her largest burst of light yet, bolts hammering into the side of his sphere until it began to buckle. In the instant it did, Nauda thrust out the broken head of her staff and force finally caught Kuber. Not the arm controlling his armament, but his torso, slamming him down into the ground several times. The glow around him held, but Kuber looked severely disoriented, and when Nauda lifted him back into the air, Fiyu began striking him with more bolts.

"You... you won't..." Kuber clutched his armament tighter and the glow deepened to the red-orange of sunset, making Nauda cry out and slump to her knees. She kept her staff raised, but the exertion was clearly overwhelming her.

Slowly but surely, Kuber began to twist around to aim his armament at Theo again. Too exhausted to dodge, Theo brought two fields down on top of him, but even triple gravity only seemed to slow him a little more. Blood covered Kuber's chin and dripped from his nose, but the armament in his hand seemed to move with its own force, inexorably shifting to aim at him...

Theo targeted the rod itself and reversed both of his fields.

The Archcrafter armament, which had dominated the fight up to that point, fell upwards out of Kuber's hand. He stared at it in shock, and that was long enough for it to shoot skyward. Though Fiyu raised a hand to target him, it wasn't necessary: without the support of such a powerful armament, Kuber collapsed instantly.

So it was over, yet not over at all. Theo began to limp down the stairs, dozens of aches and pains emerging as the adrenaline wore off. He let the armament crash back down to the courtyard once he got close, then kicked it to a safe distance, just in case Kuber had anything left in him. But he appeared to be unconscious, and a glance at his soulhome showed that the great dome and foundation had broken in half.

"What..." Nauda had to pause to catch her breath, slowly working her way to a standing position. "What now? How do we... get through that barrier?"

"We don't." Theo sat down on a piece of rubble and ran his hands through his hair wearily. "I can't copy the trick he used to get in, so none of us can get through. He's probably already reached the vault, and this 'crane' vessel of his must be able to fly out, or his plan doesn't make any sense."

"You knew that." Fiyu shuffled closer, staring at him so intensely that he could feel her gaze even through the mask. "You walked back out to help us fight, knowing that you couldn't catch up."

"Yeah." It should have been a warmer moment, but he was just exhausted. Nauda came to sit down beside him, staring upward toward the silent boughs where the vault lay.

"Are we going to regret this?"

"I don't know." Theo looked up too, wondering what was contained within. Doing all this, he'd probably made an enemy. Magnafor might not be able to fight them now, but he had access to a huge store of sublime materials that could comfortably take him to the Authority tier. If he came for revenge, that might be an impossible threat.

As they watched, reality folded on itself and the tree was consumed by nothingness.

Theo's mind refused to believe what he was seeing at first, as the world itself warped into a tight knot. A rush of liminal power swept past him, but this was nothing like walking through a door into another world. This was the power of the worlds themselves, twisted into a weapon.

The vortex snapped out of existence a moment later, leaving only jagged remnants of the massive tree trunk. No sound, no fires, no remaining destruction. Yet he felt an overwhelming sense of horror and the certainty that nothing could possible have survived that. Power was simply irrelevant if space itself no longer existed.

He only realized he was holding his breath when Nauda let out hers. "Was... was that how Magnafor planned to escape?"

"Impossible." Theo had seen many things, but not that. "No armament can do that, and his power just wouldn't have been capable of it. Could it have been something the Landguards stored in the vault?"

"I... don't think so."

They were silent for a while longer before Fiyu spoke the obvious truth. "It was a trap."

And though he couldn't know the truth for sure, Theo had a feeling that it wasn't a trap set for the Landguards. No one in a backwater like Myufuru could overpower the barrier, so only someone with deep knowledge of barriers could have entered. Someone who had traveled the Nine Worlds before.

Someone like him. If he had made slightly different decisions, or even just been faster than Magnafor, he would have been in the vault when it ceased to exist. Theo took a deep, shuddering breath as he realized that for forty years on Earth, he had been much less paranoid than he should have been.

Whoever stood against him, Vistgil or the demons or someone else, they weren't merely fumbling blindly. If this was really a trap, it had been laid before he even returned. Just how far did their schemes spread? What could be worth this much effort?

A green comet struck the stairs not far from them, but they were too exhausted to care. Nanjuma rose from a crouch, his eyes locked on the remnants of the tree. Though he cradled one arm that was severely burned, that didn't seem to compare to the pain in his eyes as he stared at the space where the tree should have been.

"No..." Nanjuma dropped to his knees and wiped his eyes before suddenly turning, his gaze touching the fallen mercenaries only briefly before it fixed on them. "Who are all these people? Was anyone in there?"

Too tired to answer, Theo glanced toward Nauda. "Magnafor wanted to steal everything from the vault," she said. "He convinced many of the students to cooperate with him. Kuber, Trathis, these mercenaries... they should be alive, but they need to be bound so we can decide what is to be done."

"Students turning against one another... our family cannot heal from this..."

Nanjuma looked more troubled about the loss of community than the demons, though as Theo looked back, he realized that he was wrong. Green flames were dying out over the rest of the village and he didn't see a single living demon, so Nanjuma must have annihilated all of them on his way in.

There were dozens of further questions, but as Theo looked around, he realized that there was darkness growing at the edges of his vision. The core in his soulhome seemed to be rotating unsteadily... when he tried to examine it, he collapsed into darkness.