Zu Mari stood for a long moment after the goddess Serena left him, staring sightlessly at the ground beneath his feet. He felt breathless with longing at her sudden absence. His surroundings changed, the weird nothing-mist fading away to reveal something green and grey, but he hardly noticed. He did not know how long he stood, overwhelmed with grief at her leaving.

But ultimately he did remember that he had a task to accomplish. She needed him to end the war and save her. That thought brought him out of his trance and he at last beheld the strange new land in which he stood. Flowering hills spread out before him, a promise of peace and plenty.

A promise that was broken as soon as he raised his head.

Beyond the fields glowered clouds of smoke, dark and heavy, flowing outward toward the distant gleaming sun. Even as he watched, the smoke engulfed the last rays of light and left the world in grim twilit darkness. Zu turned to see where the smoke came from.

A vast and sprawling city.

Or what had once been a city. Now it was instead a scene of utter devastation. Destruction beyond anything he could have imagined. Fire and death and chaos.

He could tell that the city had been beautiful once, that it had housed many tens of thousands. He saw toppled spires of gleaming gold and crystal, shattered statues of unsurpassed skill. And the broken bodies of hundreds of people. Some wore armor or bore weapons, but most were in the common garb of workers.

Nowhere did he see the robes of cultivators.

Nor did he see any signs of life.

“HELP!” someone screamed, the sound piercing through the crackle of flame and the roar of the wind that drove the smoke relentlessly onward. Though the voice was cracked and hoarse, Zu heard echoes of the goddess Serena in its tones. At once he understood. Her spirit had come to him and brought him to this world so he could save her from whatever danger threatened here.

“I am coming! Fear not, Serena! I will save you!”

Zu sprinted toward the city and its pleading captive, darting through lifeless streets muddied with the blood of the deceased.

“Help, someone, please!” shouted Serena again, her voice rough and weak.

Zu adjusted his course to run toward the source of the sound.

He came around a corner and saw the scene before him. Two women in flowing green robes, a dark olive hue like dying vegetation seen at night, dragged a chain of battered and bloodied captives between them. The one in the lead tugged on the chain as she strode through the ruined streets, while the one at the rear shoved those nearest along with her spear.

Zu counted seventeen prisoners, most of whom appeared to also be women. He did not recognize Serena among them, but knew she must be here. Or… perhaps he was mistaken, seeing traces of the goddess where there were none. The voice, he now realized, had in no way resembled Serena’s, apart from being female.

Either way, there were people here who needed help. Serena’s people, if not Serena herself.

He reached for Heart of Fire and Spirit of Twilight Death, only to find that while he had been transported to whatever strange realm this was… his weapon and his familiars had not. He wore a simple tunic and no overrobe, tied with a twined rope instead of his dimensional storage belt.

When Serena had transported him from his forest hideaway to her world, she’d forgotten to bring his possessions along with him.

“Serena,” Zu whispered, ducking out of sight behind a half-destroyed bakery. “If you have any power, can you send me my things?”

There was no answer. No voice, no sudden appearance of Death Shadow, or Heart of Fire and Spirit of Twilight Death, or even Little Otter.

Zu felt within himself and found them still connected to his spirit, but the sense that usually gave him a direction for where they could be found pointed nowhere. Wherever he was, it was impossibly far removed from the world of his birth. Four intimate connections leading nowhere.

“I don’t suppose you’ll speak to me now?” Zu asked his inner phoenix, the only one of his companions to remain with him since it had no physical body to be left behind.

The phoenix did not respond, humming with heat and compressed power waiting to be unleashed, but otherwise inert.

It seemed when the goddess said she needed only Zu, she truly meant only Zu.

Well. It would be a chance to prove to the cosmos that he was more than someone with a collection of powerful items and subordinates. Zu didn’t need all the trappings of power and success to be unstoppable. He could do this on his own. Serena knew it, and so did he.

Zu peered out at the two robed women and their chain of captives.

A third person had joined them, a man in an equally ugly green robe, dragging a child by one leg. He tossed the bedraggled girl toward the end of the line, and the rear robed woman added her to the chain. The girl whimpered pitifully, receiving a sharp smack in retaliation.

Zu reflexively reached for his pocket to activate a time bubble around them. It would take time to convince them to trust him and let him know what was going on safely. But his pocket was empty. As much as he missed his sword and familiars, Zu was as much a weapon in himself and he rarely employed Death Shadow for more than scouting or disruptive attacks. But the loss of the loop cube felt far more intimate and devastating. Without it, one mistake could be dire.

He needed a weapon, at the very least. Fortunately, he was in a war-torn city. Once he stopped viewing the corpses of its defenders and attackers alike as obstacles to be stepped around, he noticed that many of them still had perfectly functional weapons.

Zu moved back out of sight from the captives and their collectors, searching through the carnage in the next street over for the best weapon. None of them were enchanted, at least not with any power he could sense, and they had an unfamiliar design and weight to them. He drew one from a relatively unbloodied sheath, its owner having died without a chance to use it. He gave it a few swings, found it passable, and unbuckled its sheath from its dead owner.

Before he could strap it around his own waist, something slammed into him from behind and sent him flying. He landed on the pile of bodies, an ache spreading across his back from the impact, but at least he could tell he wasn’t bleeding. But as Zu tried to stand and face his new foe he felt disoriented on a deeper level. His inner strength wasn’t absent, exactly, but felt distant as though a curtain had been drawn across it. Echoes of an unfamiliar power rang through him in pulses and tremors.

Zu staggered upright. Before he could more than glimpse the dark olive robes of his attacker, another impact threw him back to the ground. The aftereffects were stronger this time. He felt dizzy and his vision blurred, even his phoenix feeling distant and frail, more like a memory of a flame than a flame itself.

Echoes, resonance.

He waited this time, let his attacker get close before he jumped up and slammed a fist into the man’s face. The attacker staggered under the blow, but reacted fast. Zu was already flowing into the momentum of his attack, bringing his knee up to slam into the man as he punched out a second time.

The robed man opened his mouth and a wave of force slammed Zu to the ground faster than he could blink. One moment he’d been about to strike, the next he lay flat on his back, stunned by the incredible force of the attack.

“Stay down,” the man snapped in a harsh accent Zu didn’t recognize. “You have too much potential to let you throw it away fighting against the inevitable.”

Well… that was one way to get close to them. Zu forcibly relaxed, slumping in exaggerated defeat, and allowed the man to drag him to the prisoner chain. It wouldn’t hurt anything to play along for a while.

And this way, he’d have plenty of time to let his Protagonist Fragment work on his captors.