Leon was furious beyond words. His anger burned within him like a star had ignited in his chest. His body had been hijacked by an ancient member of his Clan, his magic body had been completely immobilized, and Xaphan was down for the count. In this state, Leon couldn’t even sense Maia, let alone communicate with her. By any measure, Leon had been thoroughly defeated, and without a way to move again, there was no way for him to overcome this turn of events.

But that didn’t stop him from struggling. His body was slowly building back up its stores of magic power, filling his soul realm—for that much was still his, at least for the time being—with fuel for him to burn.

Leon flexed and pulled, pushed and relaxed, struggling and raging against the invisible chains that locked him in place. Aside from a bit of twitching, his magic body remained motionless, face-down in the dirt of his Mind Palace.

He wanted to scream, he wanted to leap up and tear Nestor from his throne and rip the older man limb from limb, and to retake his body. He had no idea what Nestor might be doing right now out in the physical world, but Leon had a sinking feeling that if he didn’t get moving again soon, then he might never recover what had been stolen.

His vocal cords stretched in a silent scream of fury, his jaw unable to move to let it out, and his struggles intensified. He dug deep within himself for every ounce of strength and willpower he possessed and pressed against this cage. His muscles strained, his body quivered, his bones almost bent to the point of breaking. All the pitiful motes of magic power in his soul realm flowed into his magic body, strengthening it further and keeping him intact as he tore at his shackles.

And still, his body remained there in the dirt.

Eventually, the effort became too much. His strength failed him. He couldn’t move.

Leon relaxed with a silent cry of frustration, anger, bitterness, and resentment. His rage and complete impotence had him on the verge of tears, for he had no other means with which to vent. He was quite thoroughly locked in place. He couldn’t even turn his head enough to glare at Nestor sitting on his throne, though for that he wasn’t sure if it were torture or small mercy.

He’d lost. That much was without question, now.

He lay there for long, agonizing minutes, stewing in that fact. He found himself rapidly alternating between bouts of energetic, righteous anger, and a more subdued melancholy, but not once was he able to surmount the obstacle that was the rune that Nestor had imprisoned him with.

As he lay there, inevitably, his thoughts turned to other things. Specifically, he found himself ruminating on everything that had happened since he’d returned to his home Vale. Just embarrassment after loss after embarrassment. His power had proven insufficient to effectively counter the wraiths, leaving him, Valeria, and Maia to an extent, drained of magic power after a single fight. The fight with the Gorgon had been even worse, they’d been nearly unable to land an injuring blow to her until after they’d been forced to run.

Now this. Now, his face was in the dirt, his power had failed him for the third time in two days. He’d lost before, he’d been forced to run away before, but this kind of string of losses was another thing entirely.

He wondered if maybe he’d grown a bit too arrogant, too sure of his power, too reliant upon it. Ever since he’d ascended to the seventh-tier, and even many times before then, his solution when faced with an obstacle he couldn’t surmount had been to simply try and overpower it. But that hadn’t been working since coming north, and all he’d gotten from his efforts had been humiliation and defeat.

Leon forced himself to relax. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been face-first on the ground, but it was more than enough time to hammer home that he wasn’t going to be able to force his way out of this. He’d tried brute force, and it hadn’t worked. It was time for a new approach.

He closed his eyes and began to think. Nestor was a master of golem-crafting, that much was obvious enough just from Leon’s previous encounters with what he’d left behind. More than that, though, he was also an expert in the use of runes, which Leon could’ve guessed from the golem-craft alone, but what Nestor had displayed blew away any expectations Leon thought he would’ve had if he’d ever expected to meet the man in the first place.

It was an admirable thing, in Leon’s eyes, to be so proficient in the use of runes, and the gulf of ability between him and Nestor was so large that he had no problem at all admitting that Nestor completely blew him out of the water in this regard. As if to undersell the magnitude of their difference in ability, Leon had no earthly idea how to free himself, and the more he thought, the less hope he had for an answer. No enchantments he knew would help, even if he were able to draw them somehow. He wasn’t knowledgeable in the ancient runes, his studies having never progressed beyond a few cursory glances at some of the books Artorias had brought to the Vale years ago.

Leon sighed again as he lay there, his rage cooling to a light simmer. There had been a vague hope in the back of his mind as he’d gotten worked up that the Great Black Dragon’s power might awaken within him again and give him the boost he needed to escape, but it seemed that he’d hoped in vain. It seemed all he could do now was to wait for the Thunderbird to eventually reappear, whenever the whim struck her.

But that in itself was risky, for he remembered the Thunderbird even telling him outright that the only reason she’d taken such an active role in his life was that he was the last of his bloodline. Now, there was another, and Nestor had proven himself stronger. Leon feared what the Thunderbird might do, who she might side with, if she were to arrive while he was still immobilized and helpless. But he couldn’t do anything about it.

His mind began to wander again, his will to resist slowly being sapped by his complete powerlessness to do anything of value. He found himself wondering how Elise’s negotiations with Torfinn were going, and how well Anzu was doing in his absence. He thought about the Bull Kingdom and everyone he knew back there, and if everything had been settled or not. He truly hoped that Octavius had been laid upon the headsman’s block by now, and he hoped that all of his acquaintances were doing well.

He thought about Marcus and Alcander and wondered how they were doing in the new order. They’d fought at his side for long enough that he was more concerned than he’d ever thought he’d be for them. He also thought about Gaius.

‘Whenever I get control of my body, I’m going to have to challenge him to keeps again!’ Leon thought with far more energy than he was able to muster in his body, almost as if he were trying to psyche himself up to do something again. ‘Our record can’t stand on a single draw!’

But that wasn’t enough. Whatever he thought about to try and motivate himself had to compete with the fact that he lacked magic power and couldn’t even move.

After a little while, he started thinking about ancient runes again. There was little else for him to do, and while he was tempted to continue wallowing in his failures, he wasn’t about to completely give up yet.

He called upon every scrap of knowledge about the ancient runes he could remember. Their shapes, which ranged from almost as simple and abstract as modern runes to those of such complexity that he could spend hours working on one and still not finish. Of the more complex runes he’d briefly studied, he remembered very little, but the simpler runes—simpler both in form and in meaning—he could remember with a reasonable amount of clarity.

The one that stuck out the most was the rune for ‘prison’, for that was how Xaphan’s prison had been identified on the map he used to come south years ago. It wasn’t the same rune that now held him down, though it had some heavy similarities in appearance, indicating that the two were related in more than just abstract meaning.

Leon knew that the more specific runes were usually more complex versions of simpler runes that covered the same meaning. The ancient runes representing ‘open’ and ‘open lock’ were probably similar, from what little information he remembered, but the latter would be more complex than the former.

But as he thought about it, the memories starting flooding back. Artorias by the fire, teaching Leon what little he knew about enchantments, encouraging the young boy’s interest in the craft.

Leon focused on his memories of the lessons regarding ancient enchantments, but even with his magic-enhanced brain, it had been years since then, and time had darkened and clouded those memories.

For a brief moment, all of Leon’s rage and hatred came roaring back, searing him from the inside and causing his heart—or whatever passed for it in his magic body—to feel like it was about to burst from his chest with how hard it beat.

But Leon took a deep breath, quelling his rush as much as he possibly could, though not without a few cathartic thoughts about carving Nestor into a thousand tiny pieces.

He hated this feeling of powerlessness with a passion, but he had to admit that it had served at least to give him a little bit of perspective with regards to his power level. He was strong enough to be nearly untouchable in the Bull Kingdom, but up against someone like Nestor, even in such a state as Leon had found him in, his power was meaningless.

That Leon was not invincible, no matter how much power he had, was a lesson that he intended to take to heart, but it didn’t help him in the slightest to escape his current—

And then, like a bolt of lightning out from the blue sky, it struck him: the shape of the ‘open’ rune. He wasn’t sure how much it would help in a situation where he couldn’t move, but he remembered it with reasonable clarity.

Leon focused on that rune as hard as he could. Unsure of what else he might be able to do, he thought about that rune as he began to strain again against his restraints. He didn’t know what he was trying to accomplish, but he felt incredible about having remembered the rune.

A few minutes of hopeless struggling later, though, his rush of good feelings was essentially gone. He couldn’t invoke the power of the rune just by thinking about it, it seemed.

He sighed again, his instincts pulling his lips back as the air escaped his mouth.

Leon’s mind froze up for the briefest of moments in shock, only to then be replaced with ecstatic glee; his lips had moved!

He tried to move his lips again, but it was difficult, like they were incredibly numb and unresponsive. But they did move, sluggishly responding to the commands they were receiving from his brain.

Leon summoned his rapidly-bolstering willpower and began to think about the ‘open’ rune again. It was a vague and unspecific notion, that of openness, but that also benefitted him since it made the rune just as simple, looking like an abstracted key with one long vertical line and three short horizontal lines sticking out of its top end on one side.

Leon thought about his situation and willed himself to move again, to open his restraints and rise.

His results were mixed. He regained some feeling in his lips and found that he could slightly open his jaw, but the rest of him remained frozen and unresponsive. He couldn’t move his arms, fingers, legs, none of his extremities.

After about ten or fifteen minutes of trying to move again, Leon had to stop. He’d regained some function of his mouth, but that wasn’t enough.

“ZZZaahfffffgiiinn!” Leon tried to shout, hoping to wake his sleeping demonic partner. His tongue was like a brick in his mouth and his lips didn’t move as he wanted them to, and on the whole, his voice alone was clearly not strong enough to break the hold of whatever Nestor had done to the demon.

Leon swallowed hard, beating back his rising rage. That wouldn’t help him right now. As with the past couple of days, it wouldn’t be raging, unthinking power that would help the most right now, but clear-thinking and determination.

The thought occurred to him that the ‘open’ rune would be more effective if it were actually physically drawn. He couldn’t do whatever Nestor did to draw the rune in the air, and he didn’t even have the use of his hands to draw it in the dirt.

But he did have other things that were moving…

Leon clenched his jaw, his pride flaring up and preventing him from doing what he knew had to be done to quickly free himself. Every moment he spent languishing here was another that Nestor had to do whatever he wanted with Leon’s body. He didn’t even want to think about the possibility of the older man encountering Maia or Valeria. On a logical level, he knew that Maia probably knew that something was up since their connection seemed to be disrupted on his end, but the thought of his lover running into someone else in his body was distressing, to put it mildly.

Just before he began, though, something else occurred to him. There was an endless amount of mist beyond his soul realm, and if he could get even a tiny fraction of what he could usually command, then he wouldn’t need to further degrade himself.

Unfortunately, after about five minutes of trying, Leon realized that the Mists of Chaos weren’t responding to him, and probably wouldn’t so long as Nestor’s restraints remained on him. Biting down on his frustration, Leon accepted what he had to do.

With as much willpower as he could summon, Leon retracted his lips and opened his jaw. He strained his neck muscles, commanding them with everything that he had to move, and miraculously, his head began to twitch. At the rate he was regaining control of himself, he figured he could undo the restraints in a few hours of struggle, but that wasn’t fast enough. Worst-case scenario, Nestor finished whatever he was doing outside and came back into his soul realm before Leon finished freeing himself.

With an ugly grimace worthy of a monster of a thousand terrifying bedtime stories, Leon used what little control he had over his body to press his face further into the soft, loose dirt, using his tongue and nose to draw the required rune. It wasn’t easy, to say the least, but fortunately, the ground had been loosened quite a bit during his bombardment of Nestor. Still, he screwed it up more than once, and each time had him silently screaming at himself for his failure.

But, finally, the rune was completed. A vaguely key-shaped ditch in the dirt, and new familiarity with the taste of dirt.

Leon breathed hard, the worst part of his job done, though it didn’t make the taste of dirt on his tongue go away any faster.

Pushing everything out of his mind save for the thought of freeing himself, Leon reached out with his will and collected the wisps of magic that had been continuing to slowly accumulate in his soul realm and pushed all of it into the rune.

It was a truly pathetic amount of magic power for someone of the seventh-tier, but at this point, Leon hardly cared. All he needed was enough to free himself. He could lament his lack of power when he was free.

The rune in the dirt began to fill with light, glowing brighter as more of Leon’s magic power was fed into it, the few sparks of hope that remained within him growing brighter with it. It wasn’t nearly as efficient as a rune drawn on spell paper with specially-prepared ink, but it was working. He focused on the removal of his restraints, letting nothing else work its way into his head for long. He mentally commanded the rune to do what he wanted it to do as his paltry reserve of magic power filled it and gave it strength.

Suddenly, there was a bright flash of light that had even blinded Leon for a few seconds. He was mildly irritated and quite worried that something had gone wrong, but as his eyes recovered, he found that he’d moved his hand up to his face by instinct.

He blinked in surprise as he stared at his palm barely an inch in front of his face. Then, he tried moving his legs, and to his immense relief and gratification, they obeyed his command.

He smiled and pushed himself off the ground. It was time to even the score a little.