Yoshika was momentarily paralyzed by indecision. Across the threshold to the throne room was perhaps the most terrifying battle she’d ever witnessed, and she was torn between rushing in to try to help little Haeun, or fleeing for her life. It wasn’t as if she expected to be able to actually accomplish anything. She was little more than an ant among giants in that room. And the barrier would temporarily cut off her connection to her other body as well—there was no way she’d be able to do anything as Jia alone.

“Yoshika, we’ve been spotted.”

Eunae’s voice snapped Yoshika out of her reverie and prompted her to expand what little of her domain wasn’t firmly committed to maintaining the connection between her distantly separated bodies. Eunae was right, there were a number of elementals and mages headed their way. The elementals were easy to identify, but figuring out the allegiance of mages was a bit more complicated.

“Eunae, is there any realistic way to evacuate your sister? We are feeling very far out of our depth right now.”

The princess’ face twisted into a pained grimace as she shook her head.

“The most we can do is hope that my family prevails against the elementals while we hold off any potential reinforcements here. If we enter the throne room now, we’ll all be dead in seconds.”

It hurt, but Yoshika agreed. The Seong family was fighting the elementals on a level that went far beyond anything they could affect. She prepared herself to meet the incoming enemies, and focused on what she could accomplish right in front of her.

In the meantime, Yoshika spared some more attention for Eui’s body and her own family. During the lull in the fighting, she’d slowly been absorbing more essence to replace what she’d spent. Her first thought was to save it for the fighting to come, but she discarded that immediately—her family needed help.

She knelt next to Jung and gave Narae a weak smile.

“How’s she doing?”

Her little sister grumbled irritably, not nearly as comfortable talking to Eui’s body as she would have been with Jia’s.

“I dunno. Aren’t you the healer?”

Yoshika inclined her head in acknowledgement. Narae was a clever little girl, and she was holding up impressively well under the stress of their situation. Resting a hand on Jung’s forehead, she started to circulate her essence before Han Shin interrupted.

“Hey! No magic!”

“Tsk, I’m just healing her, Han Shin. Keep your pants on.”

“If you don’t stop in one second there won’t be anything left of her to heal, An. Don’t fucking test me!”

Yoshika growled in frustration, but stopped channeling her essence. She turned towards her captors and scowled.

“My sister is sick! And her condition is even worse because you forced her out of her bed and into this damn courtyard! Let me at least make sure she doesn’t die from your negligence.”

Han Shin stepped forward to snarl something, but Sagong So was faster.

“Stand down, soldier! Miss An, feel free to take care of your sister or any of the other mortals, but for obvious reasons I can’t condone you healing any mages or other combatants. Don’t blame me for what happens if we catch you trying something.”

Yoshika scoffed and rolled her eyes, refusing to dignify the bastard with a response as she got back to checking on her sister’s condition. Thankfully, Jung wasn’t as bad as she looked. She was feverish and exhausted from her body trying to fight off the infection, but it hadn’t actually spread very far yet. A quick circulation of essence would be enough to bring her big sister back to a clean bill of health.

With a silent apology, Yoshika took her time with the healing. Working on Jung’s condition was a perfect cover for her to do some meditation, and as she healed Jung with deliberate ponderousness, Yoshika focused a significant portion of her attention on something else. Something that the mages wouldn’t be able to sense at all—her divine spark.

The first wave of elementals came streaming into the main hall of the castle at that moment in numbers far greater than Yoshika had faced in her earlier fights. Luckily, she’d had time to prepare for them. Trap formations detonated all over the hall—both pre-existing defenses that they had found and activated, and new ones that Yoshika, Eunae, and Hyeong Aecha had prepared. Explosions, cutting beams of light, intense gravity wells, and more stopped or destroyed elementals outright as they flooded into the hall.

With most of her attention focused on her divine spark, Yoshika fought mechanically. Producing spell talismans from her ring and firing them off at the elementals that had been slowed but not stopped completely. She had hundreds prepared over the better part of the last year. Simple attack spells of nearly every element, which she chose to counter whichever creature she attacked. An ice elemental was met by a spear of lava, a stone bullet crashed mercilessly through the core of an air elemental, lightning blasted a fire elemental apart—on and on it went.

It was a battle of endurance more than anything, but the elementals were both fearless and relentless—and worse, they had reinforcements on the way. There was little question now that the approaching mages were working with the elementals—the palace guards evidently having already been completely overrun. It still struck Yoshika as strange that there were so few xiantian fighters, but she didn’t have the mental capacity to spare thinking about it.

Her divine spark was like a brand new appendage, and while she’d had some success capturing the Kumiho’s soulfire, she was still a long way from being adept at using it to manipulate the energy around her. More to the point, she had to be careful. While Sagong So and Han Shin wouldn’t be able to detect the divine spark itself, they would surely notice if she started to mess with the mana around her—especially the mana in Han Shin’s treacherous spell.

Yoshika tried to flex and experiment with the metaphysical appendage, but its mastery eluded her. Internally, she likened it to the muscles in one’s face. It was easy to make a specific expression, but to isolate and control only a small group of muscles? To intentionally wiggle just one ear, or to furrow only one eyebrow? Difficult. Yoshika could even recall a time in Jia’s life when winking had been difficult, and this felt like a similar problem.

Instinctively, she kept trying to do things that were too broad—to cultivate the essence around her, or to push parts of her own foundation into the divine spark for something that she could feel drawing the attention of the heavens. Those were the normal and natural uses for the divine spark, but it’s not what she needed right now. What she was trying to accomplish was something more delicate, something that truly went against the designs of her soul. She’d done it before, but without the impetus of the soul-consuming fire pushing her forward, she found herself struggling once again.

Time was against her. The trap formations were exhausted, and her position in the palace hall was getting overwhelmed. She’d also finished Jung’s healing, and Han Shin was getting antsy. Yoshika had to act before it was too late. With utmost care, she began to try wrapping her divine spark around Han Shin’s spell without cutting off his connection to it, or disrupting the spell itself. She had to do as much as she could before they noticed that she was doing anything, or else—

An explosion rocked the palace, and Seong Min came crashing through the walls of the throne room, covered in rapidly cooling magma. More than the sudden explosion, the pressure that Yoshika felt startled her. The barrier was gone and now she felt the full force of over half a dozen xiantian fighters bearing down on her. The final straw was a pained scream from Eunae—raw and visceral—that completely snapped Yoshika out of her concentration.

Then, several things happened at once. First, time seemed to stop entirely as Yoshika reflexively committed every last bit of her mental capacity towards Absolute Awareness in order to make sense of what was going on. The wall separating the main hall from the palace was gone—completely reduced to rubble. Standing among its ruins was the Magma elemental—like a humanoid figure of hollow glass, the inside roiling with molten liquid. Its central core was a blindingly bright white, with the magma forming its body cooling to deeper shades of orange and red at the extremities.

Inside the throne room, the Queen still struggled against the void elemental, but Eunae’s mother had been completely encased in an impossibly cold chunk of frozen air, while Seong Misun had been impaled on a long icicle. Yoshika’s senses were drawn inexorably to the figure that had elicited Eunae’s pained scream—little Haeun, lying face down on the ground in a pool of her oldest sister’s blood. The sight was so shocking that it nearly broke Yoshika’s concentration a second time, but she quickly calmed herself—Haeun’s aura was still present, she was alive.

All of them were. Even with Yoshika’s mind accelerated to its absolute limit, she could still see the battle raging on between the xiantian mages and elementals. The magma covering Seong Min moved as if it were still part of the elemental that had created it, actively trying to stop her from forming spells to free herself. Eunae’s older sister, still impaled, was infusing her own blood with mana in order to form it into some sort of spell. Even Seong Minhee in her solid block of ice was rapidly circulating the mana around her towards some inscrutable purpose.

No—as horrifying as the situation in the palace was, Yoshika’s real problems were closer to home. Her startled reaction had carried over to Eui’s body, and that reaction had not only broken the concentration on her attempts to disrupt Han Shin’s spell, but it had also spooked the mage himself. The spell holding her family hostage had been released, and would kill most of her family within the next second.

Without thinking, Yoshika acted on her first intuition and seized the spell with her divine spark. Since Han Shin had already released his hold on the mana, it became hers without any resistance, but the mana was already unstable—the spell already unraveling. She didn’t have time to absorb it entirely or to learn fine control of her divine sparks. Unless she could do something, Jung, Chunhei, and Minjun would all die.

Yoshika refused to accept it. She’d just been reunited with her family—she couldn’t possibly lose them now. Especially not to a piece of filth like Han Shin! A thought struck her like a bolt from the blue—a horrible, awful idea that she had no time to second guess. There was one thing she’d learned to do already—one place she could focus the blast that would keep her family and friends safe. Her demonic core tried to reject the thought outright, but it was balanced out by Jia’s core practically glowing with approval.

Before she could second guess it, Yoshika swallowed the spell as she had Jianmo’s divine essence. It was the trick she’d been inspired to learn from Heian, taking the mana that wasn’t part of her cultivation into herself for safekeeping. Though ‘safe’ was the last word that Yoshika would use for what she was doing. Already drawing from her foundation to reinforce her body and circulate wood essence in preparation for what was going to happen, Yoshika barked out one word—the only thing she had time to say before the spell went off.

“Now!”

Before Yoshika could confirm whether her friends and allies had followed her directive or understood her intentions, the spell detonated inside of her.