Lyra sat in the centre of the tiny crater that she’d just created, stared down at the dirt with a pensive frown. It seemed that she was also fighting off a panic attack, for neither of them knew the effects and repercussions of the curse that’d just been branded upon their hearts.

“Okay,” said Nyla, after several minutes had dragged by. “What’s done is done. What we need to figure out is where we go from here.”

“As far north as we can. So long as we don’t cross paths with the guy that gave you these damnable pellets then he shouldn’t have any control over the curse.”

“So we stay on course.”

“Let’s just hope that this curse doesn’t have some autonomous effect. For all we know our hearts will stop beating in our sleep one of these nights, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Anxiety made it difficult to breathe, enough so that Nyla needed a few moments to collect herself. What would Nolan do if he were in her shoes?

“First thing’s first. We need to stabilize our cultivation bases.”

Lyra agreed, and so they spent the following twenty hours consolidating the large amount of energy that the pellets had released into their bodies. They sat within the crater of churned earth, the desolate plains silent save for the harsh sound of the whiplashing wind that seemed to permeate the region.

“We can’t wait any longer.”

Nyla opened her eyes as Lyra stood up and patted the dirt off of her clothes. She nodded, knowing full well that by this point the girls’ plight might have already reached its peak.

“Wait,” she said as her friend made to leave with sudden steps. “We need to come up with a plan.”

“I already did. We jump the walls and start killing those pigs. We then find the girls and make away with them safely.”

“Seriously? There’s no way that will work.”

“Well, then what do you propose we do?”

“We take advantage of the fact that there aren’t any stars out tonight. Most people in that town won’t be able to sense us anyhow, which is something that we need to make use of.”

In the end they decided to leap over the western walls of the fortified town, which they knew had the lowest presence of guards based upon their earlier observations. From there Nyla would search for the auras of the girls they’d recently gotten to know. There were only a couple of hours until sunrise, which meant that most of the bandits would have already turned in for the night. If things went south then they would use the peculiar painting that Nyla had acquired in the Vespasian tomb to escape.

“Remember,” said Nyla as they closed in on the looming ramparts. “We stick together and go after the ones that are awake.”

“And kill them as quietly as possible. I got it.”

Lyra leapt atop the crenellations under the cover of darkness while Nyla took out the nearest guards with a series of well-aimed arrows. About fifty men stood sentinel over the city, at least fifty paces apart from one another. In some cases, as much as two hundred paces separated one guard from the next.

They conducted a clean sweep of the western wall, their cultivation levels hidden from their weaker victims. Most of the men were too drunk to call out for help, though this wouldn’t have mattered as the few cries that sprang up were smothered by well-placed bubbles of projected spiritual energy.

Most of the guards on the northwestern side of the walls had passed out with flagons in hand, the ones capable of holding down their drinks too far away to sense the disappearance of their colleagues on the western ramparts. This was the case to the southwest as well, so the girls held off on killing the unconscious morons in order to avoid drawing suspicion to the silent murders that they’d just carried out. Lyra grabbed a spatial bag from a nearby corpse and stowed its owner inside. She went on to do the same with the other bodies before she hurled the bag away from the town.

“Pathetic,” Lyra whispered in disgust as she stared down at the drunken fools that littered the dusty streets.

Nyla shared her disdain. Most of the caravan’s cargo had been wine and spirits, fine products that the brutes below had evidently indulged in since the day of the attack.

The majority of structures were wooden houses, built by the bandits themselves if their rough designs were any indication. Only a handful of buildings were made from stone, all of them sectioned off in a quaint neighbourhood in the northern reaches of the settlement.

She recognized Alicia’s aura in less than a minute, along with many others that had grown familiar to her in recent days.

“There,” she said, pointing to a cluster of cabins tucked against the old stone of the eastern wall.

“Let’s hurry and—”

A chill crept down Nyla's spine as an enraged roar shattered the silence and shook the air.

“WAKE UP YOU USELESS TRASH! THERE ARE ENEMIES AMONG US!”

“Where are they?” Lyra gave her a hard stare. “I can’t sense whoever said that.”

Almost as soon as the golden-haired girl stopped speaking, a powerful aura at the fourth level of Integration sprang to life like a beacon in the night.

“To the north. He just left one of the stone buildings.”

Lyra grabbed her shoulders and squeezed. “The best we can do is help Alicia and the girls.”

“But how?”

One by one the doors to the stone buildings were flung open, dozens of men rushing out in the seconds that followed. Most were at the first level of Integration, people who weren't present during the raid on the caravan.

“Go to the cabin, use your painting and get the hell out of here!”

Lyra withdrew a torch from her spatial bag and ignited the snapfire bean hidden amongst the cloth at the top.

“Will you be okay?”

“Not if we keep standing here.” She ducked an arrow, several others whistling through empty air. “I’ll draw them away. Hurry up and get the girls, then meet up with me.”

Dozens of powerful auras began to close in on their location.

“Stay alive, Lyra.”

“That’s what I should be saying!”

Her friend hurled the torch at the largest thatched roof within eyesight and then disappeared with a gust of wind. She reappeared on the streets below, stabbing her broad sword into as many sleeping bodies as she could before she was forced to leap free of a devastating strike from a heavy hammer. The cobblestone around her was shattered for dozens of paces in all directions, though the quick-witted girl was fast to retreat towards the southern wall.

Nyla leapt far enough to land midway along the eastern wall, where she landed at a run and hurried toward the northern end of the city. Of the five men atop the walls that hadn’t drunk themselves unconscious, none of them were brave enough to face her in a head-on confrontation, which was reasonable considering that they had no clue what level of cultivation she possessed. One man aimed an arrow at her gut before leaping off of the walls, though she stopped it with a soft globe of spiritual energy, plucked it from the air and fired it back with the evernight bow. She didn’t spare a second to watch the man die, for she sensed three auras rushing in her direction from the streets below, all at the same level as she was.

Even if most members of the band were too drunk to answer the call to arms, she couldn’t afford to engage with the stronger ones head-on. With that in mind, she activated her nameless movement skill and quickly arrived before the cabin where her friends were being held. The heavy doorway caved in beneath her kick, only to reveal a surprising scene.

The cabin only had one large room, which was decorated with a surprisingly decent supply of oil paintings, ornamented candelabras and silken tapestries, the floors covered in fine rugs of fluffy fur. Alicia and the girls sat at a large stone table situated in the centre of the room, alongside a dozen others of varying ages. All of the girls were pale, with a wariness to their sunken eyes that she had yet to see during the time that she’d known them.

“Nyla?” said Aine, the youngest of the group. “What are you—”

“There’s no time. Hurry, gather around me!”

“Why did you come back?” said Alicia, her honest eyes wide with worry. “You and Lyra were already safe!”

With her pursuers only seconds away from the cabin, she hurled a mass of spiritual energy at the door in the manner that Uncle Grey had taught her and Nolan and then directed a small stream of energy into the diagram’s entry point. With no time to marvel at the fact that she’d pulled off a basic barrier arrayment on her first attempt at the craft, she loosed another supply of energy and shaped it into a long rope, which quickly tightened around the girls that had gathered around her.

A terrible crash echoed throughout the room as the first man to arrive made to smash the barrier in with a ferocious punch, though he only succeeded in creating a slight fracture.

“What the…”

“Hit it again, you fool!” said the second to arrive.

Nyla ignored the worried exclamations of those around her as she summoned the beautiful painting from her spatial bag and powered it with almost half of her inner essence reserves, along with most of her spiritual energy. The jewels at its corners began to glow as it rose up into the air and expanded enough to accommodate everyone present, her mind focused on the barren landscape around the tree from earlier.

Another crash echoed in her ears, though she maintained her focus and remained committed to her task. The warmly lit room disappeared a moment later, immediately followed by an off-putting sense of weightlessness and the rough sound of snapping branches. They’d appeared a few paces above the tree, the others crying out as they fell into the forgiving embrace of its broad-leaved limbs.

Nyla relied on her spiritual sense to supersede her dizziness, though worried exclamations from the girls caused her to look over to the limp body that lay face-down on the dirt.

“June!”

Aine ran over to her older sister and flipped her over with anxious hands, covering her mouth and crying out when she saw the dagger buried deep within the girl’s throat.

Those bastards! She’d been too focused on operating the painting to notice if those at the doorway had hurled anything inside upon breaking her arrayment. If I hadn’t run in there, then June would still be… She shook such thoughts from her head as several thunderclap-like sounds drew her attention to the west.

“Where are you going?” cried Hela, one of the older girls. “This is all so sudden. You can’t just leave us here like this!”

“Lyra needs my help.”

“What about us?” said one of the women she didn’t know.

“They’re coming!”

Hundreds of people began to pour out of the town, the staggered steps of many doing little to lessen the fear that filled those around the tree.

“They’ve spotted us!” cried Alicia, who quickly began to push the girls away from June’s body. “We need to leave.” Most of the girls were too shocked to show an immediate response, though she was unrelenting in her prods and pushes. “Now, Aine!”

“B—but I…”

Alicia scooped up the sobbing girl and ran after the others, Aine crying out her sister's name as she struggled in vain to break free of her friend’s caring grasp.

As much as Nyla wanted to rush to Lyra’s aid, she couldn’t just abandon the girls, not after she’d brought this situation upon them. And as much as she wanted to follow after the others, doing so would only put them in further danger.