Mitch barrelled down the pathways to the bottom of the mine at a pace that no person in their right mind would consider safe, even occasionally jumping down from one level of the switchback to the next. The little LED lantern he brought with him jumped and wobbled wildly but managed to, by the most minute of margins, provide enough light to turn the pell-mell descent from suicidal to merely reckless.

On the final stretch, he lost his footing and pitched sideways into the night. It was only about five meters down, but he landed poorly and had the breath knocked out of him. After a few moments spent gawping for air the mad dash continued.

Finally, he arrived at the workshop and immediately grabbed a bit of scrap wood and began to lay out a standard formation with the salt stored here. After so much practice the motions were almost second nature and barely a minute later the layout was completed. Mitch broke one of the larger crystals out of the geode and placed it upright within the circle before sending a bit of energy into the formation to activate it.

After about ten to fifteen seconds the crystal let out an underwhelming flicker of light, but about five seconds later it flashed again more strongly. This repeated several times at shorter and shorter intervals until the crystal appeared to be glowing rather than pulsing. Mitch continued to observe things carefully, but a seed of doubt crept into his heart as time passed and nothing resembling a beam formed.

About twenty seconds later his patience was finally rewarded as a white line of light burst from the tip of the crystal. It was so brief it was nearly unnoticeable, and if he hadn’t been paying such close attention, Mitch would probably have missed it.

A few seconds later another beam pulsed from the crystal shooting straight up toward the tent roof, this time it was strong enough to leave a scorch mark on the canvas.

Mitch couldn’t help but grin at this point it was starting to look like this was the missing piece. A moment later another ray shot out with an audible snap. Once again the intervals shortened with each shot, each one pushing his grin wider and wider, until they blended into each other to form a single laser-like stream the width of the crystal accompanied on its journey by the snapping of a thousand fingers.

The energy stream had long since pierced the fabric of the tent and was now shooting directly into the sky. Mitch rushed outside to see where the light started to lose its cohesion but upon laying eyes on it was unable to discern any kind of spread. It resembled nothing so much as an unreasonably bright line of silk dropped from the heavens by some tremendous cosmic spider.

The minute pillar of light continued to brighten for a time before Mitch managed to break his gaze away from it, attempting to blink away the purple striations it left in his vision, reluctantly returning inside to undo the formation. The beam persisted for a few moments before petering out in a symmetric reversal of the process through which it had formed.

The crystal itself was intact and seemingly undamaged. Although the energy it had channeled just now had not been particularly intense, that remained a promising sign. Additionally, it had taken the raw mana fed to it and focused it flawlessly. When using a concentrated source like a mana rod, it should be feasible to form a beam almost instantly.

Unable to express the intensity of the triumph surging in veins Mitch sat took a seat in his work chair grinning maniacally.

Mary, I take back what I said about you and that mustang.

It was like this that Joel found him, when the man finally deigned to part from his supper and see about the commotion, wearing the grin of a Cheshire cat and a satisfied demeanor which would not look out of place on a man who had just accomplished a foursome with Swedish triplets and had them ask for a repeat. A man who, for a moment, could pretend all the problems of his life had been solved.

“I guess whatever you tried worked.”

“Yes, yes it did.” His voice was deeper than usual, made so by the relaxation found in laying down a heavy burden; a challenge conquered, a threat averted.

“Good. So, what’s next?”

Mitch’s satisfaction faded a bit at that question, returned to the reality that there was still much to be done and little time to do it in.

“Next I make weapons, and we plan a defense.”

“You’re planning to stay here?” Joel couldn’t quite believe his ears. He had assumed that they would head to a more populated area whenever Mitch’s experiments were done. Staying here, with just the two of them, surrounded by a forest mainly populated by the creatures that would shortly be attempting to kill them seemed to be the worst idea he had ever had the displeasure of hearing.

“Where else would we go?”

“To the city, someplace with some walls and more people!”

“We can make walls here, and people in the city will be useless, they don’t know what’s coming. They’ll just get in the way.”

“Yeah, sure, but we could help them. We do know what’s coming, we’ve spent weeks preparing for it, isn’t it our responsibility to help?”

“Those people have nothing to do with me.”

“That…” Joel trailed off as he found himself utterly unable to find words to express his incredulity.

“Don’t look at me like that. I can’t save everyone, and I have no reason to risk myself for some random schmuck.”

“You don’t have to save everyone, but you could save someone!”

“Are you really this naïve or is it a show you put on? You’re as much of a loner as I am and your goal in life is to be strong right? What part of that involves saving Tom, Dick, and Harry? Or did you really buy into that ridiculous crap about the two of us saving the world from some alien menace? Wake up, you can’t take these people at face value. They’re messing with us for their own reasons, and they’ll tell you whatever it takes to get you to dance to their tune. Not me, heroes die young, and I have no intention of letting the Reaper hook my soul before I’ve crushed every brick these despotic, self-rimming, bastard sons of a herpetic whore have ever laid.”

“Aren’t you at least going to save your family? Or have you completely abandoned your humanity?”

“What family? They already took my family from me! My wife, my son, my daughter, all dead at their hands! If that wasn’t enough, then they mired me in their schemes and shoved a slave collar through my gut and into my chest!” As Mitch heard his own words, a look of confusion crossed his face.

“I, I never married… I don’t have a… I didn’t … I don’t…” His voice got weaker and weaker before trailing off. A moment later, as Joel looked on in complete confusion, Mitch collapsed sideways and fell to the ground in a faint.

Mitch was kneeling in an open space the sky was grey, and light came from it evenly. The ground was smooth and looked like water but was as hard as glass, soundless blue and orange lightning flickered beneath its surface. The horizon was strange as if the ground went on forever just as flat was where he was kneeling. Strange, distorted sounds echoed around him; a slapping noise like skin on skin, or leather on leather, a little girls giggle, a woman’s huskier laugh among many others.

Attempting to stand he found that he was bound by whitish orange webbing that barely allowed him to move. Struggling did no good and even seemed to make the bindings tighten, the only leeway he had was side to side. Laboriously he dragged himself around until he was facing the opposite direction and found three statues side by side behind him, also kneeling and tied in the same manner as himself. At least, the appeared to be statues, but after a few seconds, he noticed the figures seemed to be struggling against the webs, shifting one way then another.

Two were small like children, one silver, and one white. Both were covered in a golden glow that seemed to be struggling against the ties with them. The third was a crystalline woman. She had no radiance, only red shackles on her wrists that appeared to be drawing her deeper into the web. All three carvings were faceless, just a smooth blankness where features should be.

He did not know who they were, only that he had to reach them; save them. He renewed his struggles against the imprisoning threads, the knowledge that he could not break them lost in his desperation to reach the three figures. He twisted and shook and roared for what seemed like hours, his breath becoming frantic and labored, blood dripping from where the webbing cut him. He did not feel the pain, even as the threads dug deeper and deeper into the wounds they had caused.

Finally, as he reached his limit, a single section of threads snapped and hung loosely. A tremendous pain shot through his mind, orders of magnitude above that caused by the cutting filaments. The agony was beyond his ability to cope and his mind finally, mercifully, fell into true blackness.