Kendrick sprinted through the woods to find his friends before the demons did.

With every step, he bashed his feet against the dirt harder and harder, willing his legs to carry him faster. It was as if his footfalls were pushing the Ecumene behind him rather than moving his own body. The myriad scrapes he collected from thorns and branches trying to hold him back were not even an afterthought for him.

Maybe Bellara can portal us if need be, Kendrick thought. We could try to come back for the wagon later? ...Nah, the horse would be demon chow, and there’s no telling what the place would look like tomorrow. It could be completely overrun... I just need to get there and pray that the wagon is fixed. Hurry, Bell!

He nearly lost his balance when a demon burst out of hiding from behind a cluster of trees.

DEMON {791}

{791}, huh? Okay, I can take him. Low and fast. Avoid the—

With a single swipe of its claw, the demon disarmed Kendrick, sending the Psysword spinning through the air. It lopped off a tree branch before coming to rest in a dense bush.

That... was not supposed to happen.

He gasped like he’d never gasped before when the demon went for another slash—its other claw snagged Kendrick by the tunic, scratching him superficially across the chest, and the force of the attack hurled him out of harm’s way. He landed with a thud on the dirt road.

“Ow,” he hissed, jumping back to his feet. If that second strike had been a finger’s length closer, that could have been the end of him. It was only at this point that he noticed the slash across his palm from the first strike. It wasn’t deep, but it hurt like a papercut; the thin red slit bled when he clenched his hand. The adrenaline of battle repressed his true pain. He wouldn’t know how bad it really felt until later.

If he lived.

This demon was slow on its hooves but determined to get at him nonetheless. Kendrick dashed for the approximate location of his weapon and scanned with hawkeyed precision. In the heat of this moment, his eyes were picking apart the scenery for any clues as to where the Psysword may have gone. He had come to rely on it so much, depended so heavily on it for survival, that he practically felt a bond to it. It was as if the Psysword were a part of him, or he a part of it.

His lens seemed to agree.

KENDRICK {363}

Whoa! Is that me? That... is not supposed to happen either!

The Psysword was nothing but an orkanite hilt with a channeling crystal embedded in the crossguard. The blade itself didn’t exist unless he channeled his aura. It was supposed to deactivate once he broke physical contact with the hilt, but his lens tipped him off to an anomaly.

The blade had bisected a bush on its way down. It was still lit—it still burned and whirred with aura, though its edges were dulling slightly without his concentration. When he picked it up, he felt an oddly magnetic pull in his arm, like a muscle rolling underneath his skin. This is my aura... my utilized aura... reconnecting with what’s still inside me. That must be it!

“Got it!” he exclaimed.

“GRUUUAAAGGHHH!” growled a demon behind him. His lens tagged it as the same one that had just tossed him.

“Let’s try that again.” This time, the demon bowed its head and charged more predictably. Kendrick, sucking air in and out of his lungs, ran straight for it, slashing its leg on the way past. The blade met more resistance than it had against the last demon he fought.

When he looked back, he saw that he’d completely taken off one of the demon’s hooves. The demon staggered on one leg, losing its balance. Rinse and repeat. He plunged the Psysword into the demon’s spine and it was no more.

Shluck. When he extracted his sword, the motion winnowing away the dark aura from the edges of his light aura, he studied it with his lens active.

KENDRICK {249}

Crap, he thought. I’m fading fast. Killing demons doesn’t come cheap. How many more can I take at this rate? Two? One?

There was no time to crunch the numbers. The dirt road curved to the right ahead—the flatter surface gave him better terrain for sprinting.

Around the bend, he was met with a sight that wanted to paralyze him with fear, but he ran through it.

A demon towered above the still-broken wagon, digging angrily at the ground with one of its hooves, snorting out steam and little feathery twists of blackish-purple fire. He didn’t see the witches or the elf anywhere. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. When the demon sighted him, it was in no hurry—what this portended, he had no clue, either.

DEMON {870}

At the rate he was running, he estimated he would close the gap momentarily. That changed when a sparkle of white materialized behind the demon on its leisurely stroll. It huffed at the air, about-faced, and found Sahni, Bellara, and Tanathil huddled together in the middle of the road, with the demon equidistant between them and Kendrick. Their cloaking spell must have worn off.

The beast of the Underworld was ready to run now.

“NO!” Kendrick screamed mid-sprint. “Hey, ugly! Over here! Hey, I’m talking to you!”

The demon ignored him completely. It charged, hooves kicking up dirt as it ran. It had in its sight two healers, one of them still grievously injured, and a recently recovered witch who had expended much of her aura on a repair spell. They were bedded deer, as Bellara had once put it.

They each got up to run, all with the same idea to duck into a nearby thicket, but the demon cut them off by spitting dark fire in their path. They flinched and shielded themselves from the sinister heat.

“HEY!” Kendrick screamed again. “Fight me, coward! Stupid monster! I’ll kill you like I’ll kill your master! HEY! YOU!” The demon was either far too cunning or far too focused for that to work. “Obstrae! Parto! Dammit. Pyrios! Obstrae!”

Kendrick was no wizard. He knew this. He knew that magic in the Ecumene operated on more than arcane-sounding words. Aura had to be channeled, bent, directed in certain shapes and patterns; it was all far beyond the utilization of pure aura into the form of a blade. Still, he kept throwing the words out into the air hoping they would do something. None did.

Farther up the road, company arrived.

ARCHDEMON {6,393}

DEMON {882}

DEMON {776}

DEMON {904}

Try as he might, Kendrick wouldn’t reach them in time. The Ecumene slowed to a crawl around him as it sometimes did in moments like this. Now it felt like a cruel joke that he would have to watch this carnage unfold in slow motion, knowing there was nothing he could do. They escaped Zorgen, the Rift, even the Dark Lord... all for naught.

The demon raised its claw above them, poised to slash at all three. Kendrick heard Sahni shriek again.

Maybe Aldiel has finally forsaken us, Kendrick thought. I guess this is the part where I die fighting... Will You send me home at least? Visions of his old life and his new one danced in tandem across the surface of his mind.

He saw a blond-haired girl with glasses riding horseback at his side through the pristine woods of the Ecumene.

He saw Bellara and Sahni riding in his car on the way to the beach. Sahni tried on his sunglasses. Bellara leaned back in the front passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard.

It was all so vivid. He thought that if he could stay in these moments, these tangled memories that stretched out into their own little eternities, death would not be the worst thing in the world.

Then the strangest sense of déjà vu came over him.

The demon brought its claw down.

“Obstrae dynamus!”

Kendrick stumbled but kept running.

Two thick halos of pure white aura clamped down around the demon’s midsection. It struggled, budging them ever so slightly—it would not hold forever.

“Gydeon?” Kendrick wondered aloud. The disgraced former wizard-cultist-turned-outcast emerged from the woods parallel to the wagon. He moved laboriously, each footfall pounding the ground with the weight of his effort, as if he were lugging a boulder on his back. But his arms were outstretched in the direction of the attacking demon—giving Tanathil and the witches just enough time to escape. “Dude, no way!”

“Do what you’re going to do!” Gydeon grunted. “Now!”

Kendrick wasted no more time in picking up his pace to slay the demon once and for all. A moment later, he was upon it—he stabbed his aural blade into the demon’s back, narrowly missing the spine.

The demon roared. Spat mauve flames at Gydeon, who dodged.

Shluck. Kendrick yanked out his blade, which was thinner and yet somehow duller than a moment ago.

Enraged, the demon thrashed in the rings that bound it. Bowing its head, the creature was even able to gnaw on one of the rings. This combination of convulsing and chewing through the binding finally broke clean through one of the two rings.

It was almost free.

“Kendrick!”

Again, he drove the Psysword into the demon’s tough hide, this time with a great deal more effort than before. But this time it hit its mark. The core of the demon’s aura was broken with this strike; it growled faintly in the throes of death and slumped forward.

Clumps of dark aura were all that remained. They bled into the ground.

“We need to go,” Bellara said suddenly, appearing behind him. The demonic reinforcements were already marching toward them with the archdemon in the lead.

“How’s that wagon looking?” Kendrick panted.

“We’re going to portal. Everyone join hands.” She grasped his hand with incredible force—the injured one, and he winced in sudden pain as the cut split once again.

“I have a very... very bad feeling all of a sudden,” said Sahni. “Bell, are you sure you have enough—”

“No time. Let’s go.”

“Aldiel save us all,” Tanathil gasped.

“All aboard who’s comin’ aboard!” Kendrick called out. “Hey, Gydeon, get in here!”

The wizard trotted over from the broken down wagon. “What about the horse?”

“I don’t even know if I have enough aura for our weight, let alone double,” Bellara answered. “Now come on!”

Kendrick’s stomach tied itself in a knot. He feared the demons would reach them before the portal could whisk them to safety—but what he saw next confounded him. The archdemon raised a massive clawed hand to stop its subjects, then about-faced and led them in the opposite direction. “They’re leaving?”

“Bell,” Sahni repeated. “Something’s wrong.”

“Not now, Sahni! We need to GO!”

Just as Gydeon took Tanathil’s hand, an ear-splitting, alien sound tore through the trees. Birds scattered, squirrels fell from treetops and scurried into hiding, and even the demons hastened to escape. The sound was unnervingly monstrous, beastly, and yet with a perplexingly melodic tone underneath it like the ringing of a bell. Everyone broke their grips to cover their own ears until it passed.

“W-what in Aldiel’s name was that?” Tanathil stammered.

“The demons are leaving,” said Kendrick. “They’re leaving. Bellara, how close is the wagon to being fixed?”

“You want to ride in the same direction that they’re running?” she retorted. “I’ve never seen a demon run away from anything.”

“All the more reason we need to get the hell out of here!”

“Agh,” Sahni grunted, grasping at her chest. “Guys? The feeling... is getting worse...” She winced in apparent pain—now it was in her head and she grabbed a fistful of blue hair at her temple. “I... It’s aura that I’ve... I’ve never felt anything like this. Not since the...”

Thud... Thud... Crunch... Thud... Heavy footfalls echoed through the woods. Thud... Thud... Trees snapped and flattened as easily as twigs. Thud...

“...Rift.”

The beast rounded the bend of the road, crushing trees underfoot as it went. Kendrick recognized it as one of the creatures he saw emerging from the Rift behind the Dark Lord Urobius. It had an elongated, reptilian snout, four pitch black eyes with bloody nictitating membranes, and so many teeth that the extra rows disappeared into the shadows of its mouth. It walked on bowed legs that had reptilian claws at the end, as well as claws on the joints and serrated fins along the limbs’ undersides. Four legs were visible or implied, but even this was not the end of the titan—it must have had six or more in total.

Kendrick raised a trembling hand to his lens when an aura reading did not automatically populate.

PRIME SIN ADROGAN | {8#,000}

PRIME SIN ADR#GAN | {82,#00(!)}

{CALIBRATING}

PRIME SIN ADROGAN | {~82,000}

“That thing,” he whispered in abject terror. “That... M-my lens just glitched. It can barely even gauge that thing.” His head swiveled to Bellara. “I think we should try that portal again. We’re not even going to tickle something that size without a lot more help!”

“Just being in its presence is hurting my aura,” Sahni groaned. “Can you even manage the spell right now?”

Kendrick glanced at his Psysword—the white aura flickered and wavered like a candle flame in the slightest intermittent breeze. He hadn’t seen it that unsteady in a long time.

“It’s our only option,” Bellara replied. “Gydeon, grab on again.” The wizard hesitated. “Now! Or you get left here!”

“I can’t,” said Gydeon. The redheaded witch opened her mouth to argue just as the Prime Sin screeched again.

It was so painful that Kendrick couldn’t even hear himself think. He was reduced to sheer animal instinct, covering his ears and shaking until it passed.

“What do you mean you can’t?” Bellara finally yelled at him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that I’m even giving—”

“It’ll level Dalcaster completely,” Gydeon interrupted quietly. “I just helped slay some imps there and left to get more help. That’s where it must be headed.”

Bellara threw up her hands. “How can you possibly know that?”

“If the texts my father made me read were accurate...” Gydeon stared in frightened awe but the resolve in his eyes never faltered. “...that is the Prime Sin Adrogan. Also called The Devourer. It consumes light aura, converts it, and spews it back out as dark aura—”

“—and Dalcaster has plenty of victims,” Bellara finished his thought.

“There are 100,000 souls of aura in that city. But only the very young, the very old, the sick, and the dying are left there. All the rest have fled for battle. And I cannot let those people die praying for help that won’t come. Not when I can be that help. I can’t let Dalcaster become another Wallbyrde. I won’t!”

Kendrick grabbed him by the shoulder. “So let’s portal to Dalcaster—”

“No!” Gydeon bucked off his hand. “I will not fight it there. If it gets anywhere near the city, its breath alone will cause untold destruction. You should go on and help them evacuate! I’ll stay here and fight!”

“That’s insanity. You really think you can do anything to that?”

The young wizard looked him sternly in the eye. “I stood up to four demons and an archdemon today to give you all a chance. Look what happened.” Kendrick was taken aback by this logic. “Aldiel helps those who help themselves, Kendrick. You three taught me that. Now make your choice. Mine is made.”

Before anyone could argue again, the Prime Sin opened its gargantuan maw. A beam of crackling purple-black energy spewed forth and cut a deep trench into the dirt road.

The ground gave way beneath Kendrick’s feet.

The beam rose to meet him.