Trapped on the other side of the magical barrier and with no ability to contact Tyler or the others, Roun weighed his options. Under the influence of magic, he only seemed to have access to veranos as an energy source. This gave him access to considerable power but also his lowest possible top speed—and if his fights with Blitz and Zed had taught him anything, it was that he was not always the fastest channeller in an encounter.

Roun sighed.

Running was a possibility, but there was no guarantee that he would escape if he took that chance.

Next, his mind drifted back to the mechanism behind his passing through the magic barrier that had cordoned this place off. Unfortunately, that also remained a mystery and there was no guarantee that, whatever the mechanism was, worked both ways—or that it would even work again for that matter. His current captors seemed just as puzzled by his ability to pass through the barrier as he was, so there was undoubtedly more at play than he was aware of.

Roun sighed lightly once more. There were simply too many variables to make an informed decision.

As he continued to weigh his options, he could still feel the psychic energy of these blue-haired people prodding at his mind, no doubt confused as to how a non-psychic like Roun could maintain such an effective defence against their attempted intrusions.

“Synchros.” He called out internally, trying to confirm whether or not his being severed from Terra’s zeta prevented him from being able to access the council, and more importantly power, of his bonded guardian spirit.

“Yes, Roun.” She replied calmly, bringing a reassuring calm over the young man as she did.

“Are you alright?” He inquired, drawing the sensation of nodding from the disembodied presence.

“Of course.” She replied, almost dismissively. “I can sense that you are somewhat distressed however.”

“A bit on edge, but more intrigued than worried I’ll admit.” Roun replied as he tuned out the yelling and hurried moving around of his captors.

“That’s good Roun, I suspect that there is little to be worried about.” Roun’s eyebrow tipped upwards at the statement.

“Do you know something that I don’t?” He pressed, but he was quickly met with a light chuckle from his ethereal companion.

“I know much that you do not, but nothing that is particularly pertinent at the moment.” She replied coyly, causing Roun to chuckle lightly in turn.

“Then why are you so confident that I shouldn’t be worried?” Roun inquired.

“You worry because you lack access to your primary power source.” She began to explain. “You feel weakened—as if options have been removed from you—but I am almost at full power.”

Roun’s eyes widened at the statement.

“Their barrier bars your zeta from entry, but it is insufficient to block the flow of Ki. Beyond that, it is powered by magic, which also feeds my abilities. Gaea’s cosmic waves are weak here, but these two energy sources will more than suffice should my power be needed.”

“That’s more than reassuring.” Roun paused. “Do you think that I should temper my curiosity and leave this place?”

“Hardly.” Synchros dismissed. “These people seem well acquainted with your last name and your family’s energy type, they may be able to provide answers about you that could prove valuable.”

“Agreed.”

With this, Roun turned his attention outwards once more, focusing his gaze on the young female psychic that had been monitoring him. He tuned in to see the most puzzled look on her face. She’d observed him physically as he conversed internally with Synchros, noting the subtle facial movements, faint chuckles and occasional nods of agreement that punctuated that conversation. She didn’t need to be able to read his mind to understand that he was communicating with someone.

“Hey.” Roun’s voice echoed in her mind, as he partially lowered his resistance to her psychic probes.

“Who are you communicating with?” She inquired as soon as their psychic link was re-established; drawing a light chuckle from Roun.

“A kindred spirit.” Roun replied cryptically, as the young woman now searched his mind for traces of another psychic link. “But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

His statement, and the lack of any traces of a psychic link, drew her attention back to him.

“You had questions about my family name, and you seemed to recognize my parents.” He continued. “I won’t allow you to probe my memories, but I am willing to talk about my heritage, if you’ll be forthcoming with why it’s relevant.”

He watched as the young woman’s eyes narrowed sharply. He could tell that she was pondering the offer.

“Fine.” She conceded.

Roun just smiled in reply.

“You claim to have no family name.” She commenced. “You also claim to be the son of the Shin Itami.”

Roun’s eyebrow tipped upwards at the way that she stress ‘the’ before stating his father’s name.

“So answer me this. Where were you born?” She pressed.

“I was born in the Geraheim province of Merricent—in Terra.” He explained. “This was twenty-one years ago.”

He watched as her gaze narrowed further, burying her ice blue irises away before of veil of suspicion and disbelief.

“And how many of you… Terrans… are there in his Geraheim province?” She queried.

“A couple million?” Roun responded off the cuff. “Two-and-a-half, maybe three at this point.” He continued with a shrug. “I don’t keep up with the exact numbers.”

“And the haima’sa, how many of them?” Roun’s eyebrow tipped upwards at the question.

“In Geraheim specifically?” He specified, drawing a nod from the young psychic. “None that I’m aware of.”

“Bullshit.” She responded, causing Roun to burst out laughing at the retort, which deeply contrasted with the woman’s particularly polished decorum up to the point.

He could only wonder if that particular turn of phrase was another artefact of the translation of their thoughts into languages with which they were each unfamiliar. Unfortunately, the young woman quickly dismissed his amusement.

“How many of you Terrans are there in total?” She inquired further.

“Just under a billion, give or take.” Roun replied with a smirk, having picked up at this point that she did not expect there to be any significant number of humans on Terra… if any at all. “If it makes you feel better, up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t think that Oya even existed—furthermore that it was populated by actual humans either. So I can sympathize with your disbelief.”

“You misunderstand young Itami.” She shook her head. “We’re aware of refugees being transported from our realm to yours, in areas where the collection of magical energy is dense enough to pierce the veil that separates us. But when the scourge also pierced the veil, we accepted that their survival was an impossibility.”

Roun’s eyebrow tipped upwards as he began to put things together. A light chuckle escaped his lips.

“You expected to be dealing with a haima’sa horde on the other side of this thing.” His chuckle slowly faded. “That’s why you erected the barrier.”

“We detected the odd energy form that permeated the pocket, and knew that it had to be of haima’sa origin.” She explained further.

“Hardly.” Roun shook his head as his light chuckle erupted into full-bodied laughter. “Zeta is a human invention, not a haima-sa energy source.” He paused. “Come to think of it, it’s probably our best weapon against the haima’sa on a global scale given the rareness of channellers. They’re still only learning how to tap into it… and function much better on the same magic that you seem to channel.”

Roun watched as the woman looked him up and down, before pointing out the obvious.

“That which you also currently channel.” She stated.

“Touché.” Came his reply. “This however, is a recent development.” He replied. “Ordinarily, I channel zeta… the concentration of magic on Terra is so low that it’s easy to overlook it as just background radiation—a by-product of global zeta saturation—up until very recently, I wouldn’t even have believed that it was a thing.”

Roun could see the proverbial gears turning in the young woman’s head as she connected the low levels of magic to reduced threat of the haima’sa.

“So the scourge has not overrun your realm?” She pressed.

“Hardly.” Roun shook his head. “From what I’m learning, they’ve been managed for almost a century by what seems like a handful of agencies—and in secret no less—the average citizen doesn’t even know they exist.”

“That is… difficult to believe. In my world, they are a persistent and credible threat.” She explained. “It requires the combined military might of the most powerful clans and the resources of every major kingdom just to halt their advance across all of Oya.”

“I don’t doubt you.” Roun conceded. “They’re definitely persistent… and hard to kill, but more importantly, the magic flowing through me is orders of magnitude more abundant than what they have access to on Terra, even with their ability to draw in energy from your realm.”

“They can pierce the veil at will?” She pressed. Roun just nodded in return.

“It’s brief and the gates are small, but they seem pretty proficient at it.” He explained.

Once again he could see the gears turning in this young woman’s head. As she began to put the pieces together, so did Roun. The young man paused to process all that he had learned, but his mind drifted back to her statement of ‘refugees’ passing from their realm to his.

“About my father—”

Unfortunately, his statement would be interrupted by the overwhelming and uncomfortable sensation of a powerful psychic force attempting to breach his mind. Roun’s eyes widened as his energies flared, green flames engulfing him as he reflexively fortified his mental defences against the intrusion. Unlike the attempts of the woman with whom he was now conversing however, these more recent intrusion attempts were far more potent. The more he resisted, the more painful the sensation became, until the youngster found himself reduced to a quivering mass.

As the world blurred from his focus, the young woman looked up away from him to identify the source of this current assault—the one who had so rudely interrupted a conversation that had finally begun to bear fruit.

While she pondered the source of the attack however, Roun was dealing with its effects. The young man clutched his head tightly now, his energies flaring wildly as each barrier erected in his mind was breached, before he felt the cold and sticky sensation of a foreign mind probing his own.

Rapidly and painfully, he watched his life play out before him, as if in fast-forward. Even instances that he’d forgotten seemed to be reconstructed from the atrophied synapses of his brain as he was forced to relive his life once more. But those twenty-one years played out in a manner of seconds, as if all of his memories were simply being downloaded from the server that was his brain—and the bandwidth of the transfer seemed limitless.

After a few minutes of this excruciating pain, the process came to a close with the briefest recap of his conversation with the young woman. With it, the pain subsided. His uncontrollable flames were also quelled, subsiding to their source within the core of his channelling abilities before his blurred vision began to focus once more on the world around him.

The psychic assault was sudden and potent, like nothing he had felt before, and in its wake the young man felt violated. He had been torn open, left exposed and his life experience drunk from. He felt parasitized by whoever this perpetrator was, but what made the entire ordeal infinitely worse was that he could not even sense this perpetrator. All he knew was that this person had torn him open and laid bare all that he was for their own purposes. The young man felt… unclean.

As this feeling washed over him, all Roun could do was struggle to his feet and try to identify who it was that had done that to him. To his surprise however, as he struggled to his feet and looked out over the fused landscape that was once Titan Academy, all he could see were his would-be captors kneeling around him. The same platoon of soldiers that had spent the last few minutes yelling at him, now seemed to revere his very presence, and even the young woman that was interrogating him just moments prior now fell to a knee before him.

He still felt dirty, but now he was also confused—thoroughly confused.