“You stupid pup!” Sagar yelled, his face red with fury, spittle flying from his mouth and dampening Ryn’s cheeks. “What in the seventeen hells do you think you’re doing? It’s your fault we got into this mess in the first place! Because you couldn’t control yourself when you saw that Imperial general! I told you before that if you ever pulled something like yanking me off that chocobo again I would end you, and this comes godsdamn close! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t slit your throat right now!”

The others were yelling at Sagar to get off him, but Ryn couldn’t hear them properly. All of his attention was taken up by the curved, glinting blade pressing at his adam’s apple.

He had been in this position before. He was trying to remember how to get out of it...

“I…” Ryn croaked. “I’m... sorry, Sagar… I…”

Something inside him lit. He had had enough of this.

This time he felt his eyes catch alight, and the whole of his vision--from the shining cutlass blade to Sagar’s sneering face--turned red and orange, transfigured by fire.

He didn’t know how to project the flames from his eyes.

Instead, as the heat rose up through his chest, Ryn realised he was about to repeat something that he had learned to do back on the train.

“FIRE!” Ryn roared, and flames leapt from his mouth straight into Sagar’s face.

The skypirate screamed and leapt backwards, dropping his cutlass and clutching at his face. He kept screaming as Ryn got to his feet, still hot with anger and seeing red.

The screams turned into “You bastard! You bastard! You burned me!”

Sagar took his hands away from his face. Ryn couldn’t completely tell in his fire vision, but it looked scorched, darker than usual.

Nothing Cid can’t heal, I’m sure.

The whole of Ryn was on fire again. He threw a fireball at Sagar--just a small one, not big enough to seriously harm him, just burn him a bit more.

Sagar saw it coming and brought his hand across his body, making a movement as if to bat the fireball away. A rush of wind issued from his hand, blowing the fire to one side and causing it to dissipate into the air.

That only renewed Ryn’s rage. He chucked another fireball at Sagar, no longer caring how big it was, then another and another.

Sagar blocked each one with his air projection, fanning them away in gusting flickers. But only barely.

On his scorched face, the skypirate’s singed brows tipped back above widened eyes and his jaw went slack.

That’s right, thought Ryn. Make him scared. Make him pay. Make him stop bullying me.

“Boltaaaaarrrrraaaa!” someone shouted.

A stab of shock lanced through Ryn. The pain entered at his back, but in an instant spread to every point in his body.

He cried out.

The pain passed, but before Ryn knew it he had lost his concentration, and his fire vision and aura were gone, steam hissing up from him.

What the hell?

“You both stop this at once!” someone was saying in a raised voice behind him.

Ah. Nuthea.

“I’ve had just about enough of this, from the pair of you!” Nuthea carried on. She lightninged me. She actually lightninged me. He turned round to listen to the rest of his telling off.

Nuthea was shaking with fury and her eyes had doubled in size. “I can’t believe you! I’ve got a highly important mission to carry out and the two of you can’t stop squabbling! We’ll never make it to Manolia if we kill each other first! You both need to just grow up!”

Ryn crossed his arms. “He started it,” was all that he could say after a moment. He knew it sounded childish but he was still smarting from being briefly electrocuted by Nuthea and it was the best he could muster at short notice.

“Well, I finished it. Now apologise to each other, both of you.”

From the way that Sagar was sat on the ground, Ryn guessed Nuthea must have hit him with the lightning as well. His face was back to normal. Cid knelt next to him, tight-lipped with disappointment, so the healer must have taken care of it.

Their eyes met, and Sagar scowled, flashing anger at Ryn.

But, Ryn realised, it was no longer the scowl of a superior. It was the scowl of an equal.

At least he had achieved something. He probably should apologise for burning the guy’s face though. At least to make Nuthea happy.

“Sorry...” Ryn said.

A long moment passed as they held each other’s gaze. Rage seemed to jostle with obligation in Sagar’s brown eyes.

Eventually Sagar looked away and mumbled something completely inaudible.

“What was that?” asked Ryn.

“I said...rrrrrrsry.”

“Pardon?”

“SORRY!” Sagar shouted. “There! Are you satisfied now, princess?”

“Reasonably,” said Nuthea. “Now come on, both of you, everyone. We have places to be.”

“This traveling party is a joke,” said Sagar as they began to climb another hill in a direction that Elrann indicated. “You’re right, princess, we’ll have all killed each other before we have a chance to get back to your homeland.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be too hard on us,” said Cid. Disappointed, but still optimistic, then. “We did just manage to elude the grasp of practically an entire Imperial battalion and several Morekemian officers together, in spite of the circumstances. That is no small achievement, and took a great amount of both teamwork and skill.”

Ryn’s shoulders eased a bit and his spirit rose at that. When you put it like that, things didn’t seem so bad.

Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea. Even if she had just hit him with a lightning bolt. He was surprised that he hadn’t been more lastingly hurt by that. He hadn’t even needed Cid to heal him, like Sagar had. He wondered why that was. Was she able to control the strength of her attacks? Nothing she had said before had seemed to indicate that… Though if she was, why had she hit Sagar harder than him?

Really, there were other things more pressing on his mind.

“So Nuthea,” he said, “can you explain to us why we’re not in so much of a rush to get to Manolia any more?”

“Yeah,” joined in Elrann. “What gives, princess-girl? For ages you’re all like”--she put on a refined voice in mock imitation of Nuthea--“‘I must return to my homeland to warn my people of what the Emperor has learned’, then all of a sudden now that we’re nearly there, you don’t seem so bothered. What gives?”

Nuthea took a while to reply, and for a moment they were walking only to the sound of their own grunting and panting as they made their way up the hill. But eventually she broke her silence.

“As you know, we are currently in Zerlan, though very close to the border of both Imfis and Manolia, in the Pelnian mountains.” Of course she was going to tell them through a lecture. “Just beyond the mountains, in the Iflama forest where the Manolian peninsula starts to jut out from the Dokanese mainland, there is a huge, fortified wall. It is not very wide, because it does not need to be to span the width of the peninsula, but it is tall, and thick, and extremely well defended. The train will have to stop at the station of a town outside of this wall. I am sure that my countrywomen will have got wind of the Empire’s invasion of Dokan by now, so they will have barred entry of the train through the tunnel that passes under the wall, especially when a battalion of Imperial soldiers appears in Plessa station. It will take Vorr time to work out how to get past this wall, and all the time he will be sitting at Plessa station with his troops, and for all we know he will be amassing more there. But now that he has beaten us to it, our goal is not speed, but stealth. We will need to sneak through or around the soldiers in order to get past the wall before they do. Then finally I will be able to deliver the information that the Emperor has found out about the Jewels to my people, before Vorr can get to them.” She took a deep breath. Her lecture had been punctuated by a lot of huffs and puffs as she climbed the hill.

The rest of them took a moment to let this sink in. Then Ryn said, “Alright… so we need to sneak past the Imperial troops...again. It’s a good thing we’ve still got this Imperial armour, even if we’ve lost our helmets. But what do we do once we reach this ‘wall’? How will we be able to get past it without revealing ourselves to the Imperials on this side of it?”

“Yeah, he does have a point there, princess,” said Sagar, to Ryn’s surprise. Perhaps Ryn should set his face on fire more often…

“That’s the reason I’m not in so much of a rush any more,” said Nuthea, determinedly looking at her feet as she walked and refusing to meet any of their gazes. “I...I know of a secret passageway through the wall. A secret entrance and exit. We will be able to sneak into Manolia through that.”

“Okay,” said Elrann, “well that makes a lot more sense now. But I think it makes all the more sense for us to be restocking our supplies here in Zerlan before we carry on. There’s no way we could even get to the Manolian border wall on what we’ve got left.”

“I agree,” said Cid. Sagar and Vish nodded their assent too.

Ryn didn’t see any reason to protest. Which meant that in a moment he could ask Nuthea about some other things that had happened on board the train which had been starting to bother him...

They reached the crest of this latest hill and took a moment to catch their breaths in the crisp air. This hill was higher than the last and afforded them an even better view of the surrounding country. To the West and North, more hills, stretching back to the Imfisi plains they had traversed on the train. To the East and South, yet more hills, yes, but instead of eventually flattening out, they rose to become the snow-dusted Pelnian mountains. Wending its way down from these was the thin blue ribbon of the river they had jumped into to escape from Vorr. The plume of steam from the Sirran train the Imperials had commandeered had long disappeared.

Ryn could not hold in his questions any more. “Why did we end up needing to jump off the train?” he asked of the world in general. Then he rounded on Cid, addressing his next few questions to the old man. “Why did Nuthea’s lightning bolt not do more damage to Vorr? You were worried about that before it happened. What do you know that we don’t?”

The old man chewed his cheek. Everyone looked at him expectantly for an answer. Everyone except Nuthea.

“Something,” Cid said eventually, “now, that I had only suspected before.”

Ryn couldn’t help from feeling that the old man was only pausing for dramatic effect. “What?”

Cid sighed. “The Jewels, when a person touches them, impart alignment to the element they are associated with. That’s why a person who has been touched by one of them can manipulate and project that element, and isn’t harmed by it.”

“We know that, old timer,” said Sagar. “Come on, skip to the new stuff.”

“I’m getting there. When my former companions and I were collecting the Jewels before, we developed a theory about this elemental alignment, but we never had the opportunity to test it properly, and we never dared test it on each other. The theory we came up with was that, when a person touched a particular Jewel, not only did they gain the ability to manipulate that element, but they also gained a certain affinity with that element. Somehow, their body became tuned to that element and came to bear some of the properties that element. And from various anecdotal incidents, we came to speculate that with this affinity came certain weaknesses and resistances to the other elements.”

“Put it in plainspeak, old timer,” said Sagar.

“In other words, a person aligned to a certain element will be especially weak to attacks from certain other elements, and especially resistant to attacks from certain other elements. The most obvious one is that people who have touched the Fire Ruby would be especially susceptible to attacks from those who had touched the Water Sapphire, as fire is vulnerable to extinguishment by water. But in turn water is highly vulnerable to lightning…”

“And fire is resistant to lightning,” said Ryn slowly, seeing where Cid was going. “That’s why Nuthea’s lightning bolt didn’t hurt me more. That’s why Sagar needed you to heal him, but not me. That’s why Vorr and the officers touched by the Ruby hadn’t been hurt more by her lightning back on the top of the train.”

“Indeed,” said Cid. “As far as we guessed, fire isn’t completely resistant to lightning, but it is partially resistant, and the same principle seemed to operate the other way around too, from what we observed. Fire and lightning seemed to be quite closely related as elements--a pair that resemble each other, and that do huge damage to some other elements, as well as being horrendously vulnerable to others, but without being very effective on each other. It was only a theory, and like I say, we didn’t have a chance to test it out properly before, since nobody but us ever had any elemental powers before, and we didn’t want to test it by attacking each other, but now that you’ve done that it does seem to confirm--”

“Do the Empire know?” said Nuthea all of a sudden, briskly. The colour had drained from her face completely; her skin was milk-white. “Do the Empire know?” she asked again, even more urgently.

“I don’t see how they could,” said Cid, putting his hands up in reassurance, “unless they have access to lore that we didn’t. Although recent events may have given them an inkling…”

“We’ve got to keep moving,” said Nuthea. “Fast. We need to find a Zerlanese settlement as soon as we can and restock our supplies, and then move on to Manolia.” She had started to hop from foor to foot. “Come on, everyone!” She seemed to have turned even whiter, were that possible, and had started to shake a little.

“Now hold on, princess!” said Sagar. “All of a sudden we’re in a rush again? What’s with all the urgency?”

Ryn knew.

“Don’t you see?” said Nuthea, pleadingly. “Vorr and his Officers are heading for Manolia, with the Fire Ruby, and they have resistance to lightning! The primary defence method of my people won’t even work against him! And he might even know this now!”

“Arrrrggh!” Ryn cried out with frustration. The mention of the General’s name had lit the flame of his temper again, and hate burned in his chest at the memory of being caught and tortured by him. “Damn him, he’s just too strong! Even with all my practice I still couldn’t beat him! He’s invulnerable to fire, and now we know he’s virtually invulnerable to lightning too!”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Cid. “Vorr is powerful and devious.”

“I hate him!” Ryn went on, unable to contain his outburst and not caring. “I hate him for killing my parents and burning down my hometown and for stealing the Jewel from us!”

“Come on, Ryn,” said Nuthea, still agitated too, “let’s go, then! That’s why we’ve got to get to Manolia ahead of him, to warn my people and stop him from taking another Jewel!”

Ryn remembered something else. In the heat of his outburst, he couldn’t hold back his questions any more.

“Nuthea, what did Vorr mean when he said to you on top of the train ‘you’ve been helpful enough already by betraying your homeland’, anyway?”

Now Nuthea froze.

They all looked at her.

She didn’t speak for a long time.

When she did, she said very quietly, “I didn’t think you’d heard that…”