"Six deaths in one mission, " one of the Shades said. "All from this weapon. " He picked up Shadebreaker.

Annabelle attempted another psychic effort, seeking to seize control of that Shade. Nothing happened.

"We should destroy it, " another said. "It's too dangerous."

"Our orders are to bring the weapon back to Cecilian, so it can be reverse-engineered," the first replied. "It may be a valuable asset when our invasion begins."

Invasion? What invasion? Annabelle wondered if Earth was one of their targets. It would explain why ACP was getting involved at this moment. These bastards could be more widespread than she first thought.

"That's an arms race waiting to happen, " the other replied. "I don't trust Cecilian to share, and if she gets a monopoly on this superweapon, she'll have a massive undeserved advantage."

If she could, Annabelle would have to stifle her laughter. If Omega got a hold of the weapon, they would be facing said massive advantage firsthand.

"So, you're proposing you introduce the weapon to everyone, and hope that internal politics don't result in this chance being 'accidentally' destroyed in some way or another?"

"This should be important enough for Nyxl to step in to take charge. He wouldn't allow squabbling when it could squander a massive advantage."

"Fine. We'll bring it to Nyxl. But if he decides it isn't worth his time, you'll take the blame for it."

A second group of Shades arrived. Annabelle's body wasn't facing the right way to see them, but she still sensed them through her lingering Starsight.

"Six deaths, " one of the newcomers said. "I believe that means we split six prisoners."

"And, I believe it calls for an… extra punishment," another said. "Who else wants to make sure that they never forget their place?"

"We were going to do that anyways, right?"

Annabelle sensed a wave of pain, as several Shades unsheathed their blades. Then, they just dropped them on the ground, spreading the pain wave across the entire group.

Bastards. Every last one of them. And I can't stop them. It was more pain than Annabelle had experienced from the Ascent Foundation's torture, and though she could still withstand it, everyone else in the group was in a horrifying agony that they couldn't escape.

She was so busy trying to think up ways to kill them (and being unsuccessful in executing said methods of killing them all) that she almost missed the arrival of a third group.

"So, two for each of us?" A Shade from that group declared. "Yareni's group would also have claims, but none of her group survived to make them."

"You can have three each," A Shade from the first group replied. "We'll take Cecilian's primary target."

"Your loss, then." The Shades from the other two groups begin to look through the pile of stunned bodies, picking six out seemingly at random. Annabelle couldn't recognize them.

While the others were doing that, Annabelle felt a metal cuff clamp onto her legs. She suddenly became weightless, her body levitating a few feet above the ground. A Shade from Cecilian's group grabbed a chain attached to the cuff and began to pull her away.

"Wait a minute…" A Shade from another group objected. "You've got a secret, don't you!"

The Shade pulling Annabelle did not respond, until that Shade fired a stunning bolt at his ally. The Shade's ward resisted, but it got their attention.

"You're getting more than your fair share," Cecilian's Shade replied. "Would you rather fight over them?"

Annabelle sensed a tension flaring up, with Cecilian's Shades on one side, and the Shades of the other two matriarchs on the other. Cecilian's group was outnumbered.

"I think you're outnumbered."

A few tense seconds passed, before the lead Shade on Cecilian's side proposed a counteroffer.

"How about we all return as one group, and let the Matriarchs figure out who gets what?"

The other two groups had a quick discussion, before finally relenting. The three groups of Shades merged into one, and then marched off, to an unknown destination. Given how the Shades had captured her in the first place, Annabelle suspected they were heading towards a portal back to their city somewhere in this demiplane.

They didn't pick up their knives as they left the area, and as a result, everyone who hadn't been taken away was still suffering from unbearable agony, and would still be suffering it for an hour until the stunning effects eventually wore off. If this was a mere temporary punishment for the Shades, Annabelle couldn't even imagine what their actual torture entailed.

Annabelle rapidly evaluated the new situation. If they reached the city, it would be too late to save the other six prisoners. However, Annabelle herself had a chance of surviving, if Omega played her cards right. But even then, what would she really be able to accomplish? Maybe, if she was lucky, she would cause serious damage, but it would only be a matter of time before she got caught.

And how would it impact ACP's proposed intervention? If they saw her captured, there were good odds that they would perform a rushed assault, desperately hoping to get her out before her certain death. Even if such a desperation move succeeded, she would have to abandon all of her friends in the process.

She even imagined a worst-case scenario, where she was brought to Nyxl. Even with her mental defense, she doubted her ability to keep secrets from a god forever. And if she broke, she had enough information in her head to turn the Shades into a technological superpower in a universe dominated by magic. And, if they were going after Earth, she had key intelligence on the planet's defenses. It would be an absolute disaster.

No. She needed to stop the Shades before they returned to their city. But she had nothing.

Somehow, their stunning bolts not only paralyzed the body, but suppressed psychic powers as well, with the exception of Starsight. Somehow, they were capable of blocking a power that was little more than a rumor outside of Earth, a power that had previously ignored normal anti-magic measures. The situation seemed hopeless.

No. There's no such thing as a hopeless scenario. There has to be a weakness.

If she had her powers, she could easily win this fight. But the Shades had somehow prepared for something they couldn't even know was possible. This was exactly the sort of situation that was normally a no-win situation, the sort of situation where she would normally have to rely on allies to save her. But there was no one left.

Wait. All powers, with the exception of Starsight.

That seemed to be a weakness, but not a big enough weakness. Her efforts to convert the telekinetic sensory field into a telekinetic force field had repeatedly proved fruitless.

But that wasn't the only way to approach the weakness in the stunning curse.

Annabelle realized that throughout the last few minutes, she had maintained Starsight constantly. Normally, she would start to feel some sort of exertion headache by now, but she felt nothing. It couldn't be the Shades nullifying the body's senses, as shown by their knives earlier.

There was only one state she knew of where psychic exertion was not present: a dream. Or, in this case, a nightmare.

But this can't be a dream. Not in the normal sense.

For one thing, if it was a dream, Annabelle would be completely unconscious right now, and would likely be waking up in a Shade prison cell (or, more likely, something worse than a mere prison cell). She briefly considered what she could do if that was already true, but discarded that possibility, more out of the hopelessness of it than anything else.

And for another thing, if it was a dream, Annabelle would have total control over it. Maybe that control over the dream wouldn't translate into anything in the physical world, but she could easily force a dream to end. She made an attempt at it, but wasn't surprised when the attempt failed. The Shades wouldn't just make that easy, would they?

Unless it wasn't her dream. She remembered Daraken's mental barriers, magical 'minds' that overlapped Daraken's own mind, preventing Annabelle from getting through to attack him directly even despite her use of an unusual attack method. Maybe she was trapped in the dream of an artificial mind, a dream that overlapped the physical world, but where Annabelle was completely paralyzed.

She made another attempt to escape from the dream, and failed again.

I'm invincible in my own mind. But this isn't my mind.

Annabelle's own lucid dreaming was enough to change the rules of reality in her own dream. If this was a magical construct modeling a dream, it would have even more potent abilities, likely enough to overwhelm the victim's ability to attempt escape.

Note to self: dream world traps may be viable for pinning down opponents. But what's the countermeasure?

The classic way to escape a nightmare was to pinch yourself to cause enough pain to jolt the body back into being awake. But as the Shades' knives had already shown, no amount of mere pain would be enough to force an escape.

Just willing herself to no longer be in the dream didn't work. Her next attempt was to overthink, attempting to rush out a stream of thoughts and somehow collapse the dream world. Again, she failed.

But, she had another idea.

Whatever magic was causing this nightmare state was gathering information from the real world and converting it into information her senses could process. What would happen if she attempted to get information that the magic couldn't?

She focused all of her Starsight into a single point, a point past the demiplane's walls. She got nothing, but persisted, focusing all of her energy into that one point, as if she was focusing all her effort into reading a fourth-dimensional mess.

She felt the simulation cracking, unable to process the request for information Annabelle's mind was putting out. Then, it shattered.

**********

She was still in the same cavern, but now she had control of her body, and of her powers. She quickly stilled herself, and hoped no one noticed.

"So, I think the prisoners are going to just love what we can do with healing magic," A Shade said, continuing a conversation that Annabelle had ignored in her quest to escape. "In fact, I'd say that it's probably what makes our torture so effective. When we can heal them from all of the damage they've caused, there's no such thing as permanent damage."

"Wait. Did anyone else see that one move?" A Shade pointed at Annabelle.

"You're seeing things."

They were on to her. Annabelle needed to finish this.

A vortex would take out all of them almost instantly. But though she could protect herself from her own vortex, there were six other prisoners. Normally they would just be collateral damage, regrettable but necessary, but if she let them die she essentially doomed them to Hell, when there was still a chance they could be saved. She just couldn't bring herself to do it.

The prisoners were, for ease of transport, being levitated above the ground, using the same magic cuffs that Annabelle had on her. Thus, if Annabelle could compact her vortex into a two-dimensional disk at their feet, she might be able to shred the Shades down to bits. That is, as soon as the group stopped moving over hills and hit a flat section of cave.

Before that happened, however, the Shade who spotted her movement earlier hit her in the knee. She tried to stay still, but her body's automatic reflexes still kicked in, and her knee jerked.

"As I thought. This one's not stunned."

"What." That got their attentions. "Impossible."

"I'll knock her out again." He first unsheathed his knife. Annabelle (as well as the other prisoners) felt the ensuing wave of pain. Annabelle ignored the pain and continued to look for a vortex angle, until the Shade then pulled out his stunner crossbow.

Could she resist another stunning shot? She might be able to escape again, but she would lose valuable time. And she didn't know how much longer it would take until the Shades reached their exit point.

The previous shot had caught her by surprise, and caught her unprepared. This time, she knew exactly what was coming, and how to prevent it.

The Shade fired a stunning bolt at her, and the bolt impacted, a direct hit. Annabelle couldn't block it with a telekinetic barrier, not without clearly giving herself away.

Instead, she maximized her mental wards, with a particular focus on locking her mind inside her own head. When the bolt landed, she could sense the magic's attempt to abduct her consciousness, but even her quick barrier was enough to block it.

"Then again, " the Shade said, "the stated policy is that any individuals that show any capability to resist stunning are to be immediately executed. Too much risk, as it were."

Are you kidding me?

"She probably wasn't-" another said, but the Shade ignored them and made a quick slash across her throat with his knife. Blood spewed out of the wound.

Annabelle didn't see a perfect angle, but at that moment, it didn't matter. There was no choice. If she didn't act now, she would bleed out in seconds. She made her best approximation of an attack route, and focused all of her fury into a quick manifestation. The vortex appeared in an instant, catching the Shades at the legs.

The Shades around her had their legs shredded at the knee, followed quickly by the rest of their bodies as they fell into the vortex and were devoured. The Shade that had just made the attempt on Annabelle's life stabbed his dagger into her chest, and attempted to hold onto it with the parts of his body he had left.

Annabelle wasn't sure whether it was a desperate attempt to survive, or an attempt to take her with him. Either way, she hit the bastard with enough telekinetic force to launch him into the ceiling, and then he fell back into the vortex and was consumed.

By sheer luck, the vortex missed all of the prisoners. five were on the same elevation she was at, and the other, trailing behind the group on lower ground, had the vortex's disk miss his head by inches. Only the Shades were casualties.

Now, Annabelle had a different problem, of the bleeding-out variety. As a first measure, She focused her telekinesis on her throat, forcing the blood to stay inside her body.

Would she kill the Shades, only to die before she could recover? Even ignoring the knife wound (which was actually the best course of action, given that removing the knife would likely cause massive uncontrollable bleeding), she wouldn't be able to stop her blood loss forever, and she wasn't sure if the wound would close on its own.

"Well, this was unexpected." Annabelle recognized Darius' voice, and looked in his direction. She almost didn't notice him underneath his cloak of concealment.

Annabelle tried to reply using telepathy, but was blocked by her own mental barriers. It likely wouldn't take too much effort to dismantle them, but it was effort she couldn't spare right now.

Luckily, Darius noticed her injuries, and pulled out a healing orb. He threw it at her, and its magic immediately went to work closing Annabelle's wounds. After the wound on her throat closed, she quickly reached up to rip the knife out of her chest to allow that wound to heal as well. With a bit of telekinesis, she threw the knife

Then, there was only the mild inconvenience of the cuff still wrapped around her legs, keeping her levitated in the air. She quickly threw a telekinetic blast at it, to no effect.

Okay, more than a minor inconvenience. She carefully prepared a distortion beam to finish the job, aware of both the risk of ripping apart her own foot and of the start of a psychic exertion headache.

But before she could act, Darius walked over, and with a simple touch, caused the cuff to detach. A moment later, Annabelle fell, hitting the ground hard. As she got back on her feet, she worked to collapse the mental barriers around herself.

"Why aren't you responding?" Darius asked.

"Thanks…" Annabelle managed to say. Even after receiving healing, she was still barely able to speak. She suspected it would take the attention of an actual healer to get her voice back.

"You do have telepathy, right?"

Annabelle finally broke down her own walls, and responded using a method that wasn't impaired by physical trauma. I had to lock myself in my own head. Long story. How did you survive the assault?

After they downed you, I broke off from the group and hid. Once they left with you, I disarmed the torture devices they left with the others, before following you, in hopes of making a rescue attempt. I almost got caught in your vortex.

I doubt you'd be able to pull off such a rescue on your own. It would be one against eighteen, and you don't even-

I also stole the warding amulet and crossbow off the corpse of the first Shade you killed, and activated them while we were fighting. The warding amulet was probably the only reason why I was able to get close enough to deactivate their knives.

So, he was, in fact, capable of messing with their tech. It wouldn't have made a solo rescue realistic, but at least it was slightly feasible. Wait, you can deactivate magic items too?

It’s a function in both their knives, and their manacles. Not something I could just do to anything.

Annabelle took a look around, and found Shadebreaker on the ground, heavily damaged. Though it was more durable than flesh, it had still fallen through the vortex alongside the Shade carrying it, and was likely nonfunctional. She picked it up and stashed it in her bag of holding. Darius, following along, also found a few pieces of Shade equipment that seemed salvageable, and gave them to Annabelle to also stash, in case Varos could repair them.

"I've memorized the route back to the group. If the Shades are all dead, we should be able to rest there until the rest of the group recovers."

At least Annabelle didn't have to dig through her own memories to remember the path they took.

What of them? Annabelle gestured to the prisoners.

"Well, I don't think we can carry them back to the group. We'll have to go back for them later."

No. No one left behind. Annabelle considered her options. Give me a minute. I should be able to break them out of it. If not, well, they're mostly weightless in this state. You should actually be able to drag them all, if necessary.

She had a suspicion that she wouldn't just be able to break into their dreams to free them, not if she could get trapped in them herself.

But, the dream constructs shouldn't be like Daraken's constructs. They were meant to keep a person in, not keep others out.

She carefully made contact with the mind of one of the prisoners, and avoided being snared in a dreamworld. Now, how would she pull him out?

With the captive's consciousness trapped by the spell, their own mind was inactive. Annabelle could almost effortlessly take control of the body, but instead she looked for the source of the mental connection, and quickly identified it.

She wondered what would happen if she severed the connection entirely. Would it trap their consciousness inside a dream for eternity? She didn't want to find out.

Luckily, she found a different method, attaching herself to the connection point and then pulling back on it. After a few seconds of effort, she managed to free him from his mind.

Now that she knew the technique, it barely took any time to free the rest of them. As she freed them, Darius deactivated the shackles on them, and this time caught them before they fell to the ground.

As soon as the group recovered, Darius quickly told them what happened, and told them to follow him back to the rest of the group.

For the next few minutes, Annabelle and the rest of the survivors followed Darius through the winding caves.

Annabelle noticed that the other survivors were heavily traumatized by their experience with the Shade's pain blades. Luckily, they were still following Darius for now, but from what Annabelle knew about torture, the trauma wouldn't just go away. Everyone in their group would be scarred for life from the experience, even after they managed to escape the Shaderealm.

But that was an issue for later. For now, Annabelle had to fortify her mind against any future attacks. After analyzing the method the magic used to inflict its effects, she was able to formulate a defensive scheme that blocked the particular pathway the attack used to force its victims into a dream. She suspected this defensive measure might also impact her ability to have normal dreams, but it would be a small price to pay to ensure that she never went down again.

Then, the group encountered a dead end.

"The route must have changed," Darius claimed.

"We never escaped their nightmare," one survivor cried. "We won't be saved."

"We're lost, with no supplies. We should just end our lives now and spare ourselves a death of starvation," another said.

"A death of starvation is better than what awaits us in the afterlife," A third whimpered.

Annabelle considered the problem. I might be able to cut through it, she told Darius. Hopefully before the rest of their group decided to give up on life.

She walked up, and focused her energy. She was going to analyze the wall with Starsight, and then find a way to cut through it to get to the other side. Some part of her knew it was an unlikely proposition, but it was the only option they had left.

But before she could begin, they heard a voice behind them.

"Surrender now, or I'll kill you. Although, you'll eventually end up dead either way."

"I recognize that voice, " Darius whispered. "Xerxes?"