Elach stared down at the unmoving man and waited for something to happen. For him to get up, to prepare another technique, even just cry out in pain; anything at all. But he was silent. Motionless.

Lifeless.

He stood over the corpse, realizing what he’d just done. The two stone practitioners screamed something about an assignment not being dangerous whatsoever and scattered, hoofing it towards the eighteenth floor zone without looking back. Elach looked back at the lava practitioner who’d barked the orders, and who now stood frozen in fear at the sight of him. With fresh, unpanicing eyes, Elach finally noticed just how weak the man was. And how young the… the boy was. The beginning of a scraggly beard was just starting to poke through his face, coal black hairs that should have been shaved away but were too much a symbol of pride to be taken. Cutting them down would be so… so… horrible.

Issi flowed out from the corpse at his feet until it was an empty husk, and Elach kept himself from noting the similarities between the two lava practitioners. They could have been twins. Hells, they probably were twins. And the smoke practitioner, crying in a heap near the living lava practitioner’s feet, couldn’t have been more than seventeen. A girl who hadn’t grown into her body yet, and hid it under a baggy coat. He looked on as the stone practitioners fled, who were the oldest of the bunch, and even they looked to be barely twenty if he had to guess. He locked onto their Issi and stopped them, feeling panic shoot through the temporary link, and pulled himself over to them. The fear that flowed off them was almost a physical thing, and as Elach gathered them under one arm each, that panic turned for the worst. Thoughts of their comrade’s death flashed through their mind, the monster of a man with shackles around his wrists and ankles coming to deliver them to the same end.

“I’m sorry, if that means anything, but I thought you were trained practitioners coming to kill me. Not a bunch of kids.” Elach kept his voice hard as he spoke, pushing the two stone practitioners towards the lava practitioner and the disabled smoke practitioner. “If you don’t use any more techniques, I won’t hurt you. I can’t bring back your friend, but no more of you have to die.”

The lava practitioner stepped forward, his hands shaking as he leveled his spear at Elach’s chest. How hadn’t he noticed that before. “You’re a monster, just like the thing that attacked our master.”

“See, that’s the problem; Shar thinks that your master is the monster.” Elach stepped forward, chaining the lava spear in place. The practitioner’s eyes widened and he tried to pull it away, but he didn’t think to try and overpower Elach’s technique. He truly was new at this. “You came here, to an enemy’s city, and you’re ambushing us while we’re just trying to clear this training pillar. And right after I was attacked by someone from Glasrime who filled me full of holes and tried to make my Issi useless.”

“Holes?” One of the stone practitioners squeaked, and Elach couldn’t tell if it came from the boy or the girl. He looked down at his arm, and found only tiny pink marks remaining where the shards had buried themselves.

He tilted his head to the side. “You can’t use your Issi to heal yourself?”

Three heads shook rapidly. That was… concerning. Did they not know how to push their Issi around their pathways?

“You probably just haven’t learned how to do it yet. So, here’s what’s going to happen to you; I’m going to send you all out of the pillar, and someone’s going to arrest you. If you try to resist, it’ll probably end pretty badly.” Elach motioned at the lava practitioner’s corpse for emphasis. Anger bubbled up in the living twin, and Elach had a bad feeling he might be forced to end both of them. “Hoalt’s worried that Glasrime and Lavassil are trying to start a war with the Gilded Night, so he’ll treat you well enough not to set it off himself. If you talk, he’ll probably be a whole lot more forgiving.”

The lava practitioner screamed and let go of his spear, spinning and slamming his fists into the ground. It began boiling under Elach’s feet, and he reached out to chain the technique in its infancy. The lava practitioner recoiled, and the ground under Elach’s feet didn’t get a degree hotter. “Whether you believe me or not, I don’t actually want to hurt you. I didn’t think my kick would kill your friend. Please just surrender and let me send you out of here.”

Four knees hit the ground, all belonging to the stone practitioners. They held their hands behind their heads, looking down at the ground in shame and fear. The lava practitioner balled his fists in rage, looking between the corpse of his brother and Elach, eventually lowering himself to one knee, then the other, and mirroring his other two comrades. The smoke practitioner was still shaking on the ground, but Elach didn’t feel anything like a technique from them, so he assumed they wouldn’t have a problem going to a doctor outside of the pillar.

An icy wind ran through Elach’s Issi sense, and he snapped his head to see a Glasrime practitioner emerge from the mists that surrounded the tome. He was a tall, lanky man with close-cut hair like frost on glass and blank white eyes to match. He raised his hands near his face in a motion of surrender, but his technique was still there in the background.

“If you don’t want the practitioners to get caught up in the crossfire, you’ll let them run.” He said, his words smooth and chained together with a perfect cadence. It was unnervingly artificial. “I would prefer they don’t fall, but war brings casualties. You have fifteen seconds to make your choice.”

Elach scanned the edge of the mists, but he couldn’t feel anyone other than the one practitioner. But from what little he remembered from fighting Arvay, glass and rime were two different Issi types. So this man either held both of them, but didn’t show both in his manifestations, or that icy feeling wasn’t from him.

“Fine.” Elach grudgingly ground out. He pointed at the lava practitioner, then swept his arm back. “You. Take your friends and get out of here.”

The glass and quite possibly rime practitioner nodded and watched as the lava practitioner ordered the stone practitioners to carry the smoke practitioner between them, then sprinted ahead to collect his brother’s body. Elach forced a neutral expression as he watched the practitioners wade off in the field, turning back to the glassy-eyed practitioner when he felt them starting a technique.

“We were told that you weren’t a threat.” The man spoke, throwing a small dart of glass in the middle of his sentence. Elach chained it right before it struck his chest then swatted it out of the air. It was barely cold. “It seems you were hiding your true strength, but that you also aren’t the monster who held his own against one of my master’s inner circle. Somehow, I expected both more and less of you.”

Glass spikes burst out of the ground on either side of Elach and he pulled himself straight up. The practitioner traced over him with a lazy motion of his head, then flourished it to reveal three darts held between his fingers. Two pierced where Elach had been moments ago, but the third dug into his shoulder the moment he arrived at his pull destination. He grunted in pain as the glass shattered while trying to blend his shoulder into mush, but he forced them out with a shove of his Issi. He wrapped chains around his fists and forearms as the glass practitioner lunged in with a thin sword of glass. Elach batted it away with the back of his hand as the practitioner revealed an ornate dagger he’d hidden in his offhand.

“Ergh.” Elach grunted and chained the dagger in place, but felt this practitioner’s hold on their technique strain against him. They narrowed their eyes and pushed Issi through their arm and into the dagger, but by the time they’d broken Elach’s technique he’d pulled himself away and plucked the remains of the dart from his shoulder.

“Even knowing what you can do, I find myself pleasantly surprised.” The practitioner chuckled, shattering the dagger and wiping his hand on his shirt. “I thought I’d be able to completely overwhelm your technique, but you lessened your hold on it the moment you felt me press back. Either you lied to my fellow apprentices, or you have a certain knack for manipulating Issi that makes me quite jealous.”