I am blind and deaf. I have severed my sense of pain, blocking the screaming nociceptors that warn me of my body’s devastation. Vital vision only permits me to see the physical surroundings, so I fail to sense as Ascendant Meng’s blossom of annihilating darkness falls over me for the second time until it’s already eating into my skin.

I saw how easily the same attack killed the competitors. Just a second ago, the darkness descended upon me, lasting only a moment. That was enough to wreak havoc on my battered body.

You need to leave the darkness! Maria shouts into my addled consciousness.

To move in this morass would only exacerbate the power of destruction, like walking into a blender. Besides, I’m more worried about you, I reply. Ash and I put Maria through the metaphorical wringer to test the resilience of her transformed regalia form. She was highly resistant to most attacks because of the ascendant energy that flowed through her. A powerful blunt force blow would have a greater chance of injuring her than a searing beam of plasma, but such a blow–if it penetrated my defenses–would likely pulp my body, killing me instantly.

Aside from when we used an artifact from Ash’s collection to create a sword of Dark energy, we didn’t have the opportunity to test Maria’s resilience to true Dark attacks. When faced with the power of disintegration, would Maria survive? If she perished, I would suffer from serious fatigue before she reformed seconds later. That moment of weakness would spell my doom.

I can’t last indefinitely, but I’m doing better than you, Maria replies acerbically. You’re falling apart and you look like you’re being simultaneously melted and sanded down.

I haven’t faced many other Dark practitioners in Eternity. Here, the only Dark practitioners I’ve interacted with are Ascendant Marcus, who was on my team for Ash’s stage of the white faction competition, and Ascendant Mordika, who was one of Karanos’s associates. Neither was present when I returned from training with Ancient Ash.

I never sparred with Mordika, but from what I saw of Marcus, he never produced such a large area of disintegration and preferred to summon Dark energy in smaller quantities. After all, to kill an opponent, he did not need to annihilate them; a well-placed slash to the neck, brain, or heart would be sufficient. Against Marcus, who only wields blue ascendant energy, I might have a chance at defending myself. But against Meng, who imbues his darkness with red ascendant energy, I shouldn’t have a chance.

A roar of defiance rises in my chest. The darkness may kill me, but it also offers an opportunity. Within the impenetrable area of disintegration, I won’t need to hide my actions.

I release my tight control over the ascendant energy beneath my skin, flaring it as much as I can to defend against the power of disintegration. Without concern for the integrity of the Blade of Revelation in the inhospitable darkness–like Maria, the blade has proven incredibly resilient in all my experiments–I grasp the dagger’s ornate hilt and channel my energy through it.

If I can transform the darkness into anything else–even if it’s liquid thunder or solid metal–I’ll be better off. As I move the blade the slightest amount, willing for it to pierce the Dark energy, nothing happens.

It cannot transform the darkness.

I suppose it makes sense­­. How could an artifact transform pure obliteration–the power of nothingness and the void?

But even as my plan to use the blade fails… I live.

I sense the destruction of my body with each passing moment, adrenaline and my Beginning affinity heightening my perception and making time pass ever so slowly. However, the ruination is far less than it should be, almost as though my body is acclimating to the field of destruction.

The only way to end this attack is to defeat Meng, and the only way to defeat a Dark practitioner who has turned incorporeal is to force their re-materialization, Maria points out. Do you have a plan?

No plan, I respond, just intuition.

May it serve you well.

I sense the barely-there vital signature of Meng less than ten feet away, his back up against the wall of the treehouse classroom. I need to control him, to force him back to reality.

I’ve controlled practitioners before, leveraging their practices against them and their allies. I developed the technique when a host of peak practitioners from the replica of Karanos’s homeworld assaulted me and Maria. I had controlled their souls, something I am unable to do with ascendants, whose souls are separate from their bodies and protected.

That was before I became an ancient and learned to wield the Blade of Revelation, and before Maria used it to turn herself into my regalia. There’s one aspect of my regalia that I haven’t had much cause to use since I discovered its purpose–the crown of embers.

Manipulating the ethereal body of an ascendant, especially one who wields red energy, is a slow, difficult process. When I indirectly attacked Karanos’s soul through such a method, I needed to distract him for over a minute.

But if I see Meng’s ethereal body using the crown of embers, I can leverage my ethereal energy exactly where it needs to be, targeting the thinnest and most vulnerable areas to take control. Instead of taking minutes, I reckon I can complete a soul attack in seconds–or less.

But first, the crown needs souls to activate.

I brought four souls with me to the competition and stored them in my private room beneath the field. However, since I was planning to depart after the winner of the competition was announced, I packed my possessions away and brought my souls along with me to the stands, holding them within the Death energy that writhed around my figure like shadowy specters and wraiths.

The initial assault of the observers that ended with me entombed in a veritable pressure cooker shattered the intimidating, ghoulish illusion, but the souls persisted, clinging to my body. They remain on my person, immune to the disintegrating darkness. My soul sight relies on visual sight, so I cannot truly perceive the souls, but I sense their presence where my ethereal body sinks thread-thin tendrils into the souls like meat hooks.

I feed the souls to the diadem but cannot see the embodied souls within Meng and the others who linger close by, including Red and Holiday. I hadn’t realized that my visual sight was also necessary when using the crown of embers’ ability to perceive embodied souls.

My thoughts race, frustration coursing through me. There isn’t even time to curse the impossible situation. I can’t regrow my eyes, the complex organs beyond my reach, not that I would have time to do so. An idea comes to me, but I know that doing it might sacrifice my only remaining arm.

My right hand brings the blade of revelation up to my head in a sudden movement. Dragging my arm through the zone of annihilation rapidly degrades it, cutting it through entirely at a few points. The same forces destroyed my left arm during Meng’s first Dark attack.

I force the arm to stay together as I roughly scratch three lines into my forehead–the top and bottom curves of an eye, and a single vertical slash for the pupil. The transformative energy of the Blade of Revelation works its miracle and an eye manifests on my head. Where an actual eye would be destroyed by the inhospitable environment, this eye survives.

Just then, the flower of darkness disappears. I see again, though what I perceive is the mirror world, the alternate reality that the dagger has the power to make manifest. The classroom looks fleshy, like the mouth of a crocodile, and the desks appear like white molars embedded haphazardly in the maw.

Meng hides his surprise at my survival well, though the rapid jump of his heart suggests bewilderment. With my distorted vision, the ascendant appears to be made of pink flowers clustered tightly together. His eyes offer one of the only areas of contrast, featuring green buds–his pupils–embedded in two almond-shaped carpets of tiny white petals. Under the flowers is a vast network of roots, pulsing in an incongruously fleshy manner, like a tumorous growth. This is Meng’s ethereal body, the amniotic sac of his soul.

The flesh-and-blood heart I sense is incongruous with the plantlike organism I see. It’s a reminder that no matter what my eyes say, Meng is still a man made of Life and Death energy… a man I can destroy if I create the right situation.

Spanning the short distance between us, needles of my ethereal energy lance out, sinking through Meng’s incorporeal form and directly into his ethereal body. Even while incorporeal, Meng doesn’t skimp on his defenses and circulates ascendant through his body. That passive defense might be enough to stop another ascendant with blue energy, but my energy’s specialty is penetration. Combined with the hyper-offensive properties of my soul, I proceed with confidence.

The only dead matter in the classroom are my sundered limbs, ruined and broken down by the Dark onslaught, but still marvelously intact. In an instant, I strip the bones and sinews, and form whip-like chains, layering them over the room like a web, ready to entangle the Meng if he flees. One strand brushes up against Meng though is unable to touch him, its jagged tip passing harmlessly through his leg.

That’s when I leverage the full strength of my will and control his ethereal body… and in turn, hijack his practice. It’s similar in principle to how a necromancer might use the soul of a practitioner to create a construct that can channel its affinity energy.

The first thing I do is simple. I make his body corporeal right where my bone chain touches him.

His eyes widen with pain and red energy erupts around him, attempting to fend off the attack. If he had flared the energy a second ago, he might have prevented me from breaching his body. However, it’s too late now that my ethereal tendrils are already inside of him.

Still, his instinctive defense prevents my original plan of killing him right then by pumping him full of Death energy. It’s an annoyance, but not actually a problem.

I control Meng’s unfamiliar energy clumsily. Now that I sense his affinity’s usage, I notice the hundreds of Dark energy discs that he’s summoned around his body. Their flat forms are perfectly angled to be nearly invisible from my point of view. It speaks highly of Meng’s combat experience that he doesn’t assume I am blind to his energy just because my eyes are gone.

The discs surge forward.

They stop inches from my body, frozen by my will. Before Meng can react, his body becomes fully corporeal.

The discs of darkness burst into motion but move in the opposite direction as before, piercing through the Dark practitioner. Meng’s ascendant energy resists the attack, but not fully. If he were a Death practitioner like me, he would be able to keep his body operating with such injuries.

But Meng isn’t a Death practitioner, and he dies.

I could keep myself ticking for a bit longer, but I think I’ve put on a good enough show for now. I mentally steel myself for the deception I’m going to need to pull this off. With a warning to Maria, I destroy my own brain.

From my perspective, no time passes between my death and resurrection.

Maria is no longer upon me as I revive in the stands; she’s still in the classroom. I sense the three regalia items–the crown that now has only a single gray ember, the silvery bracers, and the flowing but tattered cape of flame–flying my way, though it’ll take them at least a few seconds to reach me. In her regalia form, Maria can move, but she isn’t particularly fast–relatively speaking.

My eyes water from the pain of extreme weakness. As I am, untransformed, and without Maria’s support, my thoughts are in turmoil, my body on the brink of unconsciousness.

But I’ve trained for this. I’ve drilled dying and resurrecting repeatedly, to the point that I don’t need to rely on conscious thought to act.

The first thing I do is surround myself in the densest coating of Death energy I can manage while withdrawing the Blade of Revelation. I channel my ascendant energy through it while hiding the blade with the oily darkness of Death, then slash it against my chest to begin my transformation.

While the transformation takes over, a bombardment of attacks come my way. I struggle to focus on them in my addled state.

Will I die before I can even recover? I wonder.

Hold on, Maria says. You aren’t alone anymore.

Right as the attacks should have blasted me to pieces, Holiday appears in front of me, his hands pressing together. A large aegis shimmers around the two of us and the various attacks fall apart as they impact it.

My transformation completes and strength returns to my limbs, clarity coming over my mind. I’m still weaker without Maria, but I can hold on for now.

“I see you finally choose to act,” I say, speaking to Holiday’s mind.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t have fun,” Holiday protests.

I don’t deign his statement with a response. Instead, I fly toward the classroom. When I died, I dropped my void storage artifacts as well as my soul gems and bones.

Holiday follows me, jumping up and pulling on his belt. A magnificent pair of spectral wings manifests on his back, the feathers ghostly and iridescent in the light of the elemental attacks splashing around us. He grins, baring sanguine teeth as a rock covered in End arrays breaches his shield. Instead of kicking it away, he bites it.

The arrays visibly shatter and the rock crunches, exploding into pieces.

Holiday’s teeth are unscathed.

That is terrifying, Maria remarks as she passes through the barrier and practically slams into me, attaching herself. Strength fills my body and I feel amazing.

Meng is already revived when I reach the classroom, but he retreats away rather than fighting me head on. I snatch up my items where they lay on the ground, then take stock of the surroundings.

Behind me, Holiday punches a massive wave of water, a spectral gauntlet forming around his hand. At that moment, Red descends into Holiday’s aegis, becoming the third member of our party.

“I’ll defend our minds,” Red asserts.

“I’ll defend against everything else,” Holiday adds.

My role becomes clear. “I’ll kill as many as I can.”

Holiday laughs out loud as he pulls out an artifact and manifests a beam of concentrated light. “I look forward to the slaughter!”