Derivan paused, awkwardly, after the blade struck him in the back; he didn't know how to react. The monster that attacked Sev was... well, it was like him.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

It didn't seem like it was intelligent the same way he was. Its sword struck him, and it did not react to the lack of damage; it simply stepped back and then moved again in a traditional stab. It didn't take much effort for Derivan to simply step to the side and move Sev with him, though he kept the cleric behind him.

In any other situation, he would have stopped to examine this being that was like him, yet not.

But if Vex was in danger... he would leave this for later examination. It took him no effort at all to reach for Patch and snap the one link it held with the system — he remembered that link, because it was the same one he'd had. The same one that had taken all three of the others to break before.

The stat suffered a slight decrease from that action, but it was nothing he couldn't deal with.

"Let's go," he told Sev, who raised an eyebrow slightly and glanced between him and the monster that was attacking them. He nodded after a moment, appearing to understand.

"Are we just going to leave it?" he asked.

"...As long as it does not follow us." Derivan glanced back at the armor. The monster had stopped moving, apparently confused without the routines it had been following.

Perhaps it was cruel, to awaken it and then leave it to fend for itself. It was strange that it was so similar to him at all — the armor was certainly different, but not by that much. But the one dungeon that had been created with all four of them as a template had been broken and scattered throughout the others.

It was surprising, but... maybe it wasn't that surprising.

Derivan sighed.

"If you are at all like me," he said, not at all unkindly; the armor he spoke to stared at him, uncomprehending but listening all the same. "Then you will be confused. There was a time that confusion was frustrating to me, but I think... I think that it is okay to be confused, and to take your time. Once you figure your system out, you may use it to contact me, and I will help you where I can."

"We gotta go," Sev said, but gave the armor Derivan was speaking to a concerned sort of look — not fearful, just worried. "He's right, though. Be careful who you trust, but don't be afraid to ask for help, or accept it."

The armor still didn't respond. Derivan and Sev took that as their cue to leave; it wasn't for several minutes, as they traveled along a surprisingly empty brick corridor, that Sev spoke again. "Also, Derivan, can you just... do that, now?"

"...I did it without thinking," Derivan admitted. "But it appears that I can, at a minor cost to my Patch skill."

"We could get through our section of the dungeon really quickly if you used that."

"I... should I?" Derivan asked, hesitating. "It seems potentially irresponsible..."

"It depends, I suppose," Sev admitted. "On how it works. If you're creating a new person when you do that, then yeah, that's not very responsible. But if you're just freeing someone from being controlled by the system—"

"Ah. Yes." Derivan paused. "I see what you mean. That is... I had not considered that."

"You just acted?"

"It was like me." Derivan glanced ahead in the corridor, to see if there was any threat there yet, but everything ahead of them was curiously empty. It was strangely hard to find the words to explain what he'd done. He'd felt a moment of kinship and reacted entirely from that.

Or maybe there had been something more than that. Maybe a part of him had latched on to small elements of something he'd seen in the way the other armor had behaved, and he'd sensed something that needed to be freed...

Or he was projecting.

It was hard to say.

"That's fair," Sev said, misinterpreting his silence as a lack of willingness to continue. The cleric sighed. "It would be so much easier if we understood why the system's doing all this. I feel like we have so many pieces of the puzzle, and if we just put it all together..."

"I have some ideas," Derivan said quietly. "But every one of them worries me. I worry that stating them will make them real."

"...Yeah, I get where you're coming from there." Sev's eyes unfocused slightly. "We're gonna put it all together soon. And we're not going to like what we find. We need to hold on to ourselves once that happens."

Derivan looked at his friend curiously. "What do you mean?"

Sev blinked. "I... I don't know." He wobbled on his feet slightly. "That was strange. I'm sorry. We should get going."

"...Indeed we should." Derivan almost pushed on the subject more, but as he did, something in Sev's version of the system pulsed strangely, almost as though it was warning him away — he sensed it through both Shift and Patch, and it gave him pause.

So, instead of saying anything, he quietly wrote a note to Misa and Vex.

Of the four of them, Sev was the one still most bound to the system, and the one whose bonds they'd loosened the least. This felt like an indication that their time with that was coming to an end.

There was no response from either of them yet, but that was fine; he hadn't expected one. They were both likely going through their own brand of problems. He just hoped they'd be able to catch up to them in time.

"Shit!" Misa let out an undignified sort of yelp as she just barely ducked out of the way of a descending blade. If there was anything she hated, it was traps — not because she couldn't block them, although the fast ones gave her a run for her money. She still needed time to react to attacks to be able to block them, after all.

But traps were harder to block than people. People were easy to read. Traps had very little in the way of warning, especially when it came to the more advanced dungeons — simpler ones would have things like light-up sequences to show that a trap was about to go off.

Good trap design? No. Convenient? Very. Misa wasn't exactly complaining.

The Elyran dungeon was far from a simple dungeon, though. She was already using her skills to examine the corridor ahead of her to the fullest, and in every one of them, the traps were slightly different — the dungeon was changing the traps on her as her actions changed. It meant she couldn't cheat. If she reacted differently to a trap, the next trap would be different as well, so even copying everything that Misa-from-another-timeline did wasn't a guarantee—

A runic circle formed in front of her, and Misa let a half-growl rip out of her throat. This, at least, she had a concrete way to deal with. She'd spoken with Vex about it before, the application of [The Blade Arcane] to spell constructs. Arcane mana tended to take on the traits of other mana aspects it came into contact with, which meant it did an excellent job of hijacking other spells.

One straight line through the runic circle. Misa slashed a moment before the spell fired, watching with satisfaction as the circle fell apart; she didn't have the same knowledge Vex did and couldn't outright hijack a spell, but she could certainly destroy it.

Once Vex had told her the trick to it, anyway. She really hoped that little guy was alright.

"Well, well," someone said, and Misa froze, spinning to face the intruder. The voice came from behind her — there shouldn't have been anyone behind her. "We meet again. I see you actually survived."

It took a moment for her to parse who she was looking at. There was a man standing there, plain as he could be. Brown hair, black eyes, entirely too much stubble; familiar—

"Oh," Misa said, narrowing her eyes. "You're the piece of shit from the dungeon."

"Irvis, yes," the man said, giving her a mocking bow. There was a hint of distaste in the way the name rolled off his tongue. "I would say 'well met', but that would be a lie."

"Please stop talking like a villain for two fucking seconds," Misa said. "It's exhausting."

Irvis frowned at her and tutted his tongue. "Kids these days," he said. "No respect for the classics."

What the fuck were the classics? He gestured, and Misa tensed.

The timeline skill was... a complicated one to use. She could choose to do different actions in other timelines, and see how they played out; she could see what would have happened if she had done something just slightly different a few minutes ago in the past. That was useful, but it was a lot of information to focus on.

Which made it all the more worrying when every single other version of her was blown back. Not killed — she was harder to kill than that — but more than half her health was gone in most of them, from attacks too fast for her to see and block.

Even more worrying was that nothing happened to her here.

"Something wrong?" Irvis asked her, mock-concern lacing his voice. "All I did was move slightly. Why do you look scared?"

"I'm not scared," Misa spat. She wasn't. There was a low anger thrumming inside her instead, calling her to violence. Irvis' words were designed to make her angry, to fight at less than her best.

Like she'd fall for that.

She'd been feeling that thread of anger ever since she'd entered Elyra. It'd be nice to have something to take that anger out on. There'd been too many fights lately where she had to hold back.

She would have burned timelines... but no. Irvis could see into them, for some reason or the other; could even choose how differently he acted in each one. In some way he was aware of her skills, and was using them against her. She had no doubt that he'd do the same if she tried to summon anyone from her village, but that didn't mean that her bag of tricks was empty.

She wasn't one to use skills conventionally, after all.

But first, a little test to see how Irvis reacted to conventional attacks.

Misa leapt forward, drawing [The Blade Arcane]; Irvis met her with a savage grin. She didn't even see him wielding any sort of weapon against her. He wore a standard, well-trimmed suit, and when his reaction to her attack was simply to reach for her weapon, she allowed it. It was clear that something would happen, and that something would give her information.

Arcane mana twisted.

The nature of arcane mana was that in some sense it took on the properties of any mana type it encountered; this she understood in an abstract sort of way, from the half-dozen lectures Vex had given about it. It still surprised her when the sword compressed and warped, eyes and nails and teeth growing along its length in a way that looked unnervingly like Irvis—

It snapped at her, and she mentally released her lock on it. Strange mana-flesh faded away almost immediately, replaced once more with the serene purple-red arcane energy that normally formed the blade, and Misa leapt back before Irvis could retaliate.

Not that he seemed to want to. He merely smiled at her, infuriatingly self-satisfied. "Learn anything useful?" he asked, his voice still mocking.

Misa smiled back. "I did."

Irvis was a creature of mana. Just like the mana abomination they'd fought, way back when all this first started.

"Wanna know something really weird I can do?" Misa asked, her tone nonchalant.

"What's that?" Irvis' tone was almost bored.

Misa attacked with [The Blade Arcane] again, throwing it towards Irvis.

It was, technically, a mana-based attack.

The instant before it struck, she blocked it. Reality shifted, and her mace took on a set of rapidly-shifting prismatic colors as she blocked her own strike with a clang, and in that moment — in that instant between her mace reverting into a normal mace, while her weapon existed as whatever was optimal for blocking a mana-based attack —

She also used it to strike Irvis, as part of the same motion used to block the sword.

The prismatic colors of the mace settled into a single solid tone of blue and rang like a bell; it sent her sword flying, and more importantly, burned into Irvis' flesh with a loud crackle-pop. The thud as Irvis' body struck the wall hit her a second later, followed shortly by an enraged scream.

It was, Misa decided, very satisfying.