Kyle thrust his hands out, and the particles from his spell spread out across the area, coating it like a thin layer of snow. Not that I’d seen all that much snow—Syashan had been in a pretty temperate area, after all—but from the little I’d experienced up in the far north on the one or two times I’d been travelling when I was a kid, I was pretty sure that it was a similar sight. Well, that or dust, but snow felt a lot more poetic than the latter in my mind.

“What does this spell do?” I asked. “Investigative spell is neat, but it doesn’t give me much as a descriptor.”

“It allows me to witness the past history of what occurred in this area,” Kyle said. “Mirrored Echoes, I think that was the name my acquaintance gave me. I can make it visible to you, if you’d like.”

“Please,” I said. Try as I might, that irritating worry just wouldn’t fucking go away. It was burning a pit straight through my stomach, and no matter how much I kept pushing it off, it came back every time. “It would give me some peace of mind.”

“Give me a second,” Kyle said, his voice strained with effort. He drew another sphere from his collection, the construct of magic flying to his hand before disintegrating, its color not even fully resolved. “Need to feed the spell a little more power for that.”

The bubble popped again, and this time I could see as the magic flew to the particles around us, enlarging them to the point where I could actually see the way they rested on the ruined surface of the Varga manor and the surprisingly pristine exterior gates of the estate like so much ash.

Telling, that my mind had gone from snow to dust to ash so quickly. My head was in a bad place right now, one that I wasn’t altogether familiar with, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like it.

Fucking attachments. I’d always known that there were emotional issues tied to getting attached, but I’d assumed that my upbringing and the disconnect I’d had from the others in my village were enough to remove myself from those problems.

Apparently not.

Gods damn it all, I was going to have to come to terms with my feelings for—my feelings about Jasmine, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit anything about those. It was almost like they were buried just beneath the surface of my brain, hidden inside a closet door that would jostle open if I thought about it all too much.

I was thinking about that a lot more than I should’ve been, and it was hurting me.

“Any progress?” I asked Kyle, more to take my mind off of its own thoughts than to actually check for progress.

“Some,” he said. “It’s going to take me about another minute to fully cast this. Maybe more to cast the visual aspect. My Shanzhai oath allows me to copy another’s magic, but copying their tactics, tips, and tricks… those are all things I have to learn myself.”

Not for the first time, I took in his observation with some subdued level of awe. Kyle was pretty damn powerful, especially for a commoner. Hell, even if I looked at him from the perspective of a noble, he stacked up pretty well to all but the most diehard combat-focused nobles in the kingdom.

The wonders of education, huh? I was sure Jasmine had a thought or three on that, but I didn’t exactly have her to reference that.

And here we were again, thinking about the same thing for the umpteenth time.

“I got it,” Kyle said, a single drop of sweat trailing its way down his brow. Didn’t even smear his makeup, which I had to be a little jealous of. “It should be up in…”

He thrust his hands up, and images appeared from the ground. Rough ones, flickering like they were half-dispelled ghosts. They lacked a lot of detail and some of them manifested partially inside the ruins of the building, cutting them off from our sight, but they were there.

“Not my best work,” the jester admitted, putting his hands up. “In my defense, I played basically this whole thing by ear.”

I stepped forward, half-ignoring his words. There were a number of hazy figures here—far more than there should’ve been, confirming that there had been enemies here—but I’d be damned if I couldn’t recognize Jasmine. Even with her face unidentifiable, there was something in the way she carried herself, her height, and that general look she had to her with the blonde hair and blue eyes and lithe body that made her Jasmine.

Well, there was that and there was also the half-formed spell attack coming out of an awfully familiar revolver. That certainly helped a bit.

“Mirrored Echoes tracks moments in time,” Kyle said. “I can’t record a sequence of events here, since there’s something about magic and the limited memory it can take up, but I can look at moments that Oloje has determined carry great amounts of weight in accordance with my current purpose.”

“Got it,” I said. “So this moment…”

Jasmine and her revolver, alongside three boys that I assumed were Alex, Lukas, and Orchid, were frozen in a moment. I traced the path of her spell, looking down its trajectory, and I found a mess of blurry figures.

“Right, about this,” Kyle said, noticing my gaze. “Like I said, I didn’t copy the technique perfectly. Visually, there might still be a number of issues.”

The attackers had been too close to each other for us to get a clear image of how many there’d been. I didn’t see the number clearly, at least. There were quite a few of them, though, enough that the resulting blob was large enough to have represented a crowd almost as large as Seb’s mob.

“Visually, you said,” I replied, clinging onto that word. “That means you see something different?”

“I count… twelve,” Kyle said. “Split up further across than this image you see here would make you believe. Once again, objects here are not quite represented as they are.”

“Oathholders?” I asked. “And was there nobody else here?”

“I made physical representations of those that I believed to be relevant,” Kyle said. “There are more of them present, but I believe they were further away and therefore either already in the process of evacuating or not in the building itself.”

“I didn’t find any dead bodies when I searched the place,” I said, taking a step around the enemy-blob. “Whatever happened here, it either killed them so thoroughly that they didn’t even leave behind a skeleton, or they left.”

“Or they were captured,” Kyle mused. “Though interestingly enough, I do not believe I detect the Varga patriarch or matriarch here.”

“It’s possible that they were out having their own discussion,” I said. “As much as we’ve been through a whole fuckload of things in the last few days, we’re not the ones that are actually supposed to be dealing with shit on this scale. We’re still barely adults, y’know? I think it’s pretty reasonable—“

“You’re right,” Kyle said, putting up a hand. “Sorry for interrupting, but yes, you’re right.”

“s’ fine,” I mumbled. I’d gotten into rambling. Bad habit to have.

Still, I was right. There were others around us that were actually nobles, and as much as I wanted to shit on them for their utter failures as human beings, it was still their duty to handle this type of conflict, not mine.

We were a bunch of adventurers, not politicians. This wasn’t our duty to solve, but we’d taken it anyway. Why? I mean, it was pretty clear that Kyle had a stake here with the commoners, and Jasmine was always looking to improve the state of the people, but why Alex or Lukas? Why did they choose to get so involved when their own families—

Oh, right. Alex’s family hated him. That meant that all of the adventurers—all of the nobles—I was with had independently made the choice of staying here to do whatever they could to make a difference in this conflict, while I’d simply… let myself get dragged along.

There was a lot to unpack there, but as much as it was tempting to get myself bogged down by moral questions, that was really and truly unnecessary right now.

“Next image,” Kyle said, manipulating his magic with his hands. Around us, the scenery started vibrating, the particles moving from side to side as the jester repositioned his spell.

When the impromptu blizzard of red died down, the scene had changed. Now, Jasmine and Lukas were holding a defensive position. A couple figures were next to them, though I didn’t recognize who they were, and they seemed to be friendly. They weren’t attacking each other, at least. The figures that I was pretty sure corresponded to Alex and Orchid were on the floor, though I had no clue whether that meant they were dead or just down for the count.

As for the enemies… they’d increased in number, and the group of adventurers had been properly surrounded. I could kind of make out the details of most of them, but I wasn’t quite sure who exactly they were. There weren’t identifying details like crests or sigils that would’ve made it clear who they were affiliated with.

“Shit,” I said, the word escaping even though I had known something like this had probably happened. “They got overwhelmed.”

“Most likely, yes,” Kyle agreed. “Some of the attackers were oathholders. None of them have visible effects here, I don’t think, but there were definitely some of those among their number. Pretty decent equipment, too.”

“Fuck me,” I whispered. “Did they die?”

If Alex and Orchid were dead and had simply been carted off to another location, there was a decent chance that Jasmine was as well.

“I don’t think they’re dead,” Kyle said. “I don’t have detailed feedback from the spell, but the general wave of ideas I’m receiving from this scene say that they’re just out of the fight.”

The scene changed again. The adventurers were all down now, dancing beams of lightning-shaped particles indicating the aftereffects of someone’s oath.

“Can you tell what that oath was?” I asked. “It looks like it managed to take them all down.”

Jasmine was included in that count. There were one, two… thirteen people downed overall, though I was pretty sure a number of enemies were included there as well. Jasmine and the others hadn’t gone down without a fight, at least.

“It’s not an Igni one,” Kyle frowned. “I… I don’t think I recognize the god it’s to. It must be a lesser one.”

A third or fourth pantheon god, perhaps. Not an oath that most soldiers would have, let alone a bunch of commoners.

“Any identifying features?” I asked. “Or indication on where they might’ve gone?”

“Hold on a minute,” the jester said, walking through the projections. He peered at and around the semitransparent creations he’d cast, though his gaze was affixed to points slightly off from where the projections were. His own, more accurate perception of the events, most likely. “There might be some, but I’m not sure. One of them has more of their uniform visible in this one.”

He found one specific shadowy figure—it had its hands thrust forward, light emitting from them, so it was probably one of their oathholders—and started pacing around it, glancing inwards all the while.

“See anything?” I asked again. It hadn’t been fifteen seconds since I’d last asked a similar question, but I was getting worried. Just because Jasmine wasn’t dead yet and hadn’t been dead in this image didn’t mean that there was no reason to fear for her life.

“I have a crest,” Kyle said. He looked up, his frown made more apparent by the painted-on makeup covering his face. “It’s not from a uniform. This one was carrying paperwork.”

The jester pointed to an area in space where I couldn’t see much more than vague shadow and wispy approximations of a body.

“I don’t see it,” I said. “I can make out the body, but the details were lost.”

“Right,” Kyle said. “I can draw it. One second.”

He reached behind his back, and out of nowhere he extracted a massive feathered pen that definitely hadn’t been stored there a few moments ago.

“The fuck?” We were covering more serious issues right now, but it still caught me off guard enough that I felt the need to react.

“Sorry. Habits.”

Right. Clown.

From another non-oath-related spurt of sleight-of-hand—though I definitely would’ve bought it if he’d told me that this was part of his oath—Kyle flicked his wrist forward, a small notepad appearing in his palm when it was complete.

He knelt down on the ashy ground, heedless of how it had to be staining his unnecessarily flamboyant pants, and I watched as he put pen—quill, rather—to paper, scratching over it with a dedication that I could only hope to match in my creative pursuits.

“You seem rather into this,” I commented, watching him fool around with the quill.

“I’m a man of many talents, what can I say?” the jester replied, glancing up to give me a smug grin without even slowing down with his drawing. “It comes to me naturally. And also after several years of practice.”

At length, he finished the drawing and passed the notepad to me.

A shield, with crossed laurels under it and the slashed T that had been in vogue a decade or so ago. The crest was drawn surprisingly well, but then Kyle was truly a multi-talented man.

I recognized the crest. Well, most of it. Maybe it had changed, or maybe it was just a related division, but I knew of this group. We’d never run into problems with them when I’d been younger, though.

“This is the Church’s noble-facing department,” I said. “I think. The multifaith Church’s subgroup that handled diplomacy and shit with the nobles used to be like that, at least.”

“So you were a noble?” Kyle asked, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t know who else that would be useful for.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, a little resigned. The cat was out of the bag now, and it had irreparably torn the bag on exit. I wasn’t going to be putting that secret away anytime soon, it looked like. “The important part is that we have an idea of what we’re doing.”

“Why would the Church be involved, can I ask?” Kyle said. “I’m gonna be honest, I only pay enough attention to noble politics to see if anyone wants me for a job or a job.”

“Respectable,” I said. “Well, I’m not one for politics either, but—“

“Oh wait, you all mentioned it,” Kyle said, snapping his fingers. “Yesterday night. It was so hectic, I nearly forgot. Something about the Church wanting an excuse to go off at the nobles?”

“Kind of,” I said. “Fuck. Dealing with them is going to be a pain. They’ve been massing power against nobility for a while, I’m pretty sure. They were doing it a decade ago, and they might still be doing it now.”

“Fundamental disagreements?”

“Yeah. Turns out that when one organization promotes naturally finding oaths and the support of the rare few Chosen while the other one shits out oathholders like they’ve just had a bad bout of indigestion, you get conflicts.”

“That’s definitely a choice of words,” Kyle said. “A bit of a lurid description, if I do say so myself.”

“Well,” I said. “It is what it is. I don’t want to deal with the Church, especially since they did help me at some point, but if we’ve got to, we will.”

Despite being at such odds with modern oath philosophy, it couldn’t be said that the multifaith Church was at odds with the people. In Syashan, it had been an important place in the community, somewhere where the people could be helped through their darkest times and village folk could get together and socialize. Though I’d never partaken in the latter, I’d gotten more than my fair share of free meals from them before I’d learned how to make a name and space for myself.

I didn’t have a particularly strong attachment to them, but they weren’t evil, at the very least. On top of that, they were strongly against nobles, which, as far as I was concerned, was a point in their favor.

Still, if this particular branch had decided to cross me, they’d picked the wrong person. There were points that I disagreed with the Church on, and many more points that I agreed with, but I didn’t give a single shit about that while they had Jasmine.

They would burn.

That is, if they actually did have Jasmine. One document wasn’t enough to prove anything. All it did was give us a good place to start.

“To the Church it is, then?” Kyle said. “This scene and spell are both just about played out. We might want to get a move on.”

I wordlessly agreed, producing a noise of assent with my throat. “To the multifaith Church.”

There wasn’t a branch of the Church in the noble sector, since conflict between the two groups had ensured that they would never coexist peacefully. However, in Dakheng proper, there was more than one. There were, to the best of the knowledge I’d obtained while scouring the city last week, at least two separate headquarters in this city as well as a dozen or more independent establishments that served as churches. Dakheng was a major powerhouse of a city, so I guess that warranted having more of them here.

Kyle just so happened to have a map of the city stowed away somewhere, because of course he did, so we used that to determine where we should go first.

“One of the headquarters,” Kyle suggested. “We can go for questioning if we can’t find them.”

“Start small,” I disagreed. “They aren’t in communication frequently enough for them to start noticing there’s something wrong if it’s only the small churches being attacked. Besides, those are the most likely ones to have people hidden away. The headquarters are too obvious.”

“I’ll defer to you on this one,” Kyle said. “I’m not exactly a professional.”

The streets were, if not empty, no longer hostile. Nobody bothered us, and we bothered nobody.

Soon enough, we had arrived at the first Church establishment.

The door was locked, but that wasn’t a problem for me. All it took was a fistful of unstructured magic and the doorknob fell to pieces.

“Let’s see if we can’t find some answers,” I said, and I kicked the door open.