Ranvir wasn’t sure how long they ran for. All he remembered from the first hour was the burn of the salt water in his wounds and the empty dark of his pocket-space. He’d never teleported that fast or often before, not to mention carrying someone along with him. The effort wore him down until he finally staggered to a halt sometime later.

They took a brief break, only to be interrupted by a tether-sense lashing them from a great distance.

“Alexis,” Ranvir hissed, recognizing the braced’s touch.

“We have to move,” Amalia agreed.

With her Abilities, Amalia would be much better suited for finding them a camp where they could find some proper rest. She quickly came up with a signal she would leave on the lines to signal her location, and they split off.

Dark rings circled her eyes, and a coating of sweat and salt spray stuck hair to her forehead and neck. He worried for her, but couldn’t offer a better solution. They split up. Repeatedly, Ranvir felt the touch of Alexis’ tether-sense. None of them struck him like last time.

His Dagger ached in a throbbing echo of the strike to Ranvir’s soul, as Alexis somehow found him again. Ranvir grit his teeth and lowered the power he fueled into Sandstorm Rage. He didn’t need that much strength to cross between the platforms.

Theoretically, he should be much harder to track on the lines now. Space mana was loud at the best of times, and they’d been moving all over the upper layer of the fold, staining it in purple power. Internal Abilities, such as Rage, left a much lesser impact on the ley lines as well.

It took another flare, if not longer, before he detect a slight hitch to his own senses. Amalia had found a location.

At first, Ranvir had been worried that their enemies could spot them from anywhere in the fold. Luckily, growths rapidly began appearing on the otherwise flat platforms. The sheer size had distracted him at first, causing him to mistake them for something else. Fyla stones, usually no bigger than the length of his finger and no wider at the base than three fingers, stood three and four meters tall.

Massive pyramidic shapes rose from the stone, densely enough that even his Perception enhanced senses couldn’t pierce from one end of the fold to the other. So when Ranvir first reached the supposed platform Amalia had picked out, he simply assumed she’d hidden within a crevice between two growths. It wasn’t until the water bubbles in a pattern odd enough for him to take notice of that he stepped away from the growths.

Stretching forth his senses, Ranvir finally detected what she had found. I guess murk mana has a few advantages, he thought, diving into the briny water. It stung at his eyes and wounds and Loce was almost torn off his jacket by the sudden resistance. Cold bit at his extremities. A small cavern appeared three meters below the surface. He reached it somewhat maladroitly, but could then use his hands to pull himself inside.

The water opened to a small cavern, an air bubble being maintained by some quirk of the fold, perhaps. It was dark and wet, and the stench of salt water was about a thousand times stronger than outside, but it was also relatively safe. The air was so thick with water mana, Ranvir feared he might accidentally drown in here.

“Ranvir,” Amalia said, her feet scuffing on the rocks as she stepped over to pull him out of the water. “You made it.”

He simply nodded, not finding the strength within to answer properly. Instead, he slumped down against the wall, stretching his feet out in front of him. Finally, the emotions that stress and the sense of oncoming battle had pushed away cleared their throat.

Deep, nearly black exhaustion hit him first. Different from his usual weariness, this came almost entirely from his emotions. The sudden flare up of familiar rage, the stoked furnace of searing fire. He blinked his eyes a few times, trying to force the sting of saltwater out of them as his mind traveled through familiar paths.

His hand found the hilt of his hammer. Having drawn it out of its pocket while fleeing, he squeezed the wet leather as hard as he could. The lightly worn wrappings bit into his callouses, pulling at his skin as his knuckles popped. He took in slow, meticulous breaths and began squeezing the handle rhythmically, his lips drawn back from his teeth.

Then the other emotions came forth, worry wearing the colors of dark violet and blue, crawling condemnation in sickly reds and yellows, and vile fear in the colors of black and white.

“How are you holding up?” Amalia asked.

It took him a while to gather a steady enough breath to answer. “I should be asking you that,” he muttered, finally wiping the salt water from his cheeks. The cuts on his face twinged with the movement. “You’re the one whose arm got cut up.”

“I have a healing Ability,” Amalia replied. “So long as I am in the dark with lots of water, I’ll recover.”

Ranvir nodded once. “That’s good, then.”

“We need a plan.”

“We do.”

“Can you break out?”

“Not easily. It’ll take me a while to wear down that seal they put on the entrance.”

“Could you break out of the fold in another way?”

“Not safely. I’d risk tearing the fold and dumping it onto Korfyi or my pocket-space.”

Amalia sucked in a harsh breath through her teeth. “Then we need to break it into smaller steps. We take out their trackers first.”

“Alexis first.”

“Agreed. If he can really reach us from halfway across the fold, then we need him out of the way.”

Ranvir nodded in agreement. The young man didn’t have Ranvir’s range with his tether-sense, but the violence with which he struck was unnerving. He was perhaps more potent than even Ranvir himself.

“How long do you need to rest?” Amalia asked.

“Not long,” Ranvir replied. Already his tether had mostly recovered from the heavy exertions and his Amanaris powers hadn’t been strained in the first place. “An hour or so to get some sleep, maybe a little more.”

“That’ll be plenty of time to go scouting, then.”

1 hour and a half earlier

Sabas sat at the head of the table, running his fingers across the chain. They’d cleared the platform of all the sand the Sentinel had conjured, giving them space to set up their center of operations.

He couldn’t yet tell if he was pleased that so many of his officers had made it into the fold before it was sealed or if he should be worried there weren’t more left behind with his other men.

“How many made it through?” Phineus asked. The logistics officer adjusted his scarf to hide the scars around his neck. A twinge of guilt assaulted Sabas at the sight, even as he tried to let it go.

“Sixty-one men,” One of his squad officers said, her officer insignia signifying her as the leader of the first army, their best trained. “Though we have a few injured, that will take a while to recover.”

“About that,” Stelios interjected. “Does anybody wanna talk about the absolute shit show we saw out there?” he cocked his head to Sabas, not hiding who he thought should be answering his questions. “That was hardly Kistios-levels of power. And so much for his ‘minor’ talent in space.”

Sabas sighed. “You’re right, Stelios, that was above what we expected of the Sentinel.”

“It’s a bit more than a blade-lengths expectation from what a Kistios can do,” one of the other squad leaders added. Sabas couldn’t blame him. His people had been positioned the worst. It was they that had suffered the worst from the Sentinel’s first attack. Sabas had seen the surge of sand snap one man’s leg at the knee and tear into the sea.

Mihail stepped into the tent and cleared his throat.

“Ah, Tracker,” Stelios said. “Good to see you have arrived. Maybe we can finally plot some information down.” The grumpy man got up and folded out the map they’d bought of the fold.

“And I’ll begin outlining what I can find soon enough, sir,” Mihail said with a slight bow of respect to the old strategist.

The old man stood up slowly. Sabas could almost hear how his body cracked and popped with the movement. “You haven’t even begun scouting yet?”

“Stelios, please,” Sabas said, forestalling the next belligerent bout about to burst out. “Let the man finish.”

The old man scowled but followed orders. “Aye, sir.”

“Alexis has recovered,” Mihail began immediately, barely giving enough time to nod at Sabas. “They’ve begun poking around, though they’re still looking a little unsteady.”

“He’s not recovered yet?” Phineus asked, his voice choked by the old injury.

“He’s a sensitive,” Sabas explained. “No matter how bad you felt about the Sentinel’s attack, he’d felt it a hundred times worse. Any news to report?”

Mihail shook his head. “Not really, sir. The scout seems to have split from the Sentinel, but we aren’t sure as of yet.”

Sabas sighed, running his fingers over the chain again, the energy buzzing against his fingertips. “Alright, men. For now, we establish a perimeter. Priorities are triage center and guarding the entrance. After that, I want all the men we can spare to help Phineus, as none of his officers made it through.”

Sabas could see the Stelios’ desire to complain, but he stifled it. The man might be a curmudgeon, but he’d been in twice as many fights as Sabas and lived through all of them. As the officers filed out, Mihail stepped over to the captain.

“What is that, sir?”

“The Sentinel was wearing it. There’s power in it, space I think, but I can’t tell what it does.”

Mihail pursed his lips. “Want Alexis to take a look at it?”

Sabas shook his head. “He’s not part of the Redoubt. I don’t want us becoming reliant upon him. What we’re doing now is bad enough. I’ll ask logistics to look when they have more time.”

Mihail nodded. “I gotta get back to work, sir.”

Sabas returned the gesture. “Dismissed.”

Once Mihail left, Sabas returned to the chain, running his fingers along the odd symbol suspended from the chain. The other symbols were familiar, spears and the like, except for the swirling symbol. What do you do, I wonder.