I stood inside another world once more, and took a deep breath. This one was a rocky area, full of enormous boulders. There were sparse trees, but each one was titanic. Hundreds of meters tall.

  The conversation with Mr. Henney still raced through my mind. Zinnic. Fucking Zinnic. They had tried to hurt my family. Tried to hurt my girlfriend. They had caused me nothing but trouble, and were a pgue upon this world.

  And the only reason I wasn’t killing them, right now, was… well, okay, maybe not just one reason. Some of the people working for them were decent. There were innocent livelihoods involved. Our guild did not have the infrastructure to repce them. And their cooperation with the usurpers at least made new gate openings predictable.

  In a bizarre way, the fact that we had Olivia on the inside of their organization was kind of keeping them alive.

  My thoughts were dispelled when Ann stepped through the portal. She took a deep breath and smiled. “It feels so good to have the seal dispelled some more,” she said.

  I smiled. She was right. With the gateway, we were not nearly as impacted as most people. That was also why I was still confident in beating even Zinnic’s strongest right now. But still.

  The fact that we were properly in the fourth realm again felt rather nice. My wellspring bubbled in my chest, a fountain of liquid gold. And next to me, Ann hummed with Mana. She was a fourth circle mage, after all, at the very peak of that realm.

  Her Mana core was enveloped by four revolving rings of power. With the seals lifting, the amount of magic she could cast was incomparable to before. It felt like there was a palpable sense of gravity around her - ah, no, that was actually there. She had summoned her silver diadem, the Burden of Lordship.

  Matt came through next, zily twirling his sword with a telltale glint in his eyes. “Did you see the way the old man looked at me, Fio?” he asked. “He wants to kill me. Hahaha. I wanna see him try.”

  “You’re an idiot, Matt,” I said.

  He paused, then snickered. “Fair enough. Fair enough.”

  A moment ter, the others came through. Marie, wielding a bow made of wood with glowing lines. Liam, wrapped in a cloak of darkness. Emilia, her armor lined with living stone. And finally Reya, who glowed with faint divinity.

  “Clear?” Marie asked.

  “For now, clear,” I replied with a nod.

  “Alright,” our archer said. “Scouting. Liam?”

  Silently, the rogue nodded. There was a tiny noise, like a droplet falling into a pond, and his shadow rippled like water, then shattered. Dozens of tiny fragments hovered, then darted away, zipping through this world.

  None of us had remained passive since we came to Neamhan, and our attributes showed it. We were prodigies, after all. It was virtually impossible not to grow… and Liam had developed techniques to move his own shadow around remotely. And in pieces. And teleport to them, if needed.

  I smiled at the strange dispy of powers. We hadn’t gone on a real raid together in a while. It felt… oddly nostalgic.

  “Usurpers are further out,” Liam whispered after a handful of seconds. “Couple hundred meters, in all directions. They’re rge. Dinosaur-likes.”

  “Ohhh, fun,” Matt hummed. “Shame we’ll have to close it in a single dive.”

  Reya rolled her eyes at him and gestured forward. Liam nodded. “Yeah, we have a suitable target.”

  “Let’s go,” Marie said. Then she took a step and vanished.

  I blinked. She had gotten scary fast recently. It was some kind of archery technique, except that she bent her body like a bow and then shot off like an arrow. The motion looked a bit bizarre, but it worked well for her, so I didn’t judge.

  Instead, I just followed, stepping into the air. Ann flew next to me, and Matt ran on a storm of pink petals. Liam slid along the ground as a shadow himself, while the earth shifted under Emilia to move her and Reya.

  Looking at everyone made me smile. In a handful of seconds, we already made it to the usurper - and Liam had not been kidding. It was huge, bigger than even a dinosaur had any right being. An enormous jaw, each tooth the same size as I was. It also had half a dozen limbs on the ground, and two more pairs for grabbing, with terrifying cws at their ends.

  “Alright. Emilia, Fio, Matt, draw it,” Marie said. She was hidden in one of the enormous tree, standing further away, an arrow already nocked on her bow.

  “You got it,” Emilia replied. She took a breath, then stepped forward. The ground moved like a trampoline, and shot her into the air like a springboard. The dinosaur noticed her a moment ter, when the living rock on her armor expanded.

  It was an incredibly dense thing she had made together with Ann and Marie. They’d taken an item that dropped from the usurpers because of [Transference]and then modified it on top of that. Now, it was a modur crystal that matched Emilia’s Qi aspect, could condense in on itself a hundred times over, and also had some minor automatic protection functions.

  Currently, Emilia was undoing that compression. The crystal ttice bent, cracked, then reformed. There was some dimensional magic ongoing, too, that let her manipute whether it was heavy or not, and currently, she was turning into a small meteor, weighing no less than a couple tons.

  By the time the dinosaur had fully turned, Emilia smashed into it like a small meteor, sending even the titanic monster stumbling back. The stone condensed back into a thin coating on her armor before she nded on the ground.

  Matt got there next. While the creature was stumbling, a storm arose around it. Pink petals suddenly dug into the cracks between its scales. Emilia had opened a wound, and Matt was more than ready to open it wide. I saw him move his sword like a paintbrush, and the storm followed.

  A moment ter, blood dripped from the monster’s side like a fountain. A thousand razor sharp petals were digging into it, tearing little paths through its flesh and mangling its insides. It roared in pain, snapping at Matt, and its jaws closed on liquid gold.

  From the start, before Liam even came into the gate, an alternate version of myself had been exploring forward. She had been fighting this monster for a little while, and now we changed pces.

  Instantly, the work the half-real Fio had done superimposed itself on the world. The usurper bled from its legs, one of the cut clean off, and found itself with an enormous, unbreakable golden spear between its jaws.

  The ability had become second nature by now. Almost always, there was a second reality I was exploring. Another version of me that was only halfway real. It was different from my [Manifestation] - granted by my gateway. That summoned a fully real clone of me, allowing me to do two things at once.

  This ability, instead, was part of my css. A part of [True Mirror], another reality, parts of which I could manifest. Swap pces, cause wounds to appear or disappear, a mirror image that wasn’t quite the same.

  Now, I’d swapped pced with my surreal self, appearing in the jaw of the dinosaur. Dozens of spears wove themselves out of liquid gold behind my back, my Qi so dense it was almost entirely opaque.

  Astraeus, my wonderful spirit who had grown alongside me, decred these weapons as part of himself, and their aura became even more crushing. I sent them down the monster’s throat, piercing the back of its mouth.

  It tried to roar, but gold flowed down its esophagus and severed its vocal chords.

  Then, the creature shook even more than it already had, when Emilia hit it again, shattering another leg as it crumpled like parchment paper - I knew, because I could see through her eyes. They were reflective, after all.

  Marie shot an arrow.

  She had grown more than any of us, really, because she had been a little behind in terms of raw power. Now, she was at the middle of wellspring realm, and her magic was at the peak of third circle. She imbued her arrow with nature Qi and a few force amplification spells, and when it flew from her enchanted bow, it moved with the force of a missile.

  Her arrows weren’t normal, either. They came from a quiver that we’d received from the usurper, and were made entirely from wood. She could prepare different ones, and the one she’d chosen… Grew to be as thick as a cannonball.

  It was like an oversized ballista bolt, and it pierced the usurper’s eye effortlessly. Then, it exploded into a bst of fire and thorns.

  As the creature grew dizzy, Liam came upon it like a swarm of horrors. He had worked on shadows, and the way he manifested them. Now, he puppeteered a mimicry of the dinosaur, woven from abyssal darkness. Except that it was infinitely more malleable. Instead of one maw biting down, the shadow-dinosaur bit, then flowed forward to bite again.

  Over and over, until the real one was enveloped and torn to shreds.

  I stepped through the reflection of Ann’s eyes, appearing just a step next to her. She gave me a small pout.

  “Didn’t even get to cast a spell,” she said.

  “Hahaha, yeah you did. I know you analyzed them,” I replied.

  She pouted even more. “That barely counts! It’s not fire.”

  “It’s literally the most complex spell you know,” I chided.

  Marie cpped. “Focus,” the message came to us through voice transmission, carried by her Qi. “What did you find out.”

  Ann nodded, focussing. The spell she had cast was called [Revetion], and it was one she had developed herself. No doubt there were simir ones out there, but that hardly mattered. Hers was probably one of the greatest.

  By utilizing the talents of the archmages, Ann had gotten far more insights into the nature of magic, space, life, and growth. [Intuition] from Erasmus the seer, [Researcher] from Calio, the lich, Klein the healer’s [Sympathy] and Lyria, the spatial mage’s [Gridwork] were all combined with the [Archive] of Archiva’s angel.

  The final touch was the tiny bit of [Stargazer] left within me. [Budding Nova]. It was not the strongest talent I had, and usually I shared [Precipitous Wings], but it was powerful. The stars within people’s chests told you a lot about them.

  Ann had taken all of these talents, and used them to develop a perceptive spell. It was a masterwork, with a long incantation, and rather demanding on mana, but she had developed downsized versions, too. It was made to pick apart virtually everything. This time, she had cast the full-scale thing.

  “They’re called tyritars, apparently. Tough scales which can be ground down into a hardening solution. Useful for potions of reinforcement or working into armor. They have a pseudo-draconic breath organ, letting them exhale acid fumes. Also, they have incredible mutation abilities, with some kind of mechanism that lets them modify DNA on the fly, so expect minor shapeshifting and adaptive resilience, as well as a generally high healing factor.”

  “Weaknesses?” Marie probed.

  “Calories,” Ann noted. “Huge bodies require enormous sustain, and their Echo isn’t enough. You can starve them by forcing them to expend too much energy. Otherwise, they can’t harden their insides as easily as their outside. Also, the mucus membranes stopping their own acid from eating them are temperature sensitive - a couple hundred degrees, and they’ll dissolve themselves.”

  Matt rolled his eyes. “Of course they’d be vulnerable to fire. Fio, she’s gonna go full pyromaniac, isn’t she?”

  I already saw the fmes light up in Ann’s hands, glowing with six-coloured rainbow brilliance. It made me smile. “Yeah, Matt. I don’t think there are more ways about it.”

  “There aren’t,” she assured me.

  “Kiting another one over,” Liam said. “Blood should be a good lure, if you said calories.”

  “It is,” Ann confirmed. The grin on her face widened, her hair gently drifting in the updraft the fmes created. “I’ll turn this pce into ash.”