Anna

  There were many times when Anna questioned what the hell the past version of herself was thinking. Like why she would stubbornly refuse to sleep early the night before a hectic day despite her chronic inability to get up in the morning. Or how she would let Liesel provoke her into another bout of sparring when she knew they had physical examinations the next day at the Academy.

  Or why she agreed to this godforsaken mission to look for a member of Vigil in the Saar.

  Did past Anna become arrogant after helping to take down of one of the inmates of Thanatos? Was she incensed by Isarelle’s destruction and compelled to enact justice for its civilians? Was she perhaps blinded by greed when she saw the reward that the Lionhearts were willing to pay for her participation?

  If she was objective and honest, it was likely all of the above. Anna didn’t consider herself a complicated person. Her goals and motivations were nothing crazy compared to the average student at the Academy—get stronger, make a name for herself, and then leverage that to carve herself a place in her family’s business. Nothing special. Nothing peculiar.

  Clearly, she must have went wrong somewhere because it somehow led her into a world-shattering brawl between a stone colossus and a godlike memetic entity.

  The thunderous clash between the two titans stormed across the encampment. Anna ran to escape the immediate vicinity of their battle. Getting crushed by the towering construct’s erratic movements was one thing, but it was the ensuing shrapnel from their clash that became the main threat. Each time Nabil’s colossus exchanged blows with Anubis, fragments of the massive stone construct would rain down like missiles. Anubis’s attacks were unfathomably strong. Each swing of its stone staff ripped through the air like explosions, smashing off chunks of the colossus. The damage was never permanent, however, as both titanic constructs would immediately regenerate thanks to their Exalted’s mana.

  The titans were evenly matched as far as Anna could tell. And so, the conflict for the Azurite mine quickly devolved into a battle of attrition. Whoever ran out of mana first between Nabil and Rakan determined the winner.

  Anna sent out a shockwave to repel the stone missiles coming her way. Rocks that looked they were going to miss whizzed by her sharply before exploding into the earth. A shadow suddenly loomed above. She glanced up, finding herself underneath a massive boulder that had been tore off the colossus.

  Shit.

  She immediately judged that this one was too big for her repel. Instead, she channeled electricity into her legs, pushing her body to their unnatural limits.

  The boulder landed inches behind her as she narrowly evaded the stray missile. She switched Volt off in an instant once she determined that she was safe. The extended use of her Gift was starting to take its toll. Her body spasmed uncontrollably sometimes as she moved. The minor convulsions were annoying for now, but they would soon become debilitating if she continued to abuse her body.

  Almost there.

  Liesel and Nabil were in front of her. She should be safer from the shrapnel once she’s able to hide underneath the entrance of the Azurite mine. After the battle between the titans had begun, the fight between the Dhazara and Zal’Khari warriors had mostly stopped. Both forces retreated out of the way, trying not to end up as collateral between the titan’s brawl.

  Or so she thought.

  War cries suddenly filled her ears. Alarmed, she looked to the side and found a contingent of Zal’Khari warriors rushing towards the Azurite mine.

  Are they insane?!

  She really shouldn’t have asked after Emil warned them about the militaristic tribe. The Zal’Khari were mad. Their warriors seemed to have no sense of self-preservation and possessed a lack of fear towards death. As long as they were ordered by a commander, they would enact those commands with dauntless tenacity.

  A stray stone missile blasted into one of the Zal’Khari warriors. Their left flank was decimated like it had been mauled off by the claws of a beast. Despite the obviously fatal injury, the Zal’Khari was still trying to run, crawling and dragging himself through the sand with half a body while screaming their cacophonous war cry. Several other warriors also met a similarly gruesome fate, but they all continued to advance until their dying breath.

  Anna wanted to puke.

  The gore was disturbing enough, but the desperation and insanity of the Zal’Khari was completely alien to her. It was horrific watching them pry themselves forward in their mad gazes until they physically couldn’t move any longer.

  The sight of scarlet ice snapped her out of her shock.

  Liesel. Her Gift severed the one of the vanguard’s head. Right. The Zal’Khari were here for Nabil. Rakan couldn’t have been content with this battle of attrition.

  Anna felt a burst of mana. A Zal’Khari Exalted suddenly leaped into the air and launched himself directly onto Liesel and Nabil’s positions. He held a massive battleaxe over his head, threatening to plunge the weapon straight down. Liesel immediately retaliated with several blood lances. The projectiles carved through the Zal’Khari’s body, but the man was unfazed, committed to the attack.

  The battleaxe plunged into the earth with a deafening crunch. Liesel and Nabil barely jumped out of the way. The Zal’Khari didn’t miss a beat and launched a follow-up swing with reckless abandon. The battleaxe never moved beyond his initial wind-up, however. His arms and body were suddenly locked in place. A closer inspection revealed that the blood pouring from his wounds was freezing. The scarlet ice crawled, rapidly spreading along his limbs like a growing web.

  Inexplicably, the ice then shattered.

  Anna was confused. She didn’t detect any sudden surge in mana from the Zal’Khari Exalted. How did he break free? She turned to Liesel. A crossbow bolt protruded from her shoulder as she was sent reeling backwards. Archanum. Her mana circulation had been disrupted.

  She pulled out a coin from her pockets right as the newly-freed Zal’Khari pounced.

  “Ionize!”

  The electrified coin tore through the air in a blink of an eye. A trail of electricity followed its trajectory as it blasted through the Zal’Khari Exalted’s skull. The man collapsed, his battleaxe dropping to the ground uselessly before he could complete his swing. Liesel wasted no time. She ripped out the Archanum bolt disrupting her mana and then using the man’s blood to reforge her ice barricades. The ensuing rain of projectiles pelted harmlessly against her fortifications.

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  “Liesel, are you okay?” Anna said, finally arriving at her side.

  The Belle scion was clenching her shoulders. The wound looked grisly and mangled. The bolt must have landed at a weird angle. Regardless, Liesel hovered her hand over the injury and channeled, turning the fresh blood congealed into a tiny layer of ice to staunch the bleeding.

  “Fine. Thanks,” she muttered, wincing. “Goddammit, I can’t believe I had trouble with that brute. If I was at full strength…”

  Anna almost sighed out of exasperation. Liesel sounded more flustered about her abilities than nearly getting cleaved in half by a battleaxe.

  “Focus,” she said, turning back towards the encroaching Zal’Khari contingent, “We need to keep Nabil safe. He’s the only one who can deal with the memetic entity.”

  The Dhazara leader was consumed with controlling his stone colossus. The strain of his Gift must have been immense since he barely acknowledged them despite how close they were to danger.

  “Or we take a page from the Zal’Khari and send you at Rakan,” Liesel proposed.

  “What?”

  “I’m tired of being on the defense. We need to do some disruption of our own instead of being reactive. We’re heavily outnumbered, but we have the stronger Exalted.”

  Anna shot her an incredulous look. “You don’t know that. The one that killed Van hasn’t showed up yet. How do you know he’s not guarding Rakan?”

  “I strongly doubt that he would be on guard duty instead of trying to take out Nabil. He’s almost certainly not here if he hasn’t appeared yet. The riffraff that Rakan just sent our way is probably the best he’s got left.”

  Anna clenched her teeth. Liesel’s hunch was probably right. Still, rushing head-first through the clash of two titans while trying to dodge Archanum attacks from the Zal’Khari felt suicidal. No, it was definitely suicidal. She didn’t even have visuals on the Zal’Khari leader. Sand and stone crowded the area around the titan’s brawl. Rakan was hiding somewhere behind that veil of chaos with who knows how many guards and reserve forces.

  “Maybe, but you’re idiotic if you think I’m running through that to fight someone who I can’t see.”

  “You can do it. I believe in your abilities.”

  Anna scoffed. “Stop trying to get me killed just because you got hurt and had to be saved twice.”

  They continued to exchange words back and forth, the morbid banter being the only thing to distract themselves from the insanity in front of them. The Zal’Khari contingent never stopped in their relentless attempt to get to Nabil. More warriors and Exalted continued to rush at their position, trying to bypass Liesel’s ice barricades. The only silver lining was that as more bodies fell, Liesel’s Gift grew more potent. The ever-increasing quantity of blood nearby allowed her a greater volume of liquids to leverage for her ice attacks.

  The ground suddenly trembled. Anna instinctively knew that something was different. The tremors this time were persistent and rolling, unlike the occasional bursts of force coming from the two titans vying for control of encampment. She peeked her head out of the entrance of the Azurite mine. The entire caverns behind her seemed to be the source of the shaking.

  What did you do this time, Emil?

  A portion of the earth by the caverns suddenly exploded and out of the wreckage shot out a massive monstrosity that Anna had grown to hate. A sandworm. Only except this one was mind-bogglingly big. It rivaled the sizes of the stone colossus and Anubis. No, it was even larger—a fact that became evident as the monster continued to emerge from the depths of the cavern. The furs on its long, slithering body writhed in anticipation. Its mouth filled with teeth and suckers quivered with expectation. They were drenched in blood.

  Anna had a terrible premonition. She stared down at the Azurite mine entrance, wondering if her friends had an encounter with the disturbing creature. What the hell was something like this doing down here anyways?!

  The battlefield suddenly descended into silence. Everyone seemed to freeze, aghast at the appearance of the giant monster. Even the stone colossus and Anubis stopped their brawl. The reason was simple—the sandworm relied on their ability to detect vibrations to find prey. None wanted to be the source of the monster’s ire.

  The sandworm alone changed the dynamics of this battlefield. The monster was a natural disaster. With the titan’s locked in a battle of attrition and the Zal’Khari’s attempt to get to Nabil effectively stalled by Liesel and Anna, the encampment was in a stalemate. One wrong move and the sandworm would become the kingmaker of this conflict.

  What do we do?

  Anna slowly turned, shooting a glance at Liesel and Nabil. The Dhazara leader had no words for her. His eyes were trembling with disbelief as he looked around to take in the situation. It was only a matter of time before someone broke from their paralysis. Adrenaline from the battlefield would soon dissipate and fear would settle in. Panic would rise until the dread of the sandworm became unbearable. It was inevitable. The only question was how can they use this to their advantage? Should they try to trigger the sandworm’s senses and compel them to attack the Zal’Khari? But how? How can they do that without it backfiring on them?

  Force Rakan’s side to move. Or create any movement or sounds near Anubis’s position without moving ourselves.

  This was trivial if Emil was here. But neither Anna and Liesel’s Gifts had long enough interference range. Maybe Liesel could if she wasn’t constrained by the effects of the Saar. Although…

  She reached into her pockets, careful to only move her upper body. She took out a single coin. Volt’s electrostatic whine grazed her ears as she energized the coin. Ionize should have enough destructive potential to make a meaningful vibration near Anubis’s position. If nothing else, the attack might compel anyone in the vicinity to move out of the way. In her periphery, Liesel and Nabil were eyeing her with horror. The Dhazara leader eventually gave her a hesitant nod. Anna raised her hand and took aim.

  The sandworm suddenly screeched.

  Her bones shuddered in resonance with the high-pitch shriek. Every instinct and fiber of her body trembled in distress. Unknowingly, she took a step back. And fired Ionize. An explosion of electricity flared up as the coin landed somewhere around Anubis’s general area, but Anna couldn’t hear anything over the deafening cry of the monster.

  The sandworm lunged.

  Its long, writhing body glided along the sands at an alarming speed. Anything in its place was knocked aside or swept beneath the raging sands. Its cries never ceased, the high-pitch shriek only grew louder as the earth tremors resumed.

  Anna’s first instinct was to get a better look of the sandworm’s path. Where was it heading? Towards Anubis? Or Nabil’s stone colossus? Or somewhere else completely? A hand grabbed onto her shoulders, trying to pull her back deeper into the entrance of Azurite mine.

  Suddenly, she couldn’t hear anything. Only the dull whine of her eardrum popping echoed in her head. For a moment, she was confused until a storm of blue light engulfed everything. The shockwave came shortly after. The force slammed into her flank. She landed hard, her back dug into the ground as a wave of sand rained down upon her.

  What the hell just happened?

  Her mind couldn’t keep up with all the insanity. She struggled to her feet, biting her lips to overcome her headache and shimmering vision.

  The sky above the encampment was filled with a kaleidoscope of colors to the backdrop of a dense blue haze. Mana. Tons of it. So dense that it made her sick to look at. She gawked at the view in horror. She recognized this sight. She’s seen it before. She could never forget.

  Borealis.

  These were residuals of Vigil’s bomb.

  Anna stepped out of the entrance of the Azurite mine in a daze. The stone colossus stood with half of its torso destroyed in the sand. Anubis had vanished. And the sandworm…

  The giant monster had been blasted into pieces. Its wide mouth had been split apart while the rest of its body laid dead. Blood soaked the sands.

  Her hearing steadily recovered, and the first thing she heard was the incessant squeal of rats. Monstrous rodents suddenly filled the outreaches of the encampment as if standing guard. A few of them even emerged from the depths of the Azurite mine, blocking off any potential escape that they might have had.

  From the distant, a woman dressed in a black shawl laced with purple and gold stepped above the sand dune. Anna could feel the intensity of sharp piercing gaze as she scanned the encampment. A gasp of recognition escaped her mouth.

  “Princess Kiniyani,” she overheard Nabil mutter under his breath, “Well played.”

  The third tribe of the Saar, the Shiraza, had arrived.

  And Karni was their leader.