The storm of Netherthreads ripped the expedition apart. I had, of course, instinctively used Illumination to protect myself and my nearby teammates, repelling the Netherthreads pretty easily. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of our little army.

  It was difficult to piece together everything that was happening in the sudden gloom. The Netherthreads were suffocating any other sources of light, including the Illumination torches I had created. Far off in the distance, black threads were spiking into the expeditioners. One Rakshasa got turned into a pincushion, frothing with dark spears that ripped his body apart with a spray of gore.

  Another Scalekin woman was dragged off into the seething darkness, screaming and clawing at the unrelenting ground all the while. No one was even close enough to help. No one, not even I, could react in time with everything else going on.

  Yet another instance had the Netherthreads combining together to form tendrils thicker than suspension bridge cables. One adventurer had created a barrier around a group of others. A barrier that was being systematically hammered by the enormous threads. Before I could take the breath I needed to act, the barrier got crushed.

  Their screams were lost in the general din along with their bodies.

  “We’re being torn apart,” Khagnio shouted.

  “Fuck.” I was on my feet, but shock and horror were rooting me to my spot. We needed to act. I needed to do something. “This is bad.”

  “The Councillor…”

  Cerea’s voice dragged my glance briefly to Se-Vigilance. She was standing several dozen feet ahead of us. Her gathered prismatic power was tanking the worst of the Netherthreads, a literal avalanche of frothing liquid blackness trying to descend on her only to get repelled by the aura of opaline energy.

  She had said that she was forging onwards to the real barrier keeping us trapped. If she wasted her energy trying to protect us, we’d never reach the real goal we had set out to achieve.

  We couldn’t depend on her to save us from the Nether Vein, no matter what it threw in our direction.

  “They’re surviving,” Ugnash said. “We can do this. We just need to stick to your lights, Ross.”

  He was right and had clearly been thinking the same thing I had—that we’d need to save ourselves without the Councillor’s help. When I whipped my head around, I found that most of the expeditioners had rallied around the torches I had handed out. The sheer intensity of the Netherthreads meant they weren’t being fully repelled, but they were better than nothing.

  I started channelling Illumination with Manifestation. Getting to everyone in time was impossible. I’d just have to trust that I had grown strong enough that I could manifest light everywhere I needed to despite the distance.

  “What is it now—oh, blasted Pits!”

  Khagnio’s curse ruined my attempt to focus. His alarm sent my concentration spiralling, and when I saw what had him so concerned, I found myself momentarily frozen too.

  Monsters were emerging from the murk. They were a variation we hadn’t seen yet. And going by the way the others were reacting, they hadn’t seen those in the previous expedition either.

  These creatures were humanoid. Rotten flesh and skeletal limbs made them look deceptively weak, but the bone-weapons in their grasping hands were edged with deadly green light. Things got a whole lot worse as the flesh around their chest unfurled into more limbs, each one carrying a jagged bone suffused with the same light.

  As expected, the creatures were no pushovers. Khagnio was forced to engage with the first one directly with his knives, the exchange of their blows blurring in the air. Crap, those things were incredibly fast.

  Two more had swarmed Ugnash, who was trying to shield Cerea.

  I thought about preparing to fight, but then my party turned things up a notch. Khagnio had beaten back the first monster, but several more were rushing his position. Even Ugnash was getting swarmed, despite Cerea trying to assist from the back. I had created bursts of Flare to assist them, but it turned out that was unnecessary.

  Khagnio leaped back to create some space. Both his knives gleamed with ferocious crimson energy, threads of red mana compressing onto the blades. He assumed a strange stance, knives held out in a weird backhand fashion.

  Then he turned into a tornado and ripped into the monsters.

  I had a feeling I wouldn’t have been able to see what happened properly without having raised my Agility as high as I had. Khagnio spun. Literally. His rotational velocity was high enough to kick up a miniature tornado around him. And then he threw himself into the midst of the onrushing monsters from the Nether Vein.

  They were shredded to nothing in no time at all. Limbs flew off, gouts of blood spraying in every direction as our enemies were reduced to piles of quivering, Netherthread-flecked flesh.

  So was that Khagnio’s peak? A weird part of me wondered if there was anything I could have done to counter something like that? It had happened so fast, with such incredible ferocity and power…

  Now was not the time for thoughts like that.

  Khagnio wasn’t the only one who was pulling out all the stops. The Nether Vein demanded that we give it everything we had, and we did just that.

  Ugnash yelled out. His red aura flared even harder. Much of it reverted back to the scarlet threads he used to buff up his tanking abilities, and they slithered out to latch onto a dozen of the monsters. Several of those were trying to get past him to attack Cerea and then me. Their luck had run out. Now, with another taunting shout, Ugnash physically drew them to him.

  Then he slammed his fist down on top of them all after a huge leap. Like with Khagnio, the monsters were torn apart. Or in this case, squashed to a pulp of flesh and bones.

  “Ross,” Ugnash said. “We can take care of the monsters. Trust us.”

  Cerea gave me a short grin. “You don’t have to jump into the thick of the fray every time.”

  “You don’t have to show off all the time, mageling,” Khagnio said as he tried to get over the blood on him while also quickly returning to the area covered by my light. Otherwise, the Netherthreads would make short work of him. “Go.”

  I nodded. Right. There was a greater threat I needed to take care of. Like the Councillor, I couldn’t worry myself over smaller-scale dangers when I was the one who could deal with the bigger peril.

  Time to go. Behind me, my party members resumed fighting against the new horde of creatures flying at us. I had to remember they were Gold-ranked too.

  It was hard to tell how much time had passed. That was another way the Nether Vein was screwing with the expedition. But I noted that the rate of casualties had fallen drastically. My torches were still lasting. Under the reprieve from the Netherthreads they gifted, everyone could spend at least some focus on beating back the new monsters.

  I was concentrating harder and harder on Illumination. For some reason, just like Scarseekers and Scarthralls, the Netherthreads hated my Aspect. So I threw out as much of it as I could, as far as I could.

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  While I blessed the fact that I had acquired Manifestation, because it would have been a great deal harder to beat back the Netherthreads without it, there was a different way to go about it. I had done it before too. I had imbued light itself into the Netherthreads to then vaporize them directly.

  But that had been when the Netherthreads had been more dormant, when they had just been a wall. In fact, before we had lost the Klevacite torch, I probably could have dealt with the huge wall of Netherthreads in the same way.

  Instead, I needed a different tactic.

  I reached Revayne and the guards as I focused on multiple Aspects this time, calling on Gravity, Flare, and Entropy alongside Illumination.

  Revayne was incredible. As if I needed proof, I now got first-hand evidence that just because she relied on her book’s magical powers didn’t mean she was bad at close-quarters combat. She was literally fending off every single one of the multitudes of Netherthreads attacking from all directions with just her sword. Her sabre flickered every which way even faster than Khagnio had earlier. She was deflecting them all.

  I forced myself to stop gawking and focus on my Compound Aspect. On Protostar.

  The little star birthed in front of me, swirling with energy, making the air thrum. So much power radiated off it that my skin felt like it was seconds away from melting off my flesh, even with Absorption and Intake working overtime.

  “Ross!” Revayne shouted. “What in the world are you making?”

  Oh, right. Shit. I had made it a little too bright and powerful. There was so much light now flooding the entire battlefield that I was starting to need to squint. It was effective. No doubt about that. Horrid screeches went up as the monsters were blinded, with several people crying out at needing to shade their eyes from my little star.

  Most importantly, the Netherthreads were literally vaporizing away. That was my main goal and I was achieving it.

  That said, I was possibly overdoing it by a mite. I tried toning it down just enough to stop everyone from needing to keep their eyes ninety-nine percent closed or get blinded.

  “This isn’t enough,” Revayne said. “The Nether vein isn’t going to stop yet.”

  She was right. Damnit, I had been looking for a little bit of reprieve for my heart. While the huge storm of Netherthreads assaulting us, including the Councillor farther away, had faded back, the danger wasn’t past. The Nether Vein was still seething. Still determined to end us in all the ways it could. I had only made one such way falter.

  The monsters, the creatures we had repelled into the general murk of the Netherthreads beyond the reach of my light, were returning now. They had reformed into huge, hulking constructs, threaded with more of the dark strands which were now somehow resisting Illumination, like my artificial star no longer had the same kind of effect when the Netherthreads were connected to actual flesh and blood.

  I had seen that before. When Zoltan had surprisingly come out alive, he had been using the Netherthreads to shield himself against my Illumination.

  “That’s fine,” I said, growling at the reappearing threat. “I’m not done yet.”

  I wasn’t kidding. Despite using Protostar, I was raring to go. My Threaded Reinforcement mana threads were sparking like livewires. I’d show this Nether Vein.

  My problem was indecision paralysis. The monsters were striking from all directions, trying to hem us in. We were forced to gather closer. The Netherthreads seethed outside the circle of my burning, vaporizing starlight.

  “I can take care of this,” Revayne said.

  I saw now why she and the guards were sticking to the centre. At the point where the ground had broken and the Klevacite and its bearer had fallen, something really strange and off-putting was trying to come out. It looked like a strange mix of gas and slime, tendrils edged with teeth trying to push out of the hole in the metal floor.

  “What is that…?” I asked.

  “Whatever ate that adventurer that tried to challenge you. Sergeant Shatri and the rest have been trying to stop it all this time. But it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Just cover me, please. I can’t actually protect myself while I set this up.”

  Revayne didn’t explain what this was supposed to be. She just sat down and opened her book, right there in the middle of the battlefield.

  I just shook my head, then focused on keeping up Protostar. Permanence meant it would stick, but it was also guzzling a pretty hefty chunk of my mana. Not that I still needed to worry about energy levels just yet. I thought about participating in the fights directly, but I decided on a different direction for now.

  “You guys,” I said to the guards. “I’m going to buff you up with some Rituals and then I want you to pass those on to the rest of the expeditioners with Runes of Transferring. Can you do that?”

  The woman called Sergeant Shatri looked dubious. “We have to stop whatever this thing is.”

  “I’ll take care of it. What we really need is to empower as many people as we can. By this time, the Rituals I did earlier have probably run out, and I can’t run around reapplying them everywhere. That’s why you’re going to be my arms and legs.”

  Sergeant Shatri looked like she wanted to argue about being anybody’s limbs save her own, but Revayne coughed into her hand even as she kept concentrating on her book. The sergeant sighed, then nodded. “What do you need?”

  I focused on performing more Rituals of Precaution and Defiance. It was nice how I could set up one Ritual Circle to encompass the effects of both Rituals. The circle’s etching was just a lot more complex so it needed a little bit of time to form on the backs of all the guards there.

  “Are you really going to take care of that thing?” Shatri asked as I handed her and her subordinates several Runes of Transferring. I knew they’d come in handy.

  In response, I manifested more Illumination closer at hand and also Flare, using Concentration to push in a huge amount of heat in no time at all. Just as the slimy, gassy mess started extricating itself out of the jagged hole, I released the burst of brilliant, fiery energy.

  It had to be some kind of monster because its screams were loud. The fire and light burned through it, vaporizing its body and burning away its tendrils.

  “There,” I said, trying not to cough in the smoke. “You can rest easy.”

  The sergeant nodded. She and the rest of the guards looked up with no small amount of awe at the star burning bright and strong, rupturing the very air around it. Then they got going.

  The monster screeched out of the hole, but I wasn’t about to relent. I created more light and heat, sending more power down into the hole. And then more. And more. Amiratha’s scream as she had plummeted replayed in my ears. This monster didn’t deserve even an inch of mercy. By the time I stopped, the whole area under the metal floor for dozens of feet around me was glowing red-hot and smoking.

  There were no more monstrous screeches.

  I tried to breathe a little easier. Things were turning around. My new Rituals were taking effect. I had proof of that with how everyone was pushing back even the stronger versions of the Netherthreads-wrapped monsters now. My powers were helping keep the Netherthreads and the monster below us at bay.

  Then there was Revayne. She had been scribbling furiously on her book all this while. I had no reason to doubt her, so I had remained patient. Now, she was done, rising to her feet as her power materialized around us.

  I could only gawk a little.

  Ink flooded out of her book. Lines of liquid black ran over the entire battlefield far too quickly for me to note every little thing it was doing. Here it rose high to create some kind of framework, there it simply spread in a pool. And there were more besides. Spikes here, summons there, literal copies of Revayne herself stalking the battleground’s edges.

  And there was the real Revayne herself, standing in the centre of it all, book and black quill raised high. Power rippled off her in waves so strong, I was almost physically rebuffed.

  I gulped a little. Her eyes were pure black now. Normally, they were strangely inverted, with white pupils lying on the black sclera. Now, there was nothing but inky darkness. I could only stand and watch as she started controlling the entire battlefield with nothing but her quill.

  A stroke here caused a squad of Revayne-clones to launch themselves and brutalize a humongous monster like piranhas attacking a carcass. A dot caused a small pool of ink to geyser upwards and spray more monsters on the left of the battlefield with ink that rapidly dissolved their bodies. An inky black bolt destroyed a whole line of monsters. More Revaynes materialized out of more pools to rip and shred into our enemies.

  I could only shake my head and stare. Now this was the kind of magic I’d expect someone who was Opal-ranked to exhibit. I wondered how much Revayne still hadn’t shown yet. What would she look like when she was pushed to her absolute limits?

  Several of the expeditioners started cheering. We were doing well. We were beating away the monsters and the Netherthreads.

  I looked farther behind us. Se-Vigilance and her aura of unimaginable power had made it all the way to her real target now. A huge steel wall stood before us, one that had been obscured by the Netherthreads so far. Our efforts had clawed away at the Netherthreads, and now, I could see the Councillor was trying to control the Nether Vein.

  A shout pulled me away from observing just what she was doing. An alarmed shout. So much alarm that my heart rate spiked even before I could see what was going on.

  And then I found it. A monster. Another one, lumbering out from within the darkness.

  I lost the ability to breathe for a second. I recognized that creature. How could I forget its skeletal ivory body, or the head made entirely of a void-like substance with all those eyes glowing like stars on the cosmic head.

  That thing… I swallowed. No one, not a single one of us here on the battlefield, was strong enough to take on that monster save the Councillor.

  And she was already way too busy.