Immense purple Yai energy surged into a vortex around the hovering mass, feeding into it, reshaping it from the inside out. Whatever was emerging, it was taking its time doing it right.
It was undoubtedly going to be a grotesque and hidous trans.formation The kind of thing that made sane people turn and run the moment they laid eyes on it.
Atiya didn't have that luxury and having one of it as he was too busy dodging.
The Yai energy condensed into dozens of sharp pointed projectiles and rained down without warning, giving him no time to study the transformation or theorize about what was coming.
He ran fast, weaving between the falling points, feet finding gaps in the chaos through instinct more than calculation.
"Give me a break, will ya."
One thing the violet Yai had done was light up the pit. The purple glow reached into corners the dim emergency strips never touched, and Atiya used every second of it.
'Good grief. Thank you for lighting up my battlefield.'
He ran deliberately, not just away but toward specific spots, the places where the glow caught pale shapes scattered across the ground. Bones. Dozens of them.
Hundreds maybe, spread across the floor of the pit in every direction.
He had just found his armory.
As one of the sharp attack was about to reach him so he slipped down grabbing the bones and swig it defelcting the attack.
'Good. The bones are hard enough.'
He snatched them up as he ran, grabbing whatever his hands could close around. When the sharp projectiles came too close he deflected them with the bones, batting them aside mid-stride without slowing down.
He kept it up for several minutes but he wasn't fooling himself. If the transformation completed before he found an opening, his chances of walking out of the pit dropped to almost nothing.
He needed to hit the mass up there somehow.
The problem was he had nothing that could reach it cleanly. He could throw bones but the Yai field around it would intercept them before they got close.
He considered a running leap but one good hit on the way up and he might be strcuk dead before he reaches at all.
He shifted tactics.
He ran deliberately through the clusters of cannibals, weaving between them, using them as cover. The projectiles chasing him found easier targets.
Bodies dropped around him and piled up and he kept moving, staying low and keeping himself lost in the crowd.
It bought him time.
But he was going in circles and he knew it.
'If there's an exit anywhere in this pit I should be looking for it. But I don't know this place well enough. And besides.'
His eyes found Shilial again across the chaos.
'What is her deal. Is she really not the Shilial I know. Because the one I know would have already reduced this thing to ash.'
He kept moving, in circles, looking for a blind spot.
Yai remaining: fifteen percent.
He couldn't coat himself in Yai much longer. Which meant he had two options. Run, or hit it now while he still had something left to spend.
The escape route wasn't certain. But Shilial had stepped in earlier with the cannibals, which meant she wasn't a threat, at least not right now.
'If I kill that creature and somehow refine its Yai I can replenish maybe twenty percent. Not much. But something.'
He looked up at the transformation and felt his window closing fast. The creature had grown legs now, long and jointed, pulling itself into the shape of something that resembled a spider. Whatever its final form was, he didn't want to find out.
'Fucking bastard. I'm taking the risk.'
For all his rational thinking, Atiya had a sin. Murder.
An innate and unsatiable pull toward it that this hellhole had him more submissive to it.
If anything the pit had made it so that Atiya was embracing it more.
The creature's attacks had slackened as the transformation neared completion, its attention turned to itself. If there was ever a chance, it was now.
Atiya spent half his remaining Yai coating himself, threw a portal above the creature, grabbed the longest spine he could find and gripped it like a spear, and leaped.
He cleared the distance fast.
'Has it not noticed me.'
The doubt arrived but he pushed through it anyway, bone spear already had angled for the strike.
The moment the tip reached the creature, an eye popped open directly beside it. Huge. Filled with something that looked unmistakably like hatred.
And the next thing he knew was that he was falling.
He hit the ground hard among the corpses and bones, sliding through the mess before coming to a stop. Something warm was spreading across his side and his back.
He was bleeding badly, apparently he was sent flying by a shockwave he never saw coming.
He lay there for a moment staring up at creature.
'That went well.'
He looked down at his torso. Something sharp had gone in and was still there.
He moved his hand to pull it out and stopped himself.
The blood will gush out faster if I remove it.
He couldn't feel much of his body anymore. Above him the creature had finished its transformation and was approaching slowly, unhurried, like it was savoring the walk. Letting him get a good long look at what was coming.
I take it back. These are no mindless savages. They are sadistic savages.
Then Shilial appeared in front of him again.
She crouched down and stroked his head, gentle and unhurried, like she had all the time in the world.
"Poor soul. Nobody leaves here alive unless they are Ascension 3. You will die here." She pressed two fingers to his forehead. "So let me see your memories."
She didn't care about the elaborate details of who he was. She didn't care about his history or his power or his name. All she was looking for was herself. The version of herself that existed in his perception of the world.
She found fragments.
"What, you're getting married?"
Atiya's voice, younger, directed at Cale who had just announced to him that he would be married within the month.
Then the wedding day. The first time he had seen her. Violet hair and green eyes and a personality that made it immediately clear she had no interest in softening herself for anyone.
"I like the way you don't give a fuck about the world. Let's be friends. Shorty."
Then later.
"Does that vampire girlfriend of yours think my money is hers too. She stole my card and emptied a large chunk of it on beacons."
And later still, across a dinner table, completely serious.
"Hey. Help me divorce my husband and let's get married instead. At least your food is better. Shorty."
"Why do I hate Cale, you asked. Isn't it obvious. Our families forced us together and honestly men like him don't do anything for me. Righteous and all that. Sure. But they don't exactly strike me as eye candy."
Then a different memory entirely.
"Oh, look at that. Isn't he so hot. Ahhhh, I fucking love Michael Jackson. So cool."
Shilial moved through the fragments quietly.
The impression Atiya carried of her was not complicated. It was just honest. An irreplaceable friend, one of the very few people he had ever opened to without thinking about it first.
Someone he pulled stupid schemes with and never had to explain himself to.
She watched all of it. The things they broke. The things they got away with. The chaos they left behind without looking back.
And then at the end, the lab. What happened there.
She stayed with that one longer than the rest.
When she finally pulled her hand back her expression had changed. The clinical distance she had kept since he woke up was gone.
What replaced it was something harder to name, bittersweet and quiet, sitting somewhere between grief and fondness and something she hadn't decided what to do with yet.
She looked at him without speaking for a moment.
Of course it aligned with how Atiya had perceived her. Her real personality may have been something different entirely, but she was content with what she found. And at the same time scared. And quietly devastated.
She sighed and murmured to herself.
"Why am I always blessed with such good friends only to tear them apart with my own hands. Why are we always toyed by fate."
She looked at Atiya lying there, bleeding out, the sharp thing still buried in his torso.
"Wake up, foreigner. Your death may be here but our work has only just started. Go and find me. Kill me before I do it myself."
The creature had reached her by then, closing in, about to tear into her neck.
Something appeared and slashed two of its limbs clean off.
---
A few moments earlier.
Why are you touching my forehead.
The moment her fingers made contact he felt something surge inside him. He recognized it immediately and the recognition made his stomach drop.
He had felt it once before. Only once.
He did not want to feel it again.
His innate skill. The one that materialized sheets capable of severing everything, laws, fate, destiny, physical matter, all of it treated the same.
The one that had minced him from the inside the first time it activated because his Ascension level was too low to contain even a fraction of its output.
The first time his mother had been there to put him back together.
There was no one here to do that now.
'No, no, no, no. Anything but that. Please.'
His Yai circuits didn't listen.
They lit up without his permission and the skill activated.
Numerous magenta sheets, thin as paper and sharp as nothing that existed in nature, spread outward from him in every direction and moved toward the Yai beast with quiet and absolute purpose.
They passed through its arms. Its legs. Its head. Through every part of it without slowing, dividing it into pieces too small and too many to count, until what remained of the creature simply ceased to be a coherent thing.
The Yai beast was gone, perished.
Shilial's eyes went wide as the sheets turned on their owner.
The same blades that had erased the creature were now passing through Atiya, indiscriminate and patient, slicing through everything they touched.
'If this is my end.'
No.
'I refuse my death.'
'I refuse to die.'
Then Atiya vanished.
Not fell. Not collapsed. Just gone, between one moment and the next, like he had never been standing there at all.
Shilial stared at the empty space for a long moment. The sheets dissolved with him. The pit settled back into its usual dark and shuffling quiet.
Then something moved across her face, not quite a smile and not quite relief, something between understanding and something older than either.
"I see," she said softly, to no one. "So that's what it was. You won't die until whatever task you carry as a foreigner is fulfilled." She paused. "Or perhaps it's a skill. Either way."
She looked at the space where he had been one last time.
"Whatever the case, I know you will find me again."
Her voice dropped to barely anything.
"Boy unbound by fate."
****
Amidst the endless glacier's frozen expanse, a girl crested a wind-scoured ridge.
Her boots crunched through brittle snowpack, each step sending tiny avalanches hissing down the slope. Biting wind clawed at the edges of her furs. She pulled the hood tighter and kept moving.
Then she saw it.
Hovering above a jagged ice spire burned a vibrant neon-purple flame.
No heat. No melt. The snow beneath the spire sat pristine and untouched. The fire simply existed, defiant and impossible, its core swirling with deep indigo, dense and coiled.
Jagged tendrils of violet bloomed outward in slow pulses, shedding glowing embers that drifted upward into the featureless grey sky. Against the glacier's cold bruised blue the flame cast long living shadows across the ice.
She stopped dead.
"Fire. Fire, here in this hellish snow." A beat. "Isn't this just amazing, wow."
The flame endured for another heartbeat, beautiful and almost mournful, then began to dim. As it shrank something gleamed at its dying center.
A body.
She bolted forward, snow spraying in frantic arcs, and dropped to her knees beside the spire. The violet haze still clung to the figure curled inside the flame's fading heart.
A young man.
He lay curled on his side, face half-hidden, dark hair and looking frsh and withou.t any clothes.
She leaned in and tilted her head.
"What kind of Yaicraft is this?"
The flame guttered once and vanished entirely.
The boy tumbled free and collapsed onto the snow in a boneless heap. Violet afterimages lingered in the air for a moment before dissolving into nothing.
The girl stared down at him.
Her eyes gleamed.
This was how the Lost Bastard Child of Frost met the Foreigner for the first time.