Running did not guarantee safety and Atiya knew it the moment his feet hit the ground.
Two Ascension 3 fighters duking it out would not stay in one place, their speed alone would carry the fight across the entire village in seconds, and their attacks would spread with them.
Kallar's lava orbs alone could engulf half the village if they came down wrong. Leishna's silver swords would slice through anything in their path without particular concern for what that anything happened to be.
'All hell has broken loose here, truly befitting an end.'
He was not the only one running. The villagers were scattering in every direction, pulling away from the altar and the two figures above it, searching for anything that resembled cover.
The yai beasts had not reached the village interior yet but the shrieks were getting closer and louder and it would not be long before those sounds mixed with something worse with the screams of the villagers.
"The barrier is gone and we are mortal now, if those monsters reach us we will truly die."
The beasts closing in from the mountain perimeter were mostly velociraptor shaped, seven feet long, moving at considerable speed across the snow, their shrieks cutting through the cold air in short sharp bursts.
Two dark yai balls flew toward Atiya. He stepped sideways and let them pass.
He glanced in the direction they had come from.
Fredo was coming at him, furious and poisoned and moving anyway, his expression carrying everything the situation had produced in him in the last several minutes compressed into a single focused point.
'He is bitter and he has every right to be.'
"Open. Sajibu, come."
Three portals materialized around him, small and precise, and the staff came to his hand, the scythe hook at its crown catching the light.
He turned to face Fredo.
"Come and get a piece of me, if you can."
On the more serious side of the battlefield.
More than dozens of lava orbs descended on Leishna from above, each one ten times her size, falling with the weight of small buildings.
Leishna did not flinch.
Hundreds of silver swords launched upward and met them, slicing through the orbs one after another, the molten contents splitting apart and raining down across the village below, onto rooftops and roads and villagers scrambling to get clear of it.
"You are boiling with anger, did it upset you that much?" She tilted her head, puppy eyes fixed on Kallar above her. "I am sorry, he really is just that special."
She was still sitting on her sword.
"Tch."
Kallar looked at her with open revulsion.
"Imptiotastl!"
He activated another skill simultaneously, his third running alongside the others already in motion.
"Inferno Death Sentence."
The air changed immediately. Centered on him and extending outward for half a mile in every direction, an orb of boiling lava flame swallowed the surrounding space whole, the heat of it bending the light at its edges.
Simultaneously hundreds of flame shots launched toward Leishna at supersonic speed, the sound of them arriving after they had already crossed half the distance.
The vision was obstructed by the heat and the light but Kallar could still see it, Leishna was engulfed in the flames, the fire closing around her from every direction.
"Ha ha he heh." Her voice came through it unbothered. "He is really going all out from the very start, he must be sore about losing to me twice before."
"Sword Shield."
Thousands of swords materialized around her simultaneously, locking together into a dense layered barrier, the flames hitting the outer edge and splitting apart, the heat dispersing outward rather than inward, not a single shot finding her through the gaps.
She was still sitting on her sword.
"That nerve of yours! Ignition!!"
The flame shots accelerated, enhanced, and this time they hit the sword barrier with enough force to move her from her spot. Several swords broke away and scattered.
The ones that remained pulled in close around her as the enhanced shots struck the larger barrier and liquified it, the steel dissolving into nothing against the concentrated heat.
Leishna watched the barrier come apart with open anticipation.
The shot closed the remaining distance and the swords flanking her intercepted it at the last moment, the collision producing an explosion that threw her sideways through the air, swords spinning around her as she went.
"Tch, bitch!!"
Kallar launched himself toward her, his body igniting as he moved, flame wrapping around him until he cut through the air like a meteorite, shooting flame after flame toward her as he closed the gap.
Leishna glanced back at the shots she had simply dodged a moment ago.
They had changed trajectory. All of them, curving back toward her, following.
"Heh, you are so persistent! Have you fallen for me? Stalker!!"
She shouted it at the raging flaming meteor that was Kallar Nelljan, his body fully engulfed, closing on her at a speed that would reach her in under ten seconds at her current pace.
For the first time since the fight began she shifted to offense.
"This is a skill I plagiarized from an arrogant king in a certain anime." She raised her hand. "Gate of Ellejort."
Thousands of mini portals opened behind her simultaneously and from each one swords launched forward, ten times the number of portals, filling the air between her and Kallar in a dense oncoming wall of silver steel.
Kallar changed trajectory mid-flight.
He was on the run.
"Isn't this exciting!!"
Leishna shouted it after him, already giving chase.
*****
After freshening up Zelaine dragged a chair from the old man's room and positioned it at the side of the meeting, present but at an angle that made her participation optional.
"So the case has already been closed," she said, the words slightly muffled by the chips she was working through. Aninke had brought them. She was not particularly fond of the flavor but she was eating them anyway.
'He is considerate at least. But I do not like this flavor. Well, beggars cannot be choosers.'
She reached for another handful.
"I will explain it to you la—" the old man began.
"No, I will explain it," Aninke cut across him, his voice carrying the particular sharpness of someone accustomed to being the most important person present and not yet certain that was the case in this room.
"Please do," the old man said, and leaned back.
The salon case had reached Aninke through the message Cale had sent on Zelaine's behalf. Given his position in the branch family he had begun investigating immediately, or at least that was his official account. Zelaine suspected the real reason was something else.
"Where to start." Aninke's eyes narrowed slightly. "The salon's previous owner, Eug Ezhaloch, disappeared a year ago and was later found under a bridge. Dead, and in a terrible state. His entire body was red, bleeding from every part except his face, and he had a blonde wig attached to his head."
Zelaine's hand stopped halfway to her mouth, chip suspended.
'Wait. Did I not dump someone exactly like that into a dumpster that night.'
She shifted her gaze to the old man. The old man was already looking at the opposite wall, expression blank, deliberately uninvolved.
'Was that his ghost. I have never encountered anything that presented quite like that.'
"Furthermore," Aninke continued, "the investigation uncovered several other things. A number of women had gone missing in the area over a period of time, and their relatives consistently reported that the last confirmed sighting of each of them was when they visited the salon. No evidence was found at the time and the case was closed."
He leaned forward, the arrogance dropping out of his posture, his voice going quiet and flat.
"Then the rumors started. People claimed they had seen Eug Ezhaloch under the bridge. Regularly."
*That rumor is entirely accurate,* Zelaine thought, remembering the red wigged figure she had dropped into the dumpster without breaking stride.
"However," Aninke said, his voice dropping, "the truth was something else."
"The thing is, one day Eug Ezhaloch's father caught him in the act, abducting a woman, pulling her hair out, killing her to use it for his mannequins."
Aninke's voice was steady, but the story was not.
"The next day, Eug's mother bound him to a chair and skinned him alive."
'That is exactly what the old man saw in his vision,' Zelaine thought, the pieces settling into place with a click that was not comfortable.
"After that, Eug's mother pulled out all of her own hair and planted it onto her son's head before strangling him to death. Then she dumped the body under a bridge."
"Did the parents burn all the mannequins to destroy the evidence before anyone found out?" Cale asked. He looked sleep deprived, his usual composure gone, something tight around his eyes that Zelaine had not seen from him in a while.
'He must have been doing intense training,' she noted. It was rare to see him rattled.
"The case is closed," Aninke said, standing, his tone carrying the finality of someone brushing dirt from expensive clothes. "The parents have been captured and punished accordingly."
"It is not over yet," the old man said.
'He is right,' Zelaine thought.
Something flickered at the edge of her mind, faint and brief, a shimmering outline she could not yet fully read.
She turned the facts over quietly.
If the victims' souls were still present, still maintaining form, still appearing under bridges in blonde wigs, something was supplying them with yai.
Nothing dead sustained itself without a living source. That was not a theory, it was how the universe worked.
Someone was feeding them and there had to be a catalyst that had summoned them in the first place.
But she and the old man had searched the salon thoroughly and found nothing. there were no residue, no trace, no source to their knowledge.
So where was it coming from.
Then doorbell rang.
At first they ignored it. The salon case was technically closed but taking on a new client directly in front of Aninke felt like the wrong move, so they let it ring.
It rang again. Then again, steady and unhurried, the sound carrying clearly through the office from the front entrance down the short corridor lined with the old man's various divination tools and Cale's jacket thrown over the hook by the door.
Then Mavine's voice came through.
"Miss Zelaine, is anyone here?"
Zelaine stood up and went to the door, weaving past the chairs pulled into the rough circle of the meeting, past the table with the half empty chip bag and the cups of tea nobody had finished, down the corridor and to the entrance.
*I told you to call me sister, so why are you saying miss.*
She pulled the door open.
Mavine was there on the step, the morning light behind her, and she was not alone. Standing beside her was a woman with striking black hair, and Zelaine's hand stopped on the doorframe.
She looked at her properly.
"No, she is different," she murmured, almost to herself, eyes narrowing slightly.
The woman from her vision had black hair. This woman's hair was violet, shorter, cut to the jaw, and she stood taller than the figure Zelaine had seen, her frame carrying itself with a stiffness that suggested she was not entirely comfortable being here.
The morning light caught the violet strands and held them a shade darker than they looked indoors. Visions carried discrepancies, especially from a skill barely a week old and still finding the edges of what it could read, but Zelaine's instincts told her clearly that this was not the same person.
"Hello," the woman said, her eyes moving briefly past Zelaine into the office behind her before settling back. "I have a job request."