Emerion stared at it. The Zaltreign had discharged and dispersed and the barrier stood exactly as it had unmarked, unaffected, as though the spell had been a suggestion it had considered and declined.
"How," he muttered.
He closed his eyes. The embarrassment was specific not the embarrassment of failing in front of someone, but the embarrassment of failing at something you should be able to do. Breaking a barrier from the inside was notoriously difficult. He knew that. The knowledge didn't make the wall any less intact.
A gust of wind hit him from behind, strong enough that he raised an arm to shield his eyes from the dust. The sound of it was followed immediately by the wet impacts of bodies hitting the floor many of them, all at once and when Emerion lowered his arm he saw Anathema moving through the suspended snakes, the green mana surging around him, his sword carving through them mid-air with a precision that had found a new gear entirely.
Then Anathema opened his mouth.
And ate them.
Emerion's face went through several expressions before settling on something between shock and reluctant understanding. No white liquid hit the floor. The snakes disappeared into Anathema completely, the venom and all, the regeneration cycle broken at its source.
So he's eating them to prevent the liquid from reaching the ground. Stopping the regeneration that way. Emerion watched with the focused attention of someone solving a problem they hadn't been asked to solve. But what about the poison inside them?
A flicker of concern moved through him. He filed it and said nothing.
Anathema paused, sensing the gaze. He glanced at the barrier still intact and then past it, through the fire of the control room, to where Arlienne stood beyond. He could see her speaking with Rui.
He could see the depression in Rui's posture and the hope trying to exist underneath it. He couldn't tell what Arlienne was doing or thinking. He rarely could.
He turned back to Emerion.
"Why are you just standing there? The spell didn't work, I assume," Anathema said, a tch escaping him. The tone of it landed on Emerion exactly the way it was probably intended.
"I told you it's not easy," Emerion said. The annoyance in his voice was visible. "Even with the new mana you're generating, breaking this from the inside might be impossible."
Anathema raised an eyebrow at the shift in tone but didn't comment. He turned to the wall himself, the green mana flowing around his body like warm smoke, and swung.
The impact was enormous. The kind that should have done something.
The wall didn't crack.
"Told you," Emerion said.
Anathema stared at the unmarked surface for a moment, something flickering behind his eyes doubt arriving and being overwritten almost immediately by the hissing behind him.
He gripped his sword.
"I am not going to give up and pass out today," he said. "If you can't break it then just don't get in my way. I have people out there I want to speak to again."
He launched another gust, the force of it lifting the snakes, and ate the ones his sword caught mid-arc. His throat moved as he swallowed them. He choked slightly on one. His expression didn't waver.
"Are you trying to say I'm not trying enough?" Emerion said. "I want to get out of here as much as you do."
Anathema looked at him a blank, level look that carried more weight than an accusation.
"I don't see desperation in your eyes," he said. "Do you really have someone out there you wish to see?" A pause.
"It's surprising. I don't see any desire in your eyes at all."
Emerion looked at him. The surprise on his face was genuine.
"Are you trying to say I'm not giving my all? I've already told you it's hard to break a barrier from the inside that's designed to keep people in"
He ran a hand through his hair. Several silver strands came away in his fingers.
He stared at them.
If only people knew I am the weakest in my family.
The thought arrived before he could stop it and brought the rest with it.
I don't have my mother's strength. I don't have my sister's intelligence. I don't have my aunt's healing capability. Even my father is capable in his own way influencing people, managing the politics of a Great House. What do I have? I'm just an average person who happened to be born into a family where average doesn't belong.
He looked at the fallen hair in his palm.
I wanted to be free. So I ran away.
But why do people still expect something from me even when I've run? My father and Arlienne used me as a pawn. Alec trusted me and I failed him. The kid Shin I destroyed his father's livelihood and then threw money at the problem. And now Anathema, of all people, is looking at me like I'm supposed to be able to do something.
When will people understand that I'm just a coward who runs from problems? A good-for-nothing who dressed his cowardice up as freedom and called it a choice.
"Something tells me you have more power than you show," Anathema said, between swallows. He had eaten more than fifty snakes now and showed no sign of stopping, though his skin was beginning to tell a different story. "You are becoming an obstacle for your own power."
Emerion didn't hear him.
Not fully.
This guy who was emotionless yesterday is now fighting through poison and burns to see his friends again. I wish I had that. He's right. I don't have anyone out there I desperately want to reach. The thought turned darker as it continued. Aunt Seraphyne, Arlienne, Nyxelle they're blood. They're probably fighting the Captain right now, dealing with things I should be helping with, and I'm standing here failing to break a wall.
If I were a stranger to them a nobody, not a Dawnveil would any of them look twice? If I were being sold or humiliated and they didn't know my name, would they even pause?
He stood completely still.
The thoughts kept coming and he stopped trying to manage them. His eyes went dull. His expression emptied out. The barrier in front of him was still there but the burning control room behind it had faded the visual noise of it falling away until the only thing the transparent surface was showing him was his own reflection.
He looked at it.
His own face. Silver hair. Blue eyes that had gone flat. The face of someone who had run away from everything and arrived here, trapped in a room with snakes, unable to break a wall.
His reflection smirked.
He hadn't told it to.
"Why are you smirking?" His voice came out quietly not a shout, just a question aimed at something that shouldn't be capable of answering. His finger rose and pointed at the surface. "Why do you even exist?"
His body started shaking. Not from cold. Not from exhaustion. Something deeper and less manageable, rising from whatever place the self-hatred had been living since before he could remember.
He pressed his hands against his head.
"Why are you so weak?" The words came out broken, addressed to the reflection, addressed to himself, the distinction collapsing between them. "Why why don't you just die? Yes. That's what you deserve." His voice changed flattening, losing its edges, becoming something he didn't entirely recognize as his own. "Death. You don't deserve to live. You-- just--DIE!"
The mana erupted.
Not Zaltreign as he had cast it before not the compressed, shaped, focused spear of light that went exactly where it was aimed. This was Zaltreign without a vessel.
The compressed mana discharged in every direction at once, pulse after pulse detonating outward from his palms like a heartbeat that had lost its rhythm, each pulse a concentrated force that hit the barrier and the walls and the floor and the air with the indiscriminate pressure of something that has stopped caring about direction.
The sound it made was not a single sharp note. It was many overlapping, chaotic, each pulse arriving before the previous one had finished.
Anathema was thrown backward by the first shockwave. He caught himself against the far wall, his arms up to shield his face, his eyes wide.
The snakes that had been regenerating on the floor the white liquid bubbling with new bodies didn't evaporate. They were dispersed. The pressure waves hit the floor with such concentrated force that the liquid was driven apart at a molecular level, the surface tension of it destroyed before the regeneration cycle could complete. New snakes began to form and were broken apart before they finished existing.
Anathema stared at the floor where the liquid had been and found it simply gone.
"What just happened?" he muttered.
The barrier cracked.
Not completely a single hairline fracture, running from the point where the first pulse had hit, spreading slowly outward in a thin line. But it was there. The first mark the barrier had shown since they arrived.
And then something else.
Water.
Thin streams of it running down the surface of the barrier from the fracture point the structure releasing moisture under the sustained compression, the water-based construction beginning to fail under the repeated pressure impacts in a way it had not failed under sustained fire or single focused strikes.
It's made of water, Anathema understood, watching it. Reinforced by the Captain's chants. And Zaltreign force repeated, uncontrolled, hitting the same structure from the same side over and over is compressing it beyond what the water matrix can hold.
He looked at Emerion.
The manic expression. The eerie smile still on his face, directed at his own reflection. The mana still discharging in uncontrolled pulses, each one larger than the last, the output climbing past anything Anathema had sensed from him before past the fire cage, past the Zaltreign that had destroyed the boulder, past whatever ceiling Emerion had been operating under when he was still thinking clearly.
This was not Emerion at his limit.
This was Emerion past the part of himself that usually managed the limit.
Anathema looked at his own hands. The skin had gone red from the pressure waves. His teeth were together. He took another step back against the wall and braced.
He needs to stop, the thought arrived. But if he stops, the barrier holds.
He watched the fracture widen.
He said nothing.
Arlienne's hands glowed light blue against Ryuuken's chest, the color of the mana she was channeling steady and controlled. Rui watched with the focused attention of someone who has agreed to something and is now monitoring whether the terms are being honored.
"Will he be alright?" Rui asked.
Arlienne nodded, not looking up. "I have stopped the bleeding. He should wake up if he is fortunate."
Rui's expression tightened. "What do you mean 'if fortunate'? Don't tell me you're tricking us again. You gave an Oath of Echoes to heal him. If you back down on it, you'll die."
"I think you didn't hear me correctly." Arlienne removed her hands and looked at him with the particular patience of someone about to explain something to someone who isn't going to enjoy it. "I merely stated I would heal him. I never promised I would provide Level Four healing. I am not naive like my brother, and I am not kind-hearted like Aunt Seraphyne."
Rui stared at her.
"Let me enlighten you," she continued, settling the smirk into place. "There are five levels of healing. Level One is for minor scratches. Level Two can stop bleeding. Level Three is for pain relief it's advanced, only ten percent of people can perform it. Level Four fixes damaged organs. Level Five is the restoration of organs, making them entirely new again. It is very rare, and I am proud to say I have mastered them all. Aunt Seraphyne knows all of this too."
Rui bit his lip. His jaw worked against what he wanted to say.
"Why only Level Two?" he asked, his voice controlled with visible effort. "Can't you feel the suffering of people? Don't you have any emotions?"
"There are two reasons." Arlienne looked at Ryuuken with an expression that was clinical and genuinely curious in equal measure. "First, the more advanced the level, the more mana it consumes. I have to find my brother and likely save this ship before the night is over. Second--" her eyes moved to Ryuuken's face "I want to see if someone like him can stand back up with only Level Two healing. Human will is always fascinating to me."
Rui looked at her the way you look at something you don't have a category for.
"You are incapable of feeling what others feel," he said.
Before the conversation could go further, the quality of the smoke changed.
Both of them noticed it simultaneously the smoke coming from the control room had shifted, carrying something with it that hadn't been there before. A white steam, thin at first, then thicker, rolling into the hallway in slow expanding clouds. When it reached Rui's exposed skin he flinched back the contact was like being briefly touched by boiling water, the pressure in it physical rather than thermal.
He looked at it. At the direction it was coming from.
"Where is it coming from?" he muttered.
Arlienne was already moving, trident in hand, walking toward the control room with the measured pace of someone who has just confirmed a prediction. She looked at the wall. At the fracture running through it. At the water streaming down its surface.
"Now I see," she said, almost to herself. "You took so long, brother."
She raised her trident.
The water she summoned hit the cracked wall in a single concentrated blast and the barrier already compromised, already leaking, already stressed past the point its construction had been designed to handle shattered.
She smirked.
The steam cleared.
Standing before them was the silver-haired boy, his expression manic, the Zaltreign energy still flickering at his palms in unsteady pulses. A few feet behind him stood the raven-haired boy, his skin fried red, his posture suggesting he had been standing against a wall for the last several minutes by deliberate choice.
The last pulse of uncontrolled mana discharged and faded.
Emerion blinked. Coughed as the smoke reached him. His expression fell the manic quality leaving it all at once, replaced by the disoriented blankness of someone returning from somewhere they hadn't intended to go. He shook his head slowly, trying to locate the sequence of events that had led to this moment.
The last thing he could clearly remember was his own reflection smirking at him.
And then the reflection had shattered.
"Don't just stand there, let's go," Anathema said, coughing. He was already moving, his sword back in his hand, his burned skin catching the light from the fire still consuming the control room. Emerion nodded and followed.
"Mui!"
"Brother"
Rui and Arlienne spoke at the same moment, their voices overlapping. Rui's tone carried the specific relief of someone who has been watching a door and has finally seen it open. Arlienne's carried something more measured but no less genuine the particular satisfaction of a plan that has resolved itself.
Anathema looked at Rui. Something moved through his face the green mana around him settling, the hardness in his expression softening by one degree, which for him was significant.
Then a third voice reached all four of them.
"Finally... back."
They turned.