Alice and Fatima, out with a group of junior knights. Safe.
Teresa had dragged Michael outside and thrown him clear before heading back in to help others.
Vice-Commander Baron was checking the tents nearest the node's boundary, making sure no one was still inside.
Baraha was following Baron, helping him.
And just behind them: Ian Pelletro.
They were some distance away. Echi pushed against the outflowing crowd, heading toward them. Someone tried to grab her arm; she slipped free without slowing. The press of bodies moving the other direction made speed impossible. She couldn't use mana visibly — not now, not with Yurien possibly watching from wherever he was.
At the edge of the distortion, the warped sphere continued to grow.
Baron had nearly finished his sweep and was moving toward the perimeter.
Baraha followed close behind.
Ian called out to him.
She was still too far away to stop it, but close enough to hear.
"I thought we checked all the cadet people - but there's one freshman tent unaccounted for."
"Which freshman?"
"Echinacea Roaz. She has a separate tent, so..."
Echi opened her mouth to shout.
The alarm, the rain, the shouting of dozens of people her voice disappeared into all of it.
She couldn't use mana. She couldn't afford to look like anything other than Echinacea Roaz, noble cadet.
She threw away the umbrella.
Her cloak snagged on someone's scabbard and was yanked from her shoulders; she left it.
Pouring rain. The smell of wet earth and something worse. Soaked clothes, soaked hair, lightning, the crack of thunder splitting the sky. The alarm, the shouts, the tense faces.
Through all of it, she saw Baraha reach her tent and pull back the entrance flap.
Her tent stood near the center of camp.
Directly above it, the boundary was still expanding.
One more step to his right.
Ian was moving up behind him.
Echi shoved a junior knight out of her path hard enough to stagger them and drove forward.
"Senior Baraha!"
Her voice finally reached.
Baraha pulled his head from the tent and turned toward her.
His face relaxed with relief, just for a moment.
Then his body staggered. Not much. Just a slight loss of balance, barely a stumble, the kind any person corrects instinctively with a single step back.
That step brought him into the node.
His body was swallowed whole.
Echi arrived at the empty space where he had been and stood there, rain running down her face.
Ian stood exactly where Baraha had been.
He let out a short gasp of shock - and subtly hid his hands.
Echi stood frozen, staring.
Baraha's large frame had partly blocked her view. She hadn't seen all of it.
But she had caught a glimpse.
In that state of heightened focus, she didn't miss it: Ian had concealed a small dagger up his sleeve. Barely the size of a razor. The tip was red with blood.
He had stabbed Baraha from behind and knocked him into the distortion.
The wound itself would be trivial, but a stumble at the wrong moment was not.
Ian moved toward her quickly, grabbing her shoulders.
"Echinacea! What are you doing here?! It's dangerous — we have to get out!"
She looked at him. His face was a perfect portrait of fear and concern.
She felt sick.
"You should have gone into theater, Senior."
"What? What are you saying? We can talk later. We have to move now..."
She glanced outward. Most of the members had cleared the perimeter. Baron, belatedly noticing that Baraha was no longer behind him, had turned back. His face — honest, solid — went pale when he saw the two of them standing at the node's edge.
"What are you two doing?! Get out, now!"
Over Baron's broad shoulders, past the scatter of gathered knights, she saw a white-clad figure running toward camp from the direction of the gorge. Yurien. Too far to read his face.
She looked back at Baron.
In an erased past, surrounded by the bodies of other knights, blood-soaked and at his limit, Baron had said something to her: Don't go outside. Stay here and die with me.
He had sent his people out to save the citizens and stayed behind to hold the gate, alone.
She had fought him. Subdued him. Beheaded him. He had failed to stop her but the time he bought had saved many lives.
"I'm going outside, Vice-Commander. But Cadet Baraha..."
Ian stepped forward, his voice trembling convincingly.
Echi almost laughed.
'You're going to tell Baron that his squire was swallowed by the node. With your own hands, you pushed him in.'
Her hand found the back of Ian's coat.
The node was directly behind them.
She let her legs give slightly and fell backward, pulling on his coat as she went, as though she didn't want to fall alone.
The node swallowed them both, soft as a bubble bursting.
Her distorted vision caught Baron's eyes going wide, his arm reaching out.
"Damn it!"
His hand cut through empty air.
What he saw: Echinacea falling, Ian staggering, both of them pulled into the node together.
Baron stared at the space they had occupied, his face bloodless.
Then a premonition hit him — sharp and certain.
He moved. Mana-assisted retreat, as fast as he could.
He was right.
The node swelled. It expanded violently, swallowing nearly the entire camp in one convulsion, and then vanished without a trace.
Where tents and equipment had stood, only churned bare earth remained.
Baron stood still, staring at nothing.
Ragged breathing approached from behind.
"Sir Baron."
"Commander."
"What… happened?"
Baron turned slowly. Opened his mouth to report. Saw Yurien's face and closed it again without speaking.
Baron was past forty. He had been a Giosa owner longer than anyone currently serving, older even than the previous commander's era. Yurien had been his squire at nineteen, second year at the academy. By twenty-three, Yurien had become a Master and formally outgrown the role. Their positions had reversed when Yurien became commander and Baron had no complaints about serving the squire he had once trained. He had known, from the moment he took Yurien on, that the boy would one day surpass him.
Nearly nine years of watching him, from cadet to commander. Baron had seen every side of Yurien there was to see.
He had never seen this.
"…What happened to Echinacea Roaz? Where is she?"
Yurien's voice came out strained. Baron nearly stepped back. The Yurien he knew was a straight-line man - controlled, cold, seemingly without boiling point.
But what radiated off him now was something else entirely: a murderous intent so raw it felt like it could rend the air, and beneath it, a fragility that looked as though the wrong word might shatter him.
Not just boiling. Vaporizing.
Baron answered carefully.
"She was… swallowed by the node."
"Where is the node now? Has it already separated?"
"Yes. Just now."
Once RakiaGiosa fully severed a node from the world, it was gone. Unfindable, unenterable. It would reconnect only when time naturally unraveled it.
Yurien looked at the empty space where nothing remained. His pale face looked like it might crumble.
***
Inside the node, the world was the same - and not the same.
The same camp, the same tents. But the rules were different.
Instead of night rain, an ominous red twilight hung over everything. The ground was thick and soft and saturated with a dark crimson fluid that pooled like a swamp. Shadows shaped like soldiers moved through it, endlessly stabbing each other, paying no attention to the monsters rising from the ground and the blood-red sky — monsters that fell upon the shadows and consumed them one by one, growing larger with every meal.
A new variety of hell.
When Echinacea fell backward through the node, she felt a sensation like passing through a soap bubble. She found her footing immediately.
Her ankle boots sank into the swamp with a wet sound.
The boots were beyond saving.
She released her grip on Ian's coat and straightened up.
"This is..."
Ian hadn't processed the situation yet.
Leaving him to it, Echi scanned her surroundings. She had entered a node once before. Once was still more than nothing. She had done extensive research afterward.
[Whoa, what is this place? It feels incredible!]
ValderGiosa sounded delighted.
'It's saturated with killing intent. Makes sense — this was a battlefield.'
After confirming the shadow soldiers and the monsters consuming them, Echi ducked into the nearest tent - which happened to be hers.
Ian, still standing in a daze, followed her in.
She ignored him and peered through the entrance, scanning for Baraha.
Finding him first was all that mattered.
A low voice came from behind her.
"…You."
Without turning around, Echi replied.