Alice felt her heart start to race as she stared at the group of Society members. Information clicked into place in her mind. The oddly undefended base. The empty hallways. The elaborate base and massive research project, without anywhere near the adequate manpower to start the whole operation.

    They had even kidnapped [Scholar] Matista, who Alice had been wanting to talk to. Cecilia had spoken with Matista long before Alice had, and Cecilia was known to be helping Alice. It wouldn’t have been hard to realize that Alice might be interested in a meeting with the [Scholar], and to kidnap her beforehand.

    The whole base was a trap. It was designed for her.

    Before Alice could finish processing that information, the worshippers in the room started to collapse. They were like sandcastles washed away by reality itself. Centimeter by centimeter, their flesh turned into black motes, which shrank into nonexistence moments later. Alice saw some of their dull, lifeless eyes flicker with relief, while others still stared deliriously at the statue - their minds too damaged for any awareness of their impending death. In moments, they all died.

    However, they didn’t completely disappear - while their physical bodies turned to dust and ash, small orbs of mana remained where their bodies had collapsed. Those orbs of mana sent a steady, unbroken stream of mana through the air... towards the statue. Alice felt her heart sink as she realized what she was looking at..

    The previous floor’s test. Whether people could still supply something with mana after their death. Clearly, the Society had found a way to make that happen, if it didn’t already happen naturally.

    “Distract him,” said the Immortal who led the Society Mages, pointing towards Ethan.

    A moment later, the statue shifted. Before, it hadn’t moved with purpose - it had only squirmed and shuffled in place.

    Now, it rumbled to life. It got to its feet, and strode towards Ethan. Its movements were a jagged mess of unsteady steps, like a toddler learning to walk for the first time. However, its effect on the nearby mana was horrible - every single movement it made broke the nearby mana, like a portal spewing broken mana into the void. Even though its movements were clumsy, the amount of mana radiating from its body made Alice suspect that it was still a threat.

    “I’ll deal with the [Bard]. You grab the girl,” said the Society leader. “Three against a [Farmer] and a noncombatant. It should be fine.”

    “Other Mages, deal with the [Mercenaries], then assist the other fights as needed,” said the Society leader.

    Alice felt a chill in her heart.

    They really were here for her.

    The three near Immortals, as well as several other Society Mages, rushed towards Alice. The [Mercenaries], who still numbered about fifty, adopted a defensive stance. Given that they were outnumbered nearly two to one, and the Society members were all Mages, Alice doubted they would last long, but she didn’t have the attention to spare to help them out.

    Ethan tried to ignore the statue entirely, and instead rushed towards the Immortal who was attacking Allira - but the Statue shut that down nearly immediately. As Ethan moved to help Allira, the statue raised its hand. A cone of broken rainbow mana fizzed into existence, surrounding both it and Ethan, and somehow, Ethan’s forward momentum just... disappeared. In a tenth of a second, Ethan had been isolated from the rest of the group. Ethan’s eyes narrowed, before he immediately tapped the air in front of him. Alice realized that Ethan couldn''t see the rainbow bubble - so he didn’t even know exactly where the boundaries of his ‘prison’ were. He tried to open a portal using dimensional mana, but the other side of the portal just... never materialized. It was something Alice had never seen before when using dimensional mana. Where did the portal go? Into the void?

    Ethan snapped the portal closed, and turned towards the statue. He started blasting it with pieces of shrapnel, but the statue shrugged off the attacks. Alice whirled towards the three near-Immortals who were advancing on her, and started to panic. Jonathan stepped in front of her, while Cecilia started throwing enchanted items at them, but the Society Mages stepped around Jonathan like he wasn’t even there. Jonathan was an extraordinary meat shield - but his [Dexterity] was uninspiring. Cecilia’s enchanted items didn’t slow the Society Mages down much - there was far too big of a level difference between them for Cecilia’s actions to matter.@@@@

    Alice’s mind raced. She needed to figure out how to turn the tables in this fight. But how?

    A moment later, Alice felt {Adrenaline Rush} activate. The Society near-Immortals were far too close for comfort, and her Perk had finally decided she was at risk of death. Time seemed to slow down as the Perk worked its magic.

    Alice scrambled for a solution.

    Kinetic Magic had been her go-to combat style most of the time. After all, it was highly effective against non-mages, and also incredibly mana efficient, while still being highly lethal. It was like being a human machine gun. However, there was no chance in hell that would work here. The Society Mages could shut down her attacks with almost no effort - the level gap was too wide. Organic magic was useless for the same reason. Alice couldn’t think of a creative way to use her System mana to fix this mess.

    Then, Alice’s mind caught on a memory. Of the first time an Immortal had attacked her, during the boat ride back to Metsel.

    Alice had proven that she could shut down even an Immortal’s Perks with anti-magic mana, during the fight with Emilia weeks ago. That could shut down one of the three monsters barreling towards her - but there was no way to handle the other two. Alice nearly rejected the idea.

    The other group was probably the Sigmusi, the nightmare that seemed to haunt more than half of Allira’s perk-induced illusions.

    Normally, Allira’s illusions were kind of random. Alice had always assumed that this was because Allira had no control over what the illusions actually did. They reenacted scenes from Allira’s memory, with little understanding of the fact that they weren’t alive, or that their environment was very different from before. They were illusions, after all. Not real people.

    This time, it was different.

    The [Soldiers], both Illvarian and Sigmusi, started the first second of the illusion like normal. They swung swords at each other, pelted both sides with arrows, and generally wreaked havoc as they tried their best to kill each other. Allira’s shadows started to melt away, as if they were snow thrown into a volcano. Perhaps Allira couldn’t maintain both her shadows and her illusions at the same time?

    As Alice was thinking about that, she saw a wave of dissolving shadows leap into the soldiers of both sides. The illusions who had been inhabited by shadows froze for half a second, and then shifted. A moment later, they looked far more aware of their surroundings than before - and far, far more pissed off at the presence of the Society Immortal.

    A moment later, nearly thirty [Archers] turned towards the Society Immortal and fired a wave of arrows at him.

    The man flew out of the way, then whirled towards Allira again, ignoring Alice.

    Only for Ethan to snap into place behind the man and slam him with a barrage of kinetically-powered objects. Alice glanced at the three near-Immortals who had tried to kidnap her, and realized that they were now dead. Ethan had finished cleaning up this part of the battlefield.

    The Immortal tried to dodge out of the way of Ethan’s storm of attacks, but now he was actually struggling. Allira’s shadow soldiers and Ethan’s barrage of attacks created enough pressure that the man didn’t have any time to focus on Alice at all. Alice focused, trying to visualize the man’s flight patterns and target him. She needed a perfect opportunity.

    Nearly twenty-five seconds later, the opportunity appeared. The Immortal ducked out of the way of another wave of heat blasts from Ethan, and Ethan used that moment to pull out his father’s old sword. The Immortal, seemingly realizing what the sword was, dodged much more heavily than usual, placing him right into the path of a wave of Allira’s arrows. The man knocked those away with Kinetic magic, but all fifty-seven of his magic tendrils were occupied. Alice decided to take a risk and go for it. She opened a portal right in front of herself - with the other end of the portal right next to the Society Immortal. She shoved a mana tendril through the portal, and into the Society Immortal, before she shoved every drop of anti-magic mana she had remaining into his body.

    For a brief moment, his Perks fizzled out. The man’s unnaturally smooth flight patterns cut out.

    Ethan swung the sword, and a blast of heat burned away nearly half of the man’s body. Rainbow mana flashed through him, trying to regrow his body - and ran into Alice’s anti-magic mana. The rainbow mana pushed through it a quarter of a second later, but that was enough time for Allira’s soldiers to nail him in the eye with an arrow. Somehow, he was still alive after that, but he teleported right in front of Alice.

    Alice’s eyes widened as the man glared at her, the arrow in his eye and the missing lower half of his body widened in hatred and madness. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, bitterly.

    “I thought so. Take it. I won’t let it go to waste.” He reached into thin air, and rainbow mana flickered. A book appeared in his hands, and he stuffed it into Alice’s hands.

    Then, Ethan appeared right in front of the man and unceremoniously beheaded him.

    Alice breathed a low, heavy sigh of relief, as she glanced at the statue, which had stopped moving after Ethan escaped. She looked at the other dead near-Immortals of the Society. She glanced at the [Mercenaries], who Allira was now helping mow down the other Society Mages. Nearly two thirds of the [Mercenaries] had been wiped out, but with two Immortals helping them out, there was practically no chance that they would lose. She turned back to the Society Immortal - presumably, the leader of the shadowy organization.

    Was he... really dead?

    Part of her expected him to reach out towards her again. Perhaps to get up and attack her, snatch her before Ethan and Allira could rescue her. Or perhaps the real Immortal’s body would step out from behind another secret passage, and reveal that they had only killed his body double... or something. Or perhaps the book he had handed her would explode, or open up a portal and drag her away. This had to be a trap.

    Right?

    Even backed by an actual Immortal, the Society members had seemed at least somewhat outmatched. This couldn’t be it, could it? Had they... really just decapitated the Society leadership?

    Alice used organic mana to start ripping apart the Society leader’s headless corpse. There was no sensation of mana resistance. The headless corpse just collapsed. She glanced at the book again, and thought over his last words.

    I won’t let it go to waste.

    As confusion filled her mind, she finally realized that there was no denying the reality in front of her. The Leader of the Society of Starry Eyes was dead, and with him, most of the leadership had followed to the grave.