Eventually, Vivi forced her gaze from where she’d torn a hole in the spatial fabric. It wasn’t nearly a disaster on the scale of the dimensional anomaly, but where that was a theoretical branch, and thus even less known, spatial spells were still bleeding-edge, not perfectly understood even by her. Casting a spell pioneered by the Shattered Oracle in the middle of Meridian had been…reckless beyond reason. She just hadn’t thought about what she was doing. She’d reacted. Seeing the man lunge for Saffra, she had crushed the Red Tithe as thoroughly as she was capable of.

And it had been thorough indeed.

She [Blinked] to where she’d dropped Saffra off. Very little time had passed, because Saffra still seemed like she was getting her bearings from being teleported. Vivi wondered if she even registered the sequence of events: the Red Tithe appearing next to her, Vivi responding, then grabbing the girl and [Blinking] her away from the spatial rift.

Saffra’s eyes met hers, and again there was a slight jerk of surprise. Vivi’s tattoos were still on display. As much as she wished it weren’t the case, the image of the Sorceress provoked primal responses in those who only knew her by legend. And even in some who had met and spoken with her back in the days of the Cataclysms. Archmage Aeris himself had nearly fainted…though that was hopefully only because of what she represented.

Saffra’s attention tore away from Vivi quickly, though. Even her magical senses must have pinged the spatial anomaly, and it provoked a more immediate, visceral response than even Vivi’s tattoos. Despite the distance Vivi had dragged Saffra—into a random hall of the Institute—the girl accurately locked her gaze in the direction of the catastrophe.

“What is that? What did you—?”

“I’m not sure what I did,” Vivi said darkly. She had torn out a chunk of spacetime, but she didn’t know if it still existed somewhere, untethered, or if everything within that pocket had been…erased. Permanently. A man—a horrible man, but a person nevertheless—gone with it.

Saffra sobered at the tone of Vivi’s voice. She studied Vivi, cat ears flattening down even further.

“Vivi. Nysari…” Saffra whispered. “It was kind of obvious. I just tried not to think about it.”

Vivi didn’t know how to respond. She rarely did, in serious situations.

Saffra hunched in on herself. “I definitely knew a while ago.” She closed her eyes for several seconds, then visibly shook herself. “That—doesn’t matter right now. Isabella. What happened to her? Who was that man?”

Vivi supposed that with the biggest secret revealed, the smaller ones should follow.

Despite the chaos of the last several minutes—and the dawning dread at how she’d shunted the Red Tithe off into some anomalous section of unstabilized space, or, more likely, killed him outright—relief washed through her. She hadn’t liked lying to Saffra, even by omission. She’d just thought it better to get used to each other without the titanic shadow of the Sorceress looming over them.

“The Red Tithe,” Vivi said. “I believe. I met him earlier, when I was speaking with the Duke.”

There were two rather huge announcements inside those short sentences—that the assassin had been an infamous high-Titled aligned with Morningstar, and that Vivi had met with Duke Caldimore. Saffra, already overwhelmed, digested them the same way she had everything else. With a look of shocked anxiety, then a full-body shake, correcting herself to what mattered most.

“But Isabella?” she insisted. “Where is she?”

“I’m not sure.” The Red Tithe had merely said she’d been taken to the Duke, but she didn’t know where the Duke was. His estate? The Wardens’ guildhall? Some other staging area for whatever he had planned? All were plausible. “But I’ll be finding out.”

Even if she had to tear Meridian up to do so.

***

“The Red Tithe is dead,” the Fell Apostate rasped.

The words were so unexpected, borderline nonsensical, that Damon didn’t immediately register them. He slowly straightened from where he’d been inspecting a section of the obscenely complex, finally completed ritual.

“What?”

“Or has been compromised such that I can no longer discern his status,” said the Fell Apostate. “The distinction is irrelevant. He has been defeated. We begin now, or our preparations have been for naught.”

“Dead,” he repeated. “The Red Tithe. How?”

“It does not matter.”

He stared incredulously at the man. “Nothing matters more. That Nysari woman. He lost to her?”

“It does not matter,” the Fell Apostate stressed. “He is gone. Too much has been invested in this Work. We must begin.”

Damon tried to orient himself to the abruptness of the development. “You said midnight. For the conceptual significance.” He understood little of why the timing would be so important, but the Fell Apostate had impressed upon Damon the necessity.

“I despise compromises, but recognize their necessity. It is this or nothing.”

Damon met the blindfolded gaze of the Fell Apostate. A growl escaped his throat.  “We begin, then.” He stormed off. “I will fetch my daughter.”

“Be swift. There is much potential to squander here, Damon Caldimore.”

He stopped himself from biting off a retort. A reminder of who had employed whom, and who had orchestrated what. Such pettiness was pointless. Passing through the doorway and down the hall, he took two turns before arriving at the room that held his daughter.

“Who is she?” he demanded. “What do you know?”

The traitorous girl was tied to a chair with a mana-suppressing artifact clamped around her neck. She looked up, startled, as Damon entered.

“You know something. I know you do,” he snarled. “You’ve always been transparent, girl. Who is she?” He grabbed her by the jaw and squeezed. “I would accuse you of planning this, but that would be giving you too much credit. You could never. Still, you know something. I see it in those insolent eyes.”

“She won, didn’t she?”

Nothing had ever infuriated him so much—that relief in his daughter’s voice. His own flesh and blood. He’d paid more attention to her than she deserved these past eight months, and for what? She’d only strayed further off the proper path. At this point, he couldn’t even blame himself. Some were simply born rotten.

He wished he had time to force an answer from her. But he didn’t. He felt the same urgency the Fell Apostate did. Anything that could kill or disable the Red Tithe wielding both a voidglass weapon and armor was a threat of monumental, and worse, unknown proportions.

Now. The ritual needed to be completed now.

He untied the girl’s bindings and wrenched her up, dragging her roughly along.

“It matters little,” Damon said. “You will secure the future of humanity, of your house, by volition or not. It is the least I can make of a Caldimore.”

***

Vivi was tempted to [Blink] across the city and storm the Caldimore estate without delay. She had been willing to take a more diplomatic approach when the situation had been ambiguous. But while Duke Caldimore’s guilt hadn’t been proved beyond all doubt, it had certainly been proved beyond reasonable doubt. Sending an assassin after her and her apprentice was as condemning an action as she could hope for. She had plenty of excuse to retaliate, now.

The only reason she didn’t immediately head for his estate was because Duke Caldimore might be there, but he might also be at the Wardens’ guildhall, or some third location. How would she know?

She wished divination magic weren’t her weakest branch. Supernatural information gathering would be a blessing from the heavens. Even if she were better at it, though, the Duke surely had wards, and divination was many, many times weaker against such defenses than other magic. To the extent even her massive mana pool might not make up for the difference.

So rather than immediately bringing hellfire to the Noble’s District, Vivi teleported them to Vanguard’s guildhall. A [Detect Presence] alerted her to an individual despite the late hour, and she wasn’t surprised to find, upon [Blinking] into his office, Rafael.

“We have a problem,” Vivi told him.

She was impressed once again by Rafael’s unbreakable composure, because the man saw Saffra, stood, smoothed his coat, and addressed Vivi without the slightest hesitation or surprise. Not even for her apprentice, whom he surely remembered Vivi was trying to keep in the dark.

“Indeed, we do.” He nodded at Saffra. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, young lady.” He faced Vivi. “I was moments from contacting you myself. The Wardens have emptied their guildhall. Even their highest officers; none remain. I believe—”

“Something bad is about to happen.”

“That is the concise summation, yes.”

“I might have killed the Red Tithe,” Vivi told him. “That dagger from earlier felt strange because it’s resistant to magic and skills, borderline immune, and not in any standard way. I believe it’s extra-planar, somehow tied to the dimensional anomaly above Prismarche, though how specifically, I have no clue.” She breathed in and continued. “The Red Tithe attacked Saffra, and I wasn’t sure I could contain him with normal means, so I ripped out a chunk of the spatial fabric surrounding him. It worked; he’s gone. The weapon and armor with it. I might be able to fix it, but I don’t know that for certain. He’s probably dead.”

Was that everything? Those were the big events her steward needed to know about.

Even Rafael had his limits. He needed a moment to digest the rapid-fire announcements. “Tobin was the Red Tithe. Duke Caldimore is working with Morningstar.” Some immense calculus played out within seconds behind the cool eyes of Vanguard’s steward. “I suspect the Wardens’ vault has been prepared as a staging ground for a ritual led by the Fell Apostate, then. Perhaps drawing on the conceptual weight of Damon Caldimore having dominion over his own guild, and sacrificing it to some end. It would be a powerful catalyst indeed.”

That made sense. The Fell Apostate, though? Who was that? Like the Red Tithe, the name rang a bell, but only a faint one. “Isabella Caldimore was brought to her father. I think she’s in danger. I’m going to break into the Wardens’ guildhall and save her, if that’s where you think she is.”

“Under normal circumstances, I would consider that course of action inadvisable,” Rafael said. “But I can see events have escalated beyond containment. I suggest, at least, that you—”

Rafael cut off, his head tilting. The demon had self-admitted to having poor senses to the arcane, not being an adventurer of even moderate acclaim. Yet even he felt the energy that suffused the air.

Through Vivi’s delicate senses? Goosebumps erupted all across her. A shiver went down her spine, she broke into a cold sweat, and her throat went dry.

“Oh no,” she murmured.

In Prismarche, she had felt the boundary separating realities crack, and that had been a properly terror-inducing event, even to a mage as powerful as her. But compared to what she felt now, it had been a prelude, a taste of what an actual shattering felt like.

“I’m not certain ‘oh no’ is a phrase I ever want falling from the Sorceress’s lips,” Rafael said. “What is it?”

“It’s already happened,” she said grimly. “Now we just have to deal with the consequences.”

For a brief moment, she wondered if she’d made a mistake by coming to Rafael. But no. She would have stormed the Caldimore estate first, since that seemed like the more natural place for Isabella to have been escorted. Sure, the Wardens’ vault had been mentioned in a passing manner, but his estate seemed like a far more private location, and thus more likely to be the final staging ground for whatever the Duke had planned.

The guildhall would have been the second location she searched, obviously. But the delay would have lasted longer than speaking with Rafael. She’d been doomed either way.

She didn’t have time to think about what she could have done. Again: she just had to deal with the consequences.

The ritual had taken place in the Wardens’ vault, because the sense of wrongness emanated not more than a hundred feet away. The Wardens were Vanguard’s neighbors. Perhaps that was why it had felt so potent. The proximity. Maybe it wasn’t that

bad, whatever it was?

Vivi snorted to herself.

“Let’s go find out what he did.”

She wrapped flight spells around Rafael and Saffra, then [Blinked] the three of them out of Vanguard’s guildhall and high into the air.

They looked down at a nightmarish scene.

Vivi had seen sights like these before, dealing with the Cataclysms, but that had been inside a game, however realistic. Never in the flesh. Never knowing she was witnessing a disaster that might be beyond even her ability to contain without massive casualties.

The Wardens’ guildhall was gone. The structure, and the plot of land itself, had sunk into a supernatural abyss. A pit of broken dimensional shards descending into an infinite darkness—beyond and through a boundary that should never have been touched, much less punctured so carelessly.

Down below, at the very bottom, gaped an open wound into some Other Side that neither she nor anyone in the world should ever lay eyes on. She tore her gaze away, feeling nauseous for having peeked in.

That would have been problem enough. But, of course, the opening itself wasn’t all she had to worry about.

Denizens were emerging.

Crawling, slithering, and flying out in thick waves were monsters unlike any she had seen in Seven Cataclysms. Sleek, vicious-looking beasts constructed in an incredible variety—all coated in violet-and-black glass-like plating.

Vivi connected the dots in an instant. However that dagger of the Red Tithe’s had been made, and the armor too, the base material had come from these: alien carapace from monsters beyond the dimensional horizon.

Instinctually, she tried [Inspecting] one of the creatures. It slid off, like always, but then something strange happened.

***

Inspection failed. Approximation provided:

***

***

Greater Voidling

Lv. 980

***

She startled slightly. Approximation provided? She doubted that was a standard response given by the Grand System. Maybe she was the first person to ever receive the screen.

Nine-eighty. That was fairly low. It even seemed promising, until she started using the skill on others within the horde.

***

Inspection failed. Approximation provided:

***

***

Lesser Voidbeast

Lv. 1340

***

***

Inspection failed. Approximation provided:

***

***

Voidbeast

Lv. 1423

***

***

Inspection failed. Approximation provided:

***

***

Greater Voidbeast

Lv. 1702

***

“I presume Duke Caldimore’s ritual did not go as planned,” Rafael observed, looking down at the chaos below. The words broke her out of her rapid-fire [Inspection] trance.

“Most rituals of this nature don’t,” Vivi said softly.

She had no idea what the Duke’s plan had been, how he had intended to benefit from this venture, but unleashing hell into the center of Meridian’s Adventurer’s District was surely too senseless for a person who—while clearly not the man most of society had assumed him to be—had spent a long career developing a reputation for competence and rationality.

He’d done the impossible, after all. It took more than a simple madman to manage the chaos incarnate that had been wrought below. Whether Duke Caldimore had intended it or not, whether he’d had help or not, he had arranged a ritual that had torn open the dimensional boundary. Something even Vivi didn’t think she could do. Something that had probably never happened before.

For a long time—though it was only a fraction of a second objectively, slowed down as her senses were—she hesitated under decision paralysis.

What did she do next? The monsters needed to be dealt with, obviously, but what had happened to the Wardens? Where was Isabella Caldimore, and her father? And, if Rafael was correct, the Fell Apostate, who had constructed and invoked the ritual?

Which did she handle first?

“[Detect Presence].”

She sorted through the immense amount of supernatural information the divination spell sent to her. Her eyes locked halfway down the dimensional pit. There, pinned into the wall by thick black spikes, was Duke Caldimore.

One easy answer, at least.

How he had survived the ritual going haywire, and had ended up half-crucified to the abyssal pit, didn’t particularly matter. She had other things to worry about. Too many of them.

She scanned the surroundings looking for other humans, but it was only Duke Caldimore down in the extra-planar maw.

She [Blinked] in front of him. He was in bad shape. The largest spike had gone through his stomach, but smaller ones pierced his left shoulder, right thigh, and right calf, among other places. His head lolled forward; he was unconscious, but alive.

A spike of cruel satisfaction went through her, seeing the man in the gruesome state, but an uncomfortable feeling of disgust, mostly targeted at herself, followed. Even if this man was a monster—and she didn’t know the extent of his crimes, how much of a horrible person he was, if he was at all, and not simply a pawn—she didn’t want to see people in agony, or punished in vicious and unusual ways. He would face consequences for what he’d done, but she wouldn’t torture him or summarily execute him herself.

Unfortunately, with extra-planar monsters surging all around her, Duke Caldimore was in an inconvenient position to be interrogated. She needed to extract him somewhere safer.

She studied the black spikes. Though certainly made of the same material as the dagger, they didn’t radiate nearly the same level of immunity. The dagger had been something special. If she were to take a guess, the difference was the same as raw and refined iron ore. Or perhaps quality of ores, or even normal iron and enchanted iron? There was a lot she still didn’t know.

“[Greater Telekinesis].”

Through her fight with the Red Tithe, she’d substantially improved her design of this spell, adapting it to better interact with the foreign substance. And indeed, though her fingers slid across the material as usual, when she poured more mana in—squeezing tighter—for the first time, her grip clamped down. It wasn’t even particularly hard; this material was much weaker.

She shattered the spikes and pulled Duke Caldimore out.

“[Greater Restoration].”

“[Blink].”

She brought the man up into the sky where she’d left Rafael and Saffra. Objectively, it had been maybe two full seconds; she was acting quickly, considering how much chaos needed dealing with.

She cast a magical platform beneath their feet and lowered the man onto it, then summoned a field of invisibility around them, so they had privacy—they were out in the open air, after all, no matter how high up in the sky.

“I healed him. He should wake soon,” she told Rafael. She cast a series of disabling spells on the Duke. “Find out what you can from him. Especially what happened to his daughter. Be quick about it.”

She pulled out a silver bell and rang it. A black line sliced down the air, then opened into a doorway. Winston stepped through immediately, rapier drawn and alert, ready for a disaster—and finding one, eyes widening at the hellish sights all around.

“Mistress Vivisari?”

“No time to explain,” Vivi told the butler. “Watch over everyone, please.” She didn’t want to leave the Duke with Rafael and Saffra without a powerful bodyguard, even if she’d cast disabling spells. “I have to deal with that.” She pointed with her staff at the abyssal pit.

And, in ironic timing, the largest and most sinister-looking of the void-creatures yet emerged. A smooth eyeless head preceding a long, cylindrical segmented body. Rising into the air without need for wings, it slithered into the sky in long, sinuous motions, the huge monster’s body nearly as thick as the pit itself. It was so large it blocked the flow of other monsters during the several seconds it took to breach the world.

***

Inspection failed. Approximation provided.

***

***

Greater Voidbeast

Lv. 1950

***

The monster didn’t even have a special name, and it rivaled the third strongest Cataclysm. A being capable of bringing ruin to entire continents, if the level was to be trusted. And she had no reason to believe the Grand System was lying to her.

“See what you can find out,” Vivi repeated gravely to Rafael, already drawing on her mana. “This might take some effort.”