Alex activated his domain instantly. He blinked away from the Forsaken Revenant, re-appearing beside Claire and the others, but the monster didn’t even try to stop him. It just stood there.

Staring.

“Well,” Wess said. “That worked. Can I shoot it now?”

“Like that did much last time,” Claire muttered. Her lips thinned and she shifted from foot to foot. “Shit. This thing is a problem.”

“And it’s wasting time,” Derek added. “We’re falling behind everyone else in the Ancestry the longer we spend here. The whole point was to find people in a fight.”

“Let’s focus on the matter at hand, maybe,” Alyssa said tersely, clutching her brush before her like it was a crucifix meant to ward off a vampire. Unfortunately for all of them, the only vampire-adjacent being was on their team. “What is it waiting for?”

“I think it went too far away from home,” Alex replied. “The Revenant been slowing down the whole time we’ve been fighting it. It’s been chasing us for a long time, but this is the first time we’ve properly fought it.”

“It must have been acting on an old command to chase us, and it just never stopped,” Claire said with a nod. “But that command took it far enough away from whatever directs it that it no longer has a good way to act.”

Alex’s brow creased.

That’s… odd. Isn’t it a bit similar to how my own abilities work? If I sent Glint off with orders to hunt somebody down, he’d totally act the same way, wouldn’t he?

“How exactly does that help us?” Wess asked. “Help us more than — say — putting a bullet between its eyes.”

“What eyes?” Alyssa asked.

“You get the idea,” Wess replied.

“You already tried that, though,” Derek reminded him. “It didn’t do very much.”

“Maybe I just need to shoot it harder.”

“Can

you shoot it harder?”

“No,” Wess admitted. He let out a huff that really wasn’t at all suited to the danger of the situation they were all in. “Alright, smartass. What would you do, then?”

“Would you all shut up?” Claire hissed. “I’m trying to think!”

The Revenant watched them. It seemed to be trying to size up its options — or perhaps it was still trying to communicate with whoever or whatever had sent it after them in the first place.

But if something did send it after us… why? The first time we saw the thing was a sheer accident. It wasn’t seeking us out. It was just killing some random monsters. Damn it. This just makes no sense. And even if something did tell it to find us, why would they give it a command like that without saying what to do after it found us?

Something tells me its orders weren’t ‘go do a half-hearted attack and fight them a bit but don’t actually accomplish anything at all’.

Claire’s eyes snapped to Alex. “How much magic do you have left?”

“Some. Enough to fight for a bit longer.”

“Have you noticed that it seems… similar?” Claire asked. “The Revenant isn’t thinking. It’s just acting on commands.”

“Yeah. I noticed that. It seems very similar to my own abilities, but do you really think we’re up against another summoner?” Alex asked, watching the Revenant warily. The monster was still standing there. It was like they’d somehow short-circuited it.

“I don’t think so. There’s no evidence to imply that,” Claire replied without taking her eyes off the huge monster. “But that thing about the soul attack… it seems like the Revenant is being controlled.”

“Hive-mind situation?” Alyssa asked.

“No idea,” Claire said. “But if it’s being controlled… the best way to defeat it would be to sever that connection. It already seems like its run against the end of the rope. We just have to give it one last push.”

“How are we meant to do that?” Wess asked. “Take it for a jog?”

“No,” Alex breathed. He tore his gaze from the Revenant and spun to Claire. “Can you hold its attention? It won’t sit around if I start using magic.”

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“How long do you need?”

“Thirty seconds,” Alex replied. “That should be enough.”

“We can do that,” Claire said as she lowered her stance and eyed up the Revenant.

“Thirty seconds?” Derek asked. He cracked his neck. “That’s light work.”

“Wait,” Wess protested, holding his hands up. “What’s going on? Did you all just have a telepathic link or something? Fill me in! What are we—”

“You can shoot it,” Claire said.

“Oh,” Wess said. “Say less.”

Alex didn’t pay them any more mind. He was drawing on his magic before the others had even finished speaking. The fight had already spent a fair bit of it, and this wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t have any room to slip up.

Electric energy raced through his body as he drank in every scrap of Qi he could muster. The Revenant responded instantly. The monster exploded into motion the instant Alex’s mind brushed against his magic, tearing across the room toward him.

Derek leapt to meet it. The berserker slammed into the considerably larger monster with a roar, flinging his entire body into one of its legs. There was a crunch. It was a bit hard to tell if it came from Derek or the Revenant.

Claire was upon the huge monster an instant later, driving herself into its other shoulder with all the force her wings could muster. It stumbled back with a hiss, blue threads spooling out from within the void at its core and shooting out toward both of them.

Alyssa’s brush danced through the air before her as she hurriedly started to paint something into being, and Wess activated his Soul Manifestation once more. Alex didn’t have the liberty to watch the fight any further.

The Revenant would be doing everything it could to get to him again. After all, the monster thought he’d stolen something. Something told Alex it wasn’t going to be happy if he escaped — and that was exactly what it thought he was trying to do.

His fingers dug into the air before him. He gritted his teeth, pumping Qi-enforced Riftwarped energy into the magic. The air warped and bent. It conformed to his grip as he pulled with every scrap of physical and magical strength he could bring to bear.

Hazy coils of magic twisted out between his knuckles as he slowly pulled them apart. The sounds of battle tore through the room all around him. Alex’s senses yelled for him to look away from the magic, to make sure the Revenant wasn’t just inches away from splitting him in two.

But there was no room for that. He couldn’t afford to split his attention. The only thing he could do was trust that the others would hold up to their end of the fight. Thirty seconds. That was all he had to work with. Every single one of them had to count.

His muscles strained as he pulled his hands farther apart. Arcs of purple-red lightning crackled through the air. They twisted into a sharp-edged disk, slowly pulling farther and farther apart as Alex stretched the portal as much as he could.

Magic pressed back against him. Pressure bore down on Alex, grinding against his limbs as he leaned against the portal. His arms trembled, shuddered, but still they pushed. Magic pumped through his muscles in a raging current of power.

The portal grew wider. His arms stretched farther and farther still. They moved until he had practically shoved them into a T shape, but even that wasn’t enough. A portal sized for a human wasn’t going to be nearly large enough for what they had to accomplish.

And so Alex continued to push. Not with his arms, but with sheer magic alone.

The difficulty more than doubled. Strain twisted his thoughts and wormed into his mind like tongues of flame. He clenched his teeth tight enough to bite through metal as he shoved Qi-empowered Riftwarped Energy through the air with will alone.

The portal continued to grow.

It stretched out before him, opening like the mouth of a ravenous beast preparing to slam shut over his neck.

But it never closed.

The portal opened past Alex. It crept past his head and up into the ceiling, reaching high enough to brush the top of the ceiling. A gale of energy poured out from it. Alex’s legs shook — though he wasn’t sure if it was because of exhaustion or the intensity of the magic pouring free from the huge glistening disk of power.

He let out a roar, shoving the portal open up the last few inches he could muster.

“Claire!” Alex screamed. “Now!”

“Alyssa!” Claire yelled in turn.

Alex spun from the portal just as a blur of shadow flashed across the room to fill his vision. The Revenant was upon him.

Before he could even try to teleport away or dodge, Derek slammed into the Revenant’s leg. The full force of his charge barely even managed to budge the monster an inch. It didn’t even glance down at him.

“Give it back,” the Revenant whispered, strands of blue flashing out for Alex. “Give it—”

Air rushed. Alex’s eyes went wide as a comically large hammer formed of brilliant yellow light — one so large that there was no way it could have even been swung upright inside the room — crashed into the Revenant’s side with a resonating crunch.

The Revenant was launched off its feet. It hurtled straight into the portal, vanishing within its murky depths without so much as another noise.

Alex spun toward the source of the hammer. Clutching onto it with nearly her entire body was none other than Alyssa.

Since when could she do that?

He spared an instant to check on Claire. She’d taken a number of nasty blows judging by the amount of blood covering her, but the wounds had already sealed over. Her increased control of blood made her remarkably difficult to kill.

“We did it!” Wess exclaimed. He was leaning heavily against the wall, riddled with deep wounds that wept enough blood to soak through all of his clothes. It didn’t look like the fight had gone very well for him.

“Now it’s someone else’s problem,” Alyssa muttered, her hammer evaporating into shimmering particles. She knelt, picking her huge brush up from the ground, and slung it over her shoulder.

“Not quite,” Alex said.

“Huh?” Derek asked, clambering up to his feet. “What do you mean? And shouldn’t you close the portal before it comes back in after us?”

“Why would I do that?” Alex asked. “It’s not every day I have a chance to get such a powerful monster.”

And, with that, he strode into the portal in pursuit of the Forsaken Revenant.