Chapter 867 503 The Odds [I]

The odds… The odds… Shut the fuck up, Shiv. You've been spending too much time with the bitch-bureaucrats and the Councilwoman.

The odds. Heh.

Let me tell you what Jackie said to me about “the odds.”

The odds are that we all should have died long ago. During some bullshit fight. To some plague that left us choking on the gunk in our lungs.

The math is ruined by the masses—most people just die, and so the odds end up being a statistical shadow poured over individuals.

But the thing about being a Pathbearer is that we’re made of legend, and legend is about telling the odds to eat shit.

The odds are that you might make Adept, that if you really, really try, you could see Low Master through a single skill before you finally get killed around your hundredth year of life by any number of things.

The odds are really bad that you reach Hero, but by then, your odds of dying rise to damn near a hundred percent when it comes to violent, unnatural death.

But we’re Legends now, kid. Legends forged through legend, and the odds are long behind us. We are outside the scale and the dots and all the numbers. We’re that lone twinkle beyond the rest of the constellation, riding through the vast and black and daring the monsters that lurk in the void to come out and show us how bright their burn is.

The odds are for the dead and the cowardly.

We’re not here to listen to any motherfucking odds. We’re here to skew the entire godsdamn graph upward. We don’t die in the shadows; we pull that shit behind us. We bend to no fucking fate but a stronger hand and a crueler foe.

Yeah, almost all of us are going to die. But it isn’t going to be because of some odds. I’m going to die because someday, I’ll grind edges with something I can’t quite outmurder, and that will be that. But until then, I’m going to be on the other end of the math.

And I expect you’re going to be worse than I am someday. Much, much worse.

—Jessica Hawgrave to Shiv

503

The Odds [I]

The offensive came together like an orchestral masterpiece. Everyone played their part to perfection, from the lowest orc Initiate to the perfidious Realmrunner, everything unfolding far beyond Maria’s highest hopes. Things went wrong during grand operations. That was the nature of tossing countless variables into a chaos born of strife and complexity. Yet, it had all come together so well.

Impossibly well.

Despite being entrenched amongst the orcs and having witnessed the sheer power possessed by the Realmrunner, there was still something about them that led you to underestimate them. It was that whimsy, that faux indiscipline that bothered Maria. She was used to the world fitting a single mold, even after two disparate lifetimes. But now, as the orcs came together to construct this masterwork, each one of them striking with lifetimes of experience, performing their part, and in perfect sync, without order or management, she realized the worthlessness of her judgment.

The orcs lived for war. It was not special to them. They did not need to propagandize themselves. Likewise, the Realmrunner was so close to his own shape, his legend mirroring his own nature down to the last detail, that there was no act of deception needed. Most people had to project a front to fight. The threat of death and the trauma of combat affected them. To avoid being misshapen by it, they had to chisel themselves first. Not so here. It all flowed naturally because it was natural. They'd been here before, all of them: the Realmrunner, raiding a Gate, planning in exquisite detail how to collapse a finely defended structure from within. The orcs, participating, dismantling a place once claimed impregnable, cutting down enemies in the dark in devastating sequence without fail, without a single slip in between. It was, in effect, like being part of something greater. It was the closest Maria had ever been to the System, and she felt alarmed by her growing kinship with beasts and butchers.

And she found herself becoming a growing paradox. For, in one part, she grew closer to how the orcs operated. She acted without over-consideration, that ancient flaw of hers from a lifetime before, when she was merely a player in the chord of the First Blood and a pawn to a greater power besides. But she remained herself. She did all this of her own will, of intellect and desire combined. Her Harbinger parried the taint of bloodlust and other addictive emotions, and thus her path stayed pure.

And it was the purity of this self-control and the drive to assert true control over her destiny and the destiny of those around her that gave her a clear-sighted view of everything unfolding. It enchanted her.

In the prelude to the raid, with everything in place, the world became still. Everything inside the Gate flowed as it did: people marching and venturing, going about their daily business, ignorant in their bliss, unaware of what was to come. There were many elite Pathbearers here—Gate Piety was dense with Legends for a Category Six gate—but it still didn't have enough people. Aside from its adamantine core, the outside of it shall remain bronze, for its general forces were little more than chaff before the great tide to come.

And if the Realmrunner's words proved true, if his plan came to proper fruition, Gate Piety's adamantine core would be cracked before its bronze crust was sundered to powder.

Submerged upon the currents of time, Maria waited and listened. For the millionth time, she checked her supporting assets, the thousands of summons the Challenger helped her obtain. Elite Chronomancers recruited not only from Lord Scorn's court but also volunteers from Compact, eager to avenge themselves for the bombings delivered by the Deathless, and a massive host of orcs. Each one ravenous in their desire for bloodshed, and all of them had a single goal: following the single spear tip of Maria herself to strike down the Deathless himself and bring down the Gate entirely.

“Feeling angsty, Insul? What you got on your odds for Insulbowl?” Retgonned—Legendary Chrono-Thief—asked.

Maria considered giving the orc a full assessment of the Deathless' strengths and weaknesses—to reiterate her confidence that they would bring him down. Yet, in the end, all these words were superfluous. The orcs had her measure, and she had theirs. The Deathless was unprepared for what was to come, and so his fate remained sealed. “Before the lot of us, he is only prey. That is all.”

The Legendary orcs and some of the other Pathbearers tied to her whistled and cheered at her confidence—and she felt their fervor rise.

“But I’m asking if you had to fight him alone,” Retgonned pushed. “How do you think that might turn out?”

Maria almost scoffed. “It is incompetence on the part of the hunter to be forced into a direct duel with their prey.”

“Or desperation. Or just pleasure.” The Breaker's words echoed through the psionic network and arrived as an expression between taunt and warning. “I don't disagree with your assessment regarding the Deathless, but I must warn you that sometimes a monster can force its hunter into some very uncomfortable decisions, sister. I crossed first with this one, and I gotta tell you, more than a monster, he’s something worse: a child.”

“How is a child supposed to be worse than a monster?” Maria asked.

The Breaker's chuckle arrived after a few seconds of delay. “Because, sister, the thing about children is that you are never really sure how they turn out. And the Deathless is nothing but surprising. He doesn't have your training. He doesn't have your experience. He doesn't even have your instincts. But he is nothing if not whimsical. It’s a trait you could have more of yourself.”

And the Breaker meant it. He also meant to rattle her a bit before the battle began, but that was the secondary goal. He truly wanted her to beware of the Deathless.

“Your advice is received,” Maria replied. “But until I find the time and practice to ingrain myself with this whimsy you speak of, I will use our overwhelming power toward absolute advantage and crush the Deathless underfoot.”

Another lull followed from there, and for a moment it seemed like Maria and the other Chronomancers were going to surface from the waters of time before they found themselves displaced too far in the future or noticed by one of the defenders. She was just about to call a postponement when the signal arrived.

The memories coursed upriver along the chain of Chronomancers, creeping from the weakest of their unit to Maria, leading the stream. A series of images flashed into her. A chain of golden blades cleaved across time and space—thousands upon thousands of the Avalons struck at an unseen threat that had reached too far, trespassed into the dome at the center of Forbidden Africa. There, within that mousetrap, blades fell one after another, a cascade of strikes that were certain to Excaliburize the enemy and leave the Great One and Gate Piety devoid of some of their strongest Legends.

At the same time, orc Seekers slid their final shapes into Eldritch spells. Some of them vanished upon pedestals. Others opened their throats in a final sacrifice, casting both mind and soul out as a projectile to anchor upon an Outsider's hollow mind. Tens of thousands of orcs performed these fell acts in unison, and the sky above the Tutorial twisted as purple veins spread through the dour, war-smoked atmosphere.

Split among three Orchestras, the first of the orc Seekers began their infiltration into the Stranger's Garden. Their initial wave was annihilated in an instant, their bodies compressed and shredded across time as the Stranger noticed these intruders immediately. A second wave followed: Seekers who'd mirrored their Eldritch magics with Stealth skills or generally had the capability of blending in and staying hidden for just a few moments longer. They circulated through the Garden, with hundreds dispatched toward the Farwalker outpost. At the same moment, the Realmrunner unspooled his Mana Stabilization Fibers, and the possessed Fingerlings snatched and drew them out as if hawks carrying wires across a bleak sky.

The last of the Seeker Orchestras was the largest, for their task was the grandest, and their casualties were appropriately immense. Numbering nearly a million strong, they threw themselves into a collective—if temporary—oblivion. The endeavor demanded that much blood, for it was no easy task to drive one Eldritch dimension toward another.

The orcs used themselves as beacons across the vast nothingness, their souls only protected by the Challenger's hand. Within a grand concert of Eldritch magic, their bodies were obliterated. Hundreds of thousands of Pathbearers were mangled, their skills shattered, and their minds were torn out from their insides. A grand inferno ignited within the boundaries of their opalescent spell, and a small planet’s worth of space within the Tutorial came ablaze as the great being they courted speared its power over into the Challenger's realm in a world-ending retaliation.

But it worked. Along the borders of the Stranger's Garden came a fire, an inverted flame that crackled inward instead of out. That gnawed at one's sanity to look upon and operated in defiance of thermodynamics and the very lore of flame.

“It's on, IT'S FUCKING ON!” the Realmrunner shrieked across the orc psy-net. “Time cunts! They're open! Hit the fuckers now! The Garden’s getting it up the ass; fuck Piety’s holes NOW NOW NOW!”

100,000 Heroic-Tier Psychomancers served as a unifying nervous system across the 24 Orchestras in action, calling themselves the Super Orchestra Nervous System, and through them, the Realmrunner's voice crackled with almost no delay as mana began to flow across time, across all vectors and all lores, spilling wide to become a translucent phlogiston that shrouded every orc in a perpetual field of real-time updates. “Dimension clash confirmed!” an orc bellowed—even as he was flayed apart from the mind outward. “It’s… it’s beautiful—”

His connection was severed before any Eldritch madness could seep and contaminate the Super Orchestra.

More images slammed into Maria's mind, incomprehensible flashes of one dimension crashing against another.

In one moment, the Stranger's Garden remained as it was: a branching nest of twisted time, past-present betwixt, represented through trillions of golden eyes upon midnight-black limbs shaped in mimicry to trees.

The next instant, it was partially ablaze as an un-creature of inverted flame slammed into it. Its body was the size of an entire dimension, its being singular and multitudinous at the same time.

The Manifold Incinerate screamed with the voice of a universe-birthing detonation as it was brought into the fray, a Deep Outsider that was revealed to Maria by the orc Seekers only upon the moment of its apocalyptic arrival—a tremendous display of operational security.

Being a supremely volatile Outsider only superficially touched by the System, the Manifold Incinerate itself was hard to describe, roughly akin to a screaming nest of fangs shaped from Eldritch flame that revolved around its wholeness like overlapping planetary rings.

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In an instant, a retaliatory flood of world-shattering mana storms was cast upon the entity as it gnawed through the fabric of existence and consumed the underlying vitality layer of the System itself to cast into the blaze of its existence for fuel. All within the Manifold Incinerate’s presence became ice as that which it burned turned far colder than ordinary physics and even the System's decree would ever allow, and time itself was bade to come to a grinding, twisted, torturous halt.

The Stranger screamed in panic and outrage as untold trillions of his Fingerlings shattered in the face of the inverted flame’s spread, carrying with it the cold of stillness greater than absolute.

“Dimensional Clash! Dimensional Clash! Go, you fucking cunts! Go! Smash the Gate! Suiciders! Get your asses in place! And get me my fucking products!”

More images unfolded across the grand psionic network of the Super Orchestra. Back in the Tutorial, two entire orchestras of expendable orcs took their positions upon massive dimensional platforms. Each one was the shape of a tower, 500 meters in diameter and twenty times as tall, with countless floors layered within. They would be ejected up into the air along static needles. When they would breach the atmosphere, the needle would connect to a rupture in space, and they would be intercepted by the dimensional shunt the Realmrunner had established in the Farwalker outpost.

At the Realmrunner’s command, a thread spiked high into the air, and another finer vein of mana intercepted it, as the orcs that were going up were promptly wrenched violently across dimensions and flung directly at the still-open pathway leading into the guts of Gate Piety.

The initial charge of orcs burst through the gateway, Reflexes Skills Heroic-Tier at the least, Legendary among the best. They moved as blurs, but the destruction that would have normally followed contained biokinetic repulsion spells and inertial stabilization enchantments. They didn't want to break what was on the other side, after all. Bursting into the base of the Tutorial Bunker, they took the guard by surprise. Umbrals and Weaveresses were shredded in scant seconds, their bodies turning to their component atoms before they could ever react. Fists the size of sledgehammers struck with the force of falling meteors; spells of fire and flame left them incinerated, reduced them to nothing but ash, and the VIP was secured in the next instant, unable to call out or even truly notice the unfolding carnage as a hand wrapped itself around the base of his skull and a psionic mana spike pierced through his feeble Magical Resistance.

“Sleep,” an orc ordered.

Enchanter Merrielmel toppled into unconsciousness.

From there, the Forward Infiltration Team broke into two groups. The first began weaving a chain of new spells at the base of the bunker. They disassembled existing enchantments and rerouted circuits of mana to fuel the impending eruption. Meanwhile, an orc Chronomancer tossed the captured Enchanter into a dimensional pocket before flashing gold and casting himself back across his personal history. Orc Magitechs saw the captured Slipgate redesigned in the span of twelve seconds, and the gateway's dimensional frequency was shifted back to its original designation.

For the first time in months, the Tutorial and Gate Piety were reconnected, but only for a few scant seconds. The moment the pathway was stabilized, they began disassembling the Slipgate and bringing things across. The Magitechs walked over with the diffusers and stabilizers in tow, and as they returned, a detachment of orc Pyromancers came forth, intersecting with them to deliver the first true blow against Gate Piety itself.

A circle of seven Legendary Pyromancers merged their mana together, their supporting Heroes and Masters further amplifying them with auxiliary spells. They unraveled everything at the base of the Tutorial Bunker, and all as one, the orcs pushed forward, unleashing the fullness of their magical might as a fist shaped from molten metal erupted into the air in a volcanic blast that shook all of Piety. A searing scar of white cleaved the Gate down the middle and splashed against the crystalline veins that spread out from the mana core to cover the skies above.

The bunker unraveled in half a heartbeat, its slag melding with the rising torrent of flame as the orc Legends shaped and wielded the volcano they forged. They directed spells and destruction down upon the Gate, casting it free and wide like artillery. At the same time, the Magitechs transferred the Slipgate over to their next closest gateway as the next phase of their operation unfolded. They were to compromise Gate Piety's surface gateway as well. When the defenders inevitably pushed the orcs back and secured the Tutorial Bunker once more using the firepower provided by their mana core, they would be flanked again from the Abyss and the surface and overwhelmed as they were struck from all angles—as their population was butchered to ensure the destabilization of the core.

Maria saw none of that, for she accelerated across time, launching herself in a single, staggering instant as her Transposition spell came to an end and a veil of Languor took hold. “With me!” she called telepathically to the rest of her Chronomantic war host, and they responded with a stalwart cry of excitement and focus. She surged across the waters of time and speared toward a temporal frequency that called to her own. Her golden mana squealed as a second Harbinger entered her vicinity, and likewise, he felt her as well—only far too late.

But then chaos and confusion unfolded both ways.

Maria struck the Deathless, her summons bursting out from the daggers in which they were stored. She tried to crack him immediately, to drag him across time, but then, with a flash of ruby-red brilliance, something went missing in her mind. Maria found herself lost, confused as to what she was doing, why she was surging across time to strike at… who?

But while her conscious mind crumbled into confusion, her subconscious and the rest of her forces had been reinforced against this very outcome.

They knew about the Deathless' Unique Skill: how he could seemingly vanish from existence, tearing all knowledge, all possible awareness of his existence, out of integration itself. Even the Challenger wasn't immune to this, so they devised a strategy that functioned in ignorance. Even if they didn't know the Deathless was there, they could continue writing commands into their subconscious, demanding they act along a specific pattern until he resurfaced. And he would resurface.

For Maria and her personal war host, the pattern was simple: provocation. They would target everyone he cherished, everyone he cared for, starting with the other two members of the Favored Three. And so, with time at a standstill, Maria launched herself at Adam Arrow without thought. Adam, Demigod of Tyrannical Heroism and the Nemesis-Beloved of the Challenger. His fate seemed to be sealed, and Maria thought nothing of how absurd it was for her to so casually end someone's ascension to godhood and break a Holy War before it began.

Then the Deathless surfaced once more, bursting across reality to strike at her, and everything missing slipped back into place.

Black fire erupted around him, and his body tumbled forth, not in a humanoid shape, but like a natural disaster of injuries, of destruction, of unstoppable malice, wreathed in pitch-black fire born of refined anger and with a lacquering of gold over all that. The landslide Shiv became was shrouded by his Harbinger, but there was something else there, something Maria didn't have enough time to discern.

“Chrono Drill Alpha.” That was all she needed to say. She had worked with these Chronomancers, gone over the strategy time and time again, and they had thousands of strategies to employ, one folding into another. Right now, she went for the most straightforward approach. She cast her Transposition spell, flinging herself half-seconds into the future while calling all the stabs and thrusts she delivered in her past into the present and ejected those attacks out along her anchor. As she remained ahead of time, she could still cast backward into where the world's present was supposed to be, and all the while the Deathless followed her like a bloodthirsty hound made mad by the scent of trailing blood.

Meanwhile, the rest of her Chronomancers lingered behind, using their Languor to extend this temporal engagement. As she drew ahead of the Deathless, he tried to catch up to her, casting himself forward, impacting and deflecting her decoy strikes and further painting his presence along the time stream. She led the pack, and he slowly aligned himself along the chain of her temporal anchors—and with that, his fate became hers to decide.

She counted her heartbeats, for that was the pace the Chronomancers synchronized their actions to. By the fifteenth, just as the Deathless was lapping at her actual heels, a combined torrent of magic cast from an entire Orchestra of orc Chronomancers, from all the High-Tier mind and time golems she'd summoned, from all the other High-Tier Pathbearers she'd recruited through her connections to the Alliance, arrived as a single overwhelming, cataclysmic blow.

Channeled and directed using Maria’s personal history against the Deathless, who foolishly aligned himself in parallel.

The impact was immense and immediate. An ocean of Legendary-Tier Chronomancy siege spells struck his Harbinger like a hammer would a porcelain plate; the Deathless' temporal shell splintered. He went from swimming across the course of time to going stiff and still as a statue, just like any other; then came the mind spells, cracking his consciousness—shivering his senses before he could slip out of reality's grasp once more. She felt the light of intellect go out from him, his enkindled flames sputtering out like a furnace deprived of fuel.

A new, invasive veil of gold replaced that which the Deathless lost. A cage of time fused over him, keeping him pinned in place while the victorious war host gave a cheer—earning a hard-won smile from Maria herself.

It was as she said before: The Deathless was a victim, and the Breaker's concern seemed paranoid at most. Yet Maria was not the kind to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. “Find his body, his original body. Find it and keep him suppressed.”

“How about his Revenant? What say we prove the System's choice in naming his Path wrong?” Retgonned laughed.

Maria scanned the path she traveled through the halls of Farnest. When she failed to locate the Revenant within a half-second, she rejected the idea. “We don't have time to waste. This is the most reliable way of keeping him subdued and contained. Besides, we are to live up to our bargain with the Realmrunner, aren't we?”

“Well, we could just betray and kill the bastard,” Retgonned suggested casually.

Maria gave a neutral hum. “Only when he has no more use. Contain your bloodlust for now.”

“Aye, Insul.”

And so her Orchestra of Chronomancers expanded across the Deathless' Garden of Wounds and Broken Things. They wielded magics to peel through his nonexistent resistance and get deeper into the substance beneath. The source of the Garden was a body, a body destroyed and made ripe through wounds.

Maria followed the confusing miasma of vitality, trying to isolate and locate the wellspring from which it all flowed. The Deathless somehow seemed brighter, a magnitude more potent than he had been during their last encounter. That left her disturbed to a slight degree. She knew he was an anomaly, a being that fed off of strife, the same way a child would find sugar in mother's milk. If she had given him more time, if she had delayed this any longer, what might he have become, indeed? The Breaker wasn't entirely wrong. The Deathless was more childlike than any other.

But still an animal, still—

Wait.

She… she had been here before. She was… It was more than a feeling.

She had been here before.

Maria jolted. Something was wrong. Why was she going over this again? She'd been here before. She'd relived all this before. This moment, everything that she was thinking about, everything that she just went through, it was like a cycle. She'd been through this before. Why was she thinking about this? Why, why was she thinking about this? She'd been here before. Why—

She shuddered. She cracked. Something was wrapped over her mind: a spell riven of translucence and gold. Psychomancy and Chronomancy entwined around her, keeping her locked in this stasis, in this trap. Was this the Deathless' doing? Had he fooled her? Had he outplayed her somehow?

Maria reached out with her Harbinger and seized the fine threads that kept her trapped. She strained against them. She pulled, and as she did, she realized she lacked the strength. She was like a child trying to break through adamantine fibers. But though she couldn't shatter its integrity, she could pull herself along and try to find a gap in its construction. As she twisted and pried, as she pressed and struggled, as her mind and being bubbled and cracked, she found the slightest of gaps, the most minute of exits, not wide enough for her being. She remained burdened by a prison of time, but there was a single gap, a fissure in the spell structure, a fine crevice for her to peer through using her mind.

On the other side, she saw her own past looping into the horrifying present, as she found herself looking upon the woman who made her a Harbinger in another lifetime during her Excaliburization.

Legend-Philosopher Melaia Kelhaus held Maria aloft as the rest of Maria's War Host bombarded her with all they had. To Maria's disbelief, every strike that landed was flung off into the future. Every attempt to strike her caused another Chronomancer to be displaced or frozen in time, with their mana fields ripped asunder and their beings entombed in looping presents that extended onward toward an eternity.

Maria could see those descending spirals of magic, twisting staircases of gold that plunged down deeper into the base of the Chronomancers' skulls. She could hear them screaming psionically as they were condemned to suffer entire eternities alone, staring out, unable to emerge—prisoners of time, prisoners of conscience, prisoners within their own flesh.

And now I am a prisoner too.

As streams of time-dissolving flame struck the Philosopher, she banished the attack into the future, same as all the others, and simply pointed a finger out as threads of fire speared free from her form. Impacts resounded, and crackles of shrieking madness echoed from past to present as another chain of chronomancers was struck down without being slain. Maria felt the psionic residue spill over her, glimpsed at the last moments of more of her forces as they were unraveled from within, their emotions amplified to a limit they couldn't withstand. The orcs suffered the worst among them, as their bloodlust was provoked to a point beyond their comprehension—and their hearts were wrenched apart as she poured the fullness of her emotions into them.

It was a terrible thing to learn how small you were—how incomplete you were in both intellect and sensation compared to someone your utter superior.

Maria remembered suffering the same thing so many times over in Paradise, yet this was worse, far worse. The Philosopher in that life had kindly come seeking Maria, seeing in her infinite potential, but the Kelhaus that stood atop the Deathless’ vessel seemed barren of that affection—left with only cold interest.

“Oh. You have found my gap. My alternate’s training must be… adequate at a base level, then.” Another blow struck Kelhaus—this one delivered at the end of a Vulteg’s hammer—a Vulteg that turned to dust from within as a Chrono-Pyromancy spell that ricocheted off Kelhaus’ field was torn back to the present.

A veil of flames washed through the Philosopher. She did not burn. She did not flinch. She remained undisturbed, and hence did her discussion with Maria continue. “But the control my false self instilled in you is lacking. As is your experience. I am disappointed. You could not keep me out at all. But my curiosity is satisfied, and my theory is correct: The bliss of Paradise is anathema to a philosopher. It is anathema to all who seek something more than pleasure and peace. You possess the Harbinger, but you have been deprived of much of what makes a true walker of the Tripartite Path.” Kelhaus exhaled—and a sliver of her mind washed over into Maria.

The vampire writhed and quailed—it was too much. Her skull screamed, and her heart tore, even as she trained to hold it together. “Too much… too—”

“No,” Kelhaus said, her voice distant and indifferent. “Not so much at all. Not even a droplet. I see it. I see why you tear. Oh, Maria. You must know that enlightenment damns you to never reach full actualization. As the Deathless is fragile, so are you. He can be shaped. Can you? Can you bear to see all I see? Can you prove yourself capable of the skill that was bestowed upon you?”

The challenge made Maria’s mind go still. Her flailing terror died, as the foundation of who she was took hold.

Maria, born a cuckoo, Excaliburized as Harbinger, desperate for true control, shed certain madness in the face of the challenge. “Deliver your test to me, then, Master,” she hissed, bearing her fangs. “Let us both see.”

For the first time, Maria read a flicker of approval within Kelhaus. “Let us both see,” the Philosopher agreed. “Surface. And we will speak again.” With that, she sealed the mental fissure she left for Maria to peer across, and she was banished back into the cemented depths of her time-locked mi—

The offensive came together like an orchestral masterpiece. Everyone played their part to perfection, from the lowest orc Initiate to the perfidious Realmrunner, everything unfolding far beyond Maria’s highest hopes. Things went wrong during grand operations. That was the nature of tossing countless variables into a chaos born of strife and complexity. Yet, it had all come together so well.

Impossibly well.

Impossibly well.

Impossibly well.

Impossibly well.

Impossibly well…

It felt impossible. It felt… wrong.

Maria blinked—but then dismissed the emotion.

She had a siege to prepare for.