Part Seventy-Nine — Resonant Disruption

Pieced together later, same as everything else about how the Church actually approached us that first time.

　Vance and the four knights arrived at the barrier's edge on a gray, unremarkable morning, the kind of weather that made the shimmer along the barrier's surface almost invisible except to eyes already trained to look for it.

"You're certain this won't simply destroy whatever's on the other side?" Seraphiel asked, watching Vance set up an array of instruments with the same meticulous care she'd apparently brought to every stage of her research.

"Resonant disruption doesn't destroy," Vance said, not looking up from her work. "It disagrees. Firmly enough that the barrier's own structure has to choose between adapting or briefly, locally, ceasing to hold. We'll have a window. Not a large one.

Large enough."

She sounds confident. More confident than the situation probably warrants, honestly, though none of them seem inclined to question a scholar of her reputation.

　The working itself took the better part of an hour to properly prepare — instruments arranged in a precise pattern, Vance's own considerable anti-mana threading through them in a working none of the four knights fully understood, though Cassian, at least, watched with genuine scholarly fascination rather than simple impatience.

"Ready," Vance said finally, straightening, something taut and focused entering her expression that hadn't been there during the earlier, more academic stages of her preparation.

She's not just excited about the puzzle anymore.

Something's changed, now that this is actually happening.

　She began the working properly, hands moving through a series of gestures that seemed, to the knights watching, almost musical in their precision — each motion building toward something the barrier itself seemed to resist, the shimmer along its surface flaring brighter, more agitated, the deeper her working pressed against it.

　The barrier held for nearly the entire hour Vance had estimated, resisting with a stubbornness that made Aldric shift impatiently more than once, before something in its structure finally, audibly, gave way.

　A sound like a held breath finally released.

　The shimmer collapsed inward for one brief, genuine window.

"Now," Vance said, already moving. "The window won't hold long. Move quickly, and quietly — I'd rather not announce our presence any louder than necessary."

　The five of them slipped through together, the barrier's disrupted shimmer already beginning to knit itself back together behind them, the window closing considerably faster than any of them had actually planned for.

　Once inside, Vance's careful academic composure shifted into something else entirely — a woman moving with clear, deliberate purpose rather than simple curiosity, angling away from the knights' more cautious, methodical advance.

"The anomaly's presumed location is this way," Seraphiel said, gesturing toward what scouting reports suggested was the settlement's likely center.

"Of course," Vance said, already moving in a slightly different direction, one that had nothing to do with any settlement at all. "I'll examine what I can from a scholarly distance. You four proceed with your own priorities."

She's not actually following their plan at all.

She's heading somewhere else entirely, and none of them seem to have noticed yet.

　The four knights, trusting her expertise and preoccupied with their own careful advance, let her go without much further question — a mistake, though none of them yet understood exactly how significant a mistake it actually was.

　Deep within the domain, in a stretch of forest none of them had any reason yet to know held something considerably more significant than an anomaly's settlement, Vance moved with the specific, focused urgency of a scholar who'd just detected something her instruments had no proper name for.

There's a second signature out here.

Older than the outer barrier.

Denser, somehow — dimensional magic layered on dimensional magic.

I need to see what's actually generating that reading with my own eyes.

　She had no idea, moving deeper into territory that was very much not hers to explore, that something considerably more alert than she'd accounted for had already noticed her presence entirely.