The ball of fire raced towards us.

  Every instinct I had told me to duck. My body refused to move, caught between my own will and the whispering of the bde. The fireball almost reached us. It paused in midair, a purple glow surrounding it. It disappeared.

  The men were charging at us. Estovan and Anias moved to meet them. Anias sent forward daggers. Estovan’s rapier glowed as he struck out with bsts of mana.

  “Eline?! Can you move?” Damian’s voice sounded frantic in my ears. At least he’d remembered to use that name.

  UNCHAIN THEM.

  The Godbde was in my hand. It didn’t come out rusted. It was as pristine and perfectly white as I remembered. The gemstone glowed. My resistance broke.

  I charged forward, past Anias and Estovan.

  “My Lady!”“Eline!”

  I felt Anias’ Gift settle over me, its grip colpsing as soon as it came. Two men faced me, ones Anias and Estovan hadn’t instantly killed with their Gifts. Both Lizardmen wielded those odd spears. One of them stepped forward and lunged at me. The other hung back, pointing the rounded end in my direction.

  Something between instinct and skill took over. I twisted under the spear aimed for my head, my own bde stabbing forward. The man was wearing some kind of padded armor. The bde didn’t care. It stabbed clean through his chest as if it wasn’t even there. There was no resistance at all. His mouth opened wide, and only blood came out. I pushed him back, and he fell on his side.

  The other man’s spear was glowing. Lightning shot out towards me. My body readied itself. I knew I just had to swing at it towards-

  A wall of earth blocked me from the attack. Damian rushed to my side.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” He shouted.

  “I-” I swallowed. Some of the immediate rage was gone now. My body still trembled, but at least I could think again. “I think I was.”

  He stared at me.

  Boom.

  Wind smashed through Damian’s wall, carving a circur hole the size of my fist. The man on the other end screamed. There were more shouts and screams now. Men were flooding out of the warehouse, carrying swords, shields, and bows. Many of those weapons glowed. Some of the men carried talismans or staffs. The barrier was only one way.

  Arcs of lightning, bolts of fire, and gouts of water all rushed towards us. Anias was at my side in an instant, a purple glow around her body. Estovan charged to meet the ones closing in with weapons.

  Even at a quick count, there must have been forty or fifty men. Well beyond what we’d expected.

  “Eline.” Anias hissed. Damian’s wall shattered, she hurled the stones at many of the elemental attacks coming our way, blocking them. “Don’t fall to the sword’s Intent.”

  “I’m trying.” My hand still trembled. My legs ached to charge towards the nearest men. It took all the willpower I had to ground my feet and not rush in again.

  Destroy.

  The scream was a whisper now. Somehow, that didn’t make it any easier to resist.

  Estovan faced a dozen men. His rapier was a blur as he moved between them. He jumped over a hammer aimed at his chest, twirled midair to avoid a thrust at his neck. A Dwarf waited for him to nd, his axe poised. Estovan’s arc changed in midair, and he nded squarely on the man’s head. Men charged at him from all directions, and yet I got the impression that he would be just fine.

  More than a dozen men charged the two of us, even as yet more magical projectiles rained down on us. It wasn’t just the elements. Glowing arrows mixed in with them. Anias’ Gift settled over them, twisting them aside, often turning them towards some of the charging men below.

  “Dorian,” Anias growled, her face a mask of concentration. “Protect her with your life.”

  “You don’t need to tell me twice.” Damian somehow managed to look both afraid and resolute at the same time.

  I would have said something in my defense, but more people were on us then. Two Lizardmen charged Damian and me from the opposite side. How had they even gotten there?

  Damian put his hands on the ground. Large stone spikes erupted from the ground in front of him, shooting out at the two. One of the Lizardmen managed to get his glowing sword up in time. The other didn’t. That Lizardman had a hole blown right through his chest, making him stumble and fall.

  I charged the remaining one, the gleaming Godbde in my hand. The sword’s whispering wasn’t as loud now. The instinct was there, but only faintly. I didn’t need it for this.

  I hadn’t had much time to learn swordpy, save for learning the first two forms Estovan had shown me. My ssh was sloppy. The Lizardman smirked even as he moved to block; he saw it too. He was going to parry and then run me through.

  The Godbde met the sword. There was no resistance at all. This wasn’t a csh of steel against steel. This was something more, and the Godbde won easily.

  My bde cut through his, moved past the steel, and severed one of his wrists. It fell limply to the ground, the arm itself leaking blood.

  “Huh,” I murmured. “I’m gd that worked.”

  “Y-you crazy bitch!” The Lizardmen tried to shove his body onto me.

  Earth erupted from the ground underneath him, smming right between his legs. That…definitely must have hurt. The Lizardman let out a strangled cry, and then he was rolling on the ground.

  “Esra, duck!”

  I did. Something warm blew right past my head. It was a fireball- no. It wasn’t the normal bright yellow and red. This fireball was pure bck. A dwarf stood a dozen feet to the side, raising a staff above his head, rger than he was. Bck tendrils swirled around the staff, starting to coalesce.

  I looked over to Anias for help. Elemental attacks tried to strike her from every direction, only to get snuffed out or redirected at the st moment. She had her hands full.

  Estovan was in the middle of a ring of corpses. The thugs around him were trying to back away, only for Estovan to chase them down again. It was just Damian and I then.

  The Dwarf’s bck fireball was rger now. He heaved forward, and the roaring fme raced not towards me, but towards Damian. Damian reacted almost instantly. He pnted his hands, a wall of earth blocking him from the attack.

  Weak.

  The sword whispered. The attack met Damian’s defense. It didn’t dissipate as it should have. Instead, it was as if it were eating the wall itself. Damian hadn’t made it very thick to begin with. I did the only thing I could. There wasn’t enough time to move. I threw the sword. It whizzed through the air.

  The wall crumbled, and the fme continued. It met the bde. The point where the bde met the fmes warped. The fmes cut in half and then lost form entirely, disappearing inches away from actually hitting Damian. The bde itself lost momentum, cttering to the ground a dozen feet away.

  I willed the bde gone. It disappeared.

  “T-thanks.” Damian stared at me wide-eyed.

  “D-don’t mention it.” I had hoped that would work. In the few experiments I had done, the bde had been able to cut through just about anything.

  The knot was in the back of my mind again. I pulled, held out my arm. The sword was back in my hand. Now that we were in this mess, I needed this power.

  The Dwarf was staring at me with even wider eyes. His arms were trembling as he slowly but surely tried to back away. “Wh-what the fuck did you do?!”

  “You bastard.” I hissed. I suspected that no amount of Damian’s mana reinforcement would have done a damn thing if that attack had hit.

  He was backing away more now, though all that did was make him stumble and fall on his ass. The Dwarf raised the staff, motes of bck fme began to coalesce right above it. I sshed his staff with the bde. There was a moment of actual resistance. It was so unexpected that it was almost enough to put me off bance. Then, the staff broke.

  The Dwarf stared at the useless piece of wood. “H-how can y-”

  I sshed again, this time at his neck. There was no resistance this time. It felt like slicing through air. His head rolled. Blood spurted out. I stepped back, watching the head roll on the ground.

  I’d well and truly killed someone, and this time it hadn’t been the bde. Or at least, mostly not. I stared at the sword. It was still pure white. It was an odd thought, but I realized I’d never actually seen it pick up any blood.

  I turned and walked back towards Damian.

  His face was pale. My anger faded when I saw that. Something writhed in my chest. The awkward weight settled in my hand. I dismissed the rusted sword.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I mumbled as I walked past him.

  “Sorry.” He muttered. “It just took me by surprise.”

  It took me by surprise, too, just how easy it was. I had suspected this for some time. but it seemed there really was something wrong with me.

  The fighting had died down now. The ring of corpses around Estovan had only grown. Anias had likely killed her attackers with their own attacks. In the end, it hadn’t really mattered that there had been more of them than we’d expected. Estovan and Anias were just too strong.

  I gnced around, not seeing anyone. Nobody save for the children. The anger threatened to take me again.

  Click. Click.

  Blessedly, this time it actually worked. I took a deep breath as I approached Anias. She was sweating.

  “You did well, Anna.”

  She looked back at me and seemed to inspect me. “You’re not hurt.” Her shoulders sagged in relief. “I see young Damian did his duty.”

  “He did.” I agreed, looking back at him. Damian still looked a little pale, but he came and stood by me all the same.

  “Their Magical Implements weren’t cheap,” Damian muttered.

  “And were better coordinated than they should have been,” Anias murmured. “Hard to believe they were just a petty gang.”

  “Aye.” Estovan had walked over. Only the tip of his rapier gleamed red. Otherwise, he looked the same as he had before the fighting had started. “Perhaps they could have made something of themselves, yet they chose this path instead.”

  “There’s one more thing,” I muttered, pointing at the Dwarf I’d beheaded.

  Estovan and Anias followed my gaze, then looked back at me. Their faces were inscrutable.

  “Eline, did you-”

  “Yes,” I answered Estovan. “But it’s not that. I think his staff was an Artifact.”

  There was a pause for a moment, and then Anias spoke up again. “Why do you think that?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  Right.

  I hurried over to the children, leaving the two to their thoughts.

  Evil.

  The children all looked exhausted. Their bodies too thin, their cheeks too hollow. Like they had been starved for a very long time. Some of them had bckened patches on their arms, legs, or faces.

  Most of them were standing aimlessly, some of them were lying down, some of them were tugging at their chains. Bound, gagged, and deafened.

  My hands trembled. Each breath was sharper than the st. I took a deep breath, tried to focus.

  “Greenward did this?” Damian muttered.

  “Maybe,” I muttered. It was hard to think right now. It was possible he simply found them this way.

  “There are supposed to be rules for this.”

  In this Kingdom, there were three 'legal' types of sves. Sves taken in war. Sves made from either heinous criminals or the families of heinous criminals, or sves sold by their own families. Odd customs, though many things about this pce were odd.

  “The w is a flimsy thing, Damian,” I whispered. “I told you that before, didn’t I?” My voice sounded alien to my own ears.

  I let him wrestle with his thoughts as I turned towards Estovan. “We still need to go inside. But…we can’t just leave them here like this.”

  Estovan frowned, looked at the children, and then at Anias. “I’ll wait outside. Anias, go with them.”

  “Very well.” Anias started to lead the way into the warehouse proper.

  Logically, anybody who could fight should have tried to fight us already. That didn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful.

  Anias stepped through the barely open doors and just vanished. Damian and I looked at each other. He sighed and stepped in first, vanishing too. I followed him. It felt like stepping into another world. The sights and smells all changed in an instant. There was an odd chemical smell in the air.

  The lights all gred down brightly at us, so hard that I winced and shielded my eyes by instinct even before I thought to use my Gift.

  Anias stood a foot away, and on either side of her were two dead humans, two men. Neither of them looked like fighters at a gnce.

  “They hid,” Anias expined. “My apologies, I was too on edge, or I could have taken them alive.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Eline…I think you should brace yourself.” Damian murmured.

  I looked around the room.

  There were... cages. I counted six different cages, arranged in two rows in one corner of the room. All but one of those cages was empty. In that one cage was something that barely even looked human.

  Evil.

  The sword whispered, almost solemnly. My eyes had clouded over before I’d even realized. I forced myself to walk, though each step felt harder than the st. I approached it. As I did, I had to walk over another corpse. A man, his hand outstretched towards the cage, a knife sticking from his neck. I ignored him.

  Inside the cage was a single child. The children outside had been starved. This one looked emaciated. He was more bone than anything else. Most of his skin was a deep bck. His eyes were hollow. He was naked. There was nothing in his gaze as I stepped in front of him. It was as if he was looking at something very, very far away.

  A distant, quiet part of me noted that he didn’t look that different from my father, save for the bckened skin.

  Another part of me was counting. There must have been room for at least thirty children here. Maybe more.

  A heavy hand settled on my shoulder. “It looks like he's been completely drained of mana, far beyond what should be natural.” My maid’s voice was soft. Kind. "This isn't good for you, My Lady."

  I knew that too. A deep anger filled me, some of it my own, some of it coming from somewhere else. The sword, perhaps. If swords could have feelings.

  I forced my gaze away to look at something else. A few doors led out of this mostly empty space. I ignored them.

  There was one thing in the center of the room. They were a set of giant metallic circles. One hung from the ceiling, another opposite circle directly in the space below it. This circle had some strange symbol carved into it, one I didn’t recognize.

  Both were a dozen feet wide. I approached them. The bottom metallic circle had small mountains of bck dust, some of it filling the lines of the pattern etched into the metal.

  My heart sank.

  Just off to the right was some kind of podium. I approached it. Unfamiliar buttons stared back at me. The buttons were all beled. I could read them, though only one of them mattered right now.

  It was the rgest button, one that simply said ‘Compost’. A part of me suspected what this would do. A part of me needed to be sure. I pressed it.

  There was a metallic creaking from the upper pte. It evidently took both Damian and Anias by surprise; they’d both been looking at the child.

  The metal pte slowly moved down, pressed against its lower half. The metal glowed for a moment, before that glow dissipated. Then, it slowly moved up again. There was an audible groan. It came from the cages. The child hadn’t reacted at all before. He did now.

  Click. Click. Click.

  I tuned down my grief. My rage. My horror. It felt hard to touch my Gift now. Even my mental fingers were shaking.

  I’d half expected the sword to take over again. It didn’t. Could a Divine Bde show mercy?

  Then, I heard it. The sound of a door closing ever so quietly shut off to the side. I turned and stared at it. I channeled mana and ran.

  Anias and Damian shouted behind me as I smmed through the door. It wasn’t locked. Inside was some kind of storage room. Boxes and boxes of wooden crates filled most of the room, and in their center were two humans. A man and a woman.

  The man must have been no older than Estovan. The woman didn’t look that old either. Two of the few humans we’d found so far. Neither had weapons. I didn’t think their fear was an act.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  They stared up at me. Their mouths opened. Nothing came out.

  I stepped forward. They backed away into the crates behind them. They didn’t channel mana, or if they did, it was so faint I didn’t even feel it.

  “Who are you?”

  The door behind me opened wider.

  “I will not ask again.” I wondered just how much force it would take to crush someone’s throat. With this much mana, it shouldn’t be hard at all.

  Anias’s rge hand settled over my shoulder again, the touch gentle. “Eline, perhaps it's a case of them not being able to speak.”

  I didn’t look away. I’d seen their tongues well enough when they’d been gaping at me.

  “Expin.”

  “A mana contract, perhaps,” Anias murmured. “They’re supposed to keep secrets safe. They can be quite specific. Such as a contract that only activates when the thing they’re meant to be guarding is attacked. It’s rare to find one that keeps a person from speaking entirely, but it can be done.”

  “I see.” That would make sense, I suppose. I stepped forward and kicked the man between his legs before he could react. Hard, but not nearly as hard as I could have.

  He croaked and fell to the ground. It wasn’t a word, just the most base expression of pain. The woman stared at me.

  “Eline, what are you doing?” Damian sounded almost offended.

  “I suppose what you said is true then.” Neither of them were fighters, and it was hard to believe any kind of leader would agree to such a thing. Why were they here then?

  “Anna, drag them outside, please.”

  A warm glow settled over the two. Their eyes opened wide, and then they floated outside. With them gone, I could look at the crates properly. All of the crates were the same, marked in green with the symbol of House Greenward.

  A quiet, distant part of me began to itch.

  “Dorian, please.” My voice sounded dead to my own ears.

  “R-right.” He stepped to my left, and in his hands was a sharp stone spear. He stabbed it into the crate, making a small hole. It wasn’t quite what I meant, but it did let me peer inside.

  It was dust. Bck dust. I didn’t need to open any more of these crates; I knew what I would find without having to look. My body trembled. I reached for the knobs again. My fingers didn’t find purchase this time.

  I turned and stepped outside.

  Anias had the cowering men and women floating over her. I didn’t notice them. I noticed the groans of the child. He was pointing a bony hand in the direction of the two. I didn’t need my Gift to know that he was trembling.

  My composure cracked. My Gift went with it. The rage filled me, followed by the grief, and then the horror.

  KILL.

  The bde screamed into my ear. It was in my hand before I’d even realized it. I stepped forward. My arm locked. The tendons in my wrist screamed. The sword demanded blood to wash away the horror of this room. I didn’t want to fight it at all.

  Anias stepped in front of me, held her arms out wide.

  “Move.” It wasn’t my voice, I noted dimly. It sounded like that of a beast.

  “I cannot,” Anias said firmly. “This is unwise.”

  “Why?” A voice, my own and yet not asked.

  “Whatever is compelling this man and woman can be broken. Given time.” Anias’s voice sounded steady. “Do not make this mistake.”

  Time? Time? Time?

  My hand moved up and towards her. What was I doing? I grabbed onto my right hand with my left, forcing the bde down. The bde trembled. I trembled.

  Anias' hand came and settled on the steel. She winced, but the bde did not cut right through her. There was that odd feeling of resistance again.

  “You can’t give in to the intent, My Lady,” Anias whispered. “But...you cannot suppress it either.”

  My body shook. Each spasm came with pain. Each breath was more ragged than the st. I had a headache, a persistent throbbing ache that threatened to split my skull.

  I screamed and smmed the sword into the ground. It cut through it, with hardly any resistance at all, burying halfway inside. Something inside of me shattered again.

  I did something I hadn’t in a very long time. I wept.

  I don’t know how long I stayed that way. Perhaps it was merely moments. Perhaps it was an hour. I noted dimly that a distant part of me couldn’t even give in to the grief. It was thinking. I wished it would just stop. It didn’t.

  Anias’ hand settled on my shoulder. A smaller hand accompanied it a few seconds ter. The wracking sobs eventually started to fade. The bde was rusted now.

  “I’m sorry, Anias.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for, Lady Esra.”

  “I do.” I took a deep breath, my voice weak. “I think I was pyed for a fool.”