Sora Brontarion
My desperate prayer fell on deaf ears.
We couldn't save them all. Professor Thorne and two of the students stood impaled, their faces pale, and their eyes rolled back as their lifeless hands tugged at the pikes submerged through their abdomens.
Their astral forms began to morph; their tethers became visible, snapped in two, and folded into their glowing forms.
Our comrades, our teacher, were becoming phantom echoes, their souls trapped in this rift, doing the bidding of whatever the rift commands.
Their emotions crashed into me in waves.
Fear.
Disbelief.
Anger.
Desperation.
Regret.
And lastly, bitterness.
Their astral forms dimmed, and their faces took on insect-like features: mandibles grew, and their hands turned into pincers. Then they laughed. They laughed at our struggle as we kept fighting the horde of behemoths.
It pained me to hear, but I understood; I would have felt the same way. Their lives were over, while they watched their comrades keep living.
Then a rush of sadness and guilt hit. Survivors' remorse from the students who were being protected at the expense of Professor Thorne and our classmates' lives.
"What a pathetic lot. If you can't save them, how do you expect to defeat the rift?" the voices of the echoes said in unison.
The smell of pungent blood, sounds of trees splintering, and people screaming engulfed the area so much that I didn't notice a centipede bite a chunk of flesh from my thigh.
I sank to my knees, no longer fighting the swarm, no longer worried about what was happening around me.
I wallowed in failure and let my body succumb to whatever damage the centipedes managed to deal.
My brain felt like it could melt.
The sadness, the anger, the helplessness all took over, drowning me and forcing my body to remember the last time I felt like this.
The time I lost grandma.
There was so much blood. And hunger.
If I couldn't save my comrades, how would I ever save my clan?
I'm a failure.
I don't deserve to be a leader.
Father and everyone back home were right.
Maybe I should have died with her?
I don't deserve to escape.
The weight of these emotions was suffocating.
It didn't matter.
I wouldn't survive much longer.
My body tilted and flipped as I fell from the branch. Below me, dozens of centipedes waited, poised to make me their next meal.
I closed my eyes.
But something wrapped around my ankle and stopped my descent, and yanked me back to the tree.
I looked up.
It was Nerena saving me and fending off a couple of behemoths at the same time.
Something tried to burrow into my psyche; it was persistent, and within seconds it cut through the layers of emotions spiraling in my head.
Then I realized it was a message.
A voice that sounded all too familiar.
"Sora, snap out of it; we need you!" The voice sounded a lot like Jace.
"Yes, Sora, you can't give up; you are our leader, we can't lose you!"
"Jace, I tried; I gave it my all."
"Until our final breath leaves our bodies, defeat is just a rumor. Now snap out of it!"
The mental message grew louder in my psyche, bombarding the emotions I felt; it was enough to suppress the overwhelming feeling.
I began to feel my body again and dodge an oncoming pincer attack.
I scanned the area around me, looking for my brother.
"Where is Jace? I heard him," I yelled out to the group, dodging another pincer strike.
"He's not here. That was Voen changing his voice so that we could get through to you. Everything else wasn't working." Nerena said, her tentacle wrapping around my waist, hoisting me up to another branch.
"We can't stay here anymore; there is no one left for us to save. We have to leave," Stravos said through our tether link.
Damn it.
His words fueled the negative emotions I felt, and they started to take over again.
As I tried to fight off the negative feelings, I saw Stravos and his titan rush over to save the remaining students; Sigmond and Ida went after an echo that tried to attack a helpless student, while my cluster fought off another wave of centipedes.
I stared at my hands shaking as they sparked with lightning.
Sorry, Jace, I can't afford to feel anything right now.
I brought my index fingers to my temples.
I focused as hard as I could, imagining a blank, clean slate scraping away the thoughts clouding my psyche.
Then I shocked my own brain.
In one quick moment, everything I felt ceased to exist.
I felt nothing; I was numb to it all.
The corpses of our comrades meant nothing to me.
My brain was focused on the most logical next step.
With cosmic energy flowing through my brain, I processed the situation quickly.
I pulled out the wire from one of my pockets, charged it with electricity, and began cutting through behemoths left and right while sending Nerena a mental message to find us an escape route to a source of celestium.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jossie struggling with a group of centipedes that climbed the world tree, trying to drag her to the surface.
I got there in time to stop one of them from chomping down on her foot, and lassoed the behemoth's head with the wire, severing it from its body.
"I'm indebted to you," she said as we both climbed higher on the world tree.
I didn't bother responding; I just looked for the next thing that was needed.
Just as another group of centipedes jumped out at me, Nerena sent a mental message to everyone.
"The route is mapped; the safest and quickest path is ascending to the very top of the tree; every other route is blocked off or flooded."
"Wait, but what about the large flying behemoths we scouted?" one of the truth seekers said
"Would you rather deal with a hundred or a couple? We are gonna take our chances." I shot back.
"Everyone, follow Nerena to the top. Stravos, hang back and make sure everyone gets up."
"Who made you leader?" Ida said.
"I did. Now go."
Stravos and his war Titan protected the rear, and within a few moments, we all outran the centipedes to the top.
"Where is she leading us to?" Stravos asked as he kicked a behemoth down to the surface as we all darted across the treetops.
"We are headed to the Exoskeleton Graveyard; it's on the way to the celestium mine."