She had been transmigrated to Ellejort by the malfunction of Sajibu, a chain reaction caused by Atiya's interference with the weapon while Nongban held it. That much she had pieced together.
What she also knew was that Atiya and Professor Correl should have come through with her, displaced to different locations across the belt.
She had to find them. That was the throughline underneath everything else.
Outside help from Ellejort's own people was not an option. The belt operated under a longstanding pact with the rest of the known belts, a mutual non-interference agreement whose violation carried consequences significant enough that an entire war was the realistic outcome.
She could not ask for help without creating a problem considerably larger than the one she was already in.
So she had Mavine, whom she had picked up along the way and could not now put down without consequence, and she had her own yaicraft, and she had twenty minutes of output left at current expenditure.
The choice in front of her was simple and terrible. Stay and fight the paper monsters, possibly die, and give Mavine a chance. Or run, survive, and leave the girl to whatever came next without her.
Both options had a body in them somewhere.
However, her worries proved to be useless, if only for the day.
Then Cale Artem dropped from the rooftop.
He came down on his chain yaicraft, the links catching the air and swinging him out and down in a clean arc the way a literal spiderman from the movies might cross a gap, landing in the street beside her as he was someone who had been looking for exactly this.
"I had a feeling you would be here." He was already moving, already scanning the street. "No time. Just act as righteous as you can."
"What? Why?"
"Ezhalochs." He said it fast and low, eyes cutting sideways. "They are here to help. Think of them as nobles in Ellejort. They value righteousness above everything and we cannot afford to put them off." He exhaled, something loosening in his shoulders that had been tight since he landed. "Just trust me on this one."
Zelaine did not have the full picture. But Cale was suggesting it, which meant the Ezhalochs were either the way home or a threat of comparable scale, and either way the correct move was the same.
"Got it."
Zelaine had not seen them clearly yet but she had heard enough from Mavine's parents to know the Ezhaloch family owned this entire area.
Which meant handling situations exactly like this one fell squarely within their responsibility. Which meant they were late.
A smirk pulled at her mouth despite everything.
"Here to hog all the rewards and the fame," she muttered. "Shameless imbeciles. They had better pay me a hundred kilograms of meat for this trouble."
The shadows came down from above.
Multiple figures descended on the paper transformers from height, and as they fell they stopped being figures entirely and became lightning, pure and concentrated, crashing into the robots in blinding columns.
The Ezhaloch family ran on lightning yaicraft and stood as one of the strongest pillars of royalty in Ellejort, and the display made that plain.
The bolts entered the paper figures at the midsection and tore straight through, the voltage igniting everything it touched on the way out. The robots burned from the inside, collapsing into charred scraps still smoking on the road.
One of the Ezhalochs swept a sustained beam across the smaller figures in a single wide arc, clearing a section of the street in seconds.
"At least there are Ascension 2 users around," Zelaine noted, and meant it.
On the ground the reinforcements arrived behind them, moving fast through the gaps the lightning had opened.
Swords, spears, guns charged with crackling lightning yai, cutting through the middle-sized transformers with coordinated efficiency. Zelaine scanned the line and found a familiar face among them.
Aninke Ezhaloch. The heir of the Ezhaloch branch that governed this area, which made him not simply a powerful yai user but the single most important person on this street right now in terms of standing and authority.
Lance in hand, the weapon crackled with built charge, electricity climbing the shaft in visible arcs. He wound back and threw it toward the paper Optimus Prime in one clean powerful motion.
The giant reacted mechanically, one hand folding and reshaping into a blade mid-air, sweeping across and slapping the lance out of its path. The weapon spun away and clattered somewhere below.
Even from where she stood Zelaine could see Aninke cursing under his breath at the failed strike.
Something lit up in her chest.
"This situation is great!" she shouted. "Come on, let's do it with the power of friendship!"
She deployed her cubes in a rising column, a floating staircase angling upward toward Aninke's position, and started running up it before it had fully finished forming.
Aninke spotted her coming, his eyes narrowing in recognition.
A paper missile caught the cubes mid-climb.
The impact shattered her footing and the staircase came apart beneath her and she dropped, the ground coming back up fast.
'I got too excited,' she thought as the world spun.
"Open."
She hit the ground, rolled, came up onto one knee, and looked at what remained of the battle. The paper Optimus Prime was still standing. The gigantic book above everything had not moved once. Even if she took the giant down the book was still there, and whatever was inside it had not yet decided to fully commit.
'What if we all die here because I wanted to conserve.'
She reached into her pocket and closed her fingers around one of the crystals.
*Fuck it. Fuck it. I would rather wager it all.*
She crushed it.
The cubes she had deployed across the street stopped being cubes. They began to come apart, their structures dissolving and spinning, the internal friction she had been sustaining across all of them converting simultaneously into heat output that had nowhere to go but outward.
They merged as they melted, pulling into a single rotating mass that grew and tightened and became a cyclone, a tornado of pure raging flame that warped the air around it and turned the surrounding street into something that should not have been survivable.
She flicked her wrist.
The tornado moved, roaring forward across the road, rising to match the height of the paper giant as it closed the distance.
It was a magnificent and terrible thing and it cost her almost ninety percent of what she had left in a single motion. The pallor hit her face immediately, sweat tracking down her temple, her breathing suddenly requiring more attention than it usually did.
The flames reached the paper titan's edges. The outermost layers curled and blackened before full contact, the heat alone enough to begin the work.
Up on the rooftop above, Cale watched the tornado rise.
'Still as troublesome as ever,' he thought. 'Good move though. Grabbed their attention immediately.'
****
Atiya grabbed Leishna and ran.
He carried her at full sprint, pushing into the dark at the kind of speed that left no room for thinking about direction, choosing one of the intersecting passages at random and committing to it.
The darkness ahead was total beyond the small distance his eyes could adjust to and he ran into it anyway, footsteps loud against the stone floor, the sounds of the cave behind them gradually swallowed by distance.
Eventually the sounds stopped following.
He slowed, then stopped, setting Leishna down and bracing his hands against his knees.
"Huff. Huff."
The cave around them was completely dark. The lamp was gone, lost somewhere in the scuffle, and whatever passage they had ended up in felt different from the ones before it. Narrower, and quieter, the air slightly heavier.
"Where are we."
"The lamp," Leishna said, as though he had not spoken, "was the apparatus that repels yai beasts. And if you had been paying attention during any of that, none of them went after me. Not a single one." She tilted her head. "They were all going after you."
Atiya replayed it. She was right. Every beast in that passage had oriented on him specifically, adjusted around her as though she simply was not a priority.
"You said it repels," he said. "Not that it makes the holder invisible to them. There is a difference."
"Loopholes, maybe."
Atiya looked at her in the dark for a moment.
"That is genuinely the least helpful thing anyone has ever said to me."
Leishna offered nothing further on the subject.
Leishna rummaged through the bag and produced another lamp. She threw it across to him without ceremony.
"Anyway, take this."
Atiya caught it and opened his mouth.
"It repels within a certain radius," she said before he could speak. "I think the problem is specifically you. They want to eat you, probably. Watching you get torn into pieces might actually excite me, but let's press forward shall we. This part of the cave has some interesting yai beasts."
She reached down and pulled a piece of rock out of her boot, examined it briefly, and dropped it on the floor.
"Then what is the use of this." Atiya looked at the lamp in his hand.
Leishna stared at him with genuine perplexity.
"What is the use of a lamp."
"Light."
"Precisely."
Atiya said nothing. He was splitting his attention across too many things at once and it was making him slower than usual and he was aware of that, which did not help.
"I am sorry, I am getting stupid. Do you have any idea how we are supposed to find the survi—"
He stopped.
A yai signature reached him, faint but unmistakable, coming from somewhere back up the passage. Then another. Then several more, all moving in the same direction.
Toward them.
He knew those signatures.
"They are here. You said they could not leave the village."
Leishna's face changed. The composure she carried so consistently cracked for a visible moment, something genuinely shocked moving across her features.
"That is not possible. They cannot leave the barrier, the demon's protection does not extend beyond—"
"It is faint but they are getting closer." Atiya was already turning, already running the new geometry of the situation. "Change of plan. Forget the survivor. We need to get out of the mountain."
If the villagers had made it out of the barrier then Fredo knew everything. The sculpture, Screja, all of it. And Fredo moving meant the village was moving, which meant whatever window had existed for a clean exit had already closed.
This had become very precarious very quickly.
Up in the passage where Atiya and Leishna had encountered the yai beasts, Fredo crouched and looked at the ground.
"The girl had the lamp," he said, straightening. "Which means either they did not come this way, or they passed through here a considerable time ago."
He was wrong on both counts. Atiya and Leishna had come through this exact passage minutes ago.
"Slay the beasts. Move forward."
The villagers needed no further instruction. They outnumbered the remaining yai beasts in the passage by a margin that made the outcome a formality rather than a fight.
They were all yai users, and while only a handful among them had reached Ascension 2, the sheer volume of them was enough.
It took less than a minute to pin down and dispatch every beast Atiya had recently fled from, cutting through them efficiently and without particular effort, incinerating the remains as they advanced so nothing could follow from behind.
At each intersection they split without being told, parties peeling off down every available passage simultaneously, a net spreading through the cave in all directions.
The distance between them and Atiya was closing whether he knew it or not.
"Capture them alive."
Fredo said it once, quietly, to the group remaining with him. It was the only condition he gave.