They were bracketing him.
He was on one knee on a cave floor with frostmarks across his hands and arms and they were bracketing him and his chest was doing something he preferred not to examine and they were very good at this.
He watched them find their positions.
He breathed.
He moved the portals.
Holding them was passive. Moving them cost more and he felt the draw of it immediately, felt the state of what was being drawn from, and he was economical about it, no wasted motion, nothing spent that did not need to be spent.
He brought one portal in close. Four feet in front of him, vertical, mouth facing the brother's approach vector. Not a redirect this time. More like a wall.
*I need to finish these two quickly.*
The second one he swung wide and high, repositioning it behind the brother and angling it downward so the exit mouth faced the back of his legs.
He came in fast and horizontal, sword extended, aiming for the gap under Atiya's left arm. A good shot, low and committed, built to get inside the staff's effective range. The blade entered the front portal.
It came out the second one behind him at full speed and opened a cut along the back of his right thigh before he had processed that his own sword had reversed on him.
His leg buckled.
He caught himself. One hand on the cave floor, sword still in the other, blood running down his calf and dripping from his boot heel, staring at the stone inches from his face. He held there for a moment, breathing hard.
He had expected something like this. He had not expected it to land that cleanly.
"Sera," he said.
"I see it," she said.
She did not come at him again immediately. Atiya tracked her by the scrape of her boot on stone, faint but present, somewhere in the right passage and moving.
She was thinking. Re-evaluating.
Good.
Atiya coughed.
'Come on. I need to be faster.'
Bad timing. It bent him forward and stole half a second and he felt both portals flicker at the edges and pushed them back open through the interruption by sheer force of will, which cost more than moving them had.
He straightened slowly. The staff took his weight.
He was more dependent on it than he had been at the start of this and both of them had noticed.
"He is tiring," the brother said. He was still on one hand and one knee, working out whether his right leg would bear weight. "His yai must have been largely spent on the beasts. Look at the portal edges."
He was not wrong. Both portals had frayed slightly at the boundaries, a shimmer where the edge should be clean, the light inside them a degree less stable than before.
Sera came from the left.
The side Atiya had already demonstrated he could defend. She came in low and tight to the cave wall, using the wall as a guide, her brother's body as visual interference, the straightforwardness of it as the attack itself.
She had reasoned, correctly, that the obvious approach was now the one he would least expect, because she understood misdirection and assumed he understood it too.
She was right. He understood it.
He had placed the portal flush against the left cave wall at knee height, vertical, sitting in the shadow until you were two steps from it.
Her leading foot went through.
It came out the second portal, repositioned at ceiling height on the right side of the cave, angled steeply downward.
For one suspended moment Sera was split between two points, her foot through the portal at the ceiling and the rest of her still carrying forward along the floor, and then her own momentum finished it. It pulled her horizontal. She hit the cave floor shoulder first and the sword rang out of her hand and skittered away into the dark.
The cave went quiet except for the dripping water.
Darro had made it to one knee. Sera lay on her back, one arm extended toward where her sword had gone, staring up at the stalactites.
Neither of them moved.
Atiya waited. He kept the portals open.
Keeping them open now was a significant act and they could both see it was, in the slight tremor that had entered the rings of light, in the quality of his stillness that had nothing to do with ease and everything to do with a man who had stopped spending anything on anything that was not the one essential thing.
"That is twice," Sera said to the ceiling.
"Three times," Darro said. "It got me twice."
A beat of silence.
"Step back, little brother." Sera's arm dropped from reaching toward her sword. "Let your elder sister handle him."
Then something unexpected happened.
Leishna brought the egg sculpture down on the back of Darro's head with both hands and everything she had left in her.
The crack of it echoed off the cave walls.
Sera's face contorted. She had not felt Leishna at all, not a sound, not a shift in the air, nothing. The girl had simply been there and then acting.
Leishna hit him again. And again. Darro's body folded under the repeated impacts, his one good knee giving out, the arm bracing him against the floor sliding wide.
Sera moved to stop it and Sajibu came out of nowhere and took her head off at the neck.
'How did he close the distance that fast.'
The thought completed itself clearly despite everything, Sera's severed head still processing, still functional, due to the Inumaki curse doing what it had always done, not letting them die.
She could see the cave floor from a new angle and the dripping water and Darro somewhere behind her and Leishna standing over him with the sculpture still raised.
What Atiya had done required no additional skill. He had two means of fighting beyond his physical capabilities.
Portal creation and the skills accessible through Sajibu, most of which cost more yai than he currently had to spend. His second skill was still incomplete in its coding. He had nothing elaborate left.
So he had used what he had in the simplest way available.
He killed the light in both portals. In the relative dark of the cave they disappeared entirely, no shimmer, no ring, nothing to track.
Sera's attention had gone to Leishna the moment the girl moved. Meanwhile Atiya had walked through the dark behind that distraction and swung.
That was all it was.
****
They entered the room and Cale gestured broadly at its two occupants.
"Here we are, my new friends." He pointed first at a composed, clean shaved man dressed in casual clothes, then at an old man occupying an armchair across the table, white bearded, white haired, entirely settled into his seat. "This is Ngamba. And he is... well, just an old man. Call him old man."
Neither of them reacted to the introduction. The composed one gave nothing away and the old man in the armchair did not even look up immediately.
Zelaine stood in the doorway with her mouth open.
"Huhhhhhhhh."
Her eyebrow twitched. She was searching for words and not finding any in the correct order.
The two men sitting in front of her were the same two she had seen outside the restaurant earlier. The ones who had nearly caused the accident with her car.
The ones whose presence had stopped her dead in the street and made her sweat through her shirt.
The two Ascension 3 users.
'Is this actually happening right now.'
Mavine, who had none of this context and therefore none of the problem, stepped forward without hesitation and extended her hand.
"Hello! I am Mavine. Nice to meet you." A small pause as she looked at the old man specifically. "Mister."
The old man's face twisted. He looked past Mavine to Aninke with genuine expression that was somewhere between surprise and genuine grievance.
"Hey, Ezhaloch big shot. What we agreed on was busty hot chicks after we dealt with the situation. Not minors."
Aninke looked at Zelaine and Mavine and then back at the old man, he was someone being accused of something immoral he had no involvement in.
'What did he ask for,' Zelaine thought, immediately settling into the particular alertness she reserved for situations that could go several directions at once.
"I did not bring them here," Aninke said, his voice carrying a measured irritation. "Your colleague is the one who brought them."
The old man turned. Something shifted in his face as he took in Mavine properly, the grievance draining out of it and something more considered replacing it.
"Oh. Are they your friends?" His voice had changed considerably, the edge gone from it. "I did not expect you to bring a child into a warzone."
Zelaine put her hand on Mavine's shoulder and kept her where she was.
Ngamba stepped forward from where he had been standing. He dipped his head in a short bow, composed and unhurried, and addressed them both.
Ngamba had spent considerable time compensating for the person standing beside him.
"Please excuse his behavior. He is not what you would call a good adult."
Zelaine looked at him and felt the sincerity in it. Then she glanced at Cale, who was looking back at her apologetically.
"She is my friend Zelaine and her younger sister Mavine," Cale said. "They were travelling when they unknowingly got caught up in this mess."
Zelaine kept her face neutral even though thehe lie confused her. Cale had said earlier that these people already knew they were outsiders, so was there any need to hide it.
She filed it and kept her mouth shut.
'One of them is not actually Cale's new friend.'
She looked between the three men and did not say that out loud. The room was modest, a table between the armchair and the door, the ceiling low enough that the old man's white hair nearly brushed it when he shifted in his seat.
There was no window. The only light came from a fixture overhead that buzzed faintly and cast everything in a slightly yellow tone.
"Care to explain now?" she said. "Just what the hell is going on."
She let the confusion sit on her face, well most of it was real.
Ngamba was the one who answered. He moved to the table and rested his hands against the edge of it, facing them both.
"You were caught up in this without knowing what it was," he said. "Then you ought to be told." He took a breath. "This entire city is currently under the effect of a skill. A yai user has been enacting something here, working toward either an ascension or the acquisition of a specific skill. The city and everyone in it became the instrument for that process."
The moment he finished, Zelaine understood.
It was the fundamental process of skill acquisition. Someone was simply completing their task, running whatever conditions the coding required, and this entire city, its streets, its residents, the paper giants, all of it had been the vessel for it.
"So the citizens," she said, keeping her voice even. "They were all under the yai user's control the entire time or were they present in the first place?." She paused. "For someone to hold that kind of reach across an entire city, the yai user has to be at minimum Ascension 3 stage 4."
The fear in her chest was not small and she did not let it reach her face. Ascension 3 were transcendents in the most literal sense.
Their strength and output sat so far beyond her current ceiling that the distance between them could not be closed by effort or cleverness alone. It simply transcends beyond her capabilities.
"Am I right?" she asked.