For the most part, Sera was just standing.
That was the reality of guides in a combat – body tensed, ready to move, but operating in the margins. Not in the way. Available when an esper fell back and needed a fast cleanse before returning to rotation, backing up support types like Ophelia when the pollution load got heavy, and otherwise staying out of the path of people who were actually fighting.
She had noted Hibiscus's look when she'd picked up the twin daggers. Contempt with a thin layer of derision underneath. Hibiscus had made a tactically correct decision and found someone else's choice baffling – she had grabbed a pistol for distance. Sensible. Violet, Sera clocked across the field, had grabbed a crossbow, and a long dagger holstered as backup. Also sensible.
Guides didn't get close to hippogriffs. There was no reason to.
But Sera had a different goal.
She needed to get in close after a hippogriff went down. The vessel would be accessible in the window between defeat and dissolution – not long, but long enough if she was already positioned. She just needed the opportunity.
Now it was about figuring out how.
One is good, the entity mused, watching the hippogriffs with its typical mild attention that Sera had grown to expect. More is better.
Keep your expectations low, Sera thought back, dryly.
She had noticed the change two days ago – that evening after she had finally talked face to face with whatever was in her core. And then she'd gone over the numbers twice to be sure, and then a third time because the first two answers had stupefied her. Something had shifted in the System debuff's architecture. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But the timer had decreased after the wyvern's vessel had integrated into her core.
Not the direction she expected. She brought up the window, once more, to double check.
< Dimensional Transfer Debuff >
A post-Filter evolution has defied the System.
Capacity throttled.
All stats halved.
Time left: 6702:34:23s
Two weeks. Roughly. Give or take a day depending on how precise the System's accounting was. Fourteen days off the remaining total.
Why? How?
…Did it matter?
The wyvern's vessel had done that. One vessel. Two weeks.
Sera had a theory – the wyvern was a System construct, built to test civilizations, a creature of thought but of deliberate creation. Something about consuming a System-ordained vessel had worked against the debuff's own throttle on her. The mechanism didn't particularly interest her. Her Instructor was the one who cared about underlying processes, who filled journals with the why of things and found the question more compelling than the answer.
Sera cared about the result.
Eating monster vessels reduced her debuff. That was a significant find. That was enough.
It seemed to satisfy the thing inside her too – not in a hunger way. The hunger was still there, deep and cavernous and ever-present, the same yawning want it had always been. Buffet week had addressed it accordingly, kept the noise manageable. But something about the vessel, after the initial swallow, once it had fully digested, had quieted the entity in a way that pollution sipping never had. Tamed it, almost. Made it more settled, more cooperative, the agreement between them sitting easier in her core.
Her grip on her own sanity felt fractionally tighter.
She noted this without examining it too closely. Something to keep in mind, but nothing she could do about now. Too little information.
The beast inside her seemed keen on helping her; seemed like it derived satisfaction from seeing her benefit. But Sera couldn't shake the feeling that she couldn't trust it entirely. Something about it kept her hackles raised. A vessel was still, more or less a soul, even if it was a monster's.
There was a fine line – like a tightrope. She felt an instinctive sensation to keep the entity inside her agreeable. Amiable. Pleasant. Easy to tame a beast when it likes your company. Harder when it hates you.
She looked at the three hippogriffs moving across the field.
She should get at least one. Store it in her core. And then later, when she and the thing were alone, they'd figure out how to actually eat it without alerting the System.
"Kael, Sable – rotate back, keep the third off Holt's flank."
Rian's voice cut across the noise of the field. Clean and sharp.
Kael peeled back without breaking stride. Sable – an esper with dark blue hair – broke from Wyer's formation and leapt in bounding steps to Holt's side without missing a beat.
The fights had found their rhythms.
Holt's team worked the first hippogriff in rotation – Yoru and Mira cycling engagement, holding the defensive line while the hippogriff tested and probed for a point to exploit. Ophelia's gold shimmer spread outward in steady pulses, blunting fatigue, increasing resistance, keeping the rotation clean. When one of them dropped back Hibiscus was already there, hands moving before they'd finished retreating. No hesitation.
Across the field Wyer's team was moving faster. Renn, a utility esper beside Violet, held the back position – brown hair, brown eyes, unremarkable posture until you felt the enhancement rolling off him, dense and sharpening, pressing into the squad's output like pressure behind a blade. A strength and movement buff. The hippogriff on their side was showing it. Its movement was slowing. Feathers matted. Eyes enraged. Blood running from cuts across its flanks and shoulders as it wheeled and snapped and swiped at the espers pressing in. Violet sniped from the back distance with cold precision, her crossbow pushing the hippogriff back into a vulnerable position whenever it tried to move toward advantage.
They were closer to finishing.
The third hippogriff was Kael and Sable and now Holt's problem for now – contained, bracketed, not finished. That was the strategy. Wyer's team had the offense to close fast. Yoru and Mira held a slow, defensive drain on the second. The third stayed distracted until the first two were down.
Sera felt a little useless.
Standing there with twin daggers while everyone else had range, waiting for a position that hadn't opened yet. Not the best look. Hibiscus had a gun. Violet had a crossbow. Even the espers cycling out of rotation were doing something – catching their breath, getting a fast cleanse from Violet or Hibiscus, reading the hippogriff's patterns before going back in.
She was just – standing there.
She was aware of the eyes at the field's edge. The other squads watching, taking notes, deciding what they thought of Rian's team. A guide with close-range weapons and no apparent purpose was not a compelling sight.
It was fine. She had a plan. Plans required patience.
She just wished the patience looked slightly less like incompetence from the outside.
She shook her head. Doesn't matter. She could endure embarrassment. She had endured worse humiliation under her Instructor.
Then Sera saw it – Simon dealt the killing blow, blonde hair flashing, his spear lancing through the hippogriff's chest, and it shuddered with a bellow and collapsed to the ground.
"It's dead!" Wyer shouted.
"Cycle," Rian commanded, voice cutting across the field. Wyer's team moved immediately – redirecting toward the remaining two, the rotation absorbing them cleanly. Violet broke from her position and moved toward Sera, Ophelia, and Hibiscus. Renn folded into the attack line.
The downed hippogriff lay still.
Sera looked at it, it was far, she wouldn't be able to get close without noticeably disobeying Rian's orders.
She crouched at the edge of her position, watching the two remaining fights with half her attention and giving the other half to the ground beneath her feet.
She could do it. It would just take time.
The carcass was one-hundred and twenty-five yards away. Carefully, through her boots, through the dirt and scratchy grass, she began weaving her mana outward – thin tendrils threading through the soil the way roots found water, feeling their way toward the downed hippogriff in slow deliberate increments.
She had never focused this far.
The distance required something different from the fight with Arlen, different from the wyvern in the cave – both of those had been close, almost immediate. This was sustained reach across open ground, the tendrils having to travel through dirt and grass and the ambient interference of fifteen people's mana output and live hippogriffs all generating their own noise. Her brow was damp. Her focus narrowed to a point. Delicate, hidden threading was never her strong point.
Across the field the fights continued.
The next hippogriff was being worn down – Yoru and Mira now reinforced with espers from Wyer's team, the rotation clean, Ophelia's shimmer keeping the fatigue manageable. The last one was still contained by Kael, Sable, Holt, and now a defensive esper named Theo, surrounded and delayed, while the team finished off the second.
She kept her face neutral. Kept her posture still. Just a guide standing in the margins, waiting for a position. Her thoughts inward as her mana pressed forward through the plains.
One-hundred and twenty yards. One-hundred and twenty-two. Almost to the body. Sweat dripped off her brow.
Off to the side of the field, Yuria had drifted.
Sera clocked it without fully registering it – the researcher had moved closer to the downed hippogriff at some point, tablet angled toward it, collar readings presumably more interesting up close. Risa and Takumi were far behind her now. Yuria's eyes were on her screen, obsessively typing down some sort of analysis.
One-hundred and twenty-four yards.
On Holt's side, Kael pressed the hippogriff back – one clean drive with his staff coated in fire, Mira's needle finding the joint between shoulder and wing, an ivy whip wrapping around the beast's neck courtesy of an esper named Caan. The hippogriff staggered and screamed.
One-hundred and twenty-five.
Sera's mana touched the downed hippogriff's vessel.
She exhaled.
Perfect. Still present.
And then.
Wait.
The vessel was warm. Too warm. Not fading. Not dissolving the way dead things dissolved, no gradual cooling and loosening of something that had stopped. This was – present. Dense. Active.
Alive.
The hippogriff shifted.
Not the twitch of a dying animal. Something deliberate, the hippogriff had made a calculation. Used the piercing injury to its chest as a feint. In a split second, it tensed and readied its feet in a single motion, crouching, the collar at its throat dark, the sigils gone. The collar was broken – offline.
Its head swung towards Yuria, eyes blazing.
Not toward Rian and the gem. Not toward the espers. Toward the white-haired researcher standing fifty yards away with her tablet, who had put the collar on its throat, whose fingerprints and scent were on every constraint it had worn since it was taken from the sky.
It remembered her.
Sera saw this in slow motion. Nobody else had noticed yet, distracted by the two remaining hippogriffs.
This wasn't her problem.
The thought arrived clean and immediate. Yuria Leth was a civilian researcher who had designed the collars currently making Sera's life – every raid member's life – more complicated. She owed her nothing. Less than nothing. The hippogriff charging toward her was a consequence of Yuria's own decisions – positioning herself too close, drifting out of range, keeping her eyes on her tablet instead of on the three large dangerous animals.
Not her problem.
Sera had her own problems. She had mana threading through one-hundred and twenty-five yards of dirt toward a vessel who she thought was dead but was actually alive. She had a debuff. She had an inscrutable beast inside her. A raid in three days. A callous System bearing down on her.
Yuria Leth was not her problem. What did it matter if a human she didn't know died? They died everyday.
With a leap, the hippogriff surged forward and thundered toward Yuria.
Her head came up from her tablet.
White hair. Blue eyes. Her brain had not yet caught up with what her eyes were seeing – confusion first, then the whites showing, then fear landing all at once across a face that had been completely, innocently absorbed in something else a half second ago.
For half a second, a flash of something snagged in Sera's memory.
Who was it again?
A person with white hair and blue eyes. Someone…kind?
Something fired in Sera's chest without asking permission.
She started running.