White.
The HUD threw four simultaneous errors and Eloy's legs were already moving.
Four seconds.
The room existed in his memory. He didn't need to see it. Twelve meters from where he'd been standing to the ritual circle, slight left curve to avoid the low platform, two steps down. He counted the impacts of his own feet.
[br0kenctrl]: HE DID IT
[Kazimiera_V]: I CAN'T SEE
[FenrirBites]: GO GO GO GO
Eight meters. Six.
The chain was cold under his hands and Arthur was heavier than he'd calculated, which was the first thing that went wrong. In the game, narrative weight was a cutscene problem. In the game, you grabbed a hostage and a prompt appeared. In the game, the +1 Strength meant something clean and numerical.
What it meant here was that Eloy's arms found the limit of what they could move in about half a second of trying.
Arthur made an incomprehensible sound.
Three seconds left.
Eloy looked up into the white and did the math.
He couldn't carry him out.
He could, however, get hit.
The blade found him because he found it first, tracking the displaced air two meters to his right where a Mugen-Za operative was swinging blind and wide. The angle was bad for them and workable for him if he rotated his left arm into the arc at the exact frame the strike committed.
He rotated.
The cut opened above his elbow. The knockback hit like a shove from something with no hands, pure force translated through the wound, and Eloy grabbed Arthur's collar on the way back and used every centimeter of the momentum to drag both of them across the ritual circle's edge.
Then the floor.
They hit the stone two steps from Valen's boots. Arthur coughed hard and didn't stop. Eloy registered the pain in his arm somewhere in the peripheral processing queue, behind the active countdown.
Zero.
The light came back like it had never left. Just a room again. Just torches and runes and a lot of people who could now see exactly where Eloy was and exactly what he'd done to their ritual circle.
[LMAO_cat]: HE USED THE FALL DAMAGE
[nachtfalter]: that's not— that's not what that is
[wo1flion]: it's exactly what that is shut up
His HUD pulsed the color of a bad notification.
[ STATUS EFFECT: UNKNOWN TOXIN DETECTED ]
[ HP: DROPPING ]
[RuinedByPixels]: THE BLADE WAS POISONED
[IsoldeSimp47]: ELOY
[val_writes]: oh no oh no oh no
He pressed his hand over the cut and looked up.
The operatives had their weapons out. Four of them, the ones closest to the circle, already moving. Not to the stairs. To him, blood in their eyes.
Valen had a blade in each hand from where he'd disarmed the nearest two, but there were more behind them and the angle was wrong.
I can't stand up yet.
Then something stepped in front of him.
Isolde didn't speak. She put herself between his body and the four people walking toward it and let the electricity at her palms do the talking. A present energy, arcing between her fingers.
The operatives stopped.
Eloy looked at the space between her shoulder blades. The way she was standing. The weight she'd put in her feet.
His HUD fired without asking.
[ OBSERVATION: Isolde Reichenbach has altered her primary survival directive. ]
He read it twice. The poison was making his vision swim slightly at the edges, and he read it twice anyway.
[Kazimiera_V]: she moved FIRST
[FenrirBites]: before valen. she moved before valen.
[nachtfalter]: she loves you trust me bro
A sound cut across the room.
Clapping. Slow, deliberate.
The operatives stepped back.
The Mugen-Za leader descended from the raised platform with the unhurried gait of a man who had never needed to hurry for anything in his life. He was smiling. He'd been smiling before the white-out, and he was smiling now.
"Bravo, bravo." He let the word land by itself. "Genuinely. Thirty years. Our light specialists, some of the best we've ever trained." He gestured at the inert ritual circle. "Not one of them ever produced an output like that."
Eloy got one knee under himself. His arm argued.
Arthur was still on the floor beside him, breathing in the way that meant he was working at it. "Hey," Arthur said, voice scraped clean of everything but the attempt. "Hey, I can— Give me a second."
"Don't move yet," Eloy said.
"I can—"
"You're still in the circle's edge. Don't move."
Arthur stopped moving.
The leader crouched to look at the ritual marks on the floor, unhurried. He traced one with a finger. "You know what you actually did, yes? Beyond the very impressive light show?"
Eloy looked at him.
"The mana cadence pattern for an affinity extraction is... particular. Sensitive." The leader stood, brushing nothing off his hands. "You corrupted the pattern. Permanently. The binding sequence has to be rebuilt from notation, new circle, new alignment." He smiled at Arthur, disappointment all on his expression "He's useless to us for weeks."
[br0kenctrl]: wait wait wait
[wo1flion]: you broke them with one exploit
Eloy exhaled. His arm was still bleeding and the poison notification was still ticking and he was on one knee on a stone floor in an underground chamber with no exit plan.
At least Arthur was out of the ritual. That part was done.
"Let him go," Eloy said. His voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "And leave Isolde out of whatever deal you had with her father. She's not him. She doesn't owe you what he promised."
He was aware, without turning, that Isolde had looked at the back of his head when he said it.
The Leader was quiet for a moment.
He stroked his beard with the deliberate rhythm of a man performing the gesture of contemplation for an audience. His eyes moved from Eloy to the ruined circle, to Arthur sitting dazed on the stone floor, to Isolde still holding the line behind Eloy's position.
"Alright."
Valen didn't lower his weapons. Isolde didn't move. Arthur turned his head slowly, like he'd misheard.
Eloy's eyes narrowed. "That's it? Alright...?"
The Leader spread his hands in a gesture of generous clarity. "The circle is corrupted. The boy will need weeks before his affinity stabilizes enough to attempt the procedure again. By then, I'm afraid our operational window has closed: the location will be compromised, the clan will have moved. It would all be very inconvenient." He glanced at Arthur with a mild expression. "Practically speaking, the boy is no longer worth the trouble."
He walked another step forward, until he was close enough that Eloy could have touched him without fully extending the arm.
"And Isolde." A brief look in her direction, warm and predatory in equal measure. "My agreement was with her father. She's right that she isn't bound by it. I'm a reasonable man."
He looked back at Eloy. Very directly. For a long time.
"The deal with the dark lord was straightforward. His daughter in exchange for the power we extracted from the boy." He stopped two steps away. Close enough that Eloy could see the quality of his attention. "But the boy is spent. The power never transferred. The deal is void." He spread his hands, reasonable. "We have nothing to offer the Chained God. And nothing to claim from his line."
He crouched so they were eye level.
"We do, however, have a vacancy."
Eloy's arm was bleeding. His vision had a sickly haze around everything from the toxin. He was on one knee. He looked the man in the face.
"You did this... light show with no mana affinity. No training. No formal unlock. Something our most competent mages couldn't produce. Do you understand how interesting that is?"
He stopped. Took one more step.
"And I want it."
[val_writes]: E L O Y
Eloy opened his mouth.
The system got there first.
Time didn't stop. The room kept existing. But a box dropped into the center of his vision, black border and red text, and it stayed there regardless of what else he tried to look at.
[ NEW QUEST: SURVIVE THE MUGEN-ZA INITIATION. ]
[ FAILURE PENALTY: SOUL DELETION. ]
He read it once. Twice. Maybe three times.
Then he looked up at the leader, who hadn't moved, who was still watching him with that same wicked smile.
"You'll join the Mugen-Za, torch boy."