Chapter 30. Alpha Level

  The communication bracelets on our wrists started flashing with a red alert button, beeping urgently, and Ilforte’s voice came through the artifact — he’d finally made contact:

  “Attention everyone! Alpha-level threat, the Seal of Creation has been broken. A rift has opened in the north, near the source of the Swiftwater River. The Gelion-Stern district has been completely destroyed,” each word hit me like a hammer blow to the head.

  “All units, teleport to this location immediately for further instructions.”

  The connection cut off, and Calypso and I just kept staring at each other in silence. Horror, disbelief, helplessness… So much could be read in our eyes.

  The ground beneath us was shaking noticeably, like an earthquake. But we both knew perfectly well it wasn’t an earthquake — it was the powerful surge of magic emanating from the point where reality had torn apart.

  “What’s going to happen now?” I whispered.

  Calypso was about to answer when a disgustingly smug voice rang out across the gym:

  “Ha! I knew you couldn’t trust Fortemins!”

  I turned around and stared in disbelief at Cloyne Mackelberry, the general’s son. He was standing by the smashed emergency exit, his face radiating such joy you’d think it was his birthday and he’d just received a couple dozen presents.

  “You?” I hissed.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Only then did I notice Kes, who was lying in the corner of the gym and was now slowly getting up, clutching his bruised head. It must have been him, the stranger in black had thrown against the wall while Calypso and I were hanging upside down in shadow cocoons and I’d heard footsteps.

  “This kid of yours,” Cloyne nodded dismissively toward Kes.

  “Was running around downtown Forland like a lunatic looking for your precious Mentor. I was hiding nearby. The kid found one of your people, asked them to contact the Mentor immediately, explained the situation, and teleported back here. Our colleagues got held up by dark creatures that appeared in the area they thought that’s where the Seal was breaking. But I decided to follow this lunatic’s trail to keep an eye on you Fortemins. And I’m glad I did. I watched everything that happened here. Now I’ve seen with my own eyes just how unprofessional Fortemins really are, and I’ll definitely report this to my father.”

  “What did you see? Us almost getting killed?” I snapped.

  “You watched and just stood there while we were being torn apart?”

  “Leave him, Lori,” Calypso sighed, already on his feet and pulling me along.

  “Let’s not waste time on this scum. Talking to him won’t help anyone right now.”

  I looked at Calypso with concern but followed him toward Kes to quickly heal him and bring him along.

  “But he’s going to twist everything he saw when he tells his daddy!..”

  “My father won’t believe him,” Calypso smiled crookedly.

  “I’ll talk to my father, explain everything… Let’s go, Lori. There’s nothing more for us to do here, we're needed somewhere else.”

  “How do we stop Effu, Cal?” I asked as we stepped into the teleportation vortex with Kes in tow.

  “There has to be some way!”

  “There is no way,” Kes spoke up.

  “No one can stop Effu. There’s no force that can defeat him. This is Effu, the primordial spirit of chaos…”

  “The Ancients managed to trap Effu once, and so can we!”

  “No one alive today knows how Effu was once sealed in the dream trap.”

  I swore under my breath.

  “So what do we do?”

  “I have an idea… But no one’s going to like it.”

  “What idea?”

  But instead of answering, Calypso just shook his head.

  “You’ll see…”

  ***

  Remember how I said during the battle with the ‘anteaters’ that I’d never been in such a bloodbath before? Well, that was nothing — not even a bloodbath, really, more like a light training exercise… compared to what was unfolding before my eyes now.

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  I’d always known that magical battles between supreme mages were brutal, swift, and merciless: when dozens or hundreds of supreme mages unleash their spells, battles are always fast and brutal. They don’t drag on for days or weeks — they’re decided in a few hours at most, sometimes minutes. In conditions like these, you need to develop tactics on the fly and change them just as quickly. Our Mentor was an excellent tactician, and the Inquisition had plenty of commanders who could adapt rapidly in real combat, managing entire armies. But right now, on the outskirts of Forland, a battle of such colossal scale was unfolding — the likes of which these lands probably hadn’t seen since the Age of the Ancients.

  Gelion-Stern really had been completely destroyed. Where there had once been a densely populated district in the Forland region, now there was nothing but scorched ruins. Barely any buildings left — just remnants of walls and foundations, and even those had been leveled in places. I won’t even mention the vegetation and people. Horrifying…

  I hadn’t been here when the rift opened, but quickly piecing the information together, I understood that the cause was a massive energy surge from the crack between worlds: a giant rift hanging vertically in the sky, glowing with a pulsating dark purple vortex.

  The Fortemins and Inquisitors who’d arrived quickly had managed to contain the destructive spread of the energy surge across Forland’s territory, but Gelion-Stern was beyond saving. The district had been at the very epicenter of the rift, from which dark creatures were now pouring out of the shadow crack. The gap between worlds, between the dream realm, the real world, and its flip side, flooding out as a massive distraction from the main event: Effu.

  The primordial spirit of chaos looked like a titan, truly colossal in size. His body wasn’t fully formed yet and was actively taking shape, but overall Effu appeared as a gigantic humanoid mass of black-purple energy. He had legs, arms, and even a face that was gradually forming, with glowing energy orbs for eyes that looked like stars from a distance.

  Effu moved very slowly, as if in slow motion, his movements blurred. He clearly hadn’t gathered his full strength yet and was slowly stepping toward us from the depths of the shadow vortex, only just beginning to emerge from the crack. And while he hadn’t fully emerged from that damned crack, we still had a chance to close the rift between worlds and leave Effu on the shadow side. I had no idea how to do that, but we had to take the chance. We had to hurry.

  At least all of Armarillis’s combat-ready Fortemins had been in downtown Forland when reality tore open — they’d sensed the disaster immediately and teleported to the problem zone as fast as possible to hold back the shockwave. There were no delays, and that saved the other areas from instant destruction.

  “Why aren’t there any bodies anywhere?” I asked Calypso as we ran through the devastated streets toward our colleagues.

  “Effu absorbed them,” Calypso replied grimly.

  “All of them?” I asked in horror.

  “Yeah. To regain his primordial physical form, he needs to absorb a massive amount of magical Sparks. Any magical energy, actually, to fuel his return to full strength. That’s exactly what he’s doing now: absorbing everything around him.”

  “And how many Sparks does he need to fully recover?..”

  “All of Forland,” Calypso replied flatly.

  A shudder ran through me at that realization.

  I tried not to think about how none of this would have happened if we hadn’t gone to check on the pentagram today. But if the trap had been set for us — and it clearly had been a trap — we would have walked into it one way or another. Against an opponent like that — whoever they were, damn them!! — we never stood a chance. Or they would have caught someone else and ‘squeezed’ the energy out of them — we couldn’t have stopped the process in time anyway, because who the hell knows how to fight a force like that…

  “There’s no point blaming yourself, Lori,” Calypso said, as if reading my thoughts.

  “When you’re dealing with a force like this, any mage can fall into a well-laid trap. And this one was so well-planned and thought out that it scares me. We’re dealing with someone who knows us very well. We checked everything we could, we actually found the fourth pentagram, and we honestly tried to prevent the Seal of Creation from breaking which any Fortemin in our position would have been obligated to do. I’m not even sure my father could have prevented this Seal from breaking… You saw how that thing went through our golden shield like a hot knife through butter. I don’t know what kind of shadow creature nearly killed us, but I’m going to find out and do everything I can to grind it into the pavement.”

  By the way, where was that strange smoke-headed creature now? The man was clearly nowhere nearby, and I couldn’t understand why, or what he was waiting for, or why and where he’d disappeared to… Why had he broken the Seal and summoned Effu? Because he definitely was the one who’d summoned him. But why?

  Fortemins took the brunt of it, throwing themselves into the thick of things, using all kinds of spells and weapons. The Inquisitors, unlike us, were far less resilient and not as advanced when it came to defensive spells. Sure, they were using various artifacts for extra protection, but against the insane onslaught of dark creatures combined with chaos magic, even the artifacts couldn’t hold. And we… weren’t winning.

  Effu was clearly using his reality-warping abilities, and it was decimating our ranks. Reality itself was going haywire: the ground turned to quicksand, dragging mages down; water from the nearby Swiftwater River was raining upward and crashing down on mages’ heads as liquid fire; you could slam into empty air at full speed as if it were a solid wall and get stuck in it.

  All of this was chaos magic that Effu was unleashing — and he hadn’t even fully emerged from the rift yet. On top of everything, dark creatures kept pouring out of the crack, trying to escape deeper into the city, which we absolutely couldn’t allow.

  I watched Inquisitors die, watched two Fortemins fall — including my classmate Iranor — and my blood ran cold from the icy grip of terror…

  Calypso’s first priority was finding his father and trying to talk to him for even a minute to explain the situation with the fifth activated pentagram, but Ilforte wouldn’t be distracted by that conversation.

  “Calypso, I don’t have time right now to figure out who, how, and under what circumstances activated the fifth pentagram,” Ilforte cut him off.

  “None of that matters right now we’re dealing with the consequences. And the consequences are that the world’s balance is broken, the Seal of Creation is shattered, there’s a hole in the sky leading to the flip side. And not only are horrifying dark creatures coming through, but Effu himself. He hasn’t fully regained his physical form yet, so we have a slim but real chance to do something about this. If we survive, we’ll talk about pentagrams. If we don’t, there won’t be anything to talk about. Since you’re here anyway, and if you’re able to help - help. Got ideas on how to neutralize Effu? I’m listening. No ideas? Don’t get in the way. Head to sector five and fight there. Stay away from the front line this isn’t the time to be reckless. Better help clear the alpha-level dark creatures as fast as possible to stop them from spreading across Forland. Your skills are needed more than ever. I managed to teleport here right as the seal broke and to clear the first wave of creatures that rushed into Forland, but that only bought us time. Now we need to act fast, together. Use your judgment, but focus on ranged attacks that’s your and Lori’s strong suit.”

  We didn’t push for further conversation and silently threw ourselves into battle. Right now, priorities had to be set.