Act 3, Chapter 126: The breach

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday)

Alex Weatherlight

For a moment, at the edge of my vision, I could see the three archmages who had unleashed this hell. They hovered several hundred feet above the ground, enclosed inside a translucent sphere of pure shadowlight, right at the edge of the zone they had spread around the island. Beside them, something that looked like a dragon hung in the air, beating its wings and clearly serving as protection against any possible attack.

They gave no indication whatsoever that they cared about anything beyond destroying the island and killing the people on it.

I had just dodged something that looked like a flying octopus inflated like a balloon, its tentacles reaching out to catch me.

The Sword of the Roses accompanying me flew straight at it, slashing and striking with its blade, while I kept myself balanced on the Zweihander, dodging and attacking with the Roman sword.

Every strike I made through the air opened another wound across the body of the horrifyingly massive creature. The Gladius Motus did not care that several dozen feet separated its edge from flesh. My movements were enough. Every slash gathered force along the blade and sent the intention of the strike farther than steel should ever have reached, carving thin red lines across the inflated monster until its bloated body began leaking something thick and yellowish into the sky.

It tried to catch me again. I leaned hard to the side. The Zweihander responded instantly, rolling beneath my feet until I was almost standing horizontally against the air. One tentacle swept past my back close enough that the wind of its passage tugged at my clothes, while another curled underneath us.

The Sword of the Roses severed that one before it could close. I twisted my wrist and sent the blade onward. It shot past the creature like an oversized silver needle, curved around in a wide arc, and struck one of the smaller flying horrors approaching from behind. The impact did not kill it, but threw the thing off balance long enough for me to pull one of the Singing Blades from the Domain and hurl it toward the same target.

The knife spun end over end. Shadowlight flared across its surface. Music exploded from the speaker embedded within it before the blade even reached its target. A rapid electronic rhythm filled the air, sharp and repetitive, each beat accompanied by another fleeting image of the spinning weapon. For a moment it looked like I had thrown twenty knives instead of one, their translucent copies spreading outward around the original.

The creature flinched. The Sword of the Roses struck from the opposite direction and passed through its throat. Three more creatures were already converging on me.

One resembled a grotesquely oversized hummingbird whose wings ended in grasping human hands. Another looked like a manta ray covered in blinking eyes. The third was something I had no convenient name for beyond flying rib cage, because that was exactly what it looked like.

I pulled two more Singing Blades free. The first flew high. The second went low. I sent them spinning in opposite directions while Catansi changed the music flowing through them. A slow, measured melody began spreading from the lower blade, and the moment the hummingbird entered its reach, its frantic movements became almost graceful.

Its wings slowed. The dozens of hands growing from them opened one finger at a time. Even the creature's eyes seemed to blink reluctantly. I kicked away from the Zweihander. For several seconds there was nothing beneath my feet. I dropped toward the monster, turned once through the air, and slashed with the Gladius Motus.

The blade never touched it. The cut still did. Its head came free from the body and both began falling toward the streets far below.

The Zweihander swept beneath me before gravity could claim the same victory. My boots struck the flat of the blade. I bent my knees against the impact, regained my balance, and immediately sent it diving beneath the manta ray.

The thing folded around us. Hundreds of eyes snapped toward me. I swung upward opening a line across its underside. The Sword of the Roses followed the wound and widened it, carving through whatever passed for organs inside the creature while I drove the Zweihander straight through the spray. Black blood splattered across my body.

The rib cage descended after me.

I threw another Singing Blade directly between its bones. The knife lodged there. Music began playing from inside its chest cavity. Flames emerged first as sparks crawling over bone in time with the rhythm. Then the song reached its next phrase and the sparks became fire, pouring between ribs, spreading across the flock of black birds nesting within the thing. They erupted outward. Burning wings filled the air.

I pulled the Singing Blade free as I flew by and sent it spinning toward the next target.

Around me, more knives were already moving, as Alexandra was indeed right. Anything coming from inside the Domain, felt like it was already where I was and thus were not in conflict with the archmage that tried to contain all that destruction around.

And thus the blades circled through the battlefield. One carried fire wherever its melody reached. Another dragged a pocket of slowed time behind it. A third scattered false images in its wake, leaving a dozen glittering copies of itself dancing through the sky.

Different songs fought for space around me, sometimes overlapping into complete nonsense, but each still carried its own meaning. Each blade remained its own little stage, dragging an artistic effect through the air wherever I sent it.

For a few precious moments, I almost enjoyed myself. Then something enormous roared in the distance. I assumed the ever-changing mountain of flesh smashing through another monster was Damien.

He had become something vaguely draconic again, though only vaguely. Red scales covered most of his body, enormous wings rose from his back, and a tail as thick as a tree trunk swept through the remains of a road. But additional limbs kept emerging from him whenever the fight demanded them.

The creature opposing him was nearly one third as large as one of the surrounding buildings. It looked like a horned ape whose back had been covered in overlapping wings. Dam caught two of those wings in clawed hands and pulled until the creature screamed. When the wings tore free a massive fist struck him across the head and sent him crashing sideways through the corner of a building.

At the same time one of the towers overlooking the plaza had begun collapsing. Its floors slid away from one another and the concrete walls cracked. Windows burst outward. Sections of steel framework bent away from the center as a foreign Authority pressed through the entire construction. For several seconds the building seemed doomed. Then purple shadowlight emerged from somewhere inside it. Thin tendrils pierced the walls—hundreds of them.

They spread through the broken structure like threads pushed through torn cloth. One wrapped around a falling slab of concrete, turning the material itself into threads. Another coiled around exposed reinforcement bars. Others split again and again, crawling through rooms, stairwells, ceilings and shattered walls until nearly the entire building was stitched together by glowing violet lines.

The collapse stopped and then the threads pulled forcing entire sections of the tower to shift sideways through the air. Floors slid back toward one another. Steel straightened and walls turned. A section of wall ended up slightly crooked. Several windows no longer aligned with the floors behind them. One balcony had somehow migrated half a story upward. But the building stood. The hostile Authority pushed against it again and where the cracks spread the purple threads were ready to answer and the whole structure realigned itself once more.

Another shriek pulled my attention upward. Too many creatures still filled the sky. The Sword of the Roses carved into one.

Two Singing Blades crossed through another, their songs overlapping as fire and slowed time swallowed the creature together. The Gladius Motus opened a wound across the wing of something resembling a giant bat, and I drove the Zweihander directly beneath it as it lost control.

Then I stopped climbing. I leaned forward and let the sword dive. Wind hammered against my body.

Buildings raced upward around me while the plaza below rapidly expanded from a distant patch of pavement into an actual battlefield. I jumped from the Zweihander roughly twenty feet above the ground. It swept away beneath me and I hit the pavement, rolled through the impact, and came back onto one knee in the center of the plaza.

The Sword of the Roses hovered at my shoulder, while the Zweihander curved overhead and slowed to a stop. Gertrude shot into the plaza on her motorcycle and she didn't bother slowing properly. The bike skidded sideways between chunks of fallen concrete, its rear wheel kicking dust and broken glass across the pavement. Gertrude jumped from it before it had even stopped moving and landed in the middle of a group of terrified people huddled beside the remains of a fountain.

She spread her arms and the entire group disappeared. The abandoned motorcycle toppled onto its side several feet away from her, its rear wheel still spinning. I stared at the empty space where twenty-something people had been a second earlier, just for a second before running into the first building ahead, while both Alexandra and Elle appeared by my side.

Elle Erikson

I did not follow Alex into the building. Instead, standing there among the dust, broken glass, and people disappearing beneath Gertrude’s Authority, I looked toward the ground beneath our feet and remembered what existed below it. Months ago, I had known those underground levels only through the senses painted into Bobby Carpenter’s headband: white corridors polished to an almost insulting perfection, laboratories separated by reinforced glass, containment tanks filled with creatures that Edge of Tomorrow had reduced to samples, specimens, and convenient sources of information.

Back then, I had watched from far away while pretending to clean offices several floors above. I had seen the muscle-like Proteian pressing against its tank, the soot-covered Pigeyeons tracking movements with their third eyes, the Unreflected hanging inside its restraints, and the feathered humanoid who had actually tried to speak to Bobby. I had hated what I saw, but I had also known that charging into the place and opening every cage would accomplish nothing except adding my corpse to someone’s research notes. I had promised myself I would return when I had enough power to do something meaningful.

Apparently, the universe had decided that moment would arrive while three archmages were tearing the entire island apart.

Alexandra, I want the underground laboratories, I thought through our connection, already fixing the remembered layout inside my mind. I felt her attention touch mine immediately, followed by Ali-Ani’s, and for a moment the island seemed to press back against the thought itself.

The Archmage of Closed Spaces still held Authority over this place, insisting upon boundaries, distance, entrances, and the simple truth that I should not be able to appear wherever I pleased. Unfortunately for him, we had already found a way around that interpretation. I was not some stranger trying to force my way into a sealed room anymore. I was Alexandra, and Alexandra existed on the island already through several bodies, several creations, and more connections than I could comfortably count. More importantly, Elle Erikson had walked these halls before, even if most of those memories had reached me through someone else’s eyes. I knew this place, and in the strange logic of our Authority, knowing mattered.

The author's official posting contains this chapter, but the copy here was taken without their permission.

Rainbow shadowlight folded around me, and the ruined plaza vanished.

The laboratory that replaced it looked nothing like the sterile complex preserved in my memories. Emergency lights flashed red through drifting smoke, turning every white surface into alternating bands of blood and darkness. Half the ceiling in the corridor ahead had collapsed, exposing pipes, electrical cables, and the raw structure of the artificial island above us. Water sprayed from a broken line and ran across the floor in shallow currents, carrying papers, fragments of glass, and something dark enough that I chose not to inspect it more closely. Alarms screamed from several directions at once, overlapping with human voices and the much less human sounds echoing through the shattered laboratories beyond. Somewhere nearby, something enormous slammed into a wall hard enough to shake the floor beneath my feet, and a second later a scream cut abruptly short.

That sound decided my priorities for me.

I ran toward the nearest voices instead of whatever had made them scream. The first survivors were less than a minute away, trapped on the far side of a section where the ceiling had collapsed across the corridor. Two scientists in lab coats were trying to drag a third person free from beneath a twisted support beam while a security guard crouched beside them, one hand pressed uselessly against a wound in his abdomen. All four stared at me when I climbed over the rubble, and for a brief second I saw recognition in one scientist’s face—not recognition of me personally, but of the fact that I had appeared from a direction no surviving corridor actually led toward.

“Do not waste time asking how I got here,” I told them as I reached the injured guard. “Grab one another and keep physical contact until you are safe. You are already dead in here, so do not think of something foolish, like resisiting my Authority and you might yet cheat that fate. Do you understand?”

The older scientist opened his mouth, probably to demand an explanation, but another impact shook dust from the ceiling and changed his mind. They linked hands instead, and I reached through the connection to our Domain. Sending myself through that path was easy because every version of me belonged there, but sending strangers required more force and a much cleaner claim. The opposing Authority pressed against mine, insisting that these people were here, inside this laboratory, and that here was separated from elsewhere by distance and walls. I did not try to overpower that directly. I simply reminded the universe that my Domain was a place I already occupied, that my Authority surrounded the people I was touching, and that removing them from danger was not the same thing as moving through the closed space surrounding us.

The resistance weakened just enough. Rainbow shadowlight wrapped around the group, bright enough to paint color across their terrified faces, and all four disappeared into the Domain.

I allowed myself half a second of satisfaction before something scraped against the wall behind me.

The noise was slow and wet, followed by the unmistakable groan of concrete under pressure. I looked over my shoulder and saw the wall deform inward. A thick reddish mass pushed through the widening crack, fibers contracting and rearranging themselves as if a mountain of exposed muscle had decided it needed a hand. Fingers formed only after the limb was already halfway through, each one too large and too flexible, curling experimentally against the floor while the rest of the creature forced itself through whatever remained of the containment room on the other side.

I remembered that one.

The Proteian had spent hours pressing itself against reinforced glass whenever Bobby came near, tracking her without eyes, ears, or anything else I understood as a normal sense. At the time, the barrier had looked absurdly strong. Now there was barely enough of it left to inconvenience the creature.

I stepped backward without attacking. Fighting it might have been satisfying and perhaps even deserved, but every second spent proving I could kill something was a second I was not finding Zoe. The creature had also been a prisoner here far longer than I had been an enemy of Edge of Tomorrow, and I had no intention of deciding its fate simply because the people who tortured it had lost control of the cage. I backed into the next corridor, let the thing pull more of itself through the ruined wall, and turned away the moment I knew it had no immediate interest in chasing me.

In a glimmer of shadowlight I pulled a spellbook from my memory and opened it beside me as I ran. The first swarm of spy-ders appeared almost immediately after that. Tiny paper bodies dropped around my feet, landed lightly, and spread in every direction. Some rushed beneath overturned carts and shattered cabinets, others climbed walls or slipped through cracks in damaged doors. I shared my intent through the connections binding them to us: find survivors, find routes through the building, and most importantly, find Zoe Harper.

The request was simple. The number of places they had to search was not.

Eight became sixteen before I reached the next junction. Sixteen became thirty-two while I helped another pair of survivors climb free from a partially collapsed office. More spiders entered through the Domain and scattered into ventilation ducts, stairwells, maintenance tunnels, elevator shafts, and gaps between broken walls that no human could use. My perception began to divide around them, not into one impossible wall of images but into clusters Ali-Ani organized for me. One group covered the lowest laboratories. Another moved upward toward the commercial levels. A third searched service spaces running beneath the island. Every few seconds another little window of attention opened somewhere else, adding a fragment of the disaster to the growing mosaic inside my mind.

It reminded me painfully of Bobby’s headband. Back then, Alexandra had arranged borrowed sight into neat sections around my ordinary vision, allowing me to scrub toilets in one building while watching the secret laboratories through another woman’s eyes. I had thought the trick impressive at the time. Now dozens of my own creations crawled through those same halls while more entered with every passing minute, and the difference between then and now felt almost obscene.

Through one spider I watched a Pigeyeon launch itself down a broken corridor, its soot-black wings beating hard enough to scatter debris. It was larger than the ones I remembered and moved with frantic purpose, the pale third eye in the center of its head fixed on something outside the spider’s field of view. Through another, I caught sight of something tentacled dragging a screaming researcher across the floor. I cut that feed from my attention before the new altruistic instinct I'd decided to indulge could pull me toward a fight I had already decided not to take. A third spider found six people barricaded inside a conference room while something scratched at the door from the other side.

I changed direction immediately, counting seconds in my mind. I knew that each one could make a difference between finding Zoe alive and failing her. But after all that I’d been through, all the crap life kept throwing at me, I decided to be stupid for once and do it Malik’s way—be a hero if I could.

By the time I reached the people, the door was bending inward with every impact. I appeared through an opening in the adjacent wall, startling the group badly enough that one man swung a metal chair toward me before realizing I was human.

“I can get you out,” I told them, raising both hands so nobody made today even more complicated. “Everyone touch someone else and stay together. Whatever is outside that door becomes irrelevant in approximately five seconds if you cooperate.”

They cooperated. The thing outside struck again just as my Authority enclosed the group, and the metal door tore partly away from the frame. I caught a glimpse of elongated fingers curling through the gap before the survivors disappeared into the Domain. I left through the hole in the opposite wall without waiting to learn what those fingers belonged to.

The rescues began to blur after that. A technician trapped under laboratory equipment. Two guards who had barricaded themselves in a storage room after running out of ammunition. A woman hiding beneath a desk while blood dripped from the ceiling above her, refusing to move until I physically grabbed her wrist and pushed her into the Domain. Three researchers attempting to carry a badly burned colleague toward an elevator that no longer existed. I sent them all away, and every time I did it the process became slightly easier. Perhaps the archmage’s claim was weakening as the island collapsed. Perhaps my interpretation was becoming stronger through repetition.

A melodic sound reached me as I passed the entrance to another damaged laboratory. It was faint beneath the alarms and collapsing structure, but unlike every other sound around me, I knew it immediately. Chirping notes rose and fell around guttural consonants, almost musical enough to be called a song and almost articulate enough to be mistaken for speech if one listened only to the rhythm.

I stopped in the corridor. The sound came again and memory supplied the rest. Bobby standing beside her cart while the feathered humanoid watched her from a wall-mounted harness. His green-and-blue plumage shifting as he breathed. His long crest raised in agitation. His strange song directed toward the only person in the laboratory who treated his existence as ordinary. Later, I had watched him try again, and when Bobby walked away his anger had gradually collapsed into something much worse—resignation.

I entered the room, where the containment equipment had been almost entirely destroyed. One wall had cracked open from floor to ceiling, and claw marks crossed the tiles where something else had escaped earlier. The heavy restraint frame remained anchored to the opposite side, twisted but intact. The elf was still inside it.

I knew what he was now, even if the word still felt strange when applied to the reptilian face before me. Joan had explained that the elves of Ideworld were heavily feathered, and after seeing more of them the description made far more sense than my original assessment of crocodile, parrot, and human stitched together by an intoxicated biologist. Even so, this one looked terrible. Many of the iridescent feathers covering his arms and neck had been burned or torn away. Dried blood darkened one side of his coarse robe. Half his crest hung limp, and the tail strapped behind him had lost enough feathers that bare scales showed beneath.

His yellow eyes locked onto mine as I approached. He sang something quietly.

“I can’t understand you,” I told him, slowing several feet away. “I know that it might be disappointing, but the current situation is not ideal for anything. I will send you to my Domain of power and if I survive this hell, I will get there and try to find you a home. I am a friend of the Shattered, and Razash whomever that is sends its regards.”

His crest shifted slightly. Another sequence of hisses and musical notes followed, and although I could not understand a single word, fear translated perfectly well. I pressed my palm against his chest.

His soul resisted immediately. The force of it surprised me. He was injured and restrained, but there was nothing weak about the will beneath those feathers. His Authority pushed against mine instinctively, rejecting the connection before it could close around him.

I did not force harder. Instead, I tried to reach him with my aura and let him feel the Domain, the way Maya was able to perceive the world: the open meadow, the lake, the creations moving through it, the absence of steel restraints and scientists with needles.

My Authority surprised me in that moment, and everything around me changed according to my perception. Steel beams started looking as if they had been painted. The ground appeared sketched and erased wherever it was broken. Each sound I made was accompanied by comic-book-like poofs and thumps. And I knew then. I knew that I had reached through the resonance for the first time and projected my Domain outward.

His resistance slowly eased, when I pushed the images of my Domain onto the surrounding surfaces. Rainbow shadowlight spread around his body. The harness remained behind, but the elf disappeared.

For several seconds, I stood alone in the ruined chamber, staring at the empty restraints, which looked as if they had been painted into the room. I felt a sudden, strange power that I was allowed to wield in this place, an extension of my Domain.

I covered part of the harness with my thumb so my eyes could not see it, changing my perspective. When I moved my thumb away, it was no longer there. But then the power I had awakened in me ended, and I had to run again.

The network had expanded far beyond the laboratory levels now. Spy-ders crawled through office buildings above, crossed shattered walkways, moved along utility tunnels beneath the plaza, and entered spaces I had never known existed during my short employment here. Ali-Ani filtered their findings ruthlessly. Survivors were marked for me, Gertrude or Alex who all rushed through different buildings. Monsters were noted only when they blocked important routes. Dead bodies were ignored unless identification mattered. Anything resembling Zoe’s height, hair, clothing, or likely workplace forced itself immediately to the front of my attention.

Still nothing, so I summoned another wave. Then another. Hundreds of tiny artistic lives entered the broken island and began searching. When my Authority levels almost faltered, I reached the closest door frame I could find and stopped there. I reached for the memory of the doors I had made for Sophie and summoned them, opening a direct route to my Domain. A sudden influx of Authority pushed through by Ali-ani’s machinations rejuvenated me.

Through one spider, I saw Damien’s transformed body pass outside a shattered window several floors above, grappling with something large enough to shake the entire building. Through another, purple shadowlight spread through broken concrete and steel, turning parts of the structure into threads before pulling them back into alignment. Another gave me a fleeting view of Alex Weatherlight crossing a lobby below while several of his blades circled him through smoke—he fought Edge of Tomorrow’s clueless mage. Elsewhere, Gertrude appeared among a group of survivors, touched two of them, and removed everyone from the room at once. Soon after, she rushed through a corridor, firing a rifle at creatures crawling across the floor, while Noxy, whom she had released, crawled along the walls, sending superpowered shots at even greater menaces.

The old laboratory corridors passed around me in broken echoes of the place I remembered, and with every step, I felt the difference between the woman who had first entered them and who I was now. Back then, Elle Erikson had been a cleaner with a false résumé, a stolen identity, and four painted eyes hidden inside an old woman’s headband. She had watched people and monsters through glass while carefully pretending she belonged there.

Now the glass was gone. The cages were open. I was no longer pretending. And somewhere inside this collapsing island was Zoe Harper.

I poured more Authority from the Domain, bracing myself against yet another doorframe that looked like a magical portal, half-remembered, half-painted, and sent another wave of spiders into the ruins, until their bodies scattered through Edge of Tomorrow like living drops of ink across a torn page.

One of them had to find her. I simply refused to accept any other ending.