Act 3, Chapter 127: Old foes

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday)

Alexandra May

Maya guided me through the main tower faster than any map could have. I barely needed to slow at intersections before her directions reached me, sometimes as words, sometimes as little pulls of attention toward the staircase, corridor, or broken wall I needed to take. The purple shadowlight made the rest almost unnecessary. Everywhere I went, traces of it ran through the damaged building in thin glowing strands, disappearing into concrete, steel, glass, and furniture before pulling broken pieces back together. A cracked support column beside me split under another distant impact, only for purple threads to burst from within it and seize the separated pieces. Concrete unraveled into bundles of glowing fiber around the fracture, shifted, and knitted itself back into a slightly crooked version of what it had been moments earlier.

The farther I went, the denser those threads became. They crossed walls like veins visible beneath skin and stretched through doors, ceilings, elevator shafts, even beneath my feet. Somewhere deeper inside this building, someone was spreading their Authority through almost the entire structure and arguing with an archmage over whether it was allowed to collapse. I had a very strong suspicion who could turn steel, concrete, and glass into threads without destroying their usefulness in the process, but I did not let myself settle on it until Maya finally directed me through the remains of a security checkpoint and toward a broad set of reinforced doors.

The doors were already open. I crossed the threshold, took one look at the room beyond, and immediately pressed my palm against the metal frame behind me.

I remembered what Elle had done below. She had taken an ordinary frame, supplied it with enough memory and artistic interpretation, and convinced it to resemble something that had already existed—an opening into our Domain. I had more Authority available than she did and a far clearer understanding of what we were asking the world to accept. Rainbow shadowlight slid from my fingers along the doorframe, not painting over it so much as filling it with recollection. My bedroom door opening into the Nest. The sensation of stepping through an image and arriving somewhere that should have been impossibly far away.

I closed my eyes and looked with my Aura. A connection thicker than my arm stretched through the false portal, crossed the Domain, and vanished beneath the rearranged landscape surrounding our hidden Soul Core. Ali was there, safely sealed in the Weaver’s Tree, surrounded by the impossible machinery of our soul and connected to hundreds of creations operating across the island. She noticed what I had done immediately and Authority came flooding toward me so quickly that the colors around my spiritual body flared almost white.

That was better—much better than any tattoo could do.

I opened my eyes.

The room was enormous, probably some kind of central transit and operations hub built around the Gate dominating its far side. The thing was active, a broad standing tear in Reality framed by machinery, crystals, and engraved metal. Through its interior I could see Ideworld, though only in fragments distorted by the shifting surface and people waiting on the other side to receive whatever Edge of Tomorrow was trying desperately to save.

There were dozens of workers here. Some pushed carts loaded with computer towers and storage arrays. Others carried heavy cases, stacks of hard drives, containers full of crystals, paper records, equipment I could not identify, and anything else apparently important enough to rescue while the island died around them.

Alicia stood near the Gate with one hand resting against Shiroi Akira’s face. A long, narrow stiletto had been pushed directly through his eye. The weapon disappeared disturbingly deep into his skull, yet he remained upright, motionless except for the slight movements of his hands. Golden-orange shadowlight poured from Alicia along the blade and into him, spreading through his body before emerging again as brilliant purple radiance. I had seen her do something similar to Bobby. Kill, restore, alter, reset. Whatever exactly her power did, this time she was using it not to empty Shiroi but to force something more out of him.

And it was working. Through my Aura, Akira did not resemble a single mage anymore. His spiritual body burned like the center of an enormous loom. Thousands upon thousands of purple threads stretched away from him in all directions, vanishing through the room and into the surrounding building. Every time the hostile Authority outside twisted a wall, broke a support, or pulled floors away from their intended positions, Akira answered. Matter unraveled under his command, shifted along his threads, then reassembled into shapes close enough to their previous state to remain standing.

The man who had once chased me through an alley by unraveling everything he touched was now doing the exact opposite.

He was holding an island together. The irony would have been funny under better circumstances.

A second man stood beside Alicia with another stiletto buried through one eye. I recognized Robert de Marco after only a moment, even though I had rarely seen him this closely. Dark hair swept neatly back, strong Mediterranean features, a fitted suit already dirty from dust and falling debris. Unlike Akira, he was not actively using anything I could see. He simply stood beside Alicia with an unnatural stillness, his visible eye unfocused and his posture arranged around her like a guard dog waiting for a command.

Dr. Gerard Jugger required no introduction. He stood willingly on Alicia’s other side, broad even before touching his Domain, brown hair still slicked back as though he had found time to care about appearance while three archmages destroyed his workplace. His hands were empty. His gaze, however, moved constantly between entrances while subtle ripples passed under the skin of his neck and arms. Biology waited beneath him like a loaded weapon.

Old foes, all of them.

Alicia noticed me. I knew from the way her head snapped toward the entrance, but by then I was no longer standing where she had first seen me.

The Waterflow Robe had already changed. Its surface drank in the polished image of the painted portal door beside me. I pressed myself flat against the architecture, and the Lake’s Surface became whatever the world expected to be painted there. The Usagi mask beneath that deception opened my senses wider while dozens of spy-ders already scattered through the room fed additional viewpoints into Ali-Ani’s arrangement of my perception.

I had no reason to talk. Alicia probably knew who I was. Shiroi knew who I was. Robert knew enough about Alexandra May to understand why I might be hostile. Gerard had already tried to kill versions of me before.

Nothing useful could be added by conversation. What mattered was the Gate. One worker disappeared through it carrying a crystal case. Then another crossed with a server rack. Another team approached behind them with hard drives stacked inside padded containers.

They were leaving. Not yet, perhaps. Alicia still needed Akira to keep the building standing while her people stripped it of everything valuable. But once the last important object passed through that Gate, she could remove the blade from his skull, abandon the island, and close the way behind herself.

If Zoe remained anywhere inside Edge of Tomorrow when that happened, the buildings would lose the only force keeping them in one piece.

I needed Alicia to stay. So I began decorating. The first canvasnake slithered from beneath my robe and disappeared under a row of computer consoles. Another followed the wall behind Gerard. Three more moved independently toward the Gate, their painted paper bodies bending with impossible flexibility as tiny scales glistened across them. Alicia’s visible eye followed one for a moment, but from a distance they looked like nothing more threatening than another species of artistic minion.

A note about provenance: this chapter was copied without permission, while the author's official page carries their published version.

She was looking for me. That was the mistake. I was not the attack anymore. The room was. One canvasnake reached the center and flattened itself beneath a worker’s cart. Its false scales split down the middle. The scroll rolled open silently across the wall, exposing a painting dominated by pale blues and brilliant white, held by the spider minions’ web.

The Identity took hold. Friction disappeared across almost a third of the chamber, across from that painting.

The first worker fell so suddenly that his feet simply ceased participating in standing. The cart continued onward without him, gathering speed until it crashed sideways into another group. Gerard tried to step forward and immediately lost his footing. Robert caught himself against a railing. Alicia remained upright only because Akira’s shoulder and the stiletto she still held gave her something stable enough to brace against.

I moved while they were adjusting.

My robe became the shattered display behind another bank of machines, carrying me across their attention like a reflection moving from one pool of water to another. Canvasnakes followed in my wake. One climbed partway up a support column before unfolding. Another disappeared behind a stack of equipment. Two more reached the ceiling by silk lines already placed by my spiders.

Gerard transformed first. His shoulders widened violently. Muscle pushed through his clothing. His spine lengthened while additional limbs began forming beneath his arms, fingers splitting and multiplying before they even finished growing. Eyes opened along his ribs and neck, searching in every direction at once.

Dozens of web-slingers poured from memory around him. They did not all appear in one place. Ali-Ani understood my intent and distributed them across every angle my Aura could reach. Some dropped from tables. Others emerged along the walls. Several appeared above him and immediately descended on lines already trailing silk.

Gerard tore the first six apart.

The next twenty attached. Every spider that landed anchored a line somewhere else. Table legs. Doorframes. Structural columns. Equipment racks. The Gate’s external supports. Gerard swelled larger, producing enough new muscle to snap several threads, but the web-slingers did not try to overpower him individually. They built an installation around him.

One strand became ten. Ten became fifty. Within seconds his growing body was being pulled in opposing directions by a dense geometric cage of reinforced silk. His Domain responded exactly as I expected. More muscle. Thicker bones. Hardened skin. Additional limbs to tear at restraints. I let him. While his Biology solved the wrong problem, the canvasnake behind him unfolded.

The image inside was ugly by my standards. I had painted decay rather than beauty: matter losing cohesion, unstable particles, structures breaking down from within as if time and radiation had been compressed into a single place. I did not need the trap to reproduce nuclear physics faithfully. It only needed the world to accept the artistic truth I had placed inside it.

This was a place where living matter decayed. Authority flooded the painting. A sickly haze formed around Gerard. He noticed immediately and his body tried to adapt. Tumors swelled and disappeared. Skin thickened, sloughed off, regrew, then blackened again. Additional organs formed beneath his ribs only to collapse almost as quickly. Biology raced to repair damage faster than the trap could impose it, and for perhaps two seconds I wondered whether I had underestimated him.

Then I fed the painting more and multiplied it through the memory of it. The doorway behind me glowed. Authority from our Soul Core crossed into my body and went straight back out again.

Gerard’s regeneration became grotesque acceleration without progress. Fresh tissue replaced dying tissue only to die itself. His enormous body continued changing because his Domain refused to accept defeat, but every attempted solution remained alive only long enough to become part of the problem.

By the time he understood that the correct adaptation would have been leaving the painted zone rather than surviving inside it, he no longer had enough freedom to move. I turned my attention away before he stopped.

Robert had finally located one of my canvasnakes.

His visible eye sharpened, and the air around him gained the strange conceptual weight I associated with Debt. I remembered Beatrice explaining how his family understood the Domain. Harm could become something owed. A promise could become an obligation. Pain itself could be collected and returned.

So I gave him nothing to collect. The trap above him opened without touching his body. Gravity reversed and Robert slammed toward the ceiling.

He managed to twist before impact, protecting his head with one arm, and struck the painted zone above with enough force to crack decorative panels. But from his perspective, the ceiling had become the floor. He fell against it and remained there, suit hanging in the wrong direction while he tried to orient himself.

He reached toward the room below. I still did not attack him directly in any way, shape, or form. Let him indebt the ceiling however he wanted or needed. I’d try to save him for Akira’s sake, but I would not allow him to harm me.

Another frictionless painting unfolded across the ceiling. His hand slipped. His shoes found nothing to grip. He began sliding across the inverted surface, unable to build leverage, while web-slingers arrived from vents and fixtures to wrap silk around his wrists, ankles, waist, and throat. Every attempt to seize a thread caused several more to attach elsewhere.

The Usagi mask brought every little motion into impossible clarity. I saw fingers tense before they moved. I heard paper scales scraping tile on the far side of the chamber. Through a spy-der behind Alicia, I watched her pupil move toward the Gate. Through another perched inside the machinery, I saw the workers slowing their evacuation because half the room had become impossible to cross without falling.

Alicia finally tried to move away from Akira. I could not allow that. The most important thing in the room was not beating her. It was keeping that stiletto inside Shiroi’s skull. His Authority still stretched through the building, thousands of violet lines keeping walls upright and floors connected while the archmages outside tried to reduce everything to ruin. I could not free him. I could not knock Alicia away from him. I could not even risk forcing her to defend herself so violently that she abandoned whatever strengthening connection she maintained between them.

The contradiction pleased some deeply artistic part of me. I needed to defeat Alicia while preserving the exact spell she was casting. Another canvasnake reached her feet.

It unrolled. Music would have been more elegant, but the painting did the same job. Inside a tight sphere surrounding Alicia and Shiroi, painted as overlapping frames from the same motion, each moment repeated with tiny differences until movement itself became an artistic progression that took far too long to complete.

Robert remained stuck against the ceiling, wrapped in a growing nest of webbing. Gerard had stopped meaningfully fighting inside the decay zone. Workers lay scattered across the frictionless floor or scrambled toward the Gate along narrow strips where traction still existed. Akira remained standing beside Alicia, violet shadowlight blazing from him strongly enough that another distant impact passed through the building without bringing the ceiling down.

Less than half a minute had passed.

I stepped out from the reflected image of a wall and let the Waterflow Robe return to the appearance of our lake. Blue and silver ripples ran across my body, carrying fragments of reflected emergency lights like red stars floating on dark water.

Alicia’s eye found me, but I kept my mouth shut. She would hear my voice distorted anyway, and there was nothing worth saying. Instead, I reached for the power offered by my Domain and searched through the memories. The Sword of the Roses emerged first. Then another. Then another. Each one came from a different memory, painted and sketched onto the pages directly in front of the portal I had opened.

More followed until the air outside Alicia’s slowed sphere filled with blades. They hovered at different heights and angles, every point directed toward the woman trapped within the temporal field.

Through my Aura, their connections burned around me like sharp silver brushstrokes added to the larger composition of the room. Alicia could see them—she simply could not react quickly enough.

I watched the realization spread across her face one slowed fraction at a time while she remained chained to Shiroi by the necessity of keeping this entire place alive.

Behind her, workers continued trying to escape through the Ideworld Gate. Above her, Robert de Marco struggled uselessly against the ceiling. To her right, Gerard Jugger died inside a painting.

Only then did I reach for one of Alex’s blades and throw it into the dome, allowing myself to speak through the speaker.

“You move one fucking inch, bitch, or you try killing Shiroi, and you’re done. And it won’t be a building falling on your head. You’ll have one whole long-ass second to know that it was an Archmage of Artistic Creation who killed you.”