The violent cancellation of the two vortexes left Joshey coughing, his lungs burning with dust. His first frantic thought was for Lucia. He spun around, expecting to see her thrown off balance like he had been.
She was perfectly fine. She had simply driven the point of her blade deep into the earth, anchoring herself against the gale, one hand holding the hilt, the other bracing against the flat of the blade. She stood now, pulling the sword free with a smooth, practiced tug, completely unruffled.
*Of course,* Joshey thought, a wave of relief mixed with sheer admiration. *That is the most Lucia thing possible. No flashy magic, just a brutally practical, physical solution.*
He turned his attention back to the commander. Using the Void now seemed pointless; the man had just demonstrated he could summon winds strong enough to scatter it. Joshey's mind, already racing, kicked into an even higher gear. Time seemed to stretch, the world slowing to a crawl as his brain processed information at an impossible rate.
In that single, stretched-out moment, his eyes locked onto a detail he'd missed before: a small, intricately designed golden badge that pinned the man's cloak at his throat. It wasn't just decorative. It had to be. The sheer scale and power of this sensory-dampening barrier was immense. For it to be maintained over such a large area, and for these men to move freely within it… they couldn't all be powering it themselves. They had to be wearing a key. A device that granted them resistance.
The plan snapped into place with perfect clarity.
"Lucia!" he yelled, his voice sharp in the eerie quiet. "The badges! Their cloak pins! Aim for the badges!"
He didn't wait to see if she understood. He launched himself forward, a clear goal finally in mind. He feinted low, then lunged for the commander's throat, fingers outstretched to snatch the golden pin.
But the space between them seemed to warp. The commander didn't move his feet, but he slid backward, maintaining the exact same distance with an infuriating ease. He then made a simple, pushing motion with his hand. There was no finesse, no vortex this time—just a raw, blunt wall of force that slammed into Joshey's chest and sent him stumbling sideways, his grab turning into a clumsy stagger.
*He has crazy power,* Joshey realized, gasping for air, *but zero skill. He's just shoving the air around. He's a thug with a cannon.*
As if to prove the point, the commander, looking annoyed now, clenched his fist. The ground at his feet rumbled, and a chunk of rock the size of a small barrel tore itself free and launched itself at Joshey.
*Geo Mana. Of course. He was just throwing whatever he had at him.*
But in that moment, Joshey saw it. The opening. The perfect, stupid opening.
"Perfect," Joshey whispered.
The man was powerful, but he was untrained. He relied on overwhelming force, not technique. And that meant he might not know how to counter something he couldn't simply overpower.
As the boulder hurtled toward him, Joshey didn't try to dodge or block it. He planted his feet, ignored the screaming instincts in his head, and focused everything he had into a single, precise point in the air directly between him and the charging commander. "Aero Mana: Void."
There was no sound nor a flash of light. But the space in front of him suddenly became… less. It was a pocket of absolute nothingness; a vacuum so intense it exerted a terrifying push on everything around it. The air itself rushed to fill the void, and the incoming boulder was violently shunted aside, veering off course and crashing into the trees. The vacuum sphere shot forward, as a projectile, and as a propagating zone of nullity, that exerted so much force that it pushes everything away from itself
"You'll regret keeping your distance," Joshey said, his voice low and steady. The commander's eyes widened in confusion, then shocked, as the invisible force hit him. It didn't feel like a punch; it felt like being slammed by a battering ram. The air was torn from his lungs; his cloak ripped at the seams, and he was thrown backward, the ground erupting beneath him in a silent, devastating wave.
Joshey worried about Lucia found Lucia standing over the two other assailants. They weren't moving. A cold knot tightened his stomach. "Why..." he started, his voice rough. "I told you to go for the badges." Lucia looked up, her expression was unreadable. She wiped her blade clean on a fold of her cloak with a practiced, efficient motion. "They were trying to kill us, weren't they?" she said, as if stating a simple, unchangeable fact of nature. To her, it was that straightforward. Kill or be killed. "You don't know that for sure!" Joshey argued, frustration boiling over. "We could have disabled them!" "What if you were wrong?" she countered, her grey eyes meeting his. "What if the badges did nothing? I would be dead. You would be dead. I do not take that gamble."
The logic was cold, brutal, and from her perspective, unassailable. He saw the third man, the one who had been flung aside earlier, lying motionless a dozen feet away. Lucia must have finished him with a swift, precise strike the moment the vortex had dissipated. He hadn't stood a chance.
Joshey wanted to argue, to shout about the value of a life, but the words died in his throat. He was relying on her strength, on her lethal competence, to survive. He couldn't demand she fight by his rules when her methods were what kept them breathing. The regret he felt wasn't for the dead men, but for his own inability to handle the situation without her having to become an executioner. He just shook his head, the fight gone out of him, and turned away. "Where are you going?" Lucia asked, her tone curious but not concerned.
He didn't answer. He walked towards the commander, the one he had spared. The man was on his hands and knees, patting the ground in front of him with a look of profound confusion. He was completely lost inside the barrier's effect now that his badge was gone.
Joshey looked down at him. The commander's eyes were wide but unfocused, staring at a world that had become a terrifying blur. He wouldn't be able to see Joshey clearly, just a hazy, indistinct shape. He probably couldn't hear him properly either, just a muffled, directionless rumble. He was trapped in a sensory prison of their own making.
The initial question of "why" they were attacked suddenly felt less important than the immediate, practical one: "How do we get out of here?"
He was stranded in the middle of a magically silenced forest with a dead driver, dead attackers, and a blinded commander. The wagon was useless without someone to guide the horse, and wandering blindly through this was a death sentence.
«Elias, » he thought, the idea forming. «The barrier. You said we're perceiving its mana wavelength directly. Is it possible to... analyze it? To understand its structure? »
There was a pause as Elias, the scholar, directed his full attention to the task. «Yes, » he replied, his mental voice buzzing with analytical focus. «It is a complex but stable resonant frequency. If we can map its harmonic pattern... in theory, we could generate a counter-frequency. A small, localized field of our own, tuned to cancel it out. We wouldn't be destroying their barrier, just creating a bubble of normality inside of it. »A way out. Not by fighting their way through, but by thinking their way through. Joshey looked from the disoriented commander to the dense, silent woods around them. The fight was over. The real work was just beginning. Joshey took a deep breath, pushing aside his frustration and the image of the dead men. Survival first. He closed his eyes, focusing inward. He willed his mana field, that thin, shimmering bubble of personal space, to expand. It wasn't about pushing outward with force, but upward, it was about stretching his awareness, reaching up like a tendril to gently brush against the oppressive, muffling blanket that smothered the forest.
The moment his field made contact, he felt Elias surge forward in their shared consciousness, a master analyst taking over the terminal. The raw data of the barrier, its resonant frequency, its harmonic structure—flooded their mind.
The effect was immediate and disorienting for Joshey. The world, which had been rendered with the hyper-clarity of their seventh sense, suddenly flickered. He felt a wave of vertigo, his own normal senses trying to reassert themselves against the artificial silence. Beside him, Lucia stumbled, a sharp hiss escaping her lips. The constant stream of sensory data she relied on had just been severed.
"Joshey? I can't—" she started, her voice tight with a sudden, unfamiliar vulnerability. She was blind again, cast back into the silent, formless dark.
"Be patient, I'm working on it!" he said, but the words felt clumsy and distant, even to himself. His focus was split, his mental resources overwhelmingly dedicated to the colossal task Elias was performing. He was just the power source; Elias was the engineer running the calculations.
«Analysis complete,» Elias's voice cut through the cognitive static. «The structure is elegant, but rigid. Commencing counter-resonance field.» Joshey didn't understand the specifics. He just felt a shift, a recalibration deep within his core. His mana field, which had been passively analyzing, suddenly began to pulse with a new, intricate rhythm. It was like finding the exact opposite note to cancel out a sound.
A faint, visible shimmer expanded from him, a bubble of warped air that pushed back against the deadening effect. It wasn't loud. It was a profound un-silencing.
The first thing to return was sound—the rustle of leaves in a real breeze, the creak of the wagon wood, Lucia's sharp intake of breath. Then sight bled back in, the grainy, desaturated fog dissolving to reveal the sharp outlines of trees, the dark stains on the ground, Lucia's wide, relieved eyes as she looked around, her vision restored.
The seventh sense, the direct perception of mana-wavelengths, flickered and died. The processing power required to maintain it while also generating the counter-barrier was too immense. The world was just the world again. It felt almost… simple.
Joshey let out a heavy breath, the mental strain easing. It was clear now. They had a way to navigate.
His eyes fell on the commander. The man was blinking rapidly, clarity returning to his gaze as the counter-barrier enveloped him too. He looked from Joshey to Lucia, then to his fallen comrades, confusion giving way to a dawning, grim understanding. He opened his mouth, perhaps to speak, perhaps to curse.
Joshey didn't give him the chance. He didn't need a speech, or an explanation. He just needed the man out of the way.
He took two quick steps forward, his right fist already cloaked in a tightly-wound sheath of Aero Mana. It wasn't for cutting or slashing; it was for concentrated, concussive force. As the commander looked up, Joshey drove his fist straight into the man's solar plexus.
There was a soft *whump*, the sound of air being violently expelled. The Aero Mana transferred the kinetic energy directly into the man's diaphragm and lungs, bypassing much of his muscle and bone. His eyes bulged, a silent, shocked gasp his only protest before his brain, starved of oxygen, shut down. He crumpled to the forest floor, unconscious but alive.
Joshey stood over him, his knuckles stinging. It wasn't a kill. It was a solution. One problem, temporarily dealt with. He turned to Lucia, the forest now alive with its true, natural sounds around them.
"Let's go," he said, his voice tired but firm. "We're walking."