V-30 Fire

I once assumed that strength was characterized by the things I could break, the lives I could take, structures and nations I could collapse.

This was a mistake. Strength is not such a simple thing. Power is not a single facet.

I once assumed that superior might was all that mattered, that it was the fate of the weaker to serve and be used. 

I was wrong. I was so very wrong.

For years, I reigned over the Midwest of this great and primordial continent. I slew titans the size of mountains, their bodies blotting out the sky. I harvested their corpses and forged a mighty keep from their bones. I used their core to fuel my little kingdom with wonder. And I cast ash and fire from the sky, drowning the horizon, boiling my enemies before they could ever encroach. And past the periphery of my domain, I compelled grand and withering storms to arise. Storms that made the lands of my neighbors sallow and barren. Storms that forced their farmers to turn to me in mass.

This was my notion of power, and this was meaningless when my daughter got sick.

I am an unkind man. Of this I know. I have denied it for years. I have told myself lies for years. But in my heart of hearts, I knew.

I was possessive with those I loved, ruthless against those who I considered my enemies, or the ones that might very well be enemies someday. Every insult directed toward me was punished to the maximum extent of my brutality. Every prayer not in my name was considered sacrilege and rewarded by an obsidian spike driven through the naysayers' chests.

But then my daughter got sick, and all of this became clear. 

There were Biomancers aplenty on my land once. But my paranoia cost me. I sent them away. I killed those who wouldn't leave, who I couldn't control. For those who wielded power beyond my knowledge wielded them without my consent. And thus did I justify their deaths as preemptive measures to protect me, protect my children. 

And then my youngest daughter got sick, and there was no one to heal her.

You know what worth a colossal storm is? One that could rip the soil from the land and cast it in the sky? You know what purpose ash and fire might bring when it cannot burn the plague afflicting your child so? I could shatter stone. I could slay monsters. I could crush the will of a people. And I could do nothing to spare my daughter of her fate.

I, the Dust King, Tyrant Lord of the Midwest, stand a Pathbearer above Pathbearers. And I, the dust king Pathbearer of the Midwest, tyrant, am nothing. Nothing at all. When it came time to protect what mattered.

I see it now. I see it clearly. I will journey east. There are whispers of new gods: the Ascendants. They maybe be pretenders; they would not be the first charlatans rising from the Abyss and claiming divinity, but if there is just a chance—the slightest chance—that they might be able to understand what ails her, that they might be able to prevent her demise, then my throne, my kingdom, my life, all can be traded. 

Everything.

I had thought myself above ruin. I had thought myself beyond the touch of decay. I was wrong, and now I learn, and now I see how powerless I am. What point is there in harnessing the potential of ruin if you cannot save when you hold the earth?

-Last entry in the Dust King’s journal before seeking out the Ascendants

V-30

Fire

Shiv had no phobias related to fire; he just didn't much like hearing people burn to death. It reminded him of his unfortunate demise within the teleportation anchor at Passage. That was a death he would never forget about. And right now, echoes of that death were being played back to him as countless students howled and brayed their pain, even through the resounding crackles of the rising flame.

From the outside, the dorms were made of sturdy materials. They were also reinforced in interesting ways, not only through concrete and metal, but also through magic circulating its inner supports thanks to the mithril rods lodged there. Some of those mithril rods were exposed now, their mana spilling out into the world like a slit throat. And to make matters worse, Shiv noticed how some of the spell patterns seemed corrupted. 

He wasn't a studied mage, but he'd been in enough battles now to notice specific shapes and colors, namely the shape and color of Pyromancy.

"This isn't an alchemical fire," Shiv sent to Helix telepathically. They were fast approaching the burning dorm, flowing from shadow to shadow like a shark closing in on wounded prey. As Shiv grew closer, he could see chains of bright orange mana snaking through the mutilated husk of the structure.

"No, it is not," Helix beheld the scene through Shiv's eyes. A low chuckle escaped from the orc. "Someone has altered the ward sustaining the building. I don't see any hint of Hydromancy either. That means that it was likely removed. Someone is deliberately trying to cause a mass casualty event."

A crushing wave of counter-chronomancy scythed over the shadows protecting Shiv from the heart of the campus. The Deathless grunted. He could still see a great many vitality signatures glinting within the blazing structure, but even with time at a near standstill, some were on the verge of winking out. He also noticed how the glass was melting; how the metal and stone were pooling into slag right after. The heat must be extreme. The students inside weren't going to last long at these temperatures. He needed to act quickly.

The first order of business would be to use his Shapeless Tides to shred the mithril supports. He would sweep the building using his Biomancy field and rip whatever injuries he could away from the wounded. He'd get Helix to help him while he was doing that, but to choke the rest of the flames into submission from a distance needed someone with far greater Pyromancy than what Shiv possessed.

Candles was the best candidate, but Shiv didn't know where he was—there was no time to go screaming for help, either. Every second mattered, and Shiv needed to act now.

The Deathless exploded out from a patch of shadows cast by the dancing flames lighting the top of the dorm, and he ripped his Perfect Semblance off. As he tossed his mask into his cape and as his body returned to its baseline state. His helmet slammed back down around his face, shrouding him from any unseen observers. Best to be caught as the Deathless than the weak and vulnerable Marcus Unblood if he was going to be fighting fires.

Temporal wards came, but Shiv ignored it as he focused on the blaze above all else. He moved fast, his vectors flaring to life, accelerating him forward.

He slammed into the side of the building yet held his kinetic might back. Instead of barreling through the entire structure, he clung to the exposed supports, ignoring the lashing tongues of fire that licked at his body. Overflow Tides surged out of him and began shredding through the mana that circulated within the mithril. Soon, bits of flame sputtered out around Shiv, as if all the oxygen sustaining them had been severed.

Inertial Overdrive 179 > 180

At the same time, Shiv's mana hydras slashed out. He washed his Biomancy field over bodies, crystallized wound after wound. His strain climbed, but it was only a paltry thing for now. Many burns, collapsed lungs, melted eyes, boils, and contusions flooded the insides of his Aegis.

But though Shiv's Shapeless Tides traveled fast and gutted an entire section of the blaze, it seemed like the entire interior of the dorm was on the verge of collapse.

Just then, the academy’s chronomantic wards smashed into him. It was like a falling tsunami slamming into the surface of an ironclad fortress. Shiv didn't budge. The wards had more power, yet his Chronomancy endured even as pieces of it were ripped away. The soup his Last Morsel made was a hell of a booster for his magic.

I need to get in the habit of eating mana or something. Maybe I should just start mixing all my available mana types to boost myself.

He began focusing, splitting his attention between the building itself and the traveling conflagration.  Something rattled and then broke inside of him. Might be better if I simply rip all the mithril supports out and crumple them into a ball. After that, I can use what's left of my overflow tides to keep the building standing until all the kids get out.is Chronomancy was about to succumb. Shiv ignored it. It would give him enough time to execute his actions.

Leviathan of the Shapeless Tide wasn't just far more powerful than Gravitic Wrestler. It was also much more dexterous as well. It gave Shiv a vague tactile sense of everything he was touching. And right now, as his tides ripped through rogue streams of Pyromancy, he could feel just how fragile the building was. It was like a tower eroded at its base. The top was getting too heavy, the middle too brittle; It was going to collapse in several directions.

Worse yet, it seemed the brittleness was spreading—and unnaturally fast, too. Probably not just Pyromancy crawling through the building then. I've guessed some kind of Geomancy spell applied. Why the hells would someone do this? Am I dealing with another escaped prisoner here?

His temporal shell finally broke. At the same time, Shiv pulled back. His overflow tides suddenly inverted in direction. Every single mithril support was wrenched free from their place and sent straight down into the foundations of the building. A deafening scream of shattering structural supports, ripping walls, and collapsing floors followed.

A dozen vitality signatures winked out right after.

Strider of the Unbending Path 164 > 165

The dorm, shaped like a frozen avalanche, began to crumble. But though it shivered, though parts of it bent and deformed, it remained standing. As a rushing flood of vectors cleaved across every meter of its surface, Shiv's mind wailed with strain. A headache was beginning to build and he found himself near overwhelmed; holding it up was no effort at all.

But there were still flames blowing, ripping through rooms along the interior, still sections that he didn't manage to gut, sections of mithril that he hadn't managed to gut. A series of life signs vanished before Shiv’s Vitaemancy, and the rage inside him grew hotter than the flames without. He didn't know these students, he didn't know why they were burning, but he was offended by their deaths. He took their passing as an insult. There he was, a legend, unable to spare a few adepts from their final end. 

He wasn't going to accept this.

"Helix!" Shiv called out.

The orc briefly appeared, popping out halfway from Shiv's cape. They were both basked in a dense layer of smoke, and the Deathless began pumping his creeping void as well. That would keep them from getting noticed in case any on-campus security or the prismatic guard teleported in. Shiv felt a flash of Biomancy mana singe his field and realized Helix was casting as well.

"This is a calculated attack, as we assumed," the orc said, sounding more fascinated than horrified. "And the Pyromancy here, well, this is a surprise. It's not a pure Pyromancy spell."

"What do you mean?" Shiv said.

"I mean, it probably is partially entwined with a bit of geomancy and Biomancy as well. It combusted practically every bit of matter in the building. Everything the flame touches, it swallows immediately. If it's a solid, it's a hyperconductor for the flames. Quite a brutal thing to shape upon a group of hapless students. Wasteful, too. Again, just poison the food. This is so much wasted power.”

Just then, Shiv felt the squeezing pressure of a teleportation. He saw the shapes of beret-wearing milita blinking in behind him and grunted. "We're going in deeper," he said. He didn't wait for Helix to respond. He began to step forward, harnessing more Overflow Tides to rip the path before him asunder.

As he snapped through bars of reinforced metal and shredded through collapsing walls, the Deathless crashed into the first dorm room, positioned along the westmost exterior of the building. There, he winced as he saw two charred bodies flash-fried into their beds. The only reason he could tell that the things they lay upon were beds at all was because the general shape of the frame had been preserved. 

The sheets were gone, however. The bathrooms were little more than a charred mess. The bathroom was little more than a charred mess, and the rest of the space was indistinguishable as well. Many students likely died without ever knowing what killed them. Shiv shook his head and pressed on. Sometimes you just had no chance at all. The world wanted you to die, and there was nothing you could do about it. 

Not unless you were powerful enough of a Pathbearer.

Not unless you fed from death like it was a refreshing nectar.

As he continued tearing through room after room, Shiv never took his hand away from the walls. He kept his grip on one surface at all times, and he also channeled his Shapeless Tides through his feet, spreading it out along the base of the building. He could hear coughing, and as he whipped the mana hydra in the direction of the sound, he realized there was someone still alive, though their vitality signature was faint. Shiv assimilated their injuries, and he made his way toward them.

Backhanding the wall into dust, he found himself looking down at a suit-covered boy whose armor was half-melted into his body. He couldn't make out any of the student's details because he was painted as black as pitch. However, the fact that he was still wheezing told the Deathless he was alive. This one had been both fortunate and smart enough to throw himself in the large tub in the bathroom within his bathroom. That probably kept him alive longer than most of his peers who lived in the perimeter dorms wrapping around the west side of the building.

The Deathless reached down and called for Helix to move the boy into his cape. The orc made some kind of sarcastic response, mocking the students' lacking constitution, but Shiv wasn't listening. He had too many things to focus on at once.

At this point, he received a message from Adam but didn’t have time to read it. Shiv intended to send Adam something, but when he got into the flow of fighting the fire, keeping the building from collapsing, and mending the injuries of the students, it all became a bit too much.

Multi-Tasking 38 > 40

The Deathless pressed on. Now, he used his Pyromancy as well. It wasn't very powerful, but it still gave him a sense of where the fire magic was active. And he followed that down into the university's basement.

He dropped through an opening burned into the ground and clawed a long gash along the right walls so he could keep pumping more tides through the building. And so, he briefly suffered a lapse in concentration and the section of the upper floors crashed inward. He grunted and halted in place. He focused more on keeping the building together. “Godsdamn it! Godsdamn Multi-Tasking! Come on!” 

He poured his anger into the Multi-Tasking Skill and felt his mind flow from one thought to another, working exponentially faster than it used to.

Multi-Tasking 38 > 41

He grew blindly upward using his mana hydras, but Helix tutted at him. "You're still swinging them like a limb. Use them with flexibility. Thread it through. Thread your field through from floor to floor."

"Bit hard to do when I'm trying to focus on eight different things at once," Shiv snapped mentally. "You could offer some help."

"Why do you think they're still alive, Insul?" Helix said with a faint sneer in his voice. "Who do you think is keeping their blood flowing, keeping their organs working, keeping their brains functional? With the fire this intense and a building filled with Adepts, most of whom lack any kind of respectable Magical Resistance or Toughness, a rather suspicious amount of survivors still remain, wouldn't you say?"

Instead of feeling pleased, Shiv simply clenched his jaw tighter. "So, any chance you're going to heal them completely?"

"That would deplete the point of this exercise."

"Exercise?" Shiv nearly shouted.

"Yes, it is a training opportunity. You're observing a great many burns and flame-based wounds you can observe later. And on top of that, you need more focus: you're going in the wrong direction."

"Felling fuck!" Shiv snapped.

He stopped talking to Helix and focused more on his Pyromancy. A section of the space behind him caved in, and the Deathless tried to recover as a few of his Overflow Tides snaked in that direction of the instability. But then another section of the building began groaning, and he had to redirect his tides once more. 

It's like trying to hold a cup of shattered glass together, Shiv snarled to himself. Just keeps breaking over and over again. Another three vitality signatures winked out, and that cut his complaining short.

He was about to advance toward where the Pyromancy mana seemed the thickest. But then a massive blast enveloped the bottom of the dorm. A wall of flame shot through the wall to Shiv's left, and it came so suddenly that he barely responded in time. He swung his arm up on reflex, and some of his Innate Tides surged upward at an angle. He backhanded a blast away from him and tore through the supports on his left, leaving a molten chasm where steel and concrete used to exist.

Frictionless Vector 92 > 93

Inertial Overdrive 180 > 181

Pyromancy 18 > 19

Multi-Tasking 41 > 42

The sudden ambush paired with Shiv's split-focus caused another cascading collapse. He felt more deaths around him. His Vitaemancy tasted every demise like it was a hit of coldness splashing upon his being, and the Deathless's frustration reached new heights. A mesh of pain pulsated within his skull, and his multitasking was driven to the limit.

The Deathless moved in the direction of the attack now, and he saw a glistening signature. Their life was strong and unaffected by the flame. There was also another signature not far away from them. It seemed like the stronger one was chasing the weaker, and they were both heading in Shiv's direction. The Deathless didn't know the layout of the building. He didn't care either. He felt a tugging sensation in his gut. 

Whoever these two signatures were, they were probably connected to the fire. Neither seemed that affected. Unlike the other students, he barreled through walls, ripped through metal as if it was tissue, and when he blasted through a final threshold of heat-weakened cement, Shiv laid eyes on the culprit behind the fire for the first time.

Ben's fingers of smoke curled around his eyes, but with a wave of his hand, he cleaved an opening in the obfuscation.

He was inside a study room of some kind. There was a glass wall to his left, a burning door to his right. In front of him, laying upon the pieces of a splintered table, was a weakly groaning girl with a horrific set of burns trailing down her lower back and left leg. Just a few steps away stood the one that burned her: A tall, thin figure who was breathing heavily, breaking chunks of frost off his body. 

His features were hidden by a molten mask, and it gleamed bright as if it had just been pulled out of a forge. The rest of the man's body was shrouded by smoke and ash as well, and a trilling chain of spell patterns connected the man to the exposed metal supports jutting out from the ceiling of the room. He coiled the pattern around his finger as if a man tightening a chain, turning it into a ball, and with a sudden rush of power, the room grew brighter as well.

"You stupid little bitch, if you had only been silent, if you—" The man's words came to a halt as he finally noticed Shiv for the first time, and as soon as he did, the Deathless notification popped up.

"You start this fire?" Shiv grunted.

“I… Who…”

“I asked you: Did you start this fire,” Shiv said, calmly, his urge to commit extreme violence hidden.

A chain of fear flowed from the man to Shiv, and he seemed surprised. It didn't last. He slashed out with a cutting gesture, and a wave of splitting heat whipped through the air to sting the Deathless. The spell tore across the room in less than a fraction of a second.

It might as well have been crawling through the mud when it came to Shiv. The Deathless, his Inertial Overdrive Skill roared with a violent fervor. Shiv didn't bother dodging. He shattered the spell with a punch, and then he was on the Pyromancer. 

The man flinched back, stunned that his magic had been undone so casually, and barely able to react to the Deathless's sudden encroachment. He pulled the saber, seemingly out from nowhere, and the blade manifested in a surge of Pyromancy. The denseness of the man's field revealed itself right then, and it shaped itself into a layer of molten plate around his body.

Ah, Heroic-Tier, Shiv thought derisively. I’m so felling scared. What am I going to even do with you?

The man aimed an arcing cut at Shiv. He barely got to move his arm before the Deathless drove a descending elbow on his left shoulder. A loud snap echoed through the room, and the Pyromancer screamed. His molten armor burst apart in a spray of ash and shattering alloy. His fire-forged sword fell from his hand. He tried to shape another blade using the molten  substance of his armor, but then Shiv slammed his left hand on the back of the man's head and established a collar tie.

A blast of force and clashing mana rippled through the room as Shiv clubbed the back of the Pyromancer’s head. The spell chain connecting the man to the mana flowing through the building sputtered out, and Deathless focused his tides. He bade them to collapse inward around the man's head, and the Pyromancer's helmet shattered like rotten wood greeted by a falling hammer.

Beneath the blazing alloy was a man Shiv didn't recognize. He screamed as pieces of glinting metal embedded itself into his flesh. The scream was cut off as Shiv slammed a knee into his testicles, bursting both. He bent down to vomit. Shiv spiked his head through the ground, offering him the thing of unconsciousness instead.

As the Pyromancer went still in the rubble, every flame engulfed in the building suddenly cut out. Thereafter, all that remained was rising waves of dust and steam. The Deathless looked about, trying to sense if any fire still lingered. There was none.

He swept his mana hydras through the building once more. He froze time, waiting, biting every moment he could to heal even more people. But the moment he did, a few more vitality signatures winked out. A thought passed through Shiv's mind, an enticing thought, for him to put his foot down and simply pace the man's skull. He decided against it. He wanted to know why someone would burn down an entire dorm and more importantly, why he was trying to kill that girl.

Looks like we got someone else we need to interrogate, he thought to himself. He directed his Aegis of Assimilation and coiled a hydra around the man's body. He fused a layer of flesh around the Pyromancer, sculpting him within a cocoon. The biomass was harvested from Shiv's homunculus, and it likely wouldn't stand up to a sudden surge of heroic-tier Pyromancy, but Shiv would leave the Pyromancer in Helix's charge.

In the meantime, he had a building to keep standing, at least until all the children were evacuated. As another wave of counter-chronomancy arrived, Shiv cut his temporal shell and reached out using his Biomancy. He ripped the wounds away from the downed girl nearby, and he slammed both hands into the nearby walls, into the wall by his right. He didn't need to focus on the fire anymore, but the smoke was also lethal.

Shiv closed his eyes, ignored the world, ignored all sounds, all senses, even Helix's complaint. He directed his vectors, sent them swimming all the way up to the very top of the building, passing through broken strips of rebar, melted matter, and the shaking, coughing bodies of students. Then, with a sudden twist of kinetic energy, they activated. They ripped the floor of the dorm room asunder, allowing the black choking the air to billow free up into the night sky.

Multi-Tasking 41 > 42

With that feat, he earned another level in multitasking, and reduced the number of fatalities that were certain to follow. But reduced didn't mean resolved. More signatures went out one after another, and with each one unfollowed, a heaviness fell upon Shiv. This entire encounter was senseless, senselessly done, with the students here senselessly dead.

A groan sounded from the downed girl, and Shiv quickly reached down and tossed the Pyromancer behind him. He used his mana hydra to nudge the man into his cape, and Helix gave a surprise call.

"Watch him," Shiv barked. "If he does anything, knock him out. Do not kill him. We're going to have to talk to him in a minute. He's the one that started the fire."

“Oh, good, a Hero,” Helix chuckled from within the cape. “Another volunteer for our lessons.”

The Deathless reached into his cape with his free hand, and pulled out his mask of stolen paths again. He slammed it on his head after his helmet unlatched itself, and his perfect semblance triggered just in time for the coughing girl to lift her head. Then she looked up, blinking through the blurry haze of dissipating smoke. She didn't see the Deathless. Instead, in his place stood one Marcus Unblood, who seemed as uncertain and terrified as she did.

Marcus leaned hard against the walls, and his legs were quivering. He didn't know if he was putting up too much of an act, but it was best to exaggerate in times like these, to make up for deficiencies in his skill.

Acting 16 > 17

"Ah, what happened?" The girl rubbed at her face. Despite the fire, her hair and body seemed mostly untouched. Waves of cold radiated out from her, and she seemed like a spot of snow amidst a garden claimed by soot. Her skin, her hair, even her lips were unnaturally pale. She was of whiteness that stung Shiv's eyes to look at. She was beyond albino. If you had to compare her to something, it would be the pieces of the broken moon drifting in the sky above.

"There was a fire," Shiv stammered, playing up Marcus’s shock. "A big fire engulfed your dorm, and I saw you... you fell over, and I pulled you here, so that you didn't get burned. Wouldn't—w-wouldn't get burned."

She blinked at him, and her eyes flashed bright, the color of an all-encompassing winter. Something about that made Shiv think of Andra, the Frost Giant… The coldness in the room grew a thousandfold, and the temperature immediately spiked down. A wave of visible cryomancy erupted from the girl, and sprawling tendrils of ice began to coil through the flame-swallowed room, a flame-eaten space.

She looked around, her breath hitching, her heart rate accelerating. "Where... where is he? He was..."

"Where's who?" Shiv said, playing dumb. "There was no one following me. I didn't see anyone. There was someone... he probably got swallowed by the flames. It was... it was pretty bad."

The girl stared at him, and there was a flicker in her eyes, a confusion, a hint of disbelief. 'Not that obvious, am I?' Shiv thought to himself. Then she shook herself and rose from the floor. The ceiling above her groaned, and part of it broke apart, metal and concrete buckled under the dorm's succumbing weight.

"We need to get out of here," she said. "This is... the building's going to come down."

"The notification says we're to shelter in place."

"We can't!" the girl cried loud. "He's still after me! I need to... we both need to leave before he finds us!"

"Who?" he cried. "Listen, you're clearly in shock. Let's just... let's just wait for campus security to arrive. They'll be here at any moment."

The girl tried to get up, but she groaned and nearly fell over. "I don't have any time! I can’t stay—they found me! And we can't trust them! They're compromised!"

"Who’s compromised?" Shiv's curiosity was piqued. Just his luck that he managed to stumble at first into another conspiracy. He thought about his Non-Sequitur skill, how it didn't activate for this. Now, you're being real selective, aren't you, system? 

Then he paused as he considered the possibility that this wasn't his strife or quest, that he might have ended up stumbling into this girl simply because he was so favored. That seemed just as likely as anything else by this point.

Just then he saw more life signatures blinking out. For a moment, Shiv felt dismayed; he thought they were dying. But with the rapid pace they were vanishing, and then suddenly reappearing in the far distance of his Vitaemancy’s awareness, he realized they were being teleported out. The Deathless paused, and played the role of terrified, shell-shocked student in anticipation for the jump mage's arrival. 

Not three seconds later, crushing pressure filled the room, and three heavily armed Pathbearers suddenly appeared. A wave of water crashed down, hammering both Shiv and the mystery girl. Then they were grabbed, and the Deathless barely cut his Shapeless Tides in time for the next jump.

"We got him!" one of the academy militia cried out. "Go, go, go!"

And not a second after, the building began crumbling down, everything inside it folding inward, held up only by the Deathless's might, who felt himself get swallowed and pulled along the narrow tunnel. A few minutes later, he burst back into existence, flung out on a nearby lawn. Here, hundreds of students gasped and wept, most of them were still clad in their nightwear, others were wrapped only in towels.

A sizable contingent of the student body, and a few hundred Poly-Magi hovered in the air. A massive spell was being shaped. The coiling strands of a complex Hydromancy spell turned and twisted, forming the shape of a large storm cloud. A second after, a deluge followed, a concentrated deluge that blasted only the badly incinerated dragon dorm. It was too late to do anything, and as the rain fell, the structure succumbed entirely, crashing down, as only a few structural supports remained. It reminded him of a picture he saw in a book once: the bleached bones of a long-decayed whale, laying dead against a cliffside.

He looked on, and speechless dissatisfaction, as the crumbling structure cast a final plume of dust and ash high up into the air, clashing against the falling pour of rain. Against the pouring rain, he felt members from the campus militia pull at him, their berets poking into his peripheral vision, their questions incessant. Someone offered him a glass of water, a jug of water. Shiv took it and poured it on himself, rather than drinking it. Couldn't anyway with his helmet closed.

A sniffle sounded to his left, and he slowly turned, seeing the all-white girl clutching the sides of her head. She was crying, she was shaking. She ignored the school militia, the academy militia's attempts to pull her away. On her lips was a repeated phrase: "It's all my fault... it's all my fault."

Shiv wanted to ask her what was her fault, but he decided against it. Not right now, not when she was still unstable, and not when other people could hear them.

A blaring sound filled the air, and a moment later, a telepathic broadcast swept across the campus. 

Attention all students of Phoenix Academy. Please avoid the Dragon Dorm. We repeat: please avoid the Dragon Dorm. The crisis is still considered to be ongoing. Surviving students of the Dragon Dorm, please proceed to your nearest aid station. Students with Biomancy, knowledge, and surgical expertise, please make yourselves known. Repeat: please make yourselves known.

“Never a crisis without an opportunity,” Shiv muttered to himself. Looks like I’m about to get an early peek into what Medic-301 is like.