"Why the hell would they just run off like that!?" Olivia roared as she and Alec sprinted down the street, their forms almost gnat-like amongst the burning wreckage of the city that they were both so used to seeing hustling and bustling with life and energy.

"If I knew-" Alec grunted, dropping into a quick slide beneath a toppled wooden pillar and pushing off the ground to rise back to his feet as quickly as he could, "I would tell you. Unfortunately, I'm just as stumped as you are."

"We've done nothing –Nothing!– but talk about how this step is just trying to freak us out and stop us from keeping our cool, and they just decide to not only lose their calm but split off from us too!" The young woman kicked off two larger pieces of rubble to clear a large crack in the street in a zigzag, hitting the ground and resuming her sprint as if she had never left the ground in the first place.

"Perhaps it would be best if you kept your cool, too," Alec suggested, his gaze moving from street to street and alley to alley as they ran towards the burning, crumbling rubble of the royal castle.

There was a short growl from the girl at his side before she took a small breath and shook her head slightly, her eyes smouldering with anger, but at least no more yelling coming from her as they both focused on their self-appointed task.

"You're right. Yelling and raving are just going to make it harder for me to pass this step. But godsdammit, those two are just so infuriating! How the hell the both of them are meant to actually fulfill their qualifications with hairpin triggers like that, I'll never know." She huffed in annoyance, swerving around a fallen pile of rubble just in time for him to do the same a moment later.

"The explosion at the castle was likely something to unbalance the both of them, something that the ritual knew would be effective," Alec grumbled, rolling his eyes.

"Yeah, no shit. The Princess." Olivia huffed, as if the realization was more aggravating than helpful, "When it comes to her, it seems like neither of them can think clearly. Morons."

"They're close to the Princess, then?" Alec tumbled over a fallen chunk of wall and extended his arm against the wall at the end to push himself up and off to regain some of the speed he had been forced to bleed off.

"Larstud likes to think that he is, and I have no idea about Callum," Olivia explained, her gaze flickering to the air for a moment, searching for something that evidently was not there.

"I haven't heard him talk about her before, but I think that Glenn has made comments here or there."

"Of course he would." She groaned, lagging behind for a single step before catching right back up.

Honestly, she wanted nothing more than to leave the two of them behind for pulling a stunt like this, but she knew that she couldn't afford to do that, for more than one reason. Chief and king among them being that she didn't know if it would even let her do so. The ritual that was. She had a sinking feeling that all of them needed to pass a step before they could be allowed into the next one, which was just perfect.

"How fast did the both of them take off!? Since when were they both this fast?"

"Only the gods could tell you that. I don't know." Alec responded, annoyance clear in his own tone.

Between the heat clinging to him like a heavy blanket and the smoke irritating his eyes, nose, and throat, it's like the environment itself was conspiring against him to throw his temper into a tailspin. Add in the actions of Callum and Glenn, and then Olivia's own growing anger on top, and the boy found himself more than struggling to keep his own cool, despite his rather well put-together poker face in front of Olivia.

Not to mention the fact that he was still reeling over whatever vision he had seen when first entering the ritual, the sight of its clockwork head and mismatched fingers sending a shiver down his spine that seemed to just make everything go cold.

He wanted to believe that it was just a figment of his imagination, his mind playing tricks on him, or his eyes seeing things in dancing shadows and flashing lights that were never truly there. However, he could not trick himself. Not that thoroughly, not that shamelessly. He knew, down to the core of his heart and the vague threads of his soul, that what he had seen was real and that what he had seen was wrong.

The pop crackle of a fire to his left shifted in tone, a crunch hidden beneath humming air hundreds of degrees in temperature and fizzling charcoal. Ordinarily, Alec would not have noticed it. Ordinarily, had he even managed to do so, he would have ignored it to focus on their task of reaching the castle as soon as possible. Ordinarily, Alec would not be jumping at shadows and habitually checking every sound he heard in a vague, illogical attempt to find something before it potentially found him.

Right now, Alec not only noticed that shift, but looked as well. Which is, perhaps, the only reason he saw the hand of mis-aged fingers lunging for him before it actually managed to grab hold.

A strangled yelp. It was not the sound of an impact, or of stone and wood shattering, nor even the whipping winds caused by surging mana, that clued Olivia into her partner's distress, but the mere subconscious sound that was forced out of his lips.

Her foot planted itself into the cracked cobblestone of the street as she turned on the spot, her eyes widening in alarm.

A hand reached for Alec, and he danced away, the wisp of the entity's cloak whipped with the spinning crouch that they performed to reorient themselves after the teen again, and Alec lurched back as if simply just grazing it would light him on fire. A lunge for his ankles had the teen hopping in the air, and a spring off the ground had the teen's blade scraping along the clockwork the entity dared to call a face, snapping the entity's body ninety degrees to the side.

"Alec!"

Rather than reorient itself and go after Alec once more, the entity merely snapped an arm up in the direction that Alec had snapped its head to and flicked its wrist.

The world itself shifted. Stone clipped into stone, fire melded with wood and made shattered metal caps and bronze cutlery, and the clouds above jerked out of place. This was nothing like any kind of magic that Alec had ever seen, nothing like anything that Olivia had ever heard of. Rather than going after Alec, wasting time that he could use to re-centre himself and prepare, it rotated and compressed the world to bring Alec to it instead.

'That's not natural!' Olivia's forward foot planted itself into the street so hard she almost fell onto her face, tremors wracking her form as she watched her friend desperately evading being touched by the entity that seemed to have a spine only when a coin flip landed on heads.

She didn't know what this entity was, or why it was going after Alec so doggedly. It matched nothing that she knew of, nothing that she could imagine. No one in her family's long and storied history had ever spoken of meeting an entity like this, never even alluded to it. It seemed to almost ignore the rules of the world, twisting and bending things to its whim, turning wood and stones alike to dust whenever its mutated fingers so much as grazed them. It was unnatural. It was illogical. It was a freak in every sense of the word. A glitch in the ritual that formed something that was never meant to be seen by mortal eyes.

And it was trying to kill her only friend in the world.

Alec leant back before leaping sideways to dodge two wild swipes aimed at him, twisting with a bump in the street to get his feet beneath him once more and jerking unsteadily as the figure before him rose a hand and flicked its wrist towards itself; the space between the two compressing to nothingness in the time it took his mind to even register the motion it had made.

His blade whirred into motion in a flash of silver, knocking one of the creature's hands away and quickly circling around to do the same to its second hand as it tried to reach out. The teen only managed to back up a single step before it was on him again, the two of them locked in a desperate struggle that had Alec doing everything he could just to stay untouched, let alone being able to injure the entity.

'Nothing I do can harm it!'

Two more swipes, a knife-handed thrust at his thigh, a sliding swipe at one of his ankles.

'I don't have the time to use one of my techniques. Could one of them even harm this thing!?'

Jab, swipe, thrust swipe sweep. Glowing sparks illuminated the space between the two of them hauntingly.

'This thing shouldn't exist- can't exist!' All thoughts of offense died with each barely successful defence, his wish to just survive this creature growing in equal measure, 'It's an error, a glitch. It's not meant to be here. It wants me. Why does it want me!?'

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"ALEC!"

The surging wave of mana finally split the two apart, letting Alec desperately back away as the entity stood motionless. It's clockwork head turned to face Olivia as Alec backed up quickly to stand beside the equally as terrified girl. The groove in the street from Olivia's attack still glowed with residual mana as the entity took a single step in their direction.

Both teens tensed up, almost violently, and raised their blades into a tighter guard position as they waited for the entity to surge forth, only for the world surrounding it to freeze.

Beneath the entity, a glowing clockface whirled to life, ticking ominously and getting a startled half-step backwards from the entity as its clockworks turned down towards it. From the edges of the glowing clockface, barriers of translucent energy began to rise. The entity's head looked left, then right, then left again in the time it would take most people to realize that it had even moved. Its hands shook and its body hunched slightly, in preparation or anxiety, neither teen could tell.

Clap!

The simulated reality surrounding them stuttered, everything lagging for a moment. The echo of the creatures' clap resounded through the streets as the translucent barrier closed entirely, surrounding the now-empty space upon which the entity had once filled. The space around the shadowed, cloaked entity having closed around it almost like the curtains in a play and leaving nothing behind for the magic circle to ensnare.

With a sputtered whine, the barrier, and the magic circle spawning it, flickered out of existence. The both of them left in tense, paranoid, thankful peace and silence once it did.

"W-What was that…?" Alec muttered, panting heavily and staring wide-eyed at the empty street before him.

"I….don't know." Olivia admitted slowly, her own expression just as wide-eyed and pale as her companions.

"That….That thing isn't meant to be a part of this." Alec said quietly, only getting a mute nod of already dawned horror in return.

"I figured. It….That thing can't be something we're meant to face." Olivia shook her head slowly, feeling her heartbeat in her ears and tingling in her toes.

Alec let out a shaky sigh and began to sheathe his blade, only to pause mid-action, staring at the street beneath him in silent horror.

"We need to get to Glenn and Callum."

"What? Larstud and-"

"They don't know about it, Olivia!" This time, it was the Kio girls eyes that widened, looking at Alec and his own panicked expression with a look that could, on the best of days, only be described as dread.

"Run."

Alec startled at her command, jolting slightly. Olivia reached forward and grabbed his wrist, pulling on it like she was trying to wrench it from its socket, and not just to get Alec moving.

"Dammit Alec, we have to run!"

XXXxxxXXX

"No no no. Where is she? Where is she?" Callum ran across the empty, cracked, and crumbling walls of the royal castle, his gaze moving from one side of the wall to the other constantly.

Even running at full speed, his hands felt cold and clammy, and his breathing felt constricted, not out of exertion, but fear. He couldn't let Glenn get to her first; it was better than letting her bleed out or potentially die, but he just couldn't be the one that found her second.

He knew that this was all a simulation being created by the ritual. He knew that Grace wasn't actually here, that she wasn't actually injured, that she wasn't actually in danger. However, just the idea, just the thought of her, any version of her, being in danger and him not being there to help….it made him sick.

More than that, though, more than even his desire to help Grace, as much as he didn't want to admit it even to himself, he didn't want to prove Glenn's words about him true. If he were the last one to arrive to her, if the mohawked boy were to arrive before him and help grace before he could even try-

A high-pitched yelp forced its way out of him as Callum tripped on a loose stone. Valiantly, he waved his arms and tried to keep his feet beneath him while bleeding his momentum off, but eventually physics won out. In a rather animated display, his head tipped too far forward, and on instinct, he ducked and curled. His body hit the shattered castle defences and skipped like a stone as he tumbled ass over head across every bump, crack, and crevice.

In a blind panic, he reached out with one of his arms, scrambling to grab a hold of something, anything, and ending up scraping his fingers along the once-polished stonework just enough to throw his momentum sideways in a tight curve. The weightlessness of free fall there for only a brief, horrifying moment before gravity grabbed hold of him once more and sent him crashing to the ground.

A low, pained groan left his lips as he rolled onto his stomach and pressed off the ground with one arm, slowly rising to his feet and trying to push down the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him. Turns out that for all his monstrous endurance, dizziness and tumbling free-falls still had an effect on him, who would have guessed.

"H….He..lp…"

Callum's eyes widened, the ground blurring beneath him before he even realized he was moving. His vision swam, and his breath left him in quick, almost painful gasps and grunts, yet he refused to stop. He didn't care what pain he went through, what nausea drilled into his head, or how many degrees his vision rotated; he couldn't stop. He wouldn't stop.

"Graaace! Where are you? I'm here to help!"

Strength that Callum didn't know he had, strength that Callum didn't think he even had spare, surged through his body at the sound of Glenn's arrogant sneering. The rubble of the wall and the snapped and fallen trees surrounding the royal castle passed by in a blur, nothing but white-noise and annoying obstacles as far as he was concerned.

'Please! Please not that! Anything but that! I can't continue if that happens!'

His mental pleas reverberated in his head like the world's most desperate echo. His words were all that he could hear –beside the high-pitched ringing– as he broke free of the ruined forest ring and broke into the intersection immediately outside where the main gates to the castle had once stood.

His feet met and ground into the cracked and uneven cobblestone at the same time as Glenn's. Both boys ground themselves to a halt while desperately looking around for the voice that they both knew was Grace, desperate to be the first to find and reach her.

Yet she was not there, only a few bloody stones and a thin trail of blood that led into what appeared to be a store on the corner of the intersection ahead of Callum.

"What the hell are you doing here, Royal-Boy?" Glenn sneered, even Callum's usual tensing up at the nickname unable to bring a grin to his lips as it usually would.

"I'm…I'm looking for Grace." Oh, how Callum hated how small and weak his voice sounded right then, the heat that he wanted, that he tried, to bring to the surface just dying out entirely in the face of Glenn and that mocking expression of his.

"Well, piss off." The more muscled boy snapped, eyes finding the bloody landing site and following the trail all the way to the same building that Callum had, "You can't even save a pencil from hitting the ground. Let alone a simulated copy of her like this that doesn't even matter. Leave it to the real warrior here."

"…Then why are you?" Callum muttered, a dawning realization breaking through his instinctive cowering for just a moment.

The light of a nearby fire flickered in Callum's hazel eyes, making them shine with ephemeral brilliance for only a single moment as his mind finally kicked back into gear after coming face to face with the Larstud boy.

"Why are you going after Grace if she doesn't matter? You're too….you'd never go after her if you thought she doesn't matter." Callum's intended insult died on his tongue, refusing to leave the safe confines of his mind, but it didn't matter.

His statement had been spoken. His thoughts had been aired. What he wished to say had been said. There was no bringing them back in now, there was no escaping the fallout that was bound to come of them. And if the way that Glenn's face began to turn a rather interesting shade of red was any kind of indication, it was, then the fallout for Callum was bound to be hideous.

"My reasons are mine and mine alone, Royal-Boy." The far more muscled young man snapped, his hands balled into white-knuckled fists and his teeth gritted so intensely that he could see some of the muscles in his jaw flexing, "So how about you stay out of business that isn't yours and go cry in some ditch somewhere. You aren't needed here. You've never been needed here! You aren't needed at her side! You'll never get to be by her side! Because it won't be you standing there! IT. WILL. BE. ME-"

Both young men took off towards the building at once, Callum's body moving before his mind, filled with static and cotton, even realized he was actually trying to compete with Glenn.

Step.

Despite their differing statures and builds, both of their leading feet hit the ground simultaneously, their weight only just pressing into their steps when the building before them exploded.

Glass and masonry cut through the air like a rain of arrows and trebuchet fire, the top floor of the building collapsing in on itself in a horrifying series of dominoes that made Callum's toes curl, and his stomach do backflips. Both students rose their arms and fed their mana throughout their bodies, sending the hail of glass and stone bullets showering off their forms harmlessly. By the time it ended, it was like the scene out of some horrific play, heavy stone chunks and shards of wooden furniture raining down on the street like long-ranged artillery magic and dust obscuring all but the most basic shapes of the building.

'Grace…'

The green-haired boy felt his breath pick up, his lungs taking in less and less air with each and every inhale, forcing him to take another, and another, and another. Faster and faster.

Out of the dust, where the top floor of the building had been only a scant few seconds earlier, Olivia and Alec burst out of the thick plume. With a fist balled up into the back of his shirt, dragging him through the air in what was clearly a large leap, Olivia's eyes scanned the street, locking onto Callum and Glenn within moments. Behind her, Alec's eyes never left the dust plume, his blade held out and to his side, prepared.

"BOYS!" Olivia's voice was thick with relief and worry in equal measure, yet the worry in her voice had nothing on what tore its way out of Callum's mouth as he launched himself forward.

"GRACE!"

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