"I'll take you there. Remember, though; no promises," Ebb reiterates as she looks each of us in the eyes. "I'm just as dead as your friend if we can't find those anchors, so I have as much, if not more, of a reason to find them."

Jumble motions for Ebb to start walking. "We know. At least until we find those anchors, we're on the same side."

Ebb purses her lips. "Hopefully longer than that."

She sets off down the halls at a leisurely pace, tail brushing against the ground with a magical swish-swish. Where she walks seems somehow cleaner than it was before… no, it is cleaner. No footprints, no scratches, no cracks from where she punched the wall a minute ago. Must be her Class at work–and damn useful for assassinations. No need to hire a cleaner when your spells do it for you.

Jumble tugs my arm to get me to start moving. I smile a crooked, apologetic smile and jog to catch up with Ebb. She looks over her shoulder at us when we get close, then down at the footprints we left behind. Part of her looks like it dies a little inside.

I shrug helplessly. "We don't have magical broom-tails."

"No, you don't," she mutters in thought. "If you're going to be the boss, we'll have to change that. At least one of your spells should be able to do this–either the salty purifying one or the one that eats spells and spits them back out."

Once more, I shrug in reply. "Haven't really worried about footprints lately. Not when people can track me with spells and skills."

Ebb raises an eyebrow. "You think that's all I'm doing? Hm. Guess I've still got it. You two ready to kick it into a higher gear?"

Jumble taps my bicep as staticy whispers fill my ears. I aim a nod at Ebb. She returns it and breaks into a sprint. Nothing quite as fast as the fastest I've seen, but it's obvious her Body stat is damn high. I match her pace with a little effort, wind whipping over my face with a silent howl. Jumble doesn't even look close to strained. We run and run and run, but only three runs' worth before Ebb points off to the right and skids to a stop.

Actual black marks follow her shoes, along with the acrid scent of burnt rubber. Ebb taps the toes of her shoes to the stone one after the other, showing off a black smear of rubber that's obviously had this done to it before. I wave the scent away and pull out a few coins in anticipation. If they had Fore guarding the prisoners–who everyone thought still had his biomancer Class–then they have to have someone guarding their treasure hall.

…Sort of pisses me off that they got enough rewards for an entire haul, but that's not important right now. Just another blatant breaking of the rules to favor the horizonguard.

I motion at the wall with a projectile. "How do we get into this one?"

Ebb waves off my concern. "I'm looking for the weak spot right now. If Scuff was actually thinking twice about his loyalties, then there'll be one."

Another name that means nothing to me. But this guy must be the one that made the tearing entrance to the theater-turned prison. I commit the name 'Scuff' to memory just in case it comes in useful later, all the while Ebb studies the wall like an art critic interpreting some modern art masterpiece. She sucks her teeth, clicks her tongue, and drums her sharp claws against a patch of tough scales on her forearm.

"Can she think without making noise?" Pearl asks sincerely. "I knew a few people like that. Sharing a library with them was always annoying."

As did I, Pearl, as did I. But this is taking it a little too far. If I was a little more skeptical, I'd say she was stalling for time. If I was more optimistic I'd say she was waiting for this 'Scuff' to show up and join our side. The truth is probably that whatever magic lets them bypass a need for the city's own door mechanic is so complicated that it takes a few minutes to pinpoint anything. And I can't feel shit with my awareness.

Another blatantly obvious reason I need to get more powerful. Preferably within the next few hours. But outside of some deus-ex-machina bullshit, which the system obviously wouldn't let happen, that ain't happening.

Out of nowhere, Ebb raises a hand for silence. After a few moments of us being exactly as quiet as before, she carefully pushes her palm towards a stretch of wall. Grunts of effort and straining muscles betray the seeming ease with which she… moves her hand through the air… towards the wall. I raise an eyebrow and lean in a little closer to try and get a look at whatever she's struggling against.

There's absolutely nothing there. But her palm flattens like she's pushing a block of solid steel. My awareness can't feel anything… except a strange flatness against her palm. One I wouldn't even notice if my eyes hadn't caught it first. Not magic, that's for sure, or else it would've been infinitely more obvious. It's more like… she's pushing against something half in phase.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Words bubble to the top of my throat. Only her earlier ask for silence stops them from coming out. Sweat drips from her forehead to hiss on the ground. The temperature jacks up a few notches to be just beyond uncomfortable. Yet from every angle other than the one I'm standing at, it looks like Ebb's having a battle with her imaginary nemesis.

SNAP!

A horrible, echoing snap rocks the hall like the failure of a garage door's spring. Everything seems to hold in place for a second with bated breath–and then the wall itself snaps into two retracting pieces. They slam against the ceiling and floor, leaving long scratches in their wake, then flutter aimlessly in the empty wind.

"The hell?" I mutter through ringing ears. "How is this safer for you than just using the city's doors?"

"It isn't." Ebb wipes the sweat from her forehead and steps back. "But the old boss insisted on it. Never explained why, and when I asked, he just brushed me off. Maybe you'll come up with some kind of reason."

I laugh dismissively. "You think I can get in the head of a system-worshipper?"

"Guess not," Ebb says with a pop of her lips. "So there's no possible way anyone could've missed that sound. Whoever's on guard duty in there is waiting to ambush us one-hundred percent. Both of you have defences against sucker punches?"

I flip a primed shield through my fingers as Jumble pats the cover of her book. Static flows from it to coat her hand in a thin sheen that makes it a little harder to focus on her–then, through her grip on my arm, it spreads to me. The sensation is… strange, to say the least. But the stranger part the amplification of Jumble's whispers, which somehow don't actually drown out any of the other noises.

If anything, I can hear better through her staticky whispers than without them.

Ebb scrunches her nose at us, but nods anyway. She turns back to the snapped opening and clinks her claws against her scales. A small ripple of magic spreads from each impact, scouring the dirt and grime from her body and clothes until everything looks as good as new. As the last ripple passes over her foot she starts to move with quick, clean steps completely void of wasted movements. It isn't insanely fast, but it's weirdly difficult to follow with the naked eye. And even harder to follow with my awareness.

I shake off the disorientation and move to follow. Jumble moves in lockstep with me even as she lets go of my arm, stepping through the snapped wall into whichever of the horizonguard's rooms this is. The first thing I see is a wall. It stretches far to either side, with only about fifteen feet of clearance between the entrance and it. It also stretches so far up that there's no way they don't show through on the level above. Countless leafy baskets hang from the tall walls, each home to differently shaped plants–though none of them seem to be flowering or fruiting at the moment–creating a very green set of confines for this strange room.

And on the ground… there's nothing but etched-in rails. No dirt, no fallen leaves, no water features. At first glance I would've called this a garden or a park, but now I'm leaning closer to a greenhouse. A greenhouse with absolutely no signs of stored treasure. Ebb looks to the left and right with a quick snap of the neck before deciding arbitrarily to go left.

I move to follow her. Green blurs by in a sprint until we reach the end of the thin room… and we're greeted by yet another hall of hanging green stretching to the left. There's a ladder in one of the rails rolled over to a pot half-picked of its bright orange bounty of bell-shaped gelatinous fruits. Or vegetables. Can't say I've ever seen anything like this before.

"Someone stopped halfway through their harvest," I note. "Think that was from us?"

Ebb cranes her neck to stare at the pot without stopping. Beyond it, all of the plants are bearing some kind of food or other–none of which I recognize in the slightest, and all of which are a little too gelatinous-looking for my tastes. Just before the twist in her neck turns her into an owl–or a dead woman–Ebb snaps back to staring straight ahead.

"Everything here grows back on a twenty-hour cycle. Even if we didn't scare whoever was harvesting this… something did."

Her ominous warning hits a little too close for comfort. I pick up the pace, feet thundering along to my heartbeat as Jumble and I scream past Ebb. She makes a strangled noise of surprise at being passed so easily and kicks it into a higher gear–one that still isn't enough to catch up. We reach the next corner a good eight seconds in the lead and skid into the next left turn–but there's something a little different about this hallway.

There's an opening in the middle of it. One my awareness says leads to a clearing that's very reminiscent of a rich person's private garden. Still no sign of any anchors, people, or treasure in any way, shape, or form. Something feels unbelievably off. But in a way that… almost doesn't seem to have anything to do with us.

Jumble grips my forearm tight, then lets go. I nod in understanding; there's something we're not seeing in here. Something Pearl hasn't seen either, or else she would've chimed in. Bile rises into my throat as we take the final sprinted steps to round the corner into the larger purely aesthetic garden.

My heart nearly stops as my awareness and my eyes blatantly contradict each other. Pearl gurgles out something like absolute disbelief, which doesn't help one bit. Because there aren't any anchors, treasures, or even people here.

But there are dozens of mutilated corpses–flesh and construct alike–frozen in their final moments of agony. Each of them reaching out towards the exact same spot; as if something that is blatantly missing was the cause of all… this. There's no blood. No scraps of flesh, either, even though a good chunk of the bodies are missing good chunks of their bodies.

Something's in phase here. No… that's not quite right. Something was in phase here.

But now it could be anywhere.

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