Chap 184: All In Line

Instantly, the mutts froze mid-charge. Their bodies locked in place as if time itself had seized them. Then, slowly, their posture shifted—not aggressive, not hostile. They stood before Tee and Zod like obedient pets, ears flicking, heads tilted. Their mad growls faded into steady breathing… and even small, almost hesitant purrs.

Zod gasped.

His eyes flicked from the creatures to Tee’s outstretched hand. The realization hit him all at once.

She had just done sorcery.

“Picked up a new trick—speaking to mutts?” he asked, half joking, half stunned. “I’m jealous.”

“They’re not mutts,” Tee told him quietly. “They’re ice-sabers. It seems I can control creatures.”

The truth unsettled her.

She hadn’t used a chant. She hadn’t drawn a sigil. She hadn’t even known how—only that she did it. It confirmed what she already feared. As an Ether source, the more energy she had, the less knowledge she needed to manipulate reality. But living things were harder to control. Their minds resisted. Their will fought back.

Or so she thought.

An idea struck her suddenly, sharp and terrifying. She gasped and turned to Zod, lifting her hand toward him. Once more, she formed the same command in her mind.

Run.

Zod saw her motion directed at him. Her eyes glowed white again, serious, unblinking. He instinctively stepped back.

But he felt nothing.

No pull. No resistance. No loss of control.

Seconds passed.

The silence stretched into something awkward, almost heavy.

Tee’s shoulders dropped, and she lowered her hand. “Guess it only works on mindless creatures.”

She turned away and walked toward one of the ice-sabers. As she got closer, she noticed one with a hairless patch below its neck. The pale skin beneath the fur was exposed, raw-looking.

It reminded her of her curse mark.

The mark that set her apart.

Slowly, carefully, she reached out to pet it. But each time her hand moved close, the creature snapped at her, jaws clamping shut inches from her fingers. Not viciously but defensively, as if it believed she was about to hurt it.

“What are you doing?” Zod asked. “Did you forget that thing tried to attack us just now?”

Tee sighed and withdrew her hand, giving up on the attempt. She turned back to him, her expression calm but weighted.

“They’re not a threat. Not while I’m here.”

Then she made a decision.

Tee decided to verge the ice-saber.

For low-intelligence creatures such as that, their Verge should be an open door. But their Verge wouldn’t always make sense either. Minds like that didn’t hold memories the way humans did. They held instinct, sensation, fragments.

She placed her hand on the head of the ice-saber to strengthen her connection, then shut her eyes.

The creature’s Verge unfolded before her.

A cloudy mess of snowy memories. Fog. Cold. Fish. Hunger. Motion. Instinct.

Nothing made any sense.

There was no sign of the Harbingers. No trace of the fragment. No hint of the Seal Bond’s defense. Just endless white, scattered sensations, and primal survival.

“What did you find?” Zod asked, folding his arms. He figured she was searching for something inside the creature’s mind from her gestures.

“Nothing of use,” she told him.

But inside, the emptiness unsettled her far more than any answer could have.

The scratching sounds made them turn to the ice-sabers.

The creatures were already at work, claws scraping furiously against the frozen wall, chipping and tearing at the ice as if they had done that a hundred times before. Tee and Zod glanced at each other, and in that silent exchange, they thought the same thing.

An opening.

Tee lifted her hand and commanded the ice-sabers to step aside and allow Zod to blast through the ice. The creatures obediently moved back, clearing the way. Zod stepped forward, energy flaring in his palms, and unleashed a blast that cracked the wall with a thunderous boom.

Watching Zod go at it stirred something righteous inside Tee. A surge of shared purpose, of standing shoulder to shoulder instead of alone. She held her hand out and blasted at the ice as well. Their attacks merged into a relentless assault, energy and force pounding forward together.

Together, they moved faster, like a powerful drill smashing through everything before them.

Unfortunately, what they found on the other side wasn’t another tunnel.

It was open air.

Cold wind rushed in as the ice gave way to a wide opening that led straight outdoors. The sudden exposure startled the ice-sabers, and they fled in a hurry, scattering into the white wilderness and leaving Tee and Zod standing alone at the edge of the breach.

“Dammit,” Zod muttered.

Just then, their telecom crackled to life.

“Guys, the Harbingers are here. A portal took us right to them.”

A pulse of dread and urgency ran through Tee at once.

Kie and the rest of his team found themselves in a massive cave with the roof opened to the sky, jagged rock framing the opening like broken teeth. Legion was already there—in his monstrous skeletal form—his massive frame nearly too large for the space. The spontaneous portals struggled to pull in something that big, their energy rippling and distorting around his bones without fully dragging him through.

Lilith floated nearby in her smoke-ash form, her body shifting and dispersing at will, easily slipping past the pull of the portals. Sade hovered in a shimmering force shield, positioned a good distance away from the fragment—a strange, dangerous object shaped like a metal gear. Cracks of unstable energy pulsed around it.

The Sealed Bond was nearly broken.

The Harbingers sensed the second the few Sentinels appeared through the portal.

The fight was on.

Legion raised one massive skeletal arm and unleashed an army of sharp, jagged bones, firing them like arrows that rained down on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, distracted for only a second, another portal opened beside Tee—its swirling edge already pulling, already trying to drag her inside. Instinct kicked in. She channeled her energy around the rims of the portal, forcing it open wider instead of letting it collapse around her.

Like mind reading, she and Zod leaped through at the same time.

But when they emerged, they weren’t where their teammates were.

“We should try that again,” Zod said, scanning their surroundings. “Keep portal hopping until it takes us to where we want.”

Tee nodded. “When one comes again, that is.”

While the fight raged on between Lilith and Legion against Miko, Kie, and Saeda, random portals kept appearing, tearing open space and trying to suck them inside. But the frequency of it seemed to drop with time, as if whatever force was driving them was losing strength.

Not long after, Tee and Zod made it through a portal that finally led them back to the battle.

By then, it seemed as if Miko was using her speed to annoy Lilith rather than make any actual blows—blurring around her in flashes of light, taunting, dodging, disrupting—leaving Legion to Kie and Saeda, who aimed at making real damage.

Lilith clawed at the air, always missing the fast-moving mortal.

Then she had to dodge flames of Ultramana that got whipped at her, the fire streaking past her smoke form as the battle intensified around them.

Kie created large crystal dagger-like constructs with his Ultramana, their massive forms shimmering as they materialized in midair before piercing down into Legion’s beast form for a brutal stab. The impact sent shockwaves through the cavern. Saeda followed instantly, enclosing sections of Legion’s form in constricting energy, locking his massive frame in place so he couldn’t move—and so he could feel the full force of Kie’s relentless assault.

Zod wasted no time rushing ahead to join the fight. He launched himself forward and sent a powerful blast straight into the top crown of Legion’s form, the energy detonating on impact and sending the skeletal monstrosity smashing into the crystal wall of the massive roofless cave. The explosion echoed so violently that it shook loose shards of ice and stone.

That action alone made the others know the rest of their team had joined the battle.

Sade, meanwhile, was near done deactivating the Sealed Bond. Though the collection of fragments was not the goal, he had hoped to garner at least something about the location of the Omega Stone. His thoughts were cut short when a pounce of lightning made of pure Ether energy came crashing toward him.

The blast on Sade was from Tee and it was intended to end his life.

Disturbed and thrown off balance, Sade was knocked out of concentration. The fragment began glowing and spinning rapidly in place, its energy flaring wildly. But no powerful volt attack came from the fragment to strike Sade as she had wanted.

Instead, lightning strikes erupted all over the cavern, originating from the fragment itself. More random portals began to open at a faster rate, tearing at the air and space around them. The wind grew fierce, like a tornado forming in the heart of the cave. The temperature dropped sharply, and it became harder to see through the storm of energy, dust, and frost.

After getting smashed down and forcing himself back up, the small pause gave Kie time to think.

An idea sparked in his mind too genius to pass up.

He mind-linked with his members and ordered them to push Sade and Lilith into the portals to get rid of them.

The second Tee felt Kie’s touch in her mind again, she felt a mix of intrusion and intimacy—all the close memories came rushing back at once. For a moment, she lost focus, her breath hitching. But luckily, it was a one-way communication, and he ended it quickly.

The plan wasn’t easy, but it took their all.

Sade, mostly drained of his energy and distracted by his obsession with Tee, left himself open. Zod seized the moment and enclosed him in an energy orb. Tee immediately reinforced it, creating a double coating around that energy orb, sealing Sade inside.

Together, they pushed it through a portal—for good riddance.

Saeda managed to trap Lilith into an energy orb, her power tightening around the Harbinger’s smoke-ash form. Before it could shatter, Miko was quick to push it through the same portal they got Sade through. The swirling rift snapped shut behind it, leaving both members of the Harbingers out of sight.

Kie was no longer handling Legion by himself.

It was now one against five.

Zod blasted energy using distant source ports meant to annoy and confuse, the attacks coming from unpredictable angles and striking Legion from all sides.

Miko sent flat Ultramana blasts that moved like razor disks, slicing clean through limbs to sever them completely.

Both Saeda and Kie sent energy waves to slice and dice, their combined power tearing through Legion’s massive frame.

Tee used her newly found Ether blasts to deal damage, each strike crackling with unstable force.

Legion was getting beaten all over, and it was infuriating him. His thundering voice roared with each attack, shaking the cavern with rage and pain. But where were his members? He sensed they were not around. Was he truly going to meet his demise? Knowing what was coming for that world, Legion couldn’t care.

One by one, all of Legion’s spiky arms were severed, and the massive horns on its head were torn away. It stood like a towering pole, grotesque bulges marking where its deadly appendages had once spiked outward.

Weakened, they trapped him in an energy orb controlled by Saeda, Kie, Miko, and Zod. Tee layered her elemental powers over it, wrapping earth, fire, water, and air around the orb in a crushing spiral. Together, their combined forces compressed the orb containing Legion into a dense black crystal ball the size of a bat ball.

It fell to the earth with a faint conk on the icy ground, mostly drowned out by the howling wind.

Then both Tee and Zod pulled down ice structures from above, slamming them into the orb and crushing it into pieces.

Amid the chaos, Saeda got sucked into a portal.

“Saeda!” Kie yelled out.

The battlefield was spiraling into madness, and it made no sense to bring her back there. Without hesitation, they grabbed hands and huddled together as Kie flashed an energy orb around his remaining members, pulling them toward him and merging them into one protective bubble. Then Zod used his hand blast to propel them toward the portal Saeda had fallen through. Tee used her sorcery to keep the portal wide enough open for them to pass.

They fell on the other side and what they saw was not what they expected.

They found themselves outside the mountainous cavern, standing on a massive floating slab of ice.

Saeda yelled out to them from a distance, leaping from one ice platform to another to get closer. They couldn’t make out what she said, but her voice carried urgency across the frozen air.

There were many ice-sabers scattered across the icy wasteland, their pale forms blending into the snow. The large pinches on their backs made them turn from Saeda at the same time they heard her voice through their telecoms.

“Behind you!”

Tee reacted instantly. She stretched her arm out toward the pack of mad ice-sabers already coiled to leap for their faces. Her voice cut through the air as she ordered them to stop.

And they did.

Miko and Kie stared, completely speechless.

“She can do that now,” Zod said, awe and disbelief still mixed in his tone.

“Legion. Did we…?” Miko asked, unsure of the answer herself.

“Kill Legion? Let’s hope so,” Kie said.

Zod stepped closer and gave Kie a firm pat on the shoulder. “Way to go using her telepathy. That was really neat.”

Tee overheard the conversation, and suddenly everything clicked. Kie hadn’t spoken only to her. He had sent that message to all of them. The realization drained the warmth from her chest. She didn’t feel so special anymore. It had been strictly business.

Then she noticed it. The ice-saber with the small hairless patch below its neck.

She rushed toward it at the exact moment Saeda reached them.

Kie frowned, confused by Tee’s sudden movement. What had gotten into her? They needed to regroup to teleport!

The others rushed after Tee.

“It’s the ice-saber we met before,” she said out loud.

Zod stood numbly, as if he didn’t know who she was addressing.

“The mission is over. We teleport now,” Kie said firmly.

They were all about to press the button until Kie pointed out the obvious.

“Tee, why is that mutt standing so close to you?”

That was the second time Kie had spoken to her after coming back. After letting that thought pass over her, she answered him.

“It is.”

“The mutt is in the teleportation range,” Zod pointed out.

“So what?” Tee shrugged her shoulders.

“Move it,” Zod said.

Tee, with her chest held high, said, “We’re giving off Ultramana and Ether energies. So jump-start teleportation should work and allow us to teleport—with my new pet.”

Her last words made them all step back.

Tee turned to Kie and asked, “Can I keep it—”

“No,” he blurted.

Tee turned away from him. “I don’t have to listen to you. You’re half leader.”

Her words hit him like a metal iron falling on top of his head. He blinked, stunned, then straightened himself and sought a group decision instead.

“All in favor of leaving the mutt behind?”

They all raised their hands and said, “Aye.”

Kie nodded. “The motion passed. We’re leaving the mutt.”

Zod approved of the formality and order he witnessed just then.

Tee knelt slightly and whispered to the ice-saber, which wouldn’t even look her in the eye.

“I guess this is goodbye.”

The others moved a good distance away—but the ice-saber followed them.

All eyes turned to Tee.

“It’s not me,” she told them.

Then she commanded it to stay using her sorcery mind control, and it obeyed. It sat and stared at her obediently—those large, beady eyes, fluffy coating, puffy ears that looked like cotton balls.

While she and her teammates gained distance, seeing the ice-saber remain in position gave her a devious idea.

They pressed the teleportation button together and left the place.

At the mission base, while the others dispersed to go their separate ways, Kie couldn’t help but listen to the conversation between the Lieutenant and Tee with his superhearing. The Lieutenant offered to give Tee a new telecom to stay within communication while she was away from Primus HQ. She was curious how the one Tee previously had still held such high energy levels.

Tee told her her Vergant pals charged it up for her.

Kie realized Tee was always wearing a telecom. Strangely, he then kept his own telecom rather than disposing of it in the chemical basket in the changing room. He knew the energy wouldn’t last long, but something urged him to keep it.

Meanwhile, in the darkness cast by thick, jagged rock structures, streaks of light shone down from above.

Sade’s lips didn’t move as he spoke telepathically to Lilith, confirming Legion’s death.

Lilith’s expression did not flicker. Her cold eyes stared into the air as she stood unmoving.

“It matters not,” she said. “The vessel displayed her ability to do sorcery. All is in line with the master plan.”

Sade’s lips curved into a small smile.

It was indeed so.