After her speech about the hero, and the ‘bomb’, they stepped into the shimmering rift.
The portal swallowed them whole.
Cold evaporated. The brine-and-iron smell of the docks dissolved mid-step, replaced by something denser—timber, stone dust, and the particular staleness of a space sealed against weather. Crow's boots hit flagstone instead of snow-dusted planks, and the sound changed accordingly: flat, close, absorbed by walls too thick to echo properly.
The warehouse stretched in every direction.
Crates occupied the floor in organized columns, stacked to twice a man's height, tagged with chalk markings he didn't recognize. Iron shelving ran the perimeter. Lanterns hung at intervals from ceiling hooks, their light steady and sourceless—magical, then, or fed by something that didn't need tending. The portal behind them remained fixed and cavernous, its shimmering edges humming with a restless energy while an occasional, erratic spark spat from the rift, vanishing before it could hit the floor.
Alice watched it.
Not with sentiment. With the clinical attention of someone confirming a calculation. Like she always does.
The portal remained there, motionless. A few more erratic sparks spat from its edges, flickering against the gloom. It looked as though the mechanism had glitched, frozen in a state of malfunction.
"Was this part of the plan?” he asked. “I don’t know about portals, but this doesn't seem like how they work.”
Alice's eyes remained on the portal.
"No," Alice said, flat and unapologetic. "The mages misjudged the window. It was configured to hold the palace destination for 11 minutes before transferring. Apparently, '11 minutes' and '10' are the same." A pause that carried the specific weight of a decision being catalogued for later, a bad decision. "I'll address that."
Somebody's going to have a bad week in this ‘company’.
Crow noted internally.
Alice smoothed a hand down the front of her dress once—brief, unconscious—and exhaled through her mouth.
"Wasteful," she said, with the flat affect of someone describing a broken tool. "The mana cost for dual-destination phasing at that scale is—" she paused, reconsidered, dismissed the calculation with a slight movement of her fingers. "Regardless. Necessary."
He glanced back.
Sophia stood two paces behind him, hands folded, expression neutral, present in the way furniture was present—occupying space without demanding acknowledgment. She hadn't made a sound since the magic department corridor. She hadn't made a sound through a portal crossing either. She'd been standing behind him this entire time and he'd registered her existence approximately twice.
She went so quiet that I forgot she was here.
He filed it away with mild interest.
Is she a rogue? She didn't make a sound and was almost motionless, so that I didn't even remember she was there, like she had become invisible. What the heck... that’s a skill, for sure.
Then he looked at Alice.
"There are three of us," he said. "Why not just teleport us straight there?"
Alice turned from the flickering portal and moved between the crates, her pace unhurried.
"Because the kingdom runs on the assumption that it won't." She didn't slow. "The defensive lattice covers every settlement of significant size—woven into the foundations, tied to the ley distribution. Teleportation into a protected zone doesn't just fail. It announces itself. Loudly." A brief pause. "If unrestricted teleportation functioned inside defended territory, invading a city, destroying a strategic target, and leaving before anyone located the source would be a logistical exercise. The kingdom's architectural defenses were not built by foolish people. Naturally, the same applies elsewhere."
Wait... is she calling me dumb between the lines? Whatever. There was no mention of this mechanic in the game. Anyway, this also means she can't just open a portal directly to where we're going.
"So a portal—" he tried to say, but she cut him off.
"—Would take time to establish against the lattice interference. Long enough to attract attention in the north and make people stop working on the capital to come see what’s going on. I'd rather not spend the effort managing that today." She stopped at a section of wall that looked identical to every other wall. "There's a faster route."
She raised her hand.
Her fingers snapped.
The sound hit wrong—too sharp, too resonant, like the snap had struck something solid hidden inside the air itself. And then the air responded.
Reality fractured.
Not broke—fractured. The way a mirror shatters but holds its pieces in place, each shard tilting at a slightly different angle, each one catching a slightly different version of the light. The warehouse didn't disappear. It split—divided into geometric sections that peeled away from each other like a disassembled diagram, the familiar stone and crates separating into planes that no longer agreed on their arrangement.
Wait a moment... I remember this.
Crow had experienced something like this before.
Not like this, exactly. But the quality of it—the particular texture of a space that existed outside the normal agreement between places—his body recognized it before his mind assembled the reference.
The cube, when it detonated. But something is different.
This is that place. Like an inventory subspace, but one she can enter herself instead of just storing items.
They stood somewhere that wasn't the warehouse and wasn't anywhere he could name. The geometry held—floor beneath his feet, ceiling vaguely above—but both suggestions rather than facts, the place treated physicality as optional, at best. The light came from no identifiable source and cast no identifiable shadows without logic. The air carried no smell. And beneath all of it, just at the threshold of hearing, murmurs—not voices, more like hearing language through a wall, all rhythm and no sense, pressing against the inside of his skull from the outside.
Crow's jaw set. He held it.
Behind him, fabric shifted. He heard a sound—a thin, terrified whimper escaping a girl’s throat, barely audible over the hum of the space.
He turned.
Sophia stood with both hands pressed against the sides of her head, palms flat over her ears, shoulders drawn inward. Not a combat posture. Not a defensive one. Something rawer than either—the involuntary contraction of a person whose nervous system had begun filing urgent complaints with no clear recipient. Her eyes were open but had stopped tracking properly, gaze landing slightly behind whatever she tried to focus on.
Alice moved.
Not quickly in a way that announced itself—not a lunge, not a dash. Simply: she was standing beside Crow, and then she was standing in front of Sophia, the intervening space handled so efficiently that Crow's eyes had simply failed to capture the transition. The hem of the royal dress settled.
"Ah." Alice looked at Sophia with the expression of someone recalling an overlooked variable. "After what occurred with Crow, I forgot. Most people don't tolerate this particular layer well." Her voice carried neither alarm nor guilt. Informational, as always. "This magic requires further polishing."
Sophia's breath came in shallow, effortful pulls.
Alice raised her right hand and placed it against the side of Sophia's face—palm curved gently along the jaw, thumb near the temple, the gesture carrying a precision that suggested it was not arbitrary. Not comfort. Placement.
"Sleep."
The word left Alice's mouth at half-volume, unhurried, and the magic in it didn't announce itself. No light. No sound. Just the word, and then Sophia's shoulders dropping a degree, and then another, the rigid tension of someone fighting a losing battle dissolving floor by floor as consciousness withdrew.
Sophia fell forward.
Alice was already there—had positioned herself perfectly for it, probably, which was why the geometry of it had been so deliberate. Sophia's face found Alice's shoulder and then slid past it, settling somewhere rather lower, and Alice accepted the weight with the composure of someone who had anticipated the trajectory exactly.
Her left hand came to rest on top of Sophia's head.
Slow. Unhurried. The particular weight of a hand that intended to stay.
She murmured something, “Shhh, we're already leaving.”
Crow caught the shape of it—syllables at a volume that reached him as vibration rather than sound, words that existed for Sophia and not for him, dropped into the narrowing space between wakefulness and absence like something placed rather than said. The hand on Sophia's head moved once. Barely.
He hadn't heard it. He'd read it in the stillness of the gesture, and he suspected that was intentional too.
Crow looked away.
The murmurs pressed closer. The light that had no source continued not casting shadows.
He looked back at Alice, who had shifted Sophia into her arms, cradling her against her chest like a sleeping infant. There was a sudden, aching tenderness in the way she tucked the girl’s head into the crook of her neck, a stark contrast to the cold efficiency he’d expected.
This is so funny, for some reason.
"Is this some sort of teleportation magic?" he asked.
Alice looked at him. "In a way, yes. It compresses the actual distance between points countless times over. It’s basically teleportation."
"How far?" Crow said.
Alice’s eyes met his, flat and unreadable. "Too many questions, Crow... Just know it’s close," she said, before turning away.
I know she’s not the best person, but this is a bit much, even for her. Is she mad? And what’s with this—carrying Sophia like a baby while giving the classic ‘we’re almost there’ brush-off... is she a mom now?
1 minute later.
The reality took form again and received them differently than the docks had.
No snow and wind, the air carried warmth and something underneath it—something with a faint metallic undertone that Crow's instincts flagged before his conscious mind processed it, not blood or rust, closer to ozone, but earthier. The smell of things being made.
A forge...
The room bore no resemblance to any chamber he'd passed through on the way to the magic department. The ceiling vaulted three stories overhead, supported by stone ribs that followed a geometry too precise to be decorative. Iron gantries lined the upper walls, connected by walkways. Below them, workbenches ran in parallel rows—not the chalk-circle tables of the robed mages upstairs, but proper fabrication surfaces, scarred with use, equipped with tools he could identify and tools he couldn't.
Tink, tink, tink.
Between each strike, a raspy, rhythmic murmur drifted through the heat.
A minion with a goofy face murmuring *“*Geometry… hehe… geometry…” Its eyes wide and unblinking as it hammered away.
Molds, clamps, measuring instruments, and chains suspended from pulley systems bolted to the gantries. Specialized forges built into alcoves along the far wall, their embers banked to maintenance heat.
A workshop, maybe a factory, the distinction felt academic.
Crow scanned the room as he followed her, aside from the idiot in the corner, no other workers were visible, yet the benches held evidence of recent occupation—tools left mid-arrangement, a measuring cloth draped over a stand, an open logbook on the nearest surface with fresh ink—but no one present. Whatever normally populated this space had been cleared, or had cleared itself.
Alice stopped.
At the center of the room, on a raised platform surrounded by the kind of supporting framework that suggested something tall and heavy, it stood.
A person? No, this was like that 'Kill' thing... no, it was... ‘K-kill?’
He mocked, mimicking the golem’s broken disc in his head.
Yeah, a golem similar to that psychopath.
The proportions approximated human like the K-kill thing—two arms, two legs, upright posture, a head that sat at the right height above shoulders broad enough to block the lantern light behind it.
It wasn't flesh, or stone, or anything with a soul. The material was too perfect, shaped with a precision that sat somewhere between engineering and art. It had joints meant for moving and hands built for work, but the face was a blank space that refused to be read. It didn't breathe, didn't twitch. It was a golem, plain and simple, despite how much effort someone had clearly wasted on the details.
On its chest, inlaid in a darker material against the primary surface—a number.
4.
Clean lines. Deliberate placement. A serial stamp probably.
Crow stared at it for a moment.
"Here." Alice's voice carried something he hadn't heard in it before—not warmth, exactly. More like when a person wants to show a work they care about. She stood at the platform's edge, her eyes on the construct, Sophia still held against her with practiced ease. "The fourth iteration."
She let the silence sit for exactly as long as it took to confirm he'd registered the number.
In the background, a feverish murmur rose again: "The geometry is wrong... hehe...”
Alice made eye contact with Crow. "The first three identified sequencing errors I hadn't anticipated." No apology in it. Pure engineering assessment. "Integration failures at the threshold between directed response and independent function. The third—" a brief pause, something passing through her expression too quickly to name—"the third nearly worked. Close enough to demonstrate the model's validity. Far enough to require starting over."
Ok Alice, lets just ignore the geometry clown in the background... yeah.
Then her gaze traced the construct from bottom to top with the slow, proprietary attention of someone reviewing long labor.
Tink, tink. “…Geometry… hehe…”
"The fourth holds," she said it quietly. Almost to herself. Then her eyes cut sideways to Crow, and the quality of attention shifted—back to the strategic register, precise and assessing. "Structurally. Functionally. This golem’ill be used tomorrow."
Crow looked at the 4 on the construct's chest, a faint light emanating from it.
Yeah, so it really is a bomb... you can see the light from the cube in its core. Ha… I know exactly where this is going.
"Right. I shall take Sophia to rest; I suggest you do the same," Alice said, her tone shifting back to that cold, organized efficiency. "Tomorrow, I will assemble a troop. You are to escort the bo—golem to the Hero. And don't worry—the goal isn't to kill him. Just to take him off the board for a while."
Alice turned without ceremony, Sophia's weight shifting against her chest as she adjusted her grip—one arm tucked beneath the woman's knees, the other across her back, with the same practiced ease one might carry a sleeping child. The fact that Sophia stood only slightly shorter than her seemed to register nowhere in Alice's posture. She simply walked, her stride unhurried and perfectly measured, heels clicking against stone in a rhythm that brooked no argument.
He gave the room one last look—the construct standing at its platform, the faint pulse of light leaking from the cube in its core, the number 4 etched clean against its chest. Somewhere in the shadows, the geometry enthusiast continued his quiet murmur.
Crow left.
He didn’t give it a second thought. After the geometry, the bombs, and all the madness he had seen, there was only one place left for him to go to relax.
The palace hot springs. This place is awesome.
The place had undergone some changes, likely due to the brawl that day. Instead of being nearby, the lockers were now behind a Japanese-style sliding door—probably to ensure no one got hurled into them again.
He shed his coat first, then everything else, folded nothing, draped the towel across his shoulder, and pushed through the cedar door into the rolling heat beyond.
Finally. Peace.
The bench creaked once under him. Steam rose in slow curtains from the stones. He tipped his head back, let the warmth press against his chest, his throat, the corners of his eyes—
"Geometry..."
He stilled.
Maybe I’m just hearing things now...
"...hehe..."
A pause.
The whisper curled through the steam like it belonged there. Patient. Delighted. Faintly reverent. And of course, a little crazed, but that was obvious.
Crow brought one hand up and pressed it flat against his face.
His shoulders shook first. Then his chest. No sound came out—he kept it silent, and contained, the particular laugh of a man who had long ago made his peace with the absurd.
He stayed like that for a long moment. Hand over his face. Steam rising around him.
“Geometry…”
"...Yeah," his voice came out low and almost fond.
For a moment there, I'd actually forgotten.
He dragged his hand down slowly, staring at the ceiling through the haze.
“…hehe…”
Somewhere, faintly, the goofy minion’s giggle echoed down the stones.
This place is absolutely infested with lunatics.
The steam offered no rebuttal.
Right. Relax.
Crow closed his eyes, trying to have an immersive experience in the hot springs.
Tomorrow is an important day.
I just have to make sure the Hero survives the 'bomb'.
(Next)
Author's note: Guys, thanks for reading so far! The commissioned cover is done, you can check it out here: (Art by ponkikih)
