Chapter Text
The Rheaird was dead beneath him. Matthew cut his losses, scooped Colette into his arms, and jumped. Sheena, Raine, Genis, and Lloyd, being unlucky enough to not have their own wings, continued to fall alongside Matthew’s now empty Rheaird. And—oh no. That was—that was a house they had just accidentally destroyed. A very big, very fancy, probably belonging to some noble house. In the center of—wow, a very big city, with a very fancy castle not all that far away.
The entire city was made of stone, like Ayuthay. Unlike Ayuthay, it was huge, sprawling across the plains. It was a walled city, with the castle backed against the beginnings of foothills, and the walls towered over all but Matthew, still floating high in the air. Size wise…Matthew wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a larger city. Tolbi, maybe? That was a pretty big maybe though and—was that a coliseum? It sure looked like a coliseum.
It was official; this city, whatever it was called, was Tethe’alla’s version of Tolbi.
There were faint sounds of pain from the ground below, the destroyed wing of the house emitting faint enough wisps of smoke that Matthew was confident that it was only the Rheairds on fire. “This,” he declared to the unresponsive girl in his arms, “is going to be a pain to deal with.”
Apologetic.
Matthew sighed as he dropped through the air. “Stop apologizing, Colette. It’s not your fault. We should’ve checked before we set out; we were in too much of a rush and we paid for it. Let’s hope we didn’t accidentally kill anyone.”
They had not, thankfully, though Raine was in the middle of healing a red-haired man when Matthew dropped through the hole in the roof and the second floor they’d created. “Nobody’s dead, yeah?” he still asked, because that was and always would be his priority.
“We’re fine, Matt,” Lloyd assured him, coming over to check Colette. “You two?”
Matthew pointedly glared at the blood dripping down Lloyd’s face as he called forth a Cure for the idiot. “We fared far better than the rest of you, Lloyd, don’t play dumb. Despite popular opinion, you’re not actually an idiot.”
“Debatable,” Genis refuted, wordlessly requesting that Matthew heal the long gash on his arm.
When he finished, he found that the man Raine had been healing was healed enough to be staring at him with an unreadable expression on his face. He was, however, also staring at Matthew’s exposed ears, and he sighed, having met enough assholes to guess what was going through the man’s mind. “No,” he preemptively answered. “I’m not a half-elf. No, I don’t know why. Yes, we are sorry for destroying your house, it was an accident. My name is Matthew, this is my sister, Colette, and our friends Lloyd, Genis, Raine, and Sheena. Any other questions?”
“That’s a Cruxis Crystal,” the man said, and hello. That wasn’t something Matthew expected him to know. “Wait, Sheena?”
“Hi, Zelos,” Sheena replied. “We really are sorry for falling on you.”
Wait, they fell on him? Directly? And he was still alive? Wait, that was an exsphere on his chest.
The man—Zelos—was looking between Sheena and Colette in something like alarm. “Sheena, what are you doing? Your mission was-“
“Yes, well, I disagreed,” Matthew cut in, loudly, pieces snapping into place. “Things that try to kill my sister get violently eviscerated. Sheena decided to be smart.” Mission. Of course it was a mission, assassins weren’t assassins because of opportunity, they were assassins because assassins got paid. The question now was, how high did this go? And, more importantly, how did they know? “You know Sheena, it just occurred to me that we never discussed how you knew about Sylvarant in the first place.” His voice sounded conversational, but everyone in the vicinity immediately backed away from him.
“The Renegades,” Sheena offered, quietly, like she saw his anger and was trying to avoid directing it to her. Matthew gave her a level stare, requesting more information, and she cracked. “They told the king about the mana transfer, and he sent for someone from Mizuho to…take care of the problem.”
“How likely are those orders to still stand?”
There was a loud clanking from outside, like a platoon of armored soldiers had just walked down the street. “I’d say pretty likely,” Sheena answered.
Matthew ended up in a meeting with the king—who was king of the whole of Tethe’alla, the guy ruled the whole of his world, that was kind of terrifying—alongside Sheena and Zelos, who was Tethe’alla’s Chosen. Raine, Lloyd, Genis, and Colette remained behind at Zelos’ house, under the guard of half a platoon of knights, ostensibly to make sure they didn’t go anywhere. Matthew blamed his paranoia for reading all the deeper, more horrifying reasons behind the guard, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. The king ruled the whole world; there was nowhere they could go here where they would not be within his power.
King Leonidas was an intimidating man for one recovering from some kind of illness. He had the kind of gravitas that was present in true rulers, the kind of rulers who were fair but strict, who made the hard choices in return for the safety and prosperity of his people. He was the kind of man that Matthew would respect, in normal circumstances. These, unfortunately, were not normal circumstances.
Sheena knelt on the ground next to him as she gave her report of the last four—five, six? Time was weird nowadays—months. Matthew, in as blatant a show of disrespect as he dared give a foreign king, stood ramrod straight, glaring at the pompous idiot next to the king who’d been introduced as Pope Reginald, head of the Church of Martel in Tethe’alla.
“Sheena of Mizuho,” the king said when she finished. “You were the one contracted to take the life of Sylvarant’s Chosen, and yet you brought her here. Why?”
“Do you know what it means to be the Chosen?” Matthew cut in. To the right of the king, the pope bristled, but Matthew couldn’t care less. King Leonidas finally looked at him.
“You are the Sylvaranti Chosen’s brother, yes? Wouldn’t you know what it means better than I?”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Matthew replied. “Sheena knows. I daresay your own Chosen knows, and probably the idiot to your side, too.” The pope sputtered again. “I’m asking you if you know, King Leonidas. If you know that to be the Chosen is to lose yourself. Your sense of taste, first. Then the ability to eat, to sleep, to cry. You lose your sense of touch, of pain, your ability to speak. Eventually, you lose what it means to be human; you lose your very soul, and the Heavens have the gall to tell you that you are not dead. That a soulless puppet still lives, even with someone else pulling your strings.
“Because nobody told me.” He was still so angry about that. “Colette knew, and she didn’t tell me, that all the plans she made for her future were pipe dreams, dreams that would never come true because she was going to die, and she didn’t tell me that one day I’d look her in the eyes and they’d be dull and lifeless and wrong, she didn’t tell me that the day Sylvarant was saved would be the day I’d lose her, that her journey was one she would never return from. She knew I’d say no, so she didn’t tell me.”
King Leonidas’ face was steadily growing more horrified. The smaller, less intricate throne to his left indicated he had a child; Matthew wondered how old they were, that the man and father in front of him was drawing parallels. “And now I know what it means, to be the Chosen, and she’s right; I’m saying no. No. Screw Sylvarant, I don’t fucking care. They can’t have my sister and neither can you, Your Majesty, so listen to this and then make the smart choice; Sheena’s a fantastic fighter. It wasn’t for lack of skill on her part that she failed so often to kill Colette.”
“Is that a threat?!” the pope screeched as the guards stepped forward, swords and polearms brandished.
“No,” Matthew said, calling upon Undine’s aggression. “It’s a fucking promise.” The knights backpedaled in a hurry as whips of water circled him. Sheena showed no fear—why would she? She knew Matthew would never harm her—and Zelos, caught in the protective sphere by virtue of being directly on Sheena’s other side, took his cue from her, settling after a brief moment of alarm.
King Leonidas held up a hand, and the knights settled further, clearly unhappy. “That does not answer why you came here,” he repeated, and Matthew let Undine fade as he turned to Sheena, who finally stood.
“The Chosen is currently undergoing transformation into an angel,” she explained. “This…process, is caused by her Cruxis Crystal, which we’ve been informed is an evolved kind of exsphere. Tethe’alla has been researching exspheres and the Chosen’s Cruxis Crystal for years; we were hoping someone might have a way to reverse the damage, or know some way to undo it completely.”
“This is preposterous!” Pope Reginald blustered, and interestingly, half the knights began to advance again. “The Chosen is a threat to Tethe’alla and must be removed! I-"
Matthew had had enough of this guy. “Enough,” he snapped, flames flickering into existence briefly as Efreet reared his head. “I have little patience for morons and even less for all who follow Martel. Silence yourself before I do it for you.”
“Yes, Reginald, cease at once,” King Leonidas agreed, not taking his eyes off Matthew. “You seek a way to save your sister; does it not bother you, that to do so would mean abandoning Sylvarant?”
“Did you miss the part where I don’t care?” Matthew refuted, crossing his arms. “Because I—well, no, I care a little. But Colette is my priority, not Sylvarant. I, after all, am no king; simply an older brother who’d happily burn the world for the ones he cares about. That includes yours, if I must.”
“Matthew please stop making threats,” Sheena begged. “This is not conducive to giving us access to the Royal Institute and other places of research we need to enter.”
“Neither is giving the impression that plunging a dagger into my back the second I turned it would be easy, Sheena. If promises of violence is what it’s going to take to get that pompous moron to rethink his life’s choices, then that’s what I’ll do.”
“You do not trust Reginald,” the king realized, and he sounded amused.
Matthew, who had not stopped glaring at the man since he’d been introduced, was surprised it had taken him so long to realize. “No,” he agreed, because he didn’t. “I’ve met his type before. The kind who lies and bribes and cheats their way into power, then plots and murders their way into keeping it. Politics aren’t really my thing, so I normally just try to stay out of their way, but this particular idiot has been going on and on about ‘getting rid’ of my sister.” He glanced at the king, briefly, before returning to glare at the idiot. “You may have given the order, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the idea to assassinate Sylvarant’s Chosen came from him.”
King Leonidas visibly startled, like that was exactly what had happened. Beside him, Sheena sighed. “Yes, Your Majesty, he is always like this. He has a very bad habit of ferreting out things you’d rather stayed hidden.”
Matthew snorted, just a little. “Sheena, your soft heart needed no ‘ferreting out’; you wore it right on your sleeve.” He shook his head and, for the first time, made eye contact with the king. “I only want to save my sister. That’s it, that’s my goal. And I promise you that anything that gets in my way won’t be there for long. Make sure it’s not you.”
“And after?” the king asked. “When your sister, your Chosen, is freed, what do you intend to do? Do you mean to go back to Sylvarant and find another way to reverse the mana flow?”
“How much did the Renegades tell you of the nature of the two worlds?” Matthew countered.
“Your Majesty,” Pope Reginald interrupted, getting nervous, “I must insist that this-“
“Enough, Reginald,” King Leonidas commanded, finally. The pope’s mouth clicked shut in his haste to quiet, because that was the voice of a man who’d been pushed too far; never a good tone to hear from a man above you in power. The king turned to Matthew and said, “Not much. Just that the two worlds constantly competed for mana, and that if the Sylvaranti Chosen succeeded, Tethe’alla would start to decline.”
Matthew took a deep breath before saying, “So you weren’t told the worlds used to be one.” Zelos choked on thin air, and the king looked like only his royal dignity was stopping him from doing the same. “Sylvarant and Tethe’alla were once the same world, and that’s why they share a mana flow. Someone cleaved your world in two and set up this—this twisted, toxic system to make sure no one could ever gain enough power to overthrow him, and my sister was used as just another pawn on his stupid chessboard, and my goal, after I help Colette? Is to take him down.
“I will rip him to shreds and fix what he so carelessly destroyed,” Matthew vowed, feeling Efreet and Undine and the Sylph stir and bind themselves to this new promise, this new vow, because that? Was the real reason they had joined him, and he knew it now. He’d earned their respect, of course, but the reason they had even given him the chance to earn it was because of this. Because that Yggdrasil guy had broken apart the world they loved and twisted it and used them to do it, and he knew what that was like.
Blados and Chalis and Arcanus had done the same to him. And just like him, the Spirits needed to undo what had been done. They needed to know they could still do good, even after so many had been hurt. “I’m going to rip him to shreds,” he repeated in four voices, and Leonidas, Reginald, and Zelos flinched away from him. “And return Aselia to its true form.” What the hell was Aselia? “To fix the mana depletion, so no longer do innocents have to die to keep a broken shell alive.” Something was wrong. It hurt. It-
Asgard. Efreet. Mana pool burning out, stop stop stopstopstop please!
“I-I-I-vow, vow, Sheena-vow it wi-help-th all I-it hurts-am!” New vow in place, the Spirits left him alone in his body, which was nice of them, because Matthew was burning up from the inside out from their forced joint Summons and all he really wanted to do was collapse on the thick carpet below him. Which was exactly what he did the moment Undine stopped forcing him to stay standing. Sheena caught him before he hit the floor, sending pain sparking up his arms and across his chest. “Ow,” he whispered, really fucking hurting.
“Holy fuck Matthew,” Sheena managed to get out after she tried to peel off his jacket; tried, and failed, because the heat from Efreet’s flames had melted the fabric onto his skin.
“Ow,” he said again. “Don’t do that Sheena, it hurts.”
“Shit, Zelos, help me, we need to get him to Raine now.”
Matthew wasn’t sure what Zelos answered with, as that was when he decided he’d had enough of being conscious and blissfully blacked out.
When he woke—actually woke, not just vaguely returning to consciousness in reaction to stabbing pain—he still felt like he was a little bit on fire. He tried to reach for the earth and let out a shuddering gasp as his mana pool told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was too scorched to do anything involving any sort of energy for a while. “Matt?”
“Lloyd,” he replied, turning his head in time to see the relieved smile break across the teen’s face.
Relief, came the broadcast from Colette, hovering behind the swordsman.
“Hey,” he rasped, giving them a smile of his own. “Did I miss anything interesting?”
Lloyd was too happy to scowl at him, but he gave it his best shot. “You’ve got to stop doing that, Matt,” he chided. “We were really worried, you know!”
Matthew grimaced as he pulled himself into a sitting position, Lloyd lunging forward to help when he almost toppled over. “This wasn’t my idea,” he defended himself. “Efreet and the others decided to be pushy.”
“What did happen?” came a voice from the doorway. He looked over as Raine swept inside, carrying—yes, food, Matthew was starving. “Sheena said—well, she didn’t really understand what was happening, but she said it looked like all three Spirits were…fighting you for control.”
He made grabby motions at the tray she was carrying. “That was pretty much what happened,” he explained as she handed over the food. “Sort of. I—you know the vows we make to each other? We were…making a new one, since apparently that’s possible.” He frowned into his risotto. “Possible and painful,” he grumped, “though that may have been less the vow and more the ‘all three at once’ thing.”
As if it had just been waiting for him to remember, the pain came roaring back into his limbs, and he flinched, nearly dropping his spoon. Raine’s Heal washed over him, the water mana so inherent to her spells soothing the pain as effectively as Rief’s Mercury psynergy always had. He sighed as the pain faded to something manageable. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” she nodded. “Now, since you’re finally awake, I believe it would be prudent for us to go over our next course of action.” Matthew straightened at that; only a little, though, because Genis made very good risotto and he was hungry, okay. “Sheena said we were allowed to travel Tethe’alla as we pleased, though their Chosen is coming along to keep tabs on us. He was…kind, enough, to contact the Imperial Research Academy and gain us access, though I’m not entirely sure how much of that was his influence, and how much of it was yours; either way, we’ll head off as soon as he and Sheena return with a guide to the region. And once you’re feeling better, of course.”
“Neat. Where is it? Have we got a map? I’m very partial to maps.” Like he’d been waiting for Matthew to mention it, Genis whisked away his now empty tray to spread a sheet of parchment across the bed he was lying on. “Hey, where even are we?”
“In Meltokio, Tethe’alla’s capital,” Genis informed him, misinterpreting Matthew’s question. Well, it was probably close enough. “Here.” Wow. He thought he was used to it by now, because of Sylvarant, but this map was tiny. Really small. Sylvarant had three continents and a rather large island. Tethe’alla, in comparison, had three continents and what looked like an inhabited icecap. Weyard had seven. Five landmasses, one icecap to the south, and thousands of islands. It was all just…so small, compared to the scale he was normally traveling at.
“Sybak, where the Academy is, is on the near continent,” Raine pointed to the northeast of their current location. “About a week’s travel, if we’re quick about it.”
“How are we getting across the ocean?” Matthew asked, because he was still a little miffed at the Spirits and didn’t feel like calling on them so soon.
Raine traced a line from coast to coast. “There’s a bridge here, according to Zelos. It goes all the way across the sea.”
Well. That was pretty cool, actually.
Days later, he took it back. It was not cool, not cool at all. Lloyd had gone white and Genis hurriedly backed up so he was hiding behind Raine and Sheena’s eyes went wide, like she was remembering something she’d forgotten and just now realized the consequences. “Three…three thousand?”
Zelos looked at them all in amusement, the lucky bastard. Beside him, Presea Combatir, their ‘guide’—though how a little girl suffering from a mild case of Toxicosis was supposed to guide anybody anywhere was beyond him—hadn’t seemed to notice they’d all started to stare at the Grand Tethe’alla Bridge like it would explode if they touched it, and had already started crossing. “They’re just exspheres, guys. You have some, why are you so surprised?”
“Where are you getting them from?” Matthew snapped, because that was what he was worried about. The exspheres came from the Human Ranches, from the despair and pain of those trapped within. Tethe’alla didn’t have any ranches. Or Desians. That was the whole selling point of the Journey of Regeneration. So where were they coming from? How did they get three thousand lives without anyone noticing!?
Zelos was looking considerably paler than normal. “What do you mean lives?” Oh, he’d said that last part out loud.
Raine took over the explanation, which was good because Matthew was getting too emotional to continue. “Exspheres are made from human lives,” she said, blunt and careful. “Souls and mana dragged out and away from their rightful places, locked into stones to be used as power sources.” Her left hand wrapped around her right bicep, where the exsphere she’d taken from Botta’s sword rested.
She’d asked him, when they’d learned what exspheres really were, if he could feel the life in her stone like he could feel Anna. He’d tried, but all he’d gotten were bare impressions; the soul in her stone was male, middle-aged, and a father. And he was highly pleased to be fighting the Desians, desperate for a chance at revenge. Raine had taken to calling him ‘Varro’, since they didn’t know his name.
Sheena’s exsphere housed the soul of a little girl, and she’d cried when she’d learned that. She’d taken to calling her ‘Mirai’, a word that meant ‘future’ in Nihonese. And also, apparently, in the language that Sheena spoke that she called ‘Mizuhoan’. ‘I call her Mirai so I never forget what I am fighting for; a future where this no longer happens’.
But…three thousand. How do three thousand people just…disappear? How do three thousand people die without anyone to mourn them?
Matthew reached blindly backwards, his hand catching one of Colette’s and squeezing. He couldn’t imagine it. He couldn’t imagine so many lives, any life, not leaving anyone behind. And now he had to walk past them, like he couldn’t feel their grief and fear and rage.
“Well, it’s not like the dead can come back to life, so…” Zelos shrugged, then turned on his heel to follow Presea across the bridge.
“That would require them to have died in the first place,” Matthew told him, and the Tethe’alla Chosen froze. “But they aren’t dead. They’re just stuck. Trapped. Birds locked so deep in their cage they can’t even tell the people around them how much it hurts-!”
Genis wrapped himself around Matthew’s free arm, and Lloyd moved so Colette was pressed between the two of them, close enough that she was tucked into his side and Lloyd’s hand could reach Matthew’s shoulder. Raine stood in front of him, hands on his cheeks, fingers catching tears he wasn’t aware he'd shed, and Sheena was a comforting presence at his back.
Worry. Fear. Sorrow.
“I—I’m fine,” he choked out, lying through his teeth. He got four glares for it, but they were half-hearted at best. “We’ve got, got to cross. Let’s just get it over with, okay?”
He didn’t let go of Colette’s hand the whole way over, and Genis and Lloyd refused to move from his side. Despite the horrors of Tethe’allan engineering, it was…nice.
Despite having the same ability to process emotions as, say, a rock, Presea found it in her to frown as they entered the University Town of Sybak. “I hate…this city,” she whispered.
Lloyd and Genis both looked apologetic, but it was Zelos who reassured her. “Don’t fret, little one! We’ll be done in a jiffy!”
“Don’t like it,” she muttered, edging her way behind Matthew. Which, fair. Matthew had proved, multiple times on their way to Sybak, that he was the scariest thing around. If there was something here that broke through her Toxicosis enough to scare her, hiding behind him was the safest place to be.
“We’ll be quick,” he promised her, following behind Zelos as he led the way to the Imperial Research Academy. (On a side note, why was it the Imperial Academy? Tethe’alla was a monarchy, not an empire.)
The scientist was…less than helpful. All, ‘Exspheres are lifeless beings’ and ‘Cruxis Crystals are evolved forms of exspheres’ and ‘exspheres are parasites’. Basically, reiterating what they already knew, thank you very much. And Matthew had learned all this without the fancy laboratory that Rief would be terribly jealous of. Just about the only new thing Matthew learned was that a device called a ‘Key Crest’ helped regulate the control of the mana flow between exsphere and host. Which was something Lloyd and the others already knew, since they, y’know, used exspheres.
“That,” Matthew announced as they stepped outside, “was a complete waste of time.”
Lloyd, holding Colette’s hand so she wouldn’t get separated from them, grumbled his agreement. “They couldn’t even tell us where we could find a Key Crest,” he complained. “They don’t even know how to make them, what the hell, I thought they were supposed to be experts?”
“Language,” was Raine’s absentminded contribution, more focused on glaring down at her removed Key Crest.
Sheena sighed. “At this point, I think we know more than they do.”
Genis, however, was tapping at his own Key Crest. “What about Dirk?”
Whomst.
Lloyd brightened for half a second before visibly deflating. “Dad’s back in Sylvarant though. And we’re still technically exiles.”
What. Matthew would like a refresher course, please.
Sheena, bless her other-worldliness, was just as confused as he was. “Who are we talking about?”
“My dad,” was Lloyd’s non-clarification. Thanks Lloyd, but they’d already gotten that. “He’s a dwarf; he made Genis’ Key Crest, but again, he’s all the way back in Sylvarant. And the Rheairds are out of fuel. And Genis and I are still technically exiles!”
“He never taught you how to make them?” Matthew asked instead of the question he really wanted to ask, which was ‘exiles?’ But he still found it kind of odd anyways, because Isaac had shoved just about everything he ever knew into Matthew’s head the moment he got old enough to remember it.
Lloyd just shook his head. “No, I…never really had the attention span for that kind of delicate work.”
That was fair. If Key Crests were delicate then yeah, Lloyd was not the best bet. “Okay.” Matthew thought for a moment then said, “Are Key Crests like, a trade secret, or would any dwarf know how to make them? And, follow up question, are there any dwarves in Tethe’alla?”
Zelos folded his arms over his chest. “…I heard a couple’a rumors, once, about a dwarf that lived in the Gaoracchia Forest. No idea how much water they hold, but it’d be way easier to walk to Ozette than it would be to try to find a way to Sylvarant.”
“So, Chosen, that is your end goal?” came a completely unexpected voice. Okay, so Matthew had noted the two presences skulking about in the nearby alleyway, but he’d assumed they were just…skulkers. People lounging about with nothing to do, not the green-armored knights that strutted out into the sunlight like the world owed them everything. “I see the pope was right to suspect you of plotting against the throne.”
Matthew let out a disbelieving scoff in tandem with Zelos, but the Chosen had more to say. “Right, because I’m definitely the guy conspiring against the king.” He sighed as he shook his head. “I mean, really, the pope’s gotta know he’s overreaching with this one, right?”
The knight scowled—or, well, Matthew assumed so. The helmet made facial cues hard to pick up on—and leveled his polearm at Zelos’ chest, which was only mildly threatening at best. “We are placing you and your companions under arrest for attempting to destroy Tethe’alla.”
Matthew rubbed at the back of his neck before rolling his shoulders. “You sure you wanna get in my way?” he threatened. He was much better at threatening than the polearm guy, as evidenced by his hasty retreat. Ah, this guy had probably been in the throne room when Matthew was proving his point; good. He’d be less inclined to push his luck.
Only, a lot of the surrounding presences Matthew thought were civilians were revealing themselves to also be green-clad knights. Zelos hissed. “Damn, did the Papal Knights mobilize their whole force?!”
That was kind of flattering, actually, but mostly just annoying. These assholes, unlike the Desians, were just doing their jobs; Matthew didn’t want to kill them for that, and he couldn’t take on this many people without somebody dying. His hesitation was noticed by the squad captain guy. “I knew you were only faking,” he scoffed, bravado restored, which was also annoying, because Matthew had really not been bluffing. But, well, there would always be opportunities later. “Restrain them and take a sample!”
Sample?
Matthew found out soon enough, when one of the knights—not the captain guy, he was still scared stiff—twisted his right arm to stick a needle in his veins. He knew he should’ve invested in a new jacket, but all the shops in Meltokio—or, at least, all the shops Zelos had dragged him too—had been stuffed full of ridiculous, flamboyant things that Matthew refused to even touch. “Hey!” he snapped, Efreet flickering across his shoulders and-
Someone else slapped something over his other wrist, and his connection with Efreet—and the Sylph and Undine—cut out. Not just that though. The thing, some sort of manacle with a glowing red stone embedded in it—was that an exsphere? Well, that would explain why he could no longer feel his own mana pool. They cut him off from his mana, and the sudden loss of energy and one of his senses cut his knees out from under him.
He hit stone with a shaky gasp, his fall tearing his arm out of the grip of the other knight, who only took a step back and said, with some confusion, “Human.”
“What did you do?!” That was Lloyd, righteous indignation and all.
“Criminals undergo biological testing before they’re arrested,” Zelos explained, extending his own arm with a sigh but no protest. “It’s because of the caste system.” Caste system? Tethe’alla had one of those? Matthew wasn’t all that familiar with them, since the last place to use one had been Morgal, back when it was trapped under Sanan rule. Still, the stories…hadn’t sounded pleasant. “Some half-elves don’t look any different from humans, and those accused of crimes are executed immediately, without trial or exception.”
Oh.
Oh no.
“S-sir! We have a match!” one of the knights blustered, clearly agitated. Matthew turned his head to see Genis staring at his own arm in confusion and the beginnings of betrayal.
“Raine?”
She bit her lip and turned away.
The captain stalked past Matthew towards the siblings, and he—tried. He tried to snag the man with stone and plant and wind, but the mana surrounding him was thick, too thick, for his psynergy to find any purchase. “Professor? Genis?” That was Lloyd once again, confused and uncertain. “He’s—you’re?”
“Engaging in caste deception, are you?” the captain scoffed, and Matthew staggered to his feet, managing, somehow, to get between the Sage’s and half the knights. They were still totally surrounded, but he felt better being in the way of some of the threats. “Get out of the way, boy, or be killed alongside them.”
Lloyd skidded into place on the other side of Genis, covering what Matthew couldn’t. “No! I won’t let you! Who cares if they’re half-elves?! They’re better people than you’ll ever be!”
Spears and halberds and polearms were raised at the four of them—five. Sheena had joined their little circle of defiance. Gods, they were really going to get into a battle in the city streets, weren’t they? Well, Matthew had tried. He snarled at the captain, causing him to retreat another step. He’d be the first to die. “This is a horrible idea,” Zelos complained as he wove around the knights until he was next to Matthew. Presea settled into a stance on the Tethe’allan Chosen’s other side, and Colette drifted into the open spot between Sheena and Lloyd.
“They started it,” he replied, raising his left hand to the sky. This was his worst idea ever. “I told them to stay out of my way and away from my family, and if the pope wants to call my bluff, I find it only fair to inform him that I’m not fucking bluffing.” He shoved his psynergy into the mana-rich air, right between metal and skin, and the manacle exploded into red-hot shards. Undine roared to life in his blood, and he let her bloodlust surface and her shark-like grin find a home on his face. His wrist was likely broken, but that was very unimportant right now. “Humans, half-elves, angels, what’s it matter when I’m the monster?”
He lunged, Undine’s rapier of pure water sliding into the gap between helmet and breastplate, the Papal Knight captain managing a choked cry before crashing to the ground. “I’m not bluffing,” he promised, the rapier twirling in his grip as Undine guided him into an unfamiliar stance. “Get out of my way. Or I’ll move you. Choose.” The knights facing him looked terribly uncertain, but those across from Lloyd and Presea seemed willing to push their luck. Well, they had been, until water from the moisture in the air coalesced in front of their faces, leaving them in a field of bubbles.
Or, he amended as one of the ‘bubbles’ popped, a minefield. The unlucky knight who’d been dumb enough to pop it was flung away, hitting a nearby wall with a crunch before falling to the ground. Either he was unconscious, or he’d done the smart thing and decided to stay down; either way, he did not return to the battlefield. “You have thirty seconds,” he told them. “Drop your weapons or prepare to die. I don’t like killing, but by this point I’m not picky.”
The clatter of metal hitting stone was a great sound, Matthew decided. He kept the minefield circling anyways, just in case someone decided to be truly idiotic. “Right,” he declared, glad that was over with. “Let’s get out of here before someone else tries to do something stupid.”