Karion's fist connected with Damus's face with a sickening crack. Damus's head snapped back, blood spraying from his nose as he collapsed onto the strange purple moss.
"What the hell are you talking about?!" Karion loomed over him, fists still clenched. "Why do you suddenly care if Adom lives or dies? You spent years making his life miserable!"
Damus lay there, blood trickling down his face, making no move to defend himself.
"What exactly went through your head running into this death trap?" Karion continued, voice rising with each word. "Was bullying him not enough? Now you want to get us all killed chasing after him?"
"Karion, that's enough!" Gus stepped forward, putting a firm hand on the taller boy's shoulder. When Karion tried to shrug it off, Gus's grip tightened. "I said enough."
Something in Gus's normally easygoing voice made Karion pause. He looked back, surprised to find steel in the other boy's eyes.
Gus released him and turned to Damus, extending a hand. "Come on, get up."
Damus stared at the offered hand for a moment but made no move to take it. Instead, he pushed himself up, wiping blood from his face with his sleeve. His head remained bowed, eyes fixed on the ground.
Karion stood a few paces away, breathing hard, hands still balled into fists. The rage seemed to be radiating off him in waves.
Gus reacted first. He thrust his hands forward, and flames erupted—not the controlled fireball he'd probably intended, but a roaring inferno that engulfed not just the giant fly but the surrounding branches as well.
"GET DOWN!" Karion bellowed, grabbing the nearest person—which happened to be Damus—and diving off the branch.
They all followed, abandoning any attempt at controlled descent. Their levitation spells sputtered and flared as they plummeted through layers of foliage, branches whipping past.
Sam hit the ground harder than he'd meant to, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs. Zuni squeaked indignantly from his pocket.
They scrambled together, forming a tight circle with their backs to each other, facing outward. Above them, flames spread through the canopy, illuminating the fog with an eerie orange glow.
"What was that?!" Mia gasped, her hair singed at the edges.
"I think it was a fly," Eren said.
"It was," Gus confirmed. "The biggest one I've ever seen in my life."
The flames above cast dancing shadows through the fog, creating the illusion of movement all around them.
"Can you guys still weave?" Sam asked, trying to form a simple light orb and watching it flare into a miniature sun before he hastily dismissed it.
"Sort of," Naia answered, flexing her fingers.
"Too much power, not enough control," Eren agreed. "The mana density here is off the charts."
As if in response to his words, a strange glow began to emanate from Karion, Naia, and Damus.
Sam stared at them, recognition dawning.
Fluid.
I really should learn to manifest it too, Sam thought. The others were sticking to magic, but given their situation, Fluid might be their best chance.
They stood in their defensive circle, energy crackling around half of them, waiting for whatever might come next in this nightmare version of a Highlands field trip.
*****
At the same moment, on another part of the Highlands...
The corridor was massive, easily wide enough for ten giants to walk abreast. The ceiling vanished into darkness above, giving Adom the uncomfortable feeling of being an ant traversing the floor of some impossibly large building.
Along the walls, runes pulsed with subdued energy—different from the murals in the main chamber but no less intricate. Some he recognized: ward configurations, spatial anchors, locks. Others were completely foreign, their patterns so complex they made his eyes hurt if he stared too long.
"You want to tell me where we're going?" Adom called out to the light.
No response. It simply drifted onward, its glow weaker than before, almost translucent against the darkness.
Adom stopped every fifty paces or so, reconsidering his decision. Each time, the light would pause too, waiting for him to resume following. Occasionally it would flicker, as if struggling to maintain its presence.
"You're not really here, are you?" Adom said after one such pause. "Not fully, anyway."
The light pulsed once but offered no other acknowledgment.
As they moved deeper into the temple, Adom began to notice something odd about the light itself. It didn't illuminate its surroundings the way normal light should. Instead, it seemed to exist in a different layer of reality—visible but not quite interacting with the physical world.
"What are you?" he asked.
The question echoed through the corridor, bouncing off stone walls and returning to him unanswered.
A sound stopped him in his tracks. Faint at first, then growing clearer—voices. Two speakers, engaged in what sounded like an argument.
Adom glanced at the walls. The runes around him had begun to glow brighter, particularly a sequence that ran along the corridor at about chest height. He recognized some of them.
"Sound capture," he muttered, running his fingers along the carved symbols.
The voices grew louder. They spoke in no language Adom recognized—the words were deep, resonant, seeming to vibrate through his bones rather than his ears.
Giants. Had to be.
The light drifted onward, and Adom followed, listening to the ghostly conversation echoing through time. The voices sounded urgent, angry. One in particular dominated—deeper than the other, carrying an authority that needed no translation.
As they progressed, Adom noticed another change. The murals lining this corridor seemed fresher, their colors more vibrant, less faded by time. He reached out to touch one, expecting smooth, clean stone.
His fingers came away coated with dust.
"An illusion?" he said, looking more closely at the wall.
The mural depicted what seemed to be a council of giants—thirteen massive figures seated in a circular chamber. Despite the dust coating the actual carving, the image appeared clean and clear to his eyes, as if he were seeing past the millennia of decay to how it looked back then.
The mysterious light flickered weakly, now barely visible even in the darkness. It seemed to be fading, struggling to maintain its presence in reality.
"Hey," Adom called to it. "What are you trying to show me? Why bring me here?"
The light pulsed once, twice, then dimmed further. The ghostly voices grew louder, more agitated. The dominating voice rose above the other, its tone unmistakably angry despite the unintelligible language.
Adom continued forward, keeping his senses alert. The corridor widened into a vast circular chamber—the very one depicted in the mural he'd just passed. Thirteen stone chairs, each the size of a small house, arranged in a perfect circle around a central platform.
Another sound stopped him in his tracks. Not voices this time, but something more violent—the clash of metal against metal, the thunder of massive footsteps, shouts of rage and pain.
"What the hell is that?" Adom said, instinctively dropping into a defensive stance.
The light flickered urgently, drifting faster now toward the source of the commotion. Adom followed, his curiosity overriding caution.
The sounds grew louder with each step—a battle was raging somewhere ahead. Grunts of exertion. The crack of breaking stone. A roar that seemed to shake the very foundations of the temple.
The blue light led Adom to a massive doorway at the end of the room. Beyond it lay darkness and the unmistakable sounds of combat.
"Is this another illusion?" Adom asked the light. "Like the murals?"
The light didn't answer. It simply drifted through the doorway and vanished.
Adom hesitated at the threshold. The combat sounds were deafening now—a furious exchange happening just beyond his sight. Something crashed against stone with enough force to send vibrations through the floor beneath his feet.
He took a deep breath, activated Wam and Bam to their full capacity, and stepped through the doorway.
The chamber beyond erupted with light—dozens of massive torches igniting simultaneously around the perimeter of what appeared to be a square arena. The sudden illumination was blinding after the darkness he'd just left.
Adom barely had time to register his surroundings before something massive descended toward him from above—a stone column the size of a house, plummeting directly at his head.
"Shit!" he shouted, diving to the side. His body rolled across the dusty floor as the column crashed where he'd been standing.
Or should have crashed.
Adom sprang to his feet, hands raised in a combat stance, ready to defend himself—then froze.
The dust he'd disturbed with his roll settled around him in a small cloud. But the enormous column that should have pulverized the floor had made no impact. No tremor. No debris. No disturbance in the dust beyond what Adom himself had created.
He looked up. The column hung impossibly in mid-air, halfway through its descent.
"What the—"
A thunderous crash to his right made Adom jump. A wall of the chamber appeared to explode inward, stone blocks flying in all directions. But again, the dust on the floor remained undisturbed where the debris should have landed.
"An illusion," Adom said, straightening up. "It's all an illusion."
No sooner had he spoken than the apparent debris from the wall blast cleared, revealing two figures locked in furious combat.
One was a giant—smaller than those in the murals but still three times human height. His muscles were knotted with exertion as he swung a club the size of a tree trunk.
The other figure was human-sized.
Adom stepped closer, fascinated despite the danger. The human moved with impossible speed, dodging the giant's attacks with fluid grace. In one hand he wielded a sword that trailed blue energy; in the other, a battle axe that glowed red-hot at its edge.
But it was the man's face that made Adom stop cold.
He knew that face. Had seen it described in dozens of historical texts, countless Academy paintings, even stamped on the official seal of his certification documents.
The pale skin. The long, curly black hair that whipped around his face as he fought. And those famous eyes—burning red like rubies, visible even across the chamber.
"Law," Adom whispered. "Law Borealis."
The founder of modern magic. The creator of the Academy. The Farmer Mage.
Fighting a giant.