Elijah awoke to pain.

  As he sat up, he clutched his side and muttered, “Reminds me of the old days.”

  Back then, he’d taken weeks to heal even relatively minor injuries, so he’d undertaken the first few tower runs accompanied by constant pain. More than anything, he wished he could just cast Wild Resurgence and deal with his current injuries, but he supposed he should have been satisfied that his regeneration had kept him from bleeding out.

  If either of the other two had been hit by those ethereal blades, they would have been sliced in half. Just another reminder of the responsibility resting upon his shoulders. He was the strongest among them, and not by a small degree, and as such, he was meant to protect them. Conquering the Primal Realm was the first priority, but such a victory would ring extremely hollow if he did so alone. Or missing even one of his companions.

  The two remained where they were when he’d passed out, though judging by the notes scattered across the golden floor, they’d both been busy. Elijah’s subtle movement rustled the nearest pages, and Hu Shui slapped his hand down in annoyance, preventing them from moving out of order.

  “Any luck?” he asked, assuming they’d been trying to solve the problem at hand.

  “No,” said Benedict.

  “A little,” Hu Shui answered at the same time. Then, the two glared at one another before Hu Shui elaborated, “We think we understand what’s going on with the vacuum.”

  “That’s not true. We believe we know why it exists. Not how.”

  “Any information is helpful,” Elijah reminded them. “Tell me what you’ve found.”

  Then, Hu Shui explained that they believed the vacuum existed as a sort of buffer zone meant to prevent djinn from reaching the other side.

  “It’s just a theory. We can’t verify it,” Benedict pointed out. “Or rather, you won’t let me do so.”

  “It would take weeks to backtrack.”

  “We can’t move forward right now. It would help us determine the nature of the vacuum, which might give us some insight into how to overcome it.”

  “We know how.”

  “Your method is not viable.”

  “It is if –”

  “Enough,” Elijah breathed, the sudden exhale of the word sending sharp pain arcing up and down his ribs. They were still broken, but at least they were no longer in pieces. Similarly, his organs had mended – mostly. He still thought there was a little internal bleeding, but there was nothing he could do about that until he regained access to his spells.

  He took another slow, steady breath. “Arguing isn’t going to solve the issue,” he pointed out. Turning to Hu Shui, he asked, “What’s your method? If it gives us a chance to overcome…”

  “Two options,” the man said, holding up a pair of fingers. “First option, we use your Mantle of Authority.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I think you can,” Hu Shui argued. “Just not the way you normally do. It won’t last as long, though. Maybe a second or two. And it’ll drain you very, very quickly. Far more than normal.”

  “That doesn’t really help,” Elijah said, though he could see where Hu Shui was going with it. The problem was that the blades had come out of nowhere, almost as if they’d manifested the instant of the attack. If he’d been capable of sensing them, Hu Shui’s plan might have worked, but as it was, it was impossible. Elijah explained as much, eliciting a nod from Benedict.

  The Astral Duelist listened intently, then said, “I think I can sense the attacks before they manifest.”

  “Think,” echoed Benedict. “If you’re wrong –”

  “I’m not.”

  “But if you are, we will die. If you miss even one…this is what I’ve been saying all along,” Benedict argued.

  “How else are we meant to bypass this obstacle?” Hu Shui asked. He didn’t give Benedict a chance to answer. Instead, he immediately went on, “I can do this.”

  “We could just destroy it all,” Benedict stated. “Go back up to the captives and kill them. It would be a mercy, and I think that removing the power source will shut down whatever mechanism conjures those blades.”

  “Or it sets off an alarm, and we are forced to fight without spells,” Hu Shui pointed out with a long-suffering sigh.

  It was obvious that the pair had engaged the same argument on multiple occasions while Elijah had been unconscious. They went on, with Hu Shui continuing to point out the problems associated with killing the djinn without knowing the consequences. For all they knew, doing so would mean instant failure.

  And then there were other issues, like the amount of time it would take to retreat to the slave chambers, then return.

  But Benedict had a point as well, and it was soon revealed that Hu Shui’s “senses” weren’t ethereal in nature. Rather, he intended to use mathematics to predict the conjuration of the blades.

  “This entire thing is a complex mathematical formula made manifest,” Hu Shui insisted. “You’ve seen the equations. You know I’m right.”

  Benedict shook his head. “I’m not arguing with that part. I’m not willing to bet our lives on your predictions. If you’re even a little bit mistaken…”

  “We die.”

  “Or Elijah gets cut in half.”

  “Which is death. We can’t go on without him. Not successfully.”

  “Aww. You both care,” Elijah breathed. “Touching.”

  They both glared at him. Then, they continued their argument.

  Elijah listened. He calculated. And in the end, he realized that the only way anything was going to happen was if he took it out of their hands. With that in mind, he said, “I think we should try it Hu Shui’s way. If it doesn’t work, we just lose a few more days while I recover.”

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  “What if you don’t dodge?”

  Elijah shrugged at Benedict. “I will. I know what’s coming now. I’ll be ready for it.”

  Hu Shui took a deep breath, then revealed, “My calculations aren’t entirely complete. We need more data. But here’s what I have…”

  He went on to explain that, without witnessing multiple conjurations, there was no way they could predict everything. So, Elijah asked, “How many do you need?”

  “Three or four should give us a good picture, but we need as many as you can give us.”

  Elijah nodded, and then, with a groan, pushed himself to his feet. His ribs still hurt, but after stretching a little, he established that he still had full mobility. Chances were, that wouldn’t last long.

  As he stretched, Hu Shui explained what he knew. “Seventeen steps,” he said. “I predict that’s when the first blade will conjure.”

  “Unless there are other variables,” Benedict pointed out.

  Elijah gave him a grin that he definitely didn’t feel. “That’s why I’m playing lab rat in a maze, right? To find the other variables.”

  With that, he took a few deep breaths – not unlike he would if he was getting ready to freedive – and stepped off the platform and onto the bridge. Immediately, the vacuum wrapped itself around him. The absence of air was a unique feeling, as if he was moving through nothingness. The only tactile sensation was the bridge beneath his feet – and the pain blooming inside his lungs.

  Normally, they would have already ruptured – that was a characteristic of being in a vacuum – but apparently, Elijah’s body could endure it. A lucky break, considering that if that had not been the case, he would have died within seconds of stepping onto the bridge.

  The fact that neither Benedict nor Hu Shui had mentioned ill effects told him that the threshold for endurance was much lower than he might have expected.

  With that odd feeling enveloping him, Elijah stepped forward. The area surrounding the bridge was entirely black, and the subtle glow of the gold-and-silver material did little to change that. Instead, it only illuminated the bridge itself, leaving Elijah to feel as if he was walking through an abyss of nothingness. Even the view of the platform faded after only a few steps.

  He hurried on, counting his steps.

  On the fourteenth, he felt a slight stirring in the air and dove to the ground. The first ethereal blade sliced into his back, leaving a shallow wound, but the second missed entirely.

  After that, he crawled back to the platform and reported his findings.

  “Interesting,” Hu Shui said as Benedict slapped an adhesive bandage on Elijah’s back.

  “I ruin so many clothes,” he said. “Where did you get those bandages, by the way?”

  “One of my underlings makes them for me. I…I cut myself a lot,” he said. “For the blood.”

  Elijah suspected that wasn’t the only reason the man turned blades upon his own flesh. He didn’t like to put much stock in stereotypes, but if there was anyone in the world familiar with self-harm, it was Benedict. Most old-world scars would have faded with the first instance of body cultivation, with the exception of those that had cut deeper than mere physical injury, but Elijah suspected that there were a few that had survived on Benedict’s body.

  In any case, Elijah removed his shirt and pants, leaving him only wearing his underwear. “Not sacrificing any more of my clothes. Avert your eyes, heathens,” he said with another reassuring grin. It was becoming more difficult to maintain his good mood, what with multiple injuries and the prospect of more on the horizon. But he knew that if he showed his true feelings, the others might start to panic.

  So, Elijah suppressed his reactions to the pain and forced himself to pretend that everything was okay. It wasn’t, but panicking didn’t help anyone.

  Still, it was difficult to maintain that fa?ade as he embarked upon another foray into the vacuum. Then another after that. Over and over, he ventured onto that bridge, and each time, he found himself on the losing end of an attack by those conjured ethereal blue blades.

  In the beginning, he thought he might be able to hone his senses such that he got a little more warning, but after the third time on the bridge, he realized just how wrong he was. The blades came with almost no warning, and he suspected that if he hadn’t been under the influence of multiple augmentations to his reflexes, he never would have sensed them at all.

  Even those advantages only gave him a microsecond to react. Anyone else would have been sliced into multiple pieces.

  With each iteration, Hu Shui marked his notes and claimed that he was getting closer to a solution to the problem, but by the fifteenth, Elijah was beginning to suspect that his optimism was more like wishful thinking. That left him to wonder if Benedict’s plan – as risky as it was – might not have been the better option. Certainly, it would have been less painful.

  Until it wasn’t, at least.

  But in his current state, with more than a dozen wounds scarring his back, Elijah was almost willing to risk the obvious dangers.

  He kept going, though. He could endure a few cuts, especially when none of them had negatively affected his mobility. So, he continued on, wondering when he might lose a limb. Or his head.

  Then, after the twenty-second instance, Hu Shui declared, “I’ve got it!”

  “What? Really?” he asked.

  “It’s definitely not random.”

  “I thought that was the assumption upon which your entire plan was based,” Benedict interjected. He’d been mostly silent throughout the testing period, probably sulking because he didn’t agree with the plan.

  “I’ve confirmed it.”

  “Oh. Goody,” Elijah said. “My back thanks you.”

  “I believe the attacks follow a temporal lattice attached to spatial nodes,” he explained. “Imagine the bridge as a grid of fixed coordinates, but each coordinate only exists for an instant. Blinking in and out of reality according to a rhythm.

  “Each time the blades appear, they manifest along those coordinates,” he went on. “But the grid isn’t static. It rotates through dimensional space every three-point-six seconds. The pattern loops every nine iterations, which is the length of its full cycle.”

  “We’re perceiving them through the wrong frame,” Benedict said, as if he’d just experienced an epiphany. “To us, they strike whenever we move across the bridge. But in truth…”

  “It’s always in motion. The safe path isn’t about avoiding a place or a time. It’s about being in the right intersection of space and time when the lattice aligns,” Hu Shui went on. “If we cross in rhythm with its rotation, we’ll pass through the gaps. The way a bead passes through the holes of a spinning abacus.”

  “It is…”

  “Elegant,” Hu Shui finished for Benedict.

  “And this means we can cross safely?” Elijah asked.

  Hu Shui shook his head. “No. Not yet. We haven’t established a pattern, just that one exists. I have some ideas, but…we need more testing.”

  Elijah groaned. “What about the Mantle of Authority idea?”

  “Unnecessary once we determine the pattern.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Benedict said. “You’d have run dry of ethera long before we found the end of the bridge. And then we would’ve all died.”

  “Oh. Then why –”

  Hu Shui waved away Elijah’s impending objections, saying, “That doesn’t matter now. This is the answer we’ve been searching for.”

  “Which means I’ve got a lot more pain in front of me, doesn’t it?”

  “If I could take your place, I would,” Benedict said.

  Pointedly, Hu Shui did not agree.

  “Fine. Let’s get to it, then,” Elijah said, turning back to face the bridge. “And by us, I mean me.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Should’ve gotten a Shape of the Lab Rat for this…”

  With that statement, he began the second phase of testing. Hu Shui’s explanation gave him no real insight into how to avoid the blades, and in fact, Elijah barely understood how they were meant to find the pattern. However, he trusted that his companions could do what they said they could. Meanwhile, he subjected itself to the torture of one slicing injury at a time.

  Over the next day or two, Elijah lost track of how many iterations he endured. Dozens, at the very least. Maybe as many as a hundred. But eventually, Hu Shui declared that he’d found the proper formula to predict the conjured blades.

  “Unless it changes further on,” Elijah pointed out.

  “It won’t.”

  “You seem pretty sure about that.”

  “I am. Space will only endure so much manipulation. If it went any further than this, the entire area would be rife with spatial rifts.”

  “Technically, it is. Those blades are spatial rifts.”

  “Irrelevant,” Hu Shui said, waving away Benedict’s comment. “Trust me. This will work.”

  “Oh. Then I guess there’s nothing for it but to give it a go. Explain the pattern to me, and I’ll test it out.”

  “Doesn’t work like that,” Benedict said. “Hu Shui needs to lead the way. It requires his spatial senses to work.”

  Elijah frowned. “I don’t like that.”

  “There’s no other way,” Hu Shui countered. “All you need to do is follow.”

  That was easier said than done, but Elijah suppressed his instincts and subjected himself to Hu Shui’s leadership, as limited as it was. Once he’d recovered, all three planted themselves at the edge of the platform and waited for Hu Shui to give them the order to plunge forward.

  Then, the Astral Duelist shouted, “Go!”

  With that, they plunged forward and into the vacuum.

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