On the surface, the world was breaking.
The Convergence at the valley's heart had entered its growth phase earlier that day, a swirling knot of distorted space and seething mana suspended above the ground like a malignant star. Its presence twisted light and sound, warping the air in shimmering waves.
Veteran mages and warriors had entered first, forming the initial scouting parties. They stepped through the boundary of warped air and vanished from sight, their figures swallowed by roiling colors.
Outside, hundreds waited.
Raylan stood near the forward line, hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword, eyes fixed on the Convergence. Elara stood to his right, rapier sheathed but fingers tapping restlessly against the guard. Marcus loomed to his left, arms folded, daggers strapped to his waist.
All around them, groups clustered by guild or academy affiliation. Banner poles sagged in the windless air. Someone in the crowd retched; the ambient mana churn made weaker constitutions queasy.
"This feels worse than the last one," Marcus muttered. "Heavier."
"You have faced one before?" Raylan asked.
"Many, in fact."
Elara's gaze flicked over the waiting forces, lingered briefly on Kale Krust and his followers gathering on a small rise not far away. Kale's group stood in disciplined formation, armor polished, weapons gleaming. They had the look of people who expected to be watched.
"They are posturing," she said. "All of them."
"People like to stand in neat lines before everything goes wrong," Raylan replied.
As if summoned by his words, the Convergence pulsed.
The air shuddered. Colors within the anomaly twisted violently, collapsing inward before exploding outward in a silent shockwave. For an instant, all sound died. Even the ever-present murmur of the crowd vanished.
Then it hit them.
Pressure slammed into Raylan's senses, a tidal wave of chaotic mana that made his breath catch. His awareness—always half-extended, tasting the flows of energy around him—was suddenly drowned in noise.
The Convergence's growth had skipped stages. What should have been a gradual increase over days and weeks spiked in the space of heartbeats.
Someone nearby screamed.
The boundary of warped air swelled. Cracks of black lightning spiderwebbed across its surface, then shattered outward like broken glass.
The scouts who had gone inside began to stumble back out.
Not in neat formations. Not in control.
They burst through the distorting veil as if spat out, armor scorched, robes torn, faces pale. One mage retched blood as he fell to his knees. Another warrior staggered past Raylan, eyes wide and unfocused, muttering nonsense under his breath.
"The growth phase ended too quickly!" someone shouted. "It has matured!"
A gout of warped space surged outward from the Convergence's center, slamming into the ground and tearing a jagged rift into existence. Something pushed through—an arm made of too many joints, covered in plates of chitin slick with dark fluid.
It planted itself in the dirt and hauled the rest of its body into the world.
The creature that emerged was terrifying even by the standards of monsters. Its torso bent at angles that defied anatomy, hindlegs jointed backward, forelimbs splitting into three from the elbow down. Its head—if that misshapen knot of bone and horn could be called a head—turned in jerky increments, eye-clusters blinking independently.
A Blight.
And there were more of them.
It opened its many-jointed jaws and screamed, the sound scraping across raw nerves.
Panic rippled through the outer ranks.
"Form lines!" a guild warrior bellowed, voice amplified by magic. "Hold your positions! This is what you trained for!"
It was not, of course.
But discipline was a habit. Enough of the older fighters responded automatically, weapons coming up, shields locking, mages raising hastily-formed wards.
Kale Krust seized the moment.
"Forward!" he roared, drawing his greatsword in a single sweeping motion. Mana flared around him—a hot, crackling aura that dragged lesser wills along in its wake. "We strike the first wave! Show them the pride of the northern line!"
His team surged with him, charging down the slope toward the emerging creatures. To an outside observer, it was a heroic image—gleaming armor, unified advance, a young leader at their head.
Raylan watched with narrowed eyes.
"They are rushing the front without knowing anything," he said. "Predictable."
Marcus snorted. "You sound almost disappointed."
"I am not," Raylan said. "I am calculating how many of them will still be standing in three minutes."
More Blights pushed through the torn edges of space.
Some were semi-Blights, twisted versions of recognizable beasts—boars with too many tusks and stone plates embedded in their hides, wolves whose shadows moved out of sync with their bodies, a serpent whose scales leaked mist that ate holes in the grass.
Others were harder to classify—amalgams of bone and crystal, pulsing sacks of flesh that floated and dripped corrosive ichor, winged shapes that blurred at the edges as if the world could not fully decide what they were.
The valley devolved into chaos.
Kale's charge struck the first wave like a hammer.
He leapt, blade wreathed in bloody light, and brought it down on the Blight-beast's leading limb. The impact shook the ground. Chitin cracked, dark ichor spraying. The creature shrieked, rearing back, its warped body twisting.
Kale rode the recoil, twisting midair to land in a roll and come up swinging again. His aura flared, a crimson storm that carved a path through lesser monstrosities. His team followed, shields raised, blades flashing, spells detonating in controlled bursts.
They were good.
They were also rapidly being surrounded.
For every creature that fell, two more pushed through the widening rifts. The air filled with the stench of blood, burnt mana, and something sour and metallic that did not belong to this world.
"Raylan," Elara said sharply. "If we stand here much longer, we will be overrun by spillover alone."
He studied the battlefield.
The lines were already starting to bend inward. Panic flared in pockets where formations broke. A group of younger students tried to run, only to be driven back by a snarling semi-Blight that had slipped past the front.
"In that case," he said, "we move."
"About time," Marcus rumbled, baring his teeth.
They advanced—not directly toward the largest beast, but at an angle that would intersect with the line Kale's group was unknowingly forming.
A smaller semi-Blight lunged toward them—a wolf-like creature whose body was half bone, half crackling black crystal. Its eyes burned with pale, fever-bright light.
Marcus met it head on.
He drew his daggers in a single fluid motion, mana surging down his arms. When the creature leapt, he stepped into its path and slashed.
The impact was like a thunderclap.
Bone shattered. Crystal cracked. The wolf-thing's momentum turned against it as the daggers' strikes and Marcus's strength redirected it sideways, slamming it into the ground hard enough to crater the dirt.
It twitched once.
Marcus planted a boot on its neck and finished the job with a short, brutal stab.
Two more creatures veered toward them, drawn by movement. Raylan stepped forward, hand on his sword's hilt.
He did not draw.
Not yet.
He reached instead for the power that shadowed him, the half-seen flicker at the edge of his awareness—another Raylan that was fusing with him, the Raylan from another timeline who had mastered the sword.
The first creature—a floating sack of flesh bristling with bony spines—spat a volley of needles.
The world seemed to slow.
Raylan moved, not away, but through the gaps. Feet placing exactly where they needed to, body twisting just enough.
The needles passed him by, close enough to sting the air.
His sword finally left its sheath in a single, clean motion.
One step. One cut.
The blade traced a pale arc through the warped air, the edge trailing a faint, ghostly luminescence. It passed through the floating flesh-sack as if through water.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the creature split cleanly in two, the halves sliding apart in eerie silence before collapsing into a stinking heap.
The second monster—a boar with stone plates and too many tusks—charged, earth shaking under its hooves.
Raylan did not meet it head on.
He shifted sideways, letting its bulk thunder past, and flicked his blade once. The motion was small, almost lazy, barely more than a tap against one of its hind legs.
The boar's momentum carried it forward.
Its leg, sliced clean through at the joint, did not.
The creature stumbled, crashed, and slid, tusks plowing furrows into the dirt. Elara was there when it finally stopped, rapier stabbing in brutal, efficient strokes until it went still.
Elara then engaged a semi-Blight that had the body of a man and the arms of a mantis, scythe-like blades dripping caustic fluid. She danced just outside its reach, rapier darting in to pierce joints and exposed flesh.
Her movements were precise, economical. She used its own momentum against it, turning wide sweeps into overextensions and punishing them with needle-thin stabs. Each thrust carried a whisper of wind spells, disrupting muscle and tendon beyond the point of impact.
Within moments, the creature's movements grew jerky. Its right arm hung limp. Its left scythe wavered.
Elara stepped in, drove her blade through the hollow at the base of its throat, and twisted.
It fell.
They carved a narrow corridor through the roiling chaos.
Kale noticed.
He cut down another beast—a lizard-thing with glassy scales—and turned briefly, eyes locking onto Raylan's group.
For an instant, irritation flashed across his features.
The three of them were moving through the battlefield with a fluidity his own team could not match. Where Kale's squad pushed and clashed, taking hits and trading ground, Raylan, Elara, and Marcus seemed to slip through the chaos, always where they needed to be and nowhere they did not.
He bared his teeth.
"Do not fall behind!" he shouted to his men, voice edged with challenge as much as command. "If you let Academy brats outshine you, I will throw you back into training pits myself!"
His team responded with a ragged cheer and redoubled their efforts.
The valley became a patchwork of micro-battles—pockets of order holding against waves of blighted creatures. Guild and Academy instructors directed spells that flattened whole ranks. Earth walls rose and fell. Lines formed, broke, and reformed.
And still, more things pushed through the tears in reality.
Up on a rocky rise at the valley's edge, cloaked figures watched it all with calculating eyes.
The Watcher stood among them, black clothing stirring in winds that did not touch anyone else. His gaze was fixed not on the individual clashes, but on the Convergence itself, counting the rhythm of its pulses, the pattern of its distortions.
When the growth phase's curve twisted unexpectedly upward, his expression turned grim.
"Someone tampered with it," he said quietly.
The mage beside him swallowed. "Tampered... sir?"
"Forced redirection of Chaos Energy," the Watcher said. "They miscalculated the feedback. Now the Convergence rushes toward maturity. Or maybe it was their intention."
"The second convergence accelerates in tandem. The third follows the pattern," he paused. "Every death here strengthens their working below."
He raised a hand.
Black threads of mana uncurled from his fingers, reaching out to brush against the edges of the anomaly. The Convergence shivered like a living thing touched by something it did not recognize.
"Send word to the lower teams," the Watcher said. "We have less time than planned. Containment priority is now absolute."
Behind him, a runner bowed and sprinted off.
"There is something bigger on the horizon."
Far below, in the tomb where blood traced the lines of a circle, the Dark Guild ritualist at the center of the array frowned as the Convergence's rhythm changed.
"This is not in the calculations," he hissed.
The Rank 6 ritualist's jaw clenched.
"Then adjust," he snarled. "We hold, or we are devoured with the rest."
The circle flared.
The Convergences above screamed.
And in the middle of it all, Raylan and his companions stepped deeper into the storm.