With the memories of being caught by that creepy old man fresh in his head, Dario had taken his time observing the compound. There was a tall wall stretching around the many buildings in the area, and inside of it there was a remarkably high number of guards for a place that was just supposed to be making pills. They must have had some problems with thieves or something, because their guard was all the way up. Still, careful scanning had shown that there weren’t any Corals or worse around, so he should be fine.

  The remainder of his pearls had bought him a useful new artefact: sound-dampening shoes. They were plain brown clumps that wouldn’t impress anyone with their cut, but they did get the job done. He could stomp around in them like a drunken mule without making a peep.

  In fact, that’s exactly what he did as a first test of their defenses: making himself invisible and hopping around in front of the guards, just to make sure they didn’t have any hidden artefacts that might pick him out. Better to find out now, while he could still make up some dumb excuse or simply make a run for it.

  But they didn’t see a thing, so he went ahead and climbed up over the wall, dropping silently down on the other side. With a bit of Ki running through his eyes, squinting to fend off the brightness, he could spot patrolling guards from far away, keeping his distance as he snuck between the many buildings. It would have been a lot easier if this Alchemist kept office hours, but nobody had seen him in weeks, so Dario had to come looking.

  The problem was that there weren’t exactly signs on the doors advertising who worked where, so he was left sneaking from alley to alley, peeking through windows and creeping into empty rooms. There was quite a large number of sleeping quarters and baths, which he passed over. A large barn-like building stood in the center of the compound, but there was smoke coming from its chimneys and plenty of guards around besides, so he decided to steer clear of that.

  After nearly an hour of patiently looking into windows and cracking open locks, he finally found something that looked like an office. Better yet, it had just the right amount of weird stuff in jars and small artefacts that he could imagine a pillmaker working there. The room was empty, so he picked the lock and made his way inside.

  The many jars, strange measuring devices and installations meant nothing to him, so he sat down in front of the desk and began to leaf through notebooks. These were filled with descriptions of experiments, noting the methods and findings in great detail.

  “Guess it’s too much to ask for a book to have ‘cultivation secrets’ on the cover,” he muttered to himself.

  The notes reminded him of the scrolls he’d found on the Asomatous Floor, the ones that had taught him splicing. But one thing was hard to make sense of: none of these notes were about making pills. Every experiment seemed to be about something else, something to do with ‘Ki decay rates’, which sounded about as boring as knitting a sweater.

  Heavy footsteps outside had him scrambling to put the notes away and hide behind a bookshelf. The added layer felt safer, even though he did make himself invisible again. The door creaked as it swung open, followed by metal boots stomping on the floor. Three or four people. Heavily armored. He hadn’t seen any guards with metal armor outside. Why had so many come here? Crap. His heart began to race. Had he been found out again?

  His hand tightened around his pouch with paralytic fruits, but then he frowned as no rush of footsteps followed. The armored guards must have been standing at rest. But why? Lighter shoes tapped on the wooden boards, followed by a sigh as someone plopped down in a chair.

  “Hm? Did I misplace that notebook?”

  There was no answer. Dario’s frown deepened. He thought he knew that voice, but…

  He peeked around the shelf, still invisible, and then he froze. After the initial shock, he darted out of hiding, moving silently between the metal figures and lunging forward to land a punch right on his brother’s jaw.

  “Oohf!” Matteo cried out as he went crashing down, chair and all, scrambling back with a shocked look on his face. His metal puppets moved to surround him as he got to his feet and went for the door, but then his eyes widened with recognition as Dario became visible again.

  “You’ve just been sitting here doing experiments all this time? A single letter was too much to ask, was it? Fucking asshole!”

  “Wha- Huh? I… Dario?” he stammered, looking as if one of his jars had just magically come to life. He bent down to pick up his glasses, then walked closer to look at Dario, keeping some distance as he rubbed at his cheek. “Why… No, how did you…”

  “Do you know how often you made mother cry? She’s been worried sick!” Dario yelled.

  “Sshh! Lower your voice, damn it!” Matteo hissed as he seemed to come to his senses, moving to look first through one window, then pushing past Dario to peer through another. When he turned around again, Dario grabbed him into a hug. Matteo stiffened awkwardly for a moment before he relaxed and returned it.

  “You’re not excused for just fucking off like that. Not by a longshot. But it’s good to see you.”

  Matteo adjusted his glasses, frowning as he looked Dario over. “You didn’t get my letters? No, wait, more importantly: what in the name of the pillar are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  Dario scratched his head. “Err.. I wasn’t looking for you, actually. Not yet. I thought this was… Wait. Are you the Alchemist?”

  “Is that what they’re calling me? I haven’t spoken to anyone on the outside in… I think it must be months, by now.”

  “So you’ve been making pills all this time?”

  Matteo sighed. “It’s a long story. Listen, Dario, you’re not supposed to be here. If anyone finds you here, there’ll be trouble. Lots of trouble.”

  “Fine,” Dario said, heading for the door. “We can catch up after we get out of here.”

  “What? No, Dario, listen, I can’t leave. They’ve got me working for them. Look, I’m in debt with these guys, but I’ve almost got it sorted out. I’ll come find you in a week or two, maybe a month at most.”

  Dario spun around, eyes narrowed. “You haven’t seen me in a year and you’re already trying to get rid of me?” He lifted his right fist, looking pointedly at his knuckles. “You want another smooch from these bad boys? It’s all fun and games until I break out the old Flicker Barrage.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “You don’t understand. These guys are dangerous. The boss is a Coral. People will come and check in on me, so they’ll find out if I’m gone.”

  “So what if they’re dangerous? You forgot how to fight?”

  Dario walked around Matteo, appraising him. His brother still had the same thick head of black hair, courtesy of their father, though his tended to form in curls rather than Dario’s messy spikes. He still wore those same glasses with a metal frame that seemed too thin for his large head. That head had used to look too big for his body, but that, at least, had changed.

  “Oh no, don’t tell me they got to you, too” Dario said, poking at his brother’s biceps. “Have you become a knucklehead?”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve been training, of course. I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life on this floor. But listen, Dario, we have to-”

  “Crap, so you don’t know any shortcuts?”

  Matteo blinked at Dario for a moment, then let out a long-suffering sigh, taking off his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose as he muttered to himself. “Of course it’s damned shortcuts he’s looking for. Some things never change.”

  He took a deep breath before grabbing Dario by the shoulders.

  “Little brother. Please focus for just a moment. This place is dangerous. People will come and check on me. I cannot leave, but you must.”

  Dario crossed his arms as he met Matteo’s eyes with a defiant look. “I promised our mother I’d bring you back down to the Basement. I’ll carry you on my damn back if I have to.”

  Matteo let out a groan, beginning to pace through the room. “Still as stubborn as a damn trashgoat. Look, you may be willing to live with the consequences of crossing these guys, but I’m not, not when I’m this close to finally being done with them.”

  Dario’s eyes tracked him as he paced, tapping his lips with a finger. “When you say they check in on you, what do you mean exactly?”

  “They bring me food, maybe open the door or just look through the window. What does it matter?”

  “So as long as you’re still here, there wouldn’t be a problem?”

  Matteo stopped pacing, looking at Dario through narrowed eyes. “What do you mean ‘as long as I’m still here’? I don’t like that look on your face one bit.”

  His grin only grew when hearing that. “How often do they bring food?”

  “Once at orange crest and again at cerulean. So the next one is in a few hours. Why?”

  Dario began to weave an image, eyes flicking back and forth between the empty desk chair and his brother. A faint glow of light solidified slowly into a rough outline of a person, the colors changing to match Matteo’s grey trousers and black tunic. Only a minute later, there was an image of Matteo sitting in the chair, bent over a notebook.

  He wiggled his eyebrows at his brother, grinning.

  “Wow. Alright, so you got really good with illusions. That’s great, but it still won’t let me leave. No matter how good you got, you can’t forge lasting Ki effects. I know for certain that the earliest reports of that capability are from Opal cultivators.”

  Dario shrugged off his pack and knelt down, digging through it until he held up a Ki battery that glowed with golden light. “You’ve got plenty of artefacts and other crap in here, right? Help me set this up.”

  ***

  “Here’s dinner,” the guard said, placing a wooden tray with food on a cupboard by the door.

  “Thanks, Tony,” Matteo said absently, before looking up from his notebook. “Oh by the way, I’m about to get into a series of experiments here. I’ll probably pull an all-nighter. I’ll skip breakfast. Please ask nobody to bother me until tomorrow night, would you?”

  “Sure, I’ll pass it on.”

  A few moments after the guard closed the door, Dario became visible again, bent down behind the desk. He fiddled with the contraption they’d put together, parts of some smaller artefacts connecting to the Ki battery that was filled with light Ki. Once again, he used his own Ki to create a nearly-identical image of Matteo, sitting at his desk, directing the Ki to flow down and back through a receiver into the battery before it beamed back out again.

  There was a trail of golden light flowing from fake-Matteo’s feet into the receiver, but this was all hidden behind the desk and could not be seen from the door, nor the windows.

  “Yeah, this should hold for a good while. It loses a bit of energy every hour, but it’ll be nearly two days before it runs out.”

  “This is crazy,” Matteo said, shaking his head. “How did you even come up with this?”

  “I’ve seen some devices like this before, with a projector of some kind. Could play sound too. But this isn’t anything as fancy as that; this projector is just using an image I burnt into it. It’ll never show anything else than this. But as long as it has light Ki, it should keep flowing along these channels.”

  Dario grabbed his pack and put it back on. “Anyway. Shall we?”

  Matteo hesitated, walking around, peering at the image of himself from different angles, then shaking his head and muttering anxiously to himself. “This is a bad idea. A terrible idea. You always get me in trouble.”

  “You’re already in trouble, Matteo. I’m getting you out of it. Come on, let’s go.”

  Before Matteo could object further, Dario opened the door and marched outside, making himself invisible as he did so. He walked ahead of his brother, who was whispering curses under his breath, head snapping from left to right. They easily avoided any people thanks to Dario’s eyesight, until they got to the main street which led to the outside walls and gates.

  “Okay, you’re gonna have to move quickly, because I can only keep this up for a minute or two. Hold on top of the wall like we said, so I don’t lose line of sight.”

  Matteo gave a quick nod, breathing fast as he wrung his hands. Slowly, from the top of his head down to his feet, the air seemed to distort until he became practically invisible. Dario clenched his teeth against the budding headache as he gestured for Matteo to move, keeping his focus to move the effect along with him.

  He watched as his brother moved quietly to a corner of the wall, easily lifting himself up on top of it. Now that he wasn’t moving, it was easier to keep him hidden while using the same effect on himself as he moved across the street, but then he froze as a guard came around the corner. The man walked slowly along the stretch of dirt between the outside wall and the houses inside the compound, looking up along the wall.

  He must have heard something. Spotting a clear outline of footprints left by Matteo that ran straight towards the wall, Dario quickly sent out another series of strings of light Ki, weaving them along the ground to hide the prints.

  Each different color required a different bend to the ever flowing strands of light Ki and with three complex effects running at the same time, Dario was pushing against his limit. It felt like his brain was pounding against his skull like a prisoner trying to escape its cell.

  The guard grunted, scratching his head as he investigated the wall and the ground, moving closer to Dario as he did so. “Mmh. Must have been my imagination,” the man muttered as he walked on at the speed of a damn snail. With every second that passed, the pain sharpened.

  By the time the guard was right by him, it felt like nails were being driven into his head. Wet blood trickled down his nostrils. He felt a slight tickle as warning when a single drop of it fell from the tip of his nose. He twisted his foot just in time, catching it on the sole of his new shoe so that it wouldn’t make a sound.

  Another drop. He shifted his foot silently. It was like an icepick was being hammered into his brain. The effect on Matteo flickered, bringing a flash of cold panic, but the guard didn’t catch it. More blood dripped down on his foot.

  His hand went for his dagger, but Matteo caught his eye, giving a sharp shake of the head. He went for a paralytic grape instead, ready to shove it down the damn guard’s throat, but then the man finally turned and passed him.

  He released the effect on the ground, then hurried up the wall, throwing himself over without pausing. Matteo dropped down right after him and then they darted quickly down an alley. Dario let himself sink to the ground, breathing heavily as he wiped his bloody nose and mouth with a handkerchief.

  “Fuck, that was close.”

  It took a long moment to regain his composure, but soon enough, he was smiling again.

  “But we did it. Come on, brother, let’s head home.”