The night of their reconnaissance mission was foggy. The night before had been foggy as well. So had the night before that.

  Kai and Lilith discussed the difficulty of creating mist from saline water, and how fortunate it was that the river was mostly fresh; turning brackish only in patches. As they maneuvered the fog to conceal their approach, Lilith reported that the mist had been much easier to create on the second night, after following Kai’s suggestion to adjust the water temperature before phase manipulation.

  Nico, not a water elementalist, tuned out their hydro-inscription talk as he sat with them on the self-navigating boat Terri had provided. It was carrying them toward the west bank from the river instead of by land. Ahead, a steep cliff rose out of the mist, its upper edge dotted with the lights of a small settlement.

  Lilith noticed his attention and filled in the details. “It’s housing for the people Aster has working the rift.”

  “From the Forged?” Nico asked.

  “No. Virids from here.” Her fronds shifted as she added, “Arcanites wouldn’t accept those working conditions; they’re stationed in the government quarter.”

  The boat kept its course along the river. Between Caleb’s arrival and tonight’s approach, they had spent over sixty hours demonstrating, to anyone inclined to notice, that nothing they were doing was urgent.

  The 60+ hours leading up to this rift had resulted in a lot of… shopping. Lilith had damned him by leading them to the alchemic workshop hub. He had managed to resist going back to the rift market for more manasteel because of a lingering fear of recreating a market date with the Sage. The hub where Terri worked was built too narrowly for Arcanites to navigate comfortably. The inscriptionists there were more eager to talk shop than make sales, so of course Nico bought a bunch of stuff.

  Whether any of it would be useful would be determined back in Lumere— debuting unfamiliar equipment on an active mission would be wild.

  There hadn’t been time to test anything properly in the past sixty hours anyway. He had a booked schedule of being present in the Virid quarter: eating near windows, standing around in plazas, continuing to be a great diplomat with absolutely no interest in the southern border whatsoever.

  Kai had been doing the same. He stayed very present in the office, organizing the data needed to finish up reports on the mana station rifts, as he was politely told to do. Quite a few personal items had been recovered in that area, so he kept busy trying to determine how long they’d been trapped inside the distortion based on mana-decay data.

  Unfortunately that data was largely unreliable, sourced from the mana survey reports signed off by Aster’s familiars over the decades.

  Terri’s provided mana detection device vibrated, signaling other devices within range and displayed their positions on its radar.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED ||

  [ Mana Circuitry (A) | "glyph keyboard"]

  Electrified glyphs floated into place over the detected devices as indicated, each one snapping into alignment with the existing inscriptions. As Nico fed mana through them, the glyphs sparked against the circuits, forcing the systems to misread their own outputs. The devices stuttered, cycling through error states before dropping into automatic resets. Their safeguards engaged just before the overloads could blow the fuses.

  The water gave way to a small mud bank that turned into slick and uneven stone. The stone rose sharply from there, becoming the sheer face of the cliff.

  || Skill Activated || [ Ember (C) | " fire starter" ]

  He held the gold flame on his finger, pressing it to flicker against the rock until the mana sank into it.

  The cliffside rippled outward from the point of contact, stone warping in slow waves as it lost its solidity. The illusion of natural rock peeled back, revealing a broad, deep crater excavated clean into the cliff face.

  It wasn’t a complicated rift—injecting fire mana to enter—but it was an unlikely affinity to have amongst the Ori and Viridfolk of Tellur’s wetlands.

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  Water had flooded where the bank had eroded away, leaving only the narrow path of stone along its perimeter where he stood. The trademark smell of ozone stank at an elevated level from just the entrance.

  || SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ||

  [Target: #######]

  [Reward: #######]

  His ears flopped to the side as he stared at the notification. Everything in Tellur was going to be new to him, apparently.

  Lilith waved him over to wade through the cave water, which Nico did not love. He dipped a paw in anyways. The water’s warmth surprised him enough to remember Terri’s comment about the rift dumping manasolids, to his immediate regret.

  Lilith coughed and motioned instead toward the boat she pulled in after the bank flooded. Oh. She had also equipped a gas mask Terri provided, worried about them breathing in mana particulates, his and Kai’s shaped to accommodate lycanthropy if they needed.

  Also oh. He pulled it from his inventory and equipped it too.

  They sailed deeper into the cave, Kai guiding the boat with his water affinity to avoid the sound of a motor now that they were enclosed. The temperature continued to rise as they moved forward, until they reached a dead end: another steep wall of stone, with a dim light source glowing near its top. They had been sailing toward it in the dark by the way; that was Kai’s thing.

  Lilith pressed both hands to the stone. Green mana zigzagged into the surface, carving out a staircase for them to climb.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED ||

  [ Lycanthropy ]

  Gold mana shone from his feet as he hopped onto a step.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED || [ Foxfire wisps (A) | [3/7] |"lil guys" ]

  For a second, Nico felt petty enough to not conjure one for Kai at all, but quelled the desire. Three orbs with little fox ears came into being and wiggled their tails eagerly to accompany the trio at their ankles.

  During their ascent, it occurred to Nico that Kai also had a fire affinity. The wisp designated to Kai suspiciously drifted more toward Lilith.

  As they neared the glow overhead, Lilith pressed her hands back into the stone. The rock shook and rolled outward beneath her palms, pushing itself into a flat landing pad directly below the platform. She drew a compact device from her inventory and split it into two clean halves, setting one near the source of light above. The other half unfolded in her hand, projecting a 360 view of whatever its counterpart was seeing as it crawled forward into the unseen space.

  With no people in sight, they walked toward the glow at the opposite edge of the walltop and looked out over the rift below. The space opened into a single cavernous hollow, enclosed on all sides by steep stone walls like the one they had just climbed. One wall had a tunnel excavated through it, presumably how the miners entered. It was notably short.

  Across the floor sat rows of inert riftborn. Judging by their form, they seemed to be stone golems, surrounded by stacked ore. Industrial components engraved with inscriptions were bolted onto their frames, shaped after mining equipment, with several designs clearly built to accommodate a seated operator. The inscriptions were dormant, though the exposed wiring showed they had been fitted to be powered externally by mana batteries or generators.

  Nico stepped forward and peered over the edge. Braced against the cliff wall below them rested the Core Guardian, wrapped in thick twists of black mana that anchored into the stone. Mangrove roots formed of bog ore and iron. Its branches had been forced into a rigid frame fused to the cliff, arranged solely to preserve the core at its center—contained within a cage-like assembly that radiated constant heat. Tracks had been laid into the cavern floor, guiding material toward nearby processing apparatuses. Thick pipes ran from the guardian’s body into the surrounding rock, venting heat and runoff away from the chamber.

  " Looks like we’re the only ones working at 3am, " Lilith said with a joyless laugh.

  “The golems work on a 9-5?” Nico asked.

  “More or less.” Her fronds bristled as she carved a staircase down the cliff face toward the guardian. “They’re built for human operators. Apparently, tossing bog ore into the core makes the cleanest manasteel.”

  Nico’s ears tipped forward as he glanced at the guardian beneath them again. “That… doesn’t sound true.”

  Lilith scoffed in short. “No shit.”

  Where the golems had visible wiring for external power, the refinement systems had no such connections, nothing sustaining them except the core itself.

  Kai was already descending. “They’ll say anything to maintain a rift.” His skills activated, aimed straight at the core.

  ***

  Mangrove roots peeled away, one after another, coaxed aside by Lilith’s Rootweave.

  Reality came back with an intact shore, somewhat preserved from erosion by a speckling of blighted vegetation. It was a nice surprise to see it still existed to a degree, but it also blocked the boat’s return to the river.

  Water displaced around the hull as earth shifted and the roots reshaped themselves into a narrow pathway, then thickened again behind them. Some of the detectors Nico had shorted earlier were blatantly incapacitated now, tangled in the mangrove roots.

  Kai and Lilith brought in a low veil of fog to slip into as they made their way across the river.

  The excavated foundry no longer hid itself in the cliff face. Its carved chambers and embedded tracks were now permanent features of the reality layer. By morning, the first shift would walk into the chambers and find them exactly as they had left them—except without a core at the center.

  The fog thinned as they reached the far bank, but the lights of the town across the river couldn’t be seen.