The room falls silent, everyone staring at Vanessa in disbelief. Julian is the first to speak up, worriedly glancing at his father who was still frozen on his chair inside that veil of white light.
- "Like, gone gone?" He whispers.
- "I met up with her inside our mind, and she just told me she'd be right back before jumping in that… dark hole. I can't feel her presence anymore…" Vanessa replies.
- "Hm…" Julian's ears lightly twitch. "I think she's still there? I can kind of feel her soul within you still."
- "You scared me…" Beatrice breathes a sigh of relief, but she suddenly turns to stare at the wall on their left. It featured the other door in the room, most likely leading to the rest of the prison complex. A few black sparks were erupting from the bricks, forming a large, irregular ring. She also notices that exact same phenomenon occurring around the door they first used to get into the room. "Oh no."
- "What is it?" Julian turns his attention to the wall. "Ah. That's weird, what's going on?..."
- "The prison's dimensional barriers have been broken…" Agnes mutters as her ravens leave her side and fly towards the door to unlock it. "We need to get in touch with the Third Branch, or the facility isn't the only thing that's at risk. The whole neighborhood might be done for."
- "What?! Why?"
- "Void Beasts. They're the-"
- "-things that live in the gap between realms…" Beatrice completes, her eyes widening in horror. "Get away from the portals!!"
Before anyone has the time to process what she said, the second ring of black sparks suddenly stabilizes, becoming a perfect circle of pure darkness. A dark purple dragon-like claw large enough to hold a person emerges from it and reaches forward. It effortlessly crushes Agnes' ravens as it grasps at the air. The latter loudly gasps, like she was just punched in the stomach.
- "Holy shit!" Julian jumps back, pulling Beatrice away by the back of her dress, and they land on the table. He takes out a concealed dagger from his hoodie, but doesn't move an inch after that. He was staring at the claw in disbelief. "I don't think I can scratch whatever's behind that… portal thing."
- "We got lucky that it sensed the birds first." Beatrice comments. "They target stuff with a lot of magical energy, so their next target could be elves like you, your dad, or…" She slowly pans over to the panicked girl staring at the claw. "…This is bad."
As if it was punctuating her sentence, the giant claw reaches further to seize Vanessa, revealing it was attached to a long feathered arm that was covered in a tar-like substance.
- "Agnes!" Julian shouts, extending his hand towards the arm. It suddenly stops dead in its tracks, trapped by a layer of solid air. Julian's hand immediately starts violently trembling under the strain the spell was exerting on his magic.
- "On it!" Agnes shouts back as her hands emit a powerful white glow.
The light forms into a flock of large eagles that rush towards Agnes, Julian, Beatrice, Vanessa and Regulus, grabbing them by their clothes and lifting them off the ground. Agnes' eyes dart around the room, assessing the situation in a split second. The exit door was still blocked by the unidentified creature reaching through the portal. The second portal behind them had yet to open. If it did, the other exit to the room would also be blocked, and they would be stuck in this room fighting off two creatures.
- "Razor sparrows!" She yells, pointing at the second door.
Five of her sparrows with knife-like wings manifest and fly into the door, elegantly slashing through the wood and iron until it is reduced to evenly cut rectangles on the floor. The eagles then carry everyone through the door, and Julian's spell finally reaches its limits. The moment they all land in the giant stone brick hallway on the other side, the giant arm rushes forward and crashes into the wall, narrowly missing Agnes who was the last to exit the room. The claw begins violently lashing at the wall, which slowly starts to form large cracks as it makes progress.
- "Agnes, are there any other exi-" Julian starts, but his words die in his throat as he notices what was happening in the hallway.
It was wide enough to fit a two story house, and its floor was made of a gray-white marble. There were doors similar to the one they just exited from lined up on their side of the wall, each of them having a sign reading "Parlor N° " with a different number next to it. Most importantly, thousands of black sparks were flying around the corridor as dozens of portals were opening. Out of the smaller ones, humanoid figures emerge, cloaked in liquid-like shadows and covered in long tendrils that seemed to be reaching towards him despite the distance separating them. When he looks at their face, a sense of dread immediately starts clouding his mind, and he stays completely still, as if he was being hypnotized. Beatrice climbs on his shoulders and slaps him on both cheeks.
- "Don't look at them or you'll go crazy!" She yells before turning to Agnes.
- "...Right." Julian quickly shakes his head, coming back to his senses. "Agnes, what do we do? There's no way we can fight off all of them"
- "We need to get to an open space first. I think the courtyard will be fine." Agnes replies, staring at the ground to avoid looking at the increasing amount of monsters.
- "So we need to break through all that?... We have three non combatants!"
- "I don't think we have a choice!"
- "Uh…" Vanessa chimes in. "I think I can try to help?..."
- "Right, if you still have Nyx's magic and her insane output we might have a shot..." Julian replies. "But you don't sound that confident, so maybe you shouldn't… Agnes can probably figure something out."
- "Oh you think I can't do it? That I'm worse than her? Is that it?"
- "What? I never said that! Her magic is just too dangerous to-"
- "Ha!" Vanessa interrupts, raising her left hand towards the monsters closest to them.
A ray of light erupts from each of her fingertips, constantly shifting between white, yellow and purple colors. As they combine in her palm to form an unstable star shining all colors of the rainbow, the two eagles holding onto her dress let go to fly away, and Julian's ears violently twitch.
- "By Solomon… I thought you'd be more reasonable, but you're even worse than Nyx!" He shouts, raising both his hands to create a barrier between her and the rest of the group as she releases her spell.
The star collapses into a supernova. It explodes forward with such violence that Vanessa is sent flying back above the group, landing a few meters behind them. The wave of plasma ravages the corridor. The monsters are incinerated. The portals, annihilated. The ground and walls give a notable resistance, their protective enchantments coating them in a dense layer of magical energy, but they eventually give in and are melted into nothingness. The eagles that flew away are still hit by the shockwave, and are instantly crushed against a wall. Agnes puts a hand on her forehead, groaning in pain as a stream of blood trickles from her nose. Julian's barrier shatters, but he keeps layering more walls behind it to absorb the force of the spell's recoil.
It finally dies down after the fourth wall he conjured, and they all stare at the desolate scenery for a few seconds when the light and smoke settle down.
The walls of the hallway were now nothing more than puddles of burning magma flowing outside, and the floor had been completely destroyed, revealing another, similar corridor under it. The destruction of the far wall revealed a giant, circular open area on the other side. A dark blue sky was visible above it, and its floor was primarily made of sand and stone slabs on the other side. It was surrounded by the giant building they were in, a twenty floor high circular fortress made of black stone bricks. Julian turns towards Vanessa, and sees the humanoid monsters remaining on the other side of the corridor silently floating in her direction while giant arms coming out of some of the portals reach towards her. She was completely paralyzed, staring into their many faces while her charred left hand kept creating disorganized rays of light.
- "Dammit!" Julian exclaims as black sparks already start reappearing in the area destroyed by Vanessa. "Agnes, take everyone to the courtyard, I'll get her!"
Agnes nods, the eagles lifting everyone but him in the air, and they fly through the giant hole in the prison's wall. Julian rushes towards her and lifts her off the ground before running away, struggling to carry her in his arms.
- "What's wrong with you?! You could've killed us all!" He yells.
- "I… I'm sorry, I got a little too excited… I didn't think her magic would be so hard to control…" Vanessa mumbles.
- "Excited?! This isn't a game!" He drops down, sliding on the ground with her to narrowly dodge a giant shadowy human-like arm covered in dark blisters that just came out of a portal adjacent to them.
- "Hey for my defense, last time I checked Nyx wasn't this stron- Ow!" She grits her teeth in pain as her blackened left hand hits Julian's leg, and the latter glances at it along with the numerous rays of light illuminating her wounds.
- "Or maybe she's just holding back to avoid burning your body to a crisp! Somehow you're doing even more damage to yourself than her!"
- "Hey, that's not-"
- "Don't bite your tongue!"
Julian jumps out from the hole leading to the courtyard, and starts sliding down towards it on an invisible slope, standing on it like a surfer on his board. He spots Agnes standing in the center of the courtyard with everyone else, along with a few prison guards in Arcane Guard uniforms and inmates in yellow jump suits. A few motionless monsters were lying on the sand around them, and Agnes' giant harpy eagle was busy tearing a larger one to shreds with its talons. He jumps from his slope and gracefully lands next to them, unceremoniously dropping Vanessa on the sand.
- "How's the situation?" Julian asks, catching his breath and glancing at Regulus who was still frozen in a veil of white light.
- "Still nothing." Agnes replies, looking at the guards and inmates around them. "Apparently the director of the Second Branch managed to warp here and is fixing the dimensional barriers as we speak."
- "Okay, we just gotta hold out until then…" He points his thumb towards Vanessa, who was holding her charred hand with tears in her eyes. "I can't believe I'm saying this but Nyx couldn't come back any sooner."
- "I was just trying to help…" Vanessa whispers.
- "Yeah, help us on our way to the underworld. Pull a stunt like that again and I'm sending you there myself."
- "Was it that bad? I-"
- "You think Beatrice could've survived that? Maybe Agnes could've, or even me. But if I wasn't there, you would've killed a child with your bullshit. If you can't see that, then even Nyx is more responsible than you are."
- "Julian, stop being mean." Beatrice cuts as Vanessa stares down at the sand under her, ashamed. "It's not her fault she can't control all of Nyx's magic. And we all got stronger too, so it makes it worse."
- "...You know, it's weird you know so much about things. Like, first your magic, then the Void Beasts, and now you're acting like you understand how magic works."
- "That's because I talked to people who know things! And I know more than you now." She smugly replies. "I don't have anything else to do with my time anyways."
- "Uh… sorry, that was probably rude."
- "Very!"
Regulus suddenly starts convulsing, and Vanessa freezes up as the white light that was coating him transfers to her. She then closes her eyes and jumps back up on her feet with a wide grin. When she reopens her eyes, the large glowing cross shaped stars are back in her irises.
- "Alright I'm done!" Nyx triumphantly declares, reaching her right hand towards Regulus. The cosmic essence in his eyes flows out of them and into her palm, concentrating and congregating into a sphere. She slightly frowns at the sight of the charred skin on her left hand. "Whoa my hand hurts. I hope Vanessa isn't gonna be mad, I didn't do anything this time!"
- "Nyx!" Beatrice exclaims, running to hug her.
- "That's me!" She hugs her back, and when they separate Nyx turns towards Julian. "Your father will be okay!"
- "What did you do?..." Julian asks, staring at Regulus who was now just lying on the floor, unconscious.
- "Wait, did she just cure a Night Touched?..." Agnes whispers, her eyes open wide. "That's impossible…"
The guards and inmates around them whisper among themselves, saying things like "Wait, actually? Damn!", "This is revolutionary…", or "Wait, does that mean my brother can come back?! I knew it was worth keeping him alive all this time!"
- "I did what I had to!" Nyx replies, before suddenly dropping her smile. "Where is the exit? I tried calling him but he won't answer me so I'll go find him myself."
- "What are you talking about?... Talk clearly for once!" Julian urges.
- "I think it's time I asked Solomon a few questions." Nyx's eyes shift to stare at the small marble of cosmic energy in her hand. "I don't think I'll have time to play human much longer if I don't do something about this soon."