Crystalline crust flaked from the giant skull-beast, layer after brittle layer. Just when everyone thought it would burst the seal, chains surfaced all around the skull.

Two green flames floated in its hollow eyes. Black fire crawled around its crown like night wind licking bone.

Chloe felt the drop in her gut before her hands moved. She yanked the scrawny Bayat behind her and clicked her tongue. “Tch. I thought you were breaking out. Guess you’re just peacocking.”

She mouthed bravado, but a cold weight sat under her ribs. That Mystic Priestess had laid a double seal. To spend two seals meant the skull mattered—so much it scared her.

If a Mystic Priestess took it that seriously, the foe’s power spoke for itself, like a mountain’s shadow swallowing a plain.

Clang... clang...

Chains cinched the skull, their ends vanishing into nowhere like hooks cast into night. The skull thrashed, but iron bit deeper, unyielding as winter roots.

It heaved free of the crystal shell. Black flame licked the links, slow and patient as coals eating rope. Chloe saw it: hairline cracks spidered the iron.

At this pace, black fire would burn through. The chains would fail. The skull would slip the Mystic Priestess’s last seal like a serpent shedding skin.

Chloe met Shazo’s and Jast’s eyes. What move hit hardest without getting them killed?

The obvious play was brutal and clean: rush the skull and drop it. Jast just shook his head, eyes like wells that had seen too much.

As an Abyss Walker, he’d carved his path out of the Abyss of Trials. Where others heard noise, he tasted auras like iron in water.

“No,” Shazo said, tension taut as a bowstring. “I can’t place its tier, but my gut says if we charge, we just throw our lives away.”

Faces tightened. Options thinned like ice underfoot. Cracks in the chains widened, bright as scars in cold iron.

Heh-heh...

A cold laugh seeped from the skull, like wind through a graveyard gate.

“Useless. Save for that Mystic Priestess, you don’t even qualify to hurt me.”

Chloe’s thoughts flickered, then steadied like a lantern trimmed low. “Hey, skull. If I’m not wrong, you were the one riding her body just now, right?”

The skull went still. While silence pooled, Chloe pulled a green sheet from her pack. Fingers folded with calm, each crease a measured breath.

The skull finally owned it. As long as the Mystic Priestess didn’t wake, these brats had no comeback. It loved those faces—panic ripening like sweat before a storm.

It saw the panic in Shazo, in Jast, in Bayat. It didn’t see it on Chloe. She watched it like someone holding a trump card beneath silk.

“Wait… If we can’t handle the skull, why not leave this world and call for help?” Bayat’s small voice popped like a pebble in a pond.

“Problem is, we can’t get back,” Shazo said, words dry as ash. Then it hit him. The skull was waiting. So were they.

It waited for black flame to eat chains. They waited for the Academy to smell the rot and send a hand.

They stared across the quiet, breath for breath, like gamblers circling the last card. Would the chains fail first, or would backup arrive?

Footsteps cut the hush like knives through silk. Several figures slid from shadow, wrapped in black cloaks, mystery clinging to them like mist.

“Lord Arulsenthes, they’re stalling for reinforcements,” one said to the giant skull, bowing like a dog to its butcher. “Help might be near.”

“We’d rather kill you when our lord breaks free,” another said, drawing a pitch-black wand. Blue fire burned at its tip like a cold star.

Chloe snorted and lifted what she’d made: a bird folded from pale-green paper, light as a leaf cupped in her palm. “You talk like you can kill us.”

“Funny. Who hid the World Gate and then never dared show their faces?”

She’d felt it the moment they stepped out of the World Gate—a foul aura like oil in rain. She felt it again now, ringing off their cloaks.

She snapped her fingers. Shazo and Jast nodded. They moved together like thunder following lightning.

Bayat flinched at the sudden harmony, nerves scattering like startled sparrows.

“We’ve been a team longer than a day,” Chloe said, voice steady as tea steam in winter.

Shazo and Jast hit the blackcloaks hard. Steel and spell tangled. No one had a hand free to snipe at Bayat or Chloe.

“Since the little pests got herded over there, it’s our turn,” Chloe said. She pinched the pale-green bird between two fingers and faced the giant skull, calm as dawn.

“You’re right. Except for the sleeping Mystic Priestess, we don’t even have the right to scratch you. Which means you just told us what to do.”

Bayat still blinked, lost as a kitten in tall grass. “Uh… senior, what do we do?”

Pale-green light bloomed, soft as spring fog. The paper bird floated from her hand and shed countless green motes like fireflies lifting from reeds.

“How? He already told us,” Chloe said, eyes bright as wet ink. “We can’t get back to the Academy. We can’t harm him.”

“The only one who can is the Mystic Priestess lost to dreams. So we wake her.”

Bayat’s eyes lit like lamps catching. Right. Why swing at a mountain? Let a storm move it.

In the skull’s sockets, green fire jittered like trapped will-o’-wisps. Black flames gnawed the chains with a butcher’s patience.

“Naïve,” the skull said, voice flat as a tombstone. “I dragged her into the depths of dream. Your power can’t wake her.”

Chloe clapped once, a clear note in the smoke. “Thought so. Dragged into dream.”

“She felt the crisis. From within that dream, she eroded reality’s rules like roots cracking stone. Using her body as anchor, she laid a double seal.”

“If she’d been awake at the start, she had a dozen exits. She only got trapped because you pulled her under first.”

Silence answered, thick as moss. The skull’s quiet felt like consent.

Chloe flashed a V behind her back at Bayat, a quick sprig of victory.

“Your insight exceeds your years,” the skull said at last, voice rust on iron. “So how will you wake a Mystic Priestess lost in dream?”

It stayed calm, a glacier that couldn’t move yet couldn’t be moved. They couldn’t touch it. It couldn’t touch them—bound as it was.

“I can’t,” Chloe said, and her certainty was a blade that didn’t waver. “But you don’t know this.”

“In the reach of the Panworld Alliance, there’s a presence that’s everywhere.”

Shazo and Jast glanced over even as they fought, surprise sparking like flint. They’d never heard this either.

The paper bird grew brighter, green thickening to luminous moss. The motes multiplied, then the paper vanished like dew at sunrise.

Motes drifted together. Life-colored green gathered and took shape. Several tiny azure birds formed, feathers like sky over river stones.

The moment they appeared, the skull jerked, chains ringing like winter bells. It fought to tear free. Several links had snapped, but the rest held like old oaks.

The azure birds wheeled in the air, weaving a circle like a wreath of sky. They spun, and the air hummed like a plucked string.

A mesh of green gridlines bloomed inside the ring, delicate as dragonfly wings. Numbers rose within—0 to 9—junk data bobbing up like leaf-litter in a tide, then winking out.

“What… what is that?” Even Shazo, of a godborn house, stared as if seeing snow in summer. Jast, who’d walked the Abyss, looked just as lost. Bayat’s mouth only opened wider.

Chloe bowed to the ring of ghostly azure birds, every line of her posture a winter pine in a storm. Shazo knew this was the highest form of courtesy.

She came from a family that nodded at gods without bending. Yet here she bent, slow and solemn as moonrise.

“Lord Azure Bird, please.”