Devastation is routine existence when truth is at the line.

  Ennet’s abdomen wasn’t bleeding out, but that did not mean it wasn’t bleeding. She had used up all of her best lesios for healing she thought she could use if she wanted to do what she wanted to do.

  Her flight over the strait grabbing on air as if it held something. Something so intangible yet important, she kept grabbing it since the battle with Astref and Zanlo, and whosoever came to say ‘fascinating.’

  She gritted her teeth. Dried blood rested in a thin layer on her teeth.

  Grabbing the air she had forced to follow her from the Island of Monite over the strait was a harder act than any she had expected. “Gripping near to nothing only looks nice in stories,” her breath rattled through her clenched mouth.

  Her descent on the nearest shore began.

  At first the descent spot showed massive greenery with an entire city with its own wharf and harbor made separately. Both manmade.

  As she closed down the first forty kilometers, she witnessed or felt the city’s approach. It had a charm to itself.

  A call hidden within that talked of the changing history it had borne witness to. Currently as well it was going through it.

  The velvet irises donned tints of the emerald and aqua within, with spots that spoke of grey and white.

  “Rentilaco, huh?”

  She indeed was falling toward Rentilaco. How could someone miss the most important seafaring territory of the Confederation of Tarna if they ever went to it? They just can’t.

  This was Rentilaco’s importance for this nation it has been a part of for several decades. This was very different from Sevenren the territory. Rentilaco joined it as a whole, Sevenren was conquered one place at a time by the Confederation of Tarna.

  Ennet thought of which of the eight major cities is the one below her. From this up in the sky, nearly a hundred kilometres, it was not easy to tell.

  Yet one thing was clear to her, this city has lived through centuries with its inhabitants changing hands from one civilization to another without ever meeting the previous civilization that lived there. It was true for most of the cities of Rentilaco.

  Last sixty kilometres, she could start seeing the high jumps of the caestres of the strait. The ones that had tracked her.

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  She let out a satisfied breath. “At least those two Regdaians were not able to follow me fast enough.” She glanced back far into the distance with a lesio based in sight.

  There over nearly ninety kilometres away from her descent’s start a blood cloud was following after her. Slow, but persistent on getting to her.

  Ennet did not wish that battle ended in a mere loss of chase. She needed their rage. Their versions of truth to follow her.

  She wanted to encounter the truths of the caestre below too. She needed to as well. Ennet had expanded what her task in Tarna was supposed to be.

  Despite it all, one emotion or lack of was at her core. It only indicated of it having the capability of being filled by something.

  She splashed down. The last sixty kilometres vanished in the mere moment she chose to push down using her lesio of flight.

  Wave after wave rose and fell washing the beach. An uninhabited one at that. All as per a lesio of the category technique-centric.

  Huh-huff-huh-huff. Her head broke the surface of water. Air gulping down fast. Vessels that had not been damaged from the fall were damaged from resurfacing faster than she should have.

  Gritting through it all. She paddled. All the way to the beach.

  But before her feet could even touch wet sand under the seawater, a caestre opened its maw coming from above her. Its last jump had cleared over a kilometer within ten seconds.

  Without looking up or her face showing any tension, quietly she activated a lesio. A tenth of its activation with a word of her chosen activation spell, and a simple form of intent that merely grasped at the idea she needed for this.

  The caestre as it fell, and was about to close its mouth on her, found its teeth sublimated. There were no burns, after all that was not what the lesio does when she calls it.

  Water streaked over her lithe body. Tracing the fine unnoticeable lines in between the cells of her skin. The castre melted next. She rose within the melt. Water acting as the garb she had earned.

  Ennet did not wait for the caestre to completely melt away and walked into the brain matter of it through pure brute force. The water replaced by the sticky gooey material a ceastre’s body is made of.

  Walking over to the beach’s sand, her feet found a stone hidden under the seabed. It wasn’t too deep into it. Bending down she snuck her hand below the wet sand and found the stone. Just her hand touching it, told her of why she resonated with this place.

  “This is an unnamed graveyard.” Her eyes scanned for other graves below the seabed. There it was not even a metre away from the one she was standing on.

  Another caestre, similar in shape, a maw of numerous teeth with no body and no fins. Just pure maw with a closed end, descended down on her. Her lesio to sublime did not activate on this one.

  Ennet dodged its descent then kicked it. The kick’s effect? The caestre randomly found itself flying north and not towards its true target.

  Shaking her head in a quiet disappointment, “Why did I expect that a caestre here will have motives beyond what it already projects.”

  Thus, she chose to step away from a graveyard made by a bounty hunter on a whim.

  “Let’s see,” she grabbed on the air around her she still carried from Central Monite with a lesio, “what effect does this battle has on Rentilaco.”

  Within the hour she found the city, and found many ready for her. A truth she did not expect since her escape from Island of Monite had only happened after nearly a day of battle with Astref and Zanlo. Even those two were not too behind to not catch up to her in Rentilaco continuing the very battle of truths.