Kyran had to have collapsed over a hundred tunnels by now.
In one, he had messed up the space so bad that it just collapsed. Another, he had used the Preta path to make a bit too many locusts. Another one, he had managed to slam an ant into a structural fault when he decided to grapple with it. His favorite by far had to be when he just planted runes everywhere that said explode.
It hadn't been just mindless destruction though. He had been attacking either intersections or pathways that had been leading to massive groups of ants, cutting off their ability to move.
Raven had gone ahead of him, stealthily trying to find the main node while he blew shit up. It worked for everybody. Except for the ants.
But they were on a time crunch now.
Which was weird. A mission of such importance would have been placed higher on the military's to-do list, meaning they shouldn't have waited for the situation to blow up in their faces to do something about it. Furthermore, it realistically shouldn't have been used as the premise for this year's AMT Finals. It was apparently a massive breach in security, yet it was being resolved by soldiers nothing more than children. Just a premade scenario would have sufficed. So why send children into a mission vital to the Empire's welfare without a controllable level of danger?
The two possible answers were that either the entire premise was a hoax that they had built up for a couple years to create an actual sense of urgency and realism(as that made soldiers show their truer reactions), which would mean that the danger was actually still controlled. Of course, Fire's addition was unforeseen, but since there had been no intervention other than making the Asura Squad do this solo, everything was still acting within acceptable parameters.
The second answer was that the true purpose of the Finals this year wasn't what it was made out to be. It wasn't made to stop the progression of the transmission, and was rather geared towards other purposes.
And finding the corpse of the very image of "hero" made him feel like those purposes were rather dangerous.
'Well, everything is, honestly', Kyran thought.
Kyran was sprinting as he thought, changing directions almost as fast as lightning, vaporizing anything in his path. He stumbled a bit, his low Aether reserves having a vital role in his fatigue, but he brushed it off, as it wasn't critical yet. He jumped out of a tunnel into a gaping pit almost a hundred meters wide. At the bottom, there was a fight going on, and it seemed to be intense.
He grinned and shot down.
He landed on a beanpole of an ant, and watched as all hell broke loose as the tornados of wind Aether he created stripped the fire out of their bodies and the flesh of their bones.
He dropped to the ground accompanied by the sound of falling skeletons, and nearly dropped as well. His Aether reserves were veritably massive, but he had been running hundreds of runes for over an hour, killed thousands of ants with reckless impunity, and suppressing Fire's power, because if it was let run amok, it would have burned the planet to ash.
As he was about to tilt over, a pair of soft, warm hands stopped his momentum and righted him up. His smile widened as he opened his eyes to the sight of Raven's grinning face.
She took a step back and tilted her head to the side, as if confused about something.
"Duck", she said, as a spear of fire passed by where her head was a second ago. She didn't even have to say it, since he had already seen the glint. It passed right over his head, since he ducked, and created an explosion on the ground behind him.
She turned around and waved her hand in the general direction of the attack, causing the ground to shift and roil, the smiling face of an earth Elemental jumping through the turmoil. The wave of earth smothered the flame of the ants, and suffocated them.
She dismissed the Elemental and once more turned to him. Kyran's Aether reserves had reached non-critical levels, but he wouldn't be throwing around anymore lightning storms.
"Have you found it?", he asked her.
"That's all you have to say?" She asked in return.
"Hello dear, how are you? Been eating properly? None of those ants hurt you, right? Have you found it?"
"Idiot. I have, actually. It should be just beyond that tunnel." She pointed at a tunnel around a hundred meters up. "Let's go."
Aether collected under her feet, forming a cushion of air, which grew wings and a tail. A stingray made of air. She quickly ascended towards the tunnel.
He just jumped.
His physical stamina was way more than its Aetheric counterpart was. He could run, jump, and fight for a long enough time that all of his current problems would have become memories.
Of course, new problems would just pop up anyways thanks to that bastard Murphy.
His jump didn't take him all that way, so he had to grab the wall and use it to propel himself upward.
Kyran grabbed ahold of the ledge and lifted himself over. When his boots hit the ground, a strange echo started ringing around him. When Raven jumped, the echo intensified, and then abruptly cut out.
They looked at each other in confusion, but kept walking forward, each step creating another echo, which grew stronger then cut, each and every time.
They ran forward until they reached a cavern that looked like all the others. Except it was empty apart from a pillar in the middle.
The conduit was a sword.
He could barely even look at it through the absolute aura of danger that radiated from it, a combination of sheer Aether emission and it's more.... abstract aspects.
The sword was around four feet long, with a blade so silver that it shined without light. It's design was that of a classic katana, with the blade and handle slightly longer than normal. It's guard was embellished with designs of miniature interlocking weapons, its pommel capped with small, gauntleted hands reaching out, and an ornament of a different card hanging from every one of them.
It was beautiful.
Kyran's heartbeat quickened, not from fear or admiration, but from something darker, something buried deep inside. The more he gazed, the more the katana seemed to belong to him, like it was calling to his very soul. His fingers twitched, and the world around him blurred, fading into the background as the overwhelming compulsion took hold. In that moment, he didn't care about consequences, didn't think about right or wrong—he just needed it. More than food, more than water, more than life.
And as Kyran's hand hovered closer to the blade, the urge to take what wasn't his, the thrill of possession, the rush of doing the forbidden, the fire that awakened when he had to fight with his life on the line, planning and manipulating to make sure he was on top, to make sure he won, washed over him, all at once.
He wanted this.
Needed it.
So he was going to take it.
Before he touched the pillar, a spear of fire nearly skewered his hand.
He jerked it away and jumped back to Raven's side. She most definitely noticed what just happened, but there was time for that later.
If he wanted that sword, he needed to take it.
Before that, he had to get rid of some annoyances first.