When Riven was confronted by Nory the Spectre, another scream tried to rip free but the box dropping on his head stuffed it back into his mouth. Chasm, it was so heavy. What did they put in there, steel bricks? His head rebelled in agony, the workshop wavering like the ship’s deck caught in a stop. Nory was unbothered. The falling boxes passed through his rather physical-looking body, and he stepped closer.

Riven stumbled back, tripping on a fallen box and falling flat on his arse. One more pain to add on top of everything. “What do you want?”

“Why were you spying on us boy?” Nory took note of his clothing. Took note of his Sept gun, and the bulging pocket that held the Sept crystal. What was it Deathless preternaturally knowing he had the thing? “You look like some rich kid from Norreston or something.”

“You’re not… wrong.”

“What you got in your pocket there, huh?” Nory reached out a hand as if Riven was just going to hand it over without him even specifically asking for it.

“Just a little souvenir.”

“Give it to me, boy.”

Riven swallowed. With trembling hands, he pulled out the dead Sept crystal, its darkness swirling as though it had come alive at the presence of a Deathless. He hesitated for a few hammering heartbeats that seemed to be pounding right in his ears, then handed it over. The crystal wasn’t worth his life. There was no point fighting over it. Besides, it served well as a distraction.

As soon as Nory’s eyes fell to it, Riven jumped up and rushed away pell-mell towards the exit. He had to get out here, now, while he still had the chance and the life.

A violent scream halted his progress, ripping through the area, tearing the air and shattering the glasses, making the very floor tremble. Riven fell to the ground, clutching his ears and adding his own shriek to the cacophony. He breathed, or tried to, but the air refused to be pulled into his lungs. What in the world was happening?

Riven forced his eyes open to find out. Nory was floating in the air, high in the air, one hand clutching the crystal and his body bent backwards at the middle. He was the one screaming, and he was the one changing too. Right before Riven, his body grew fainter, the ghostly outline growing sharper and brighter. His clothes and hair flapped around like in an invisible gale.

All of a sudden he stopped. He dropped the crystal, which clinked but didn’t shatter. Nory floated, frozen in place.

“Impossible.”

Riven pulled himself to an upright position, watching Vrey float down straight from the second floor to an assembly without using the stairs like a civilized person. For a ghost, he looked quite frightened, eyes wide, jaw working like he couldn’t formulate what to say.

Nory unfroze at his voice. “You came. Though you’d be a coward and stay back. Guess I was wrong.”

“How did you turn into a Phantom—”

Vrey didn’t get to finish the sentence. Nory gestured and Vrey froze, his form twisting in upon himself, his outline warping and cracking. He screamed. The very air was twisting around him, and Riven was having trouble breathing again.

Then Vrey snapped out his arm. Nory flew back, colliding hard with the walls. Bricks, plaster, glass, and metal pipes broke, and as Vrey solidified into his normal state, he thrust his arms forward again. All the debris coalesced in onto Nory, forming an impenetrable cocoon. And it grew smaller, compressing tighter and tighter.

The whole refinery was trembling now. Pipes were bending and snapping off at the joints, broken plaster raining down like pieces of dead Sept. Riven crawled forward. Let the arguing Phantoms fight it out. He’d grab the crystal and then complete his tactical retreat, and he could figure what in the Chasm the crystal had done later. When he was safe.

He reached it. The crystal looked no different from before, the darkness within it frozen solid. Riven pocketed it, intending to get back, but the cocoon shutting in Nory exploded.

Bricks, plaster, and metal pipe bits shot out everywhere. The shockwave thrummed through the entire building. Boxes and carts flew everywhere like they were caught in a cyclone. Cracks ran along the walls ceiling, and the floor, all the windows shattered, the assembly lines ripped off and flew up, writhing like snakes, pipes splintered and rained down along with the water they carried. Riven was pressed flat to the quaking ground. He curled in on himself, protecting his head from the falling debris, shivering and jumping as the water struck him with a hundred thousand minuscule droplets.

“Riven!”

Viriya’s shout made him look up. The two Phantoms were staring at each other ignoring him, Viriya, and the refinery falling apart all around them. She jumped down from the second floor’s platform and landed on a broken assembly line. Her gun was out, pointed straight at Vrey. He turned to face her.

Now was the chance. Riven pulled himself up and forced his legs to cooperate. He needed safety and staying in one place was the least safe thing he could do. A shot rang out, and he froze, his head reluctantly pulled towards the noise.

Viriya had fired her gun, and a hole oozed Sept from Vrey’s shoulder. She shot at him again but this time the glowing Sept bullet froze a handsbreadth from Vrey’s face. His gleaming eyes regarded it with undisguised contempt. A lazy blink, and it shot back the way it had come, straight at Viriya. But it didn’t hit her. The dark green star was back in her hand, shining so bright it dyed the whole workshop an arboreal green. The bullet reversed direction once more and blasted straight into the Phantom’s head. Vrey fell back, landing on the floor soft as a feather.

He wasn’t dead though. They didn’t call his ilk Deathless for nothing.

Vrey waved his arms, and the fallen and still-falling debris cannoned towards Viriya, pipes, bricks, chunks of the broken floor, walls, and ceiling all flying straight at her as though she was a lodestone.

None of it hit her. Riven gawked. Viriya was an artist. There was no other word for it. She weaved between the charging debris like an acrobat, dodging most with the grace of a dancer. The few she didn’t she struck with her green star with a fencer’s skill, and they immediately reversed momentum to shoot at Vrey. They hit him too. Despite him being a ghost, they thumped into his chest and threw him back, pinning him to the ground.

Viriya aimed her gun at the Phantom again, firing a few more rounds before the magazine became empty. But Vrey had regained control of the debris and he held them out in front with whatever power Phantoms were capable of, using them as a shield.

The glowing Sept bullets hit the floating debris and stuck there. Viriya stood frozen, one hand still holding her star, the other gripping her gun tight. Riven eyes widened. She couldn’t reload with one hand, and she couldn’t drop her star in fear of being pummelled by the debris. A stalemate. They were both stuck.

Riven pulled out his own gun, hands trembling. The Chasm was he doing? He needed to get his arse out of here, needed to get himself to safety before he torn apart by whatever that Phantom decided to throw at him. No. No. This was why he’d come along, this was the opportunity he’d been hunting for. A chance to do something real.

He held the rectangular stock—slanted at an angle from the barrel instead of coming straight down—as tight as he could. No one cared if he was shooting someone in the back. He pulled the toggle back then assumed the standard shooting position, one hand holding the gun and resting in the palm of the other. Levelling the tiny iron-sights with his eyes, Riven pointed it at the back of Vrey’s head. All within a rapid heartbeats.

Survival. That’s what mattered. No one cared if he shot someone in the back or not like a cowardly scoundrel.

Grimacing, Riven fired. The shot was loud, and he wasn’t prepared for the recoil, eyes riveted to the shell flying off the top of the gun. Then he saw Vrey falling, floating rather, to the ground with a hole in his head.

Viriya locked eyes with him for the briefest of moments. Then her star vanished. She began reloading her gun.

Riven got his shaking arms under control and pointed the gun at Vrey, but the Phantom was already back up. What in the world was going to keep that thing down? Riven froze. Oh shit. He was caught, and unlike Viriya, he had no star to defend himself with. He had nothing at all.

The Phantom gestured, rage twisting his features and making his outline sawtooth jagged. No surprise when the debris came flying at Riven, pipes, glass, rocks, even pieces of the assembly line all charging in faster than he could think. He was done for now. Even as they hurtled through the air at him, even as he started to scream in fear and anger and who knew what else, something snapped. In a minuscule fraction of a second, an immense pressure reared within him, blanking out the outside world as Riven gasped. He jerked as he was about to be impaled by a broken pipe.

And the world jerked to protect him.

An explosion of gold made Riven fall back on his arse on again, the dust and shrapnel flying everywhere forcing him to close his eyes. He opened them back up once he was no longer being pelted by tiny bits of rubble and plaster.

What in the eternal Chasm had happened? The ground had risen, the floor spiralling out like an insane, shimmering-golden snake to form a whirling shield in front of him. A pipe jutted out of it like a hand breaking out of a grave, and the centre was ruined and broken, shattered pieces of the floor mixed up with parts of the ceiling and the assembly. Riven gasped. That must have been that little explosion—everything Vrey had thrown had collided with this shield of Riven’s.

“This night couldn’t get any more insane,” Vrey muttered. “First another Phantom, now this sudden Essentier?”

He growled in frustration, then raised his hands high. The workshop rose in greeting. All the broken debris, so far the only casualties of the fight, twirled around him faster and faster as though a cyclone had landed in their midst.

“Hey!” Viriya had somehow climbed to the top of a teetering stack of boxes. The spot where she’d been standing glowed a virulent green like a star was growing on the floor, and the Phantom and his tornado was between the glowing spot and the tower of boxes. Riven made to shoot again, but he caught Viriya’s warning glance. Not yet. He nodded in acknowledgement.

Viriya touched her right foot her star, tiny glows lighting up at the tips of her boot. Then she fired her gun, Vrey blocking the bullet with more debris. She fired again and again, aiming at different areas until she must have emptied her magazine again, too fast for Vrey to respond by throwing the debris back at her. Riven frowned. Sure, tell him to hold back while she wasted her rounds, why not?

But any vocal protest he was about to make died as his jaw dropped. Viriya had jumped. Most of the debris caught in Vrey’s in twister had coagulated into his shield against Viriya’s gun, and she shot towards them feet first. With next to no trouble at all, Viriya burst through feet first, and punched the Phantom with her star.

The hit sent him flying through the wall of his rubble tornado, and he crashed into the floor right on the green star. Green light arced all over him, chaining him to the cracked ground.

“What have you done to me?” Vrey asked. He tried to rise, but the green light grew dark and leashed him tighter.

“What were you and your little group planning to do?” Viriya asked back.

Vrey only answered with a growl, that turned into a loud screech. Riven slammed his hands over his ears as the whole workshop shook, more cracks threading through the walls and dirt raining down.

“Not one to answer, are you?” Viriya said. “Die then.”

She stomped hard on the ground with her glowing boot, and the little pinprick of green light disappeared completely. And sprung up everywhere else. Random bits of rubble, from broken debris and entire pipes too big for Riven to carry, to tiny shards of glass so small he wouldn’t have noticed if they’d stabbed him, all rose in the air. All glowing the same dark green. Riven took a step back as all the floating debris rammed into Vrey. Of course. Somehow, Viriya could transmit bits of her star to whatever she touched. That’s how brushing her feet and then kicking through the debris had infected so much else with her green, starry glow.

Despite the weight of it all, Vrey didn’t stay down. The walls shook, the air trembled, the assembly lines bent and twisted, and the Phantom of the refinery stood up, rage twisting his features. Riven had to fight with the urge to run as far as his feet could take him.

“You think you can kill a Deathless?” he shrieked. “You fu—”

“I said, die!”

Viriya threw her long-barrelled pistol from her free hand to the one that held the star, and the bright green glow enveloped it as she caught it. The illumination grew, and all Riven saw was deep, dark green everywhere, like the workshop had entered the depths of an emerald.

Before the Phantom could gesture again, Viriya fired. The bullet blazed in a line green and gold, and hit the Phantom with a burst of dappled sunlight. All the shaking and trembling stopped. Riven couldn’t have run even if his body had been screaming for him to do so.

Vrey was being shredded to bits.

The bullet tore through Vrey, the momentum carrying it towards the wall behind him when it petrified in its path like it had met an invisible barrier. Then it rebounded back. It bored through his neck this time, and repeated the motion. Over and over, the glowing bullet shot holes through Vrey like an enraged wasp, poking out an eye, blasting through his larynx, taking off fingers, popping his knee, bursting through the elbow. Even his screams were cut off. In breathless moments, he was riddled with holes, all oozing a soft glow and sewing tiny particles. Sept! Vrey was dissolving into particles of Sept that lost their lustre as soon as they lost of sight of the Phantom. The Sept died as they were freed from the Deathless.

Viriya switched her gun back to her regular shooting hand, closing her fist and crushing the glow. The star died, and with it died every green glow in the area. She approached the dying Deathless. Riven unfroze, and forced his legs to join her, the irony dancing in his head. Dying Deathless. Someone needed to get their naming credentials revoked, for Vrey was dying, no doubt about it.

“One last chance to answer.” Viriya’s eyes were colder than a dead star’s. “Who is the Deadmage you were talking about?”

Vrey was breaking apart, his skin crumbing to fading has and revealing an interior that glittered like Sept, but that died alongside him. That sharp, eerie outline of his was nowhere to be seen. He stared at her, then grinned. “Go to the Chasm, you Essentier bitch.”

She stomped on his face, and though it passed right through, at least his grin was obscured. Riven stared at the fading glimmer of his eyes, at the white turning through murky grey, to a black pinprick. A dot of darkness not dissimilar from the ones swirling in his dead Sept crystal.

“See, this is why I told you to stay put.” Viriya glared at him. A stray strand of hair had come loose, waving in front of her face like an antenna. “Do you love flirting with death?”

Riven glanced at his eyes, struck how much they appeared like the star she wielded. He smiled. “Do you hate being saved from dying?”

She grunted then looked at the wall that had broken, stacks of boxes lying everywhere with the rubble. Riven’s smile died. The other Phantom, the one he had helped create, had disappeared. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“But we need to investigate, don’t we?”

“Later. We’ve got as much as we can here, for now.”

Riven didn’t argue further. The whole workshop was a mess, assembly lines ripped apart, glass, pipes, and rubble littering the floor, water dripping from the ceiling. What a mess. Just like Riven himself, truth be told.

Viriya led the way out of the refinery and he traced his steps after her. There were too many questions tagging along with them, but at the moment, it was hard to care. Exhaustion lined his every sluggish movement and lazy thought, and all he needed now was rest. A good night’s sleep. A bath first, perhaps. Oh, and a good dinner couldn’t hurt. But despite all that, adrenaline still flooded every vessel, and the questions flickered just out of sight like ghosts that had decided to target him for haunting.

He sighed. Riven was alive, and that was all that mattered now.