Chapter 48: The Fourth State of Matter Could Wait
We started by picking up Adam.
The girls and I retraced our way to his alley, Alice raised her hand, spoke the words, and the fog tore away above his head like the times before. The discussion that followed led nowhere, exactly as it had the time before.
This time, he concluded that we were envoys from the kingdom come to relieve him of his command for grave misconduct. He accepted the sanction with a dignity that almost commanded respect, assured us that he understood, that he bore us no ill will, and shed two or three tears over his family’s lost honor. When I explained that no one was relieving him of anything, he blinked, said "Ah, right," and left, his little wings beating cheerfully at his back.
Then the four of us headed for the northern front, where our paths split: him off to find Isaiah, us in search of somewhere quiet.
We eventually found it off to one side, a sort of large empty warehouse standing open, out of sight. Out of Lazaüs’s sight, above all — because if our theory held, it was vital that he see nothing coming.
And there we were, a few hours later.
Outside, the wave had begun to break against the walls. We could hear the din in the distance, muffled by the space between us and by the warehouse walls — the roar of the tide slamming into the stone, the shouts, the orders bellowed along the ramparts, and now and then an explosion that set the roof beams humming above our heads.
Soldiers were dying out there, a few streets away from us.
It should have done something to me, I suppose. But all those people would be alive again come the next loop, running down the same streets screaming the same words, and nothing we did today would change a single comma of it. I saw them a bit like NPCs in a game, in a way. So I left the noise outside, and I focused on the only problem that actually mattered.
Plasma.
The principle came down to three motions. I’d summon a sphere of water, not a big one — fist-sized, to start with. Seorin would wrap it at once in a shell of wind spinning on itself, a tight sheath that compressed the mass and kept it from scattering by so much as a millimeter. And Alice, inside it, would discharge everything she had.
Not a bolt. Everything. She’d empty her mana into that confined ball of water, again and again, her reserve refilling in a loop thanks to Parallel Mind as fast as she drained it, stacking discharge on discharge without ever stopping. The temperature climbed, and climbed, until the water was nothing like water anymore — the discharges tore its electrons away, the matter came apart, and what was left was no longer liquid, or vapor, or gas.
Plasma.
Right. Put like that, it sounded simple.
The first attempt blew out through the bottom: the shell held everywhere except where Seorin felt it least, and the whole charge escaped downward at once in a burst that ripped up the flagstones for three meters around.
The second lasted longer, until one of Alice’s discharges found a weak point on the flank and shot out horizontally across the warehouse. The bolt struck the far wall, gouged a blackened hole the size of a head, and left the three of us standing there looking at the hole.
"... It’s fine, there was no one behind it," Alice said.
The third sprayed us with warm water and steam.
"Your shell is too even," Alice told her after the fourth, leaning over her shoulder. "You’re holding it like a wall, all the way around, at the same strength everywhere. But the energy doesn’t push everywhere the same."
"Where does it push hardest?"
"Where I discharge. Follow my ignition points and reinforce there, and let it slacken elsewhere. It’s not a wall you need, it’s something that moves with what’s inside it."
Seorin stayed quiet a moment, chewing that over.
"So I shouldn’t try to contain it all equally. I have to follow."
"There you go~"
"And if I’m too slow?"
"It comes out where you aren’t." Alice shrugged. "Like the last four times."
Seorin let out a breath and set herself back into position.
And we’d start over.
Me, in the meantime, I didn’t have much to do. I’d summon water, it would blow up, I’d summon more, it would blow up again. Raise my hand. Make a ball appear. Watch it burst. Start over.
I was beginning to wonder whether my role in this plan came down to anything more than knowing how to make water appear.
By the thirtieth, I let out a full yawn, jaw unhinged, and caught Alice throwing me an amused look without breaking off her explanations.
"Bored, Kuro?"
"Not at all. It’s fascinating." I summoned the thirty-first. "The suspense is killing me."
Then came the moment it worked.
The ball of water contracted under the wind, Alice chained her discharges, the shell deformed around the ignition points instead of holding rigid — and what appeared inside looked like nothing I’d ever seen.
A blue-white light, so intense I had to look away, held in its sheath of air like a small sun someone had caught. It crackled, spun on itself, lit the whole warehouse in a cold white that threw our shadows across the walls. The heat coming off it dried my throat from three meters away.
It held for two seconds. Then Seorin let go, and the plasma scattered in a scorching gust that swept the dust off the floor.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"... We did it," Seorin breathed.
Except I could already see the next problem.
That ball was the size of a fist. Against the giant, I’d have to summon a mass of water on another scale entirely — something like a column, a lance the size of a building. And the more matter there was, the more energy there’d be to contain, the more the shell would have to be vast and precise at once. The miniature test had nothing to do with what we were about to attempt.
"We’re going to have to scale up," I said. "A lot."
"I know." Seorin wiped her forehead with the back of her sleeve. "Let’s go again."
So we went again.
From fist-sized, we moved to the size of a ball. It held. Then to the size of a barrel, and that one blew after a second, the shell unable to keep up with the energy across all that surface at once. We redid the barrel. It held two seconds, then three.
And at every step up, it was Seorin who paid. She said nothing, but I could see the sweat plastering strands of black hair to her temples, her breathing coming shorter between attempts, her hands trembling faintly when she raised them. Containing a mass like that wasn’t casting a spell — it was wrestling a beast bodily and keeping it from biting, while Alice poured boiling oil over it.
And even so, she started over. Every time. Without a word of complaint.
Alice, for her part, corrected, adjusted, explained — never impatient, never tired of it, which had nothing to do with her usual way of doing things.
And I caught myself watching her.
She was stunning like that. Really. Leaning toward Seorin, a strand of white hair falling across her cheek, brows slightly drawn, explaining for the tenth time how to feel the push of the energy before it gave. Invested in something. Invested in something other than me.
That never happened.
Well, I knew perfectly well why she was throwing herself into it, deep down. I’d promised her anything she wanted once we were out of this tower, and Alice wasn’t one to let a promise like that sit around. She wasn’t doing it for the city, or for the heroes, or even for Seorin. She was doing it so we’d be done.
But it didn’t change the fact that I found her magnificent.
She must have felt my eyes on her, because she lifted her head toward me.
Our gazes met. She tucked a strand behind her ear, an absent gesture, and her eyes lingered on my face — on the smile I hadn’t noticed I was wearing.
Her cheeks colored all at once.
And I watched her come toward me as if drawn, without even seeming to decide it, leaving Seorin and her wind behind her.
"Aaaahhh..." Her voice was low, almost plaintive. "I can’t take it anymore, Kuro. Since last time... my body is burning."
She threw herself at me.
Her arms locked behind my neck, her mouth found mine and crushed against it with a hunger that had nothing patient left in it. Her tongue forced my lips, sought mine, twined with it, and her whole body pressed against me full length, her curves molding to my lines, the heat of her skin coming through the fabric. She caught my hand, guided it against her, and closed it over her breast.
"There’s..." I pulled my mouth from hers, my breathing ragged. "There’s Seorin. Alice, settle down."
"She’s focused on her magic." She came right back, her lips brushing mine with every word. "She won’t look. I can’t hold back anymore — and I know you want it too."
I glanced over her shoulder.
Seorin had her back to us, perfectly focused on the wind she was calling around herself, both hands raised, motionless.
Except her ears were scarlet. And what I could see of her cheeks, in profile, was just as red.
But Alice didn’t give me the time.
Her tongue found mine again, more feverish still, and she rubbed against me in a slow movement that pulled a breath out of me. Her fingers slipped under the hem of my tunic, ran up my back, and I heard her breathing break against my mouth. The hand she’d guided hadn’t moved, and I could feel her heart hammering beneath it, her chest rising faster with every second.
"Kuro..." She bit my lip, gently. "Please."
The din of the battle in the distance, the warehouse, the mission, the giant — all of it narrowed down to that point of contact and the heat rising between us.
And I gave in.
Ah, screw it. Given the state Alice was in, the fourth state of matter could wait a bit.