There was no message when the stealthy attacker died. The Guide didn't give awards for fighting other humans; it was only monsters that awarded Wisps or Feats. Instead, the knowledge that the fight was definitely over came from Xin'ri's alarms, which no longer sensed the presence of attacker.

"He's dead." Xin'ri's words allowed Sophia to return to her normal shape, but Xin'ri wasn't done. "I can't believe you took out someone an upgrade above you on your own."

Sophia shook her head. Wasn't it obvious? "I wasn't alone. You let us know he was coming and approximately where he was. Dav actually located him, showed the rest of us where he was, let us communicate, and fed me mana. I'm pretty sure he did something at the end, too." Sophia frowned at her lover. He was supposed to tell her these things before he did them in a fight.

Dav grinned at her, clearly not regretting his choices at all. "Turns out I can overcharge one of your dragons. Only the eldritch one, unfortunately, but that's still something."

Sophia shook her head with a smile. She couldn't stay mad at him, and anyway he'd probably only thought of it during the fight. While they tried to test things out in advance, there were so many possibilities that they missed things. Sometimes those things should have been obvious. Sophia didn't think this was one of them; using Eldritch Overcharge on a summoned creature that wasn't his own summoned creature made sense but seemed easy to miss.

Not that Dav could exactly summon creatures anymore, but the spell did work on his Calls. That made the interaction all too easy to miss, especially if it didn't work on all summons.

"Right, so, anyway. Taika hid us from sight. Dav and Ci'an before the fight, the flight of dragons during the assault. He also helped against the enemy's hiding Ability; it worked on the mind as well as the world. Ci'an slowed him down and confused him a little; she says they're small abilities and common for Night Owls, but I think they had a pretty big impact." Sophia carefully skipped over Cliff's contribution; she hadn't mentioned him to Xin'ri and she didn't plan to, so she was going to have to leave him out.

She'd originally planned to have Cliff summon a bunch of different creatures, but when he mentioned he could summon a flight of dragon-echoes, it seemed like the obvious choice. They were agile, sturdy, and had relatively powerful varied attacks; better, they were affordable to summon as a group.

The flight was five fifty-pound dragons, each of which had to be a different Variant, and he couldn't summon it and the larger pony-sized echo at the same time. If he summoned fewer than five, he could fill in the missing dragons, but that was all. Since Sophia (and therefore Cliff) was now level five and could summon exactly five small dragons, Sophia had the feeling the number would go up in the future.

Sophia was particularly proud of the basic Echo. It turned out that her magical breath could be tuned to either simple force or a sort of magical goop that clung to a shield and dissipated it slowly. It wasn't really "breaking" the shield so much as it eroded it. The Eldritch variant could then shatter the weakened shield. Apparently it could do more than that against an unshielded person if Dav used Eldritch Overcharge on it.

The other Variants were more straightforward. The flaming Variant could spit fire or raise the heat in a small area, while the Winter variant did the opposite. Both could slow reaction times if they had time to work, but that didn't come into play in this fight and Sophia doubted it would often. She wasn't sure where the lightning Variant came from, unless it was from the fight with the Hungering Spark. It really only had one elemental attack, but that attack both burned and made muscles seize, so it was if anything more useful than the other two elemental dragons.

Sophia knew she was getting credit for Cliff's contribution, so Xin'ri was overestimating her contribution. She really hadn't done that much in the fight. Oh, she'd cast a few spells; Stun Spirit and Attractive Affix in particular came in helpful. She'd had several other spells in reserve, but by the time she actually cast Plush Bonds it was no longer really important. The man was so confused that she wasn't even sure he noticed that the reason he couldn't get out of the way was that he couldn't move nearly as easily as he should have been able to because feathers slowed down his every movement. She couldn't completely restrain him, but slowing him down was enough.

Sophia had to admit that Cliff's contribution really shone in that fight, but without everyone else to set him up, he wouldn't have been half as effective. On his own, Cliff wouldn't have been able to even find the man. She shook her head. "It really was a group effort. It took all of us working together to make it look easy; even then, it wouldn't have been so easy if he had any idea what we could do."

It was a good argument for keeping secrets away from your enemies. Sophia knew that had to be balanced; allies needed to know enough to plan. That wasn't likely to be a problem, though; Sophia was terrible at actually keeping secrets. She was pretty sure that she'd already spilled the important ones, at least to Ci'an.

Xin'ri snorted. "Stop talking yourself down, girl. Sure, maybe you only did the final blow during the fight, but without you there wouldn't have been a fight. You planned this out while I was out there laying all those alarms. Which, I should add, I wouldn't have been able to do without your summoned … what did you call it? A dragon?"

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"I had help," Sophia insisted. It was true, too; everyone offered what they could do and they all built a plan from that. Ci'an and Taika got to play to their own strengths while Dav and Sophia had to use secondary Abilities, but that was good practice. They couldn't take everything on just by hitting it harder with spells and Dav's sword; sometimes they had to be sneaky. That was Taika's specialty and Ci'an was pretty good at it too. Even Dav was better at it than Sophia was. "And yeah, they're dragons. In shape, at least; they're not real dragons, just echoes. Imitations."

"Are they common, where you're from?" Xin'ri sounded curious. "I've heard of a flying lizard before."

"Common?" Sophia blinked and tried to figure out how to answer that. "Depends on what you mean by common, I guess. There are probably a couple thousand on Earth. That's more than most planets, but the numbers are carefully limited to keep from overwhelming Earth."

Xin'ri tipped her head to the side. "Why do you call shards planets? I think that's what you mean?"

Sophia opened her mouth to declare that planets and shards weren't the same thing, then paused. They really weren't, but there were some similarities. Relatively few people lived in space; as far as Sophia knew, no one lived in the Broken Lands unless you were in a shard, but it was possible to move between them the same way she could move between worlds. She'd really need to be careful how she answered it. "Uh, shards are pieces of a planet. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happened, your planet was broken into shards when…"

"When the Broken Lord broke the Tower," Xin'ri finished, clearly following Sophia's words. "Then other planets are on the other side of the Mazegates. That makes some sense; they're supposed to be even more different from the Broken Lands than different shards are from each other. I'm not sure how that's possible; the Skylands are very different from the Far Desert, and both are different from Tamoanchan."

Sophia shook her head. She didn't know much about those places, but it didn't matter. "Any planet is a huge variety of things. I'm not sure they are more different, they're just bigger and have a lot of stuff."

She shivered. The room near the entrance was cold with the door open, but they couldn't close it and still look outside. The illusion that hid them from the man's perspective didn't block the wind at all. Sophia frowned and turned towards the outside. "We should get moving. We need to figure out who this was and if there are more of them. I wasn't expecting only one."

"I've already recalled Los'en," Taika added from his nest in Dav's backpack. "Which makes it naptime. Making a fake sky is tough."

Sophia nodded. That meant Taika had created the image of an early aurora in the sky. That was what they'd agreed on if they didn't need Los'en's help and everything went well. It was the least likely to be noticed by enemies if there were more out there. "Sleep well."

With that, Sophia stood and headed out to the body. They needed to find out who he was and what he was doing here. They probably wouldn't be lucky enough to be able to answer all of their questions, but maybe they could at least answer the important one: was he alone?

It took two hours to truly examine the dead man's gear. Even then, Los'en had to step in and show how to find some hidden pockets. Long before they got there, though, they knew a lot about the man. He was definitely a Templar; that was obvious from his sword, which had a jagged break where its tip had been snapped off, clearly intentionally. His sheath was made for the broken sword.

According to Los'en, that meant he was a Temple enforcer of some sort. Very few Templars carried swords of any sort; the ones that did were always broken in some manner and they almost always worked directly for the Hilt and the Temple.

They also found a broken sword badge and a tattoo on the body that reinforced who he was. This wasn't someone pretending to be a Templar. They hadn't thought he was, but it was clear that he wasn't even trying to hide who he was.

The first clue to his mission was when Los'en opened a hidden pocket and had to snatch his fingers away before they were burnt. Los'en snorted. "He had trace matchsticks. It doesn't look like he had many, but they were definitely keyed to me. He probably followed us from Izel; he wasn't here for Lan'ti after all."

Los'en sounded surprised. Sophia wasn't sure why; while they'd tentatively settled on the reason for the collapse having something to do with the complex and Lan'ti's expedition, someone following Los'en away from Izel was still on the list. When she asked, all Los'en could tell her was that he'd been sure they weren't followed, so he was shocked to be wrong.

Other than that, it was clear the Templar had a hideout somewhere, possibly with other people in it to support him. He was carrying the gear for a fight but not the tools and materials he'd need to stay alive in the wilderness. A cache somewhere was not a surprise, but they'd have to hunt for it.

That still left a number of things the man hadn't managed to use during the fight, from a holdout knife to a small group of magical bombs with different effects. It was quite a collection, but most of it wasn't very useful for Sophia or Dav. They had enough options that by the time they got down to throwing a glue-bomb, it would only be useful if they didn't have the mana to use their actual Abilities.

Ci'an, on the other hand, thought she could find uses for most of it. What she didn't want, Los'en collected. He didn't say what he was going to do with most of it, but he did mention that he was going to destroy both the sword and the Templar badge when he burned the Templar's body. He didn't want to leave something near the ruin that might lead more Templars to it.

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