I felt a trickle of water off to my right, though it was so faint it could have emanated from background humidity. That was no good. I needed more information.
“I’m about to try something,” I said. “Everyone hang tight for a second.”
“Do your thing,” Hagar said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Once more, I activated the medallion on my chest. The Borrowed Core technique stitched to the medallion burst to life and locked onto a familiar target: the rat I’d used to demonstrate my experiment to Hagar. The connection wavered for a moment, and a strange disturbance, like static on a telephone line, crackled between us. I pushed through the noise and put the next step of my plan into action.
I triggered the Army of a Thousand Eyes technique stitched into the band around the rat’s forearm. When I’d first learned the technique, it had been difficult to connect to more than a few rats. As I’d grown stronger, though, the number of allies I could add to the Army grew. Delamination had knocked me back several steps on that path.
The vessel, though, didn’t have that limitation. The rat’s core was solid, and the technique I’d scrivened onto its band was the advanced form I’d mastered. The technique, with the aid of my ally, pulled dozens upon dozens of rodents into my Army.
“Come to me,” I whispered.
Though the portal was invisible from our side, the rats found it immediately. Through our shared senses, I watched them scurry across the courtyard and plunge through the blue gateway. Their noses and ears twitched with confusion when they found themselves in utter darkness, and they wisely froze in place until their keen senses could tell them more about where they’d landed. Satisfied they hadn’t died, the rats fanned out in every direction.
The Army of a Thousand Eyes technique synthesized the senses of a hundred different rats and gave me a much clearer picture of the arena. The rats couldn’t see in the dark any better than I could. Their twitching whiskers, on the other hand, relayed an enormous amount of information about their surroundings. In a handful of minutes, I’d armed myself with a mental image of the arena.
“Everybody still all right?” Hagar called. “Something’s moving out there.”
“That’s me,” I said. “Here’s the deal.”
I quickly sketched out what I understood of our surroundings. We were in a circular chamber roughly fifty feet in diameter, with no exits that the rats could detect. Twisting chasms split the floor into irregular islands. The Army of a Thousand Eyes couldn’t tell me how deep those rifts were without sending a rat into one, and I wasn’t about to do that. My allies deserved better. The rats also found ten pillars scattered around the room. These were topped by strands of jinsei that had been woven into cages or baskets. The rats couldn’t get close enough to those to tell me what they contained, unfortunately.
The strangest features of the room were the clusters of elemental aspects scattered around in no discernible pattern. There were so many pockets of fire, earth, air, water, and metal aspects I was surprised I hadn’t sensed them earlier. The arena must have done something to mask them.
“That still doesn’t tell us what we’re supposed to do,” Clem said. “We can’t just stand here in the dark all day.”
“Eric,” I called out. “I’m sending you a guide. Follow it.”
“Uh, okay,” my friend shouted back. “How will I know—oh, there it is.”
I focused my thoughts on the rat I’d sent to Eric and instructed it to tug on the laces of his boot. Eric inched forward in response, and I repeated the pattern until my friend was standing before a bundle of fire aspects suspended in midair by some unseen force.
“There are fire aspects right in front of you,” I said.
“Okay, I found them,” Eric said. “They’re weird, though. I feel their heat, but there’s no light.”
“Can you protect yourself from fire?” I asked.
“Yep,” Eric said.
“Great. Grab one of those aspects!” I shouted.
A burst of fire banished the darkness from around Eric. That flash of light showed me the entire arena in the blink of an eye. Combined with the information I’d received from the Army of a Thousand Eyes, I now knew that Clem was the furthest away from me, Hagar and Eric were about the same distance from my location, and Abi stood on a thin bridge of stone just a few yards away. It also showed me something in the air above our heads.
“Do it again!” I shouted. “I see something.”
The fire blazed again, and this time my eyes were focused upward. Eric’s light revealed a rectangle of scrivened metal floating twenty feet above the arena’s floor. The flames were gone before I could make out any details other than a connection point near the construct’s lower edge. A serpent could easily trigger that scrivening.
Unfortunately, using my serpents was a good way to speed up the delamination process. I’d need some help.
“Abi,” I called. “I’m sending someone to guide you to me. Try not to step on them.”
One of the rats scampered over to Abi and tugged at the hem of his robe. The rodent scurried a few feet away from my friend, chittered loudly, then waited for Abi to follow the sound.
“I do not like heights,” he called to me. “Please be careful.”
“Just follow the rat,” I said. “You’ll be here in no time.”
One shuffling step at a time, my friend made his way across the bridge to me. His outstretched hands brushed against my robes, and he let out a sigh of relief.
“Tell me the ground we are standing on is solid,” he begged.
“You’re good,” I confirmed. “I need you to look up. There’s a scrivened metal panel above us. We need to get some jinsei to it.”
“I can do that,” Abi said. “Allow me a few moments to summon my serpents.”
Seconds later,
