Prism sent a bolt of white lightning at the sealed double doors at the end of the corridor. The doors appeared undamaged by the attack, making Prism lean forward and run his hands together. He then sent a series of bolts in quick succession, but the doors remained impervious to the attacks. Prism ran down the hall at the doors, leapt into the air, then brought down a powerful magically-enhanced punch at it. The entire hall quaked from the impact, but the doors still didn’t budge.

  “What the heck is this thing made of!?” Prism said between hard breaths. He rubbed the knuckles of his sore fist before he placed his fingertips on the door’s surface.

  “Can’t you just turn the doors into butterflies or something?” Wadaw shared as he crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. He was starting to get the hang of speaking without using his mouth.

  “Altering reality like that requires a level of magic that I haven’t had in centuries.” Prism shared.

  Blue sparkles moved from the hand Prism had kept flat against the door. He bowed then tilted his head slightly forward as he analyzed the door’s construction. It was made of tiny hexagonal tubules composed of a carbon material similar to diamond, but even harder. Its structure seemed a bit ridiculous to Prism, so he shared his findings with Leanna.

  “Those are mril nanotubes. It’s the hardest and most durable material we know of.” She shared as she bit the fingernail of her right thumb. “These doors probably cost a fortune to construct. They definitely want us trapped down here.” She shared a sense of irritation that bordered on dread.

  “These doors are flush against the wall. I’d bet even the frame is made of the same material…” Prism groaned. “If I try to drill through the walls, I could cause the whole base to collapse.” He shared his thought process with his team.

  “Why can’t Leanna hack the doors?” Lorias asked over their link.

  Leanna shook her head and shared what she gleaned from her own scans with everyone else. “There’s nothing electronic or biologic on these doors. They use an analog mechanism to open and close, and the controls aren’t on this side.” She explained.

  “I’m almost spent. It’ll be a while before I can take control of these doors and their mechanisms to open them with my magic, considering how strange they are to me.” Prism wiped the sweat from his eyes and shared.

  “We don’t have time for any of this. These conniving queenies are probably plotting are demise as we metaphorically speak.” Ursun aimed his coilgun at the door. “How many of them are there in that stairwell? You can sense that, can’t you?” He asked Prism pointedly.

  “20. Four at the door’s winch controls, four guarding them, eight along the stairs, and four at the doors at the top of the stairs leading to the ground level.” Prism shared along with what he could see with his remote viewing magic.

  “Wait a minute, why can’t you just teleport to the other side of the door? You teleported an entire jet halfway around the world; surely this is nothing in comparison?” Wadaw shared.

  “From what I understand, I converted the ship into energy and fired it at an extreme speed across the ocean. That’s not exactly teleportation. The fact that I was in an unconscious trance with access to higher-order magic helped a great deal, though I’m still not entirely sure what I’m capable of when I’m in a trance, or even why I go into them…” Prism tapped his fingers on the door while he began to ramble over the shared telepathic link.

  “That’s not the point.” Wadaw shook his head.

  “Just providing some context.” Prism sighed. “I definitely don’t have the mana for even a short-range teleport spell, especially with how ?ba taxes geospatial magic.” Prism then shrugged and looked down at the smooth flooring in front of the line where the two doors met. “The only reason my tele-circles work is because they’re tapped directly into ?ba’s mana currents. I’m not capable of having that kind of constant, direct connection with the raw power of this world, but an inanimate object can.”

  “Your magic has so many rules. It sounds like just another sort of science to me.” Wadaw’s psychic words received emotive agreement from Lorias and Srell.

  “It appears to be getting hotter in here, much hotter.” Leanna said as she dabbed away a few trickles of sweat that slid down her cheek with a cloth she took out of one of the pockets of her utility belt.

  “Another test for Prism.” Ursun relaxed his shoulders and took a few deep breaths to cool himself down.

  “We’re just rats in a maze.” Wadaw shook his head and sighed loudly.

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  Prism held out his hands towards the other end of the corridor and coalesced what mana he could from his surroundings into an orb of cold. He then caused wind to blow from the orb, chilling the area and offsetting the buildup of heat.

  He could sense the circuitry behind the walls that was responsible for controlling the multitude of traps and sensors embedded into the walls. An idea occurred to him, one that was perhaps a bit too dangerous to consider.

  “I’m going to become pure electricity and travel through the wiring in the walls. The doors’ resistivity is too high for me to just move through them that way. I’ll be able to exit the wiring at a console in a control room on the floor directly above us. I’ll then reconstitute myself and fight my way into the stairwell. You guys will be in danger until I’m able to open the doors, but it’s our only option.” Prism shared as he left the chilling orb to float in the air while it did its air conditioning work automatically.

  “They might be expecting that. They could try and trap you within their circuitry, or worse.” Leanna let her worry travel through the link along with her words.

  “Do it. We’re out of time.” Ursun ordered.

  “We’ll meet you in that control room. We’re almost there!” Srell shared while he and Lorias made a mad rush through the upper level as alarms blared around them.

  “I’m off!”

  Prism crouched down as if he was about to leap into the air, his eyes fixed on a square inactive lighting panel on the ceiling. His body glowed and crackled with power until it only vaguely resembled his body. He fired himself up at the panel like lightning and disappeared into the circuits, causing the lighting to shine for a short while.

  As pure energy, Prism could exist as a waveform that transmitted disconnected jumbles of electrons for short periods of time. He propelled those jumbles along the advanced embedded circuits of the base’s environmental control system, moving them all towards outlets that were ill-suited for such a large electrical flow. His mind too became a jumble of impulses, but he managed to focus his magic on increasing the voltage of his electric field body, moving its electrons faster through the system.

  After a minute or two, arcs of electricity shot out of a dark-screened control panel where several Sguvan military technicians stood. Some of the arcs went straight through their bodies, killing them before Prism had even reformed his body. The electric field converged directly in front of the console into a mass of white light that rapidly took on the shape of Prism’s nude, kneeling body. Before the light faded, the shape of Prism stood up and stretched out its arms. Several bolts of white lightning shot from the energy form, striking the remaining technicians and the soldiers who’d begun to fire at the semi-formed Prism.

  “You almost hit us!” Srell’s voice shouted as he and Lorias ran around the corner into the control room.

  Prism’s body darkened into to its corporeal form in time to see his two allies standing before him. Lorias and Srell held their PAWs in one hand and pointed at the ground. The base’s loud alarm system was on full blast, reminding Prism that they were all in significant danger. In spite of this fact, he stretched his arms high above his head and groaned.

  “Phew, it’s good to be whole again.” He said aloud. When he saw Lorias give him a snide look, he smiled and shared telepathically, “Let’s jam.”

  Prism took off running past Lorias and Srell into the corridor they’d come from. He immediately saw several heavily-armed soldiers standing on the end of the hall opposite to where the stairwell was. Two of the soldiers were kneeling with what Prism thought were some sort of cannons on their shoulders, aimed and trained on him. The third soldier held out what looked to be a long pistol.

  His immediate instinct was to erect a magical barrier to block whatever the soldiers fired at him. But when he tried to cast the needed spell, he felt a sharp pain stretch across the entirety of his body. He doubled over from the shock of it at the same time the soldiers fired their weapons. The air above him undulated as if it was a mirage, then came a wave of heat that briefly hurt his skin. He soon felt himself being yanked by his splayed arms and legs back into the control room.

  “What did they do to you!?” Srell yelled at Prism.

  When Srell didn’t get a response, Lorias leaned down and calmly slapped Prism hard across the face. Prism jerked himself up all at once until he was kneeling before the two of them. “I think I tried to do too much too soon. My body is still…reorganizing itself.” Prism bowed to them before standing up on his feet again. “Oh, and my mind too. I might not be thinking straight.”

  “Oh great, we have to deal with a loopy Prism when we’re staring down a base full of Royalists!” Srell shared, almost shouting his complaints from his mouth.

  “They’ve got energy weapons. We can’t kill them without your help.” Lorias shared while looking towards the open doorway with a solemn expression.

  “Right, right.” Prism nodded as he started rubbing his palms together. He focused on the feeling of skin against skin, grounding himself in the reality of physicality. He then offered his left hand to Srell and his right hand to Lorias. “I’ve got just the thing for you two. Give them a shake.”

  “This ain’t the time to be acting all silly and cute. Get your mind together before you get us killed.” Srell said before grabbing Prism’s left hand.

  Lorias rolled his eyes and shook the right one. “This bett-“

  Lorias felt a rush to the head as the world seemed to compress itself around him. He felt like a darkness was swallowing him whole; a feeling he hadn’t had since his adoptive father had been killed right in front of his once teenaged eyes. Fear threatened to claw its way into his very soul.

  “No death in darkness…”

  With an ominous whisper from the unknown, the shadows retreated as quickly as they’d come to Lorias. He was left staring blankly at Srell, who was surrounded by a thin, wispy outline of complete dark. Srell’s brown eyes looked like pitch black holes staring back at Lorias.

  “Peculiar.” Lorias said as he brought his hand up in front of his face. He saw that the same black aura also surrounded his own body.

  “What…is this?” Srell sounded like he was about to fall asleep.

  “A more primal type of magic. It won’t deflect bullets, but it’ll neutralize most forms of energy being shot at us.” Prism shared. His own body also had the same black aura. “Be careful though, we won’t feel any pain while we’re like this.”

  “Cool.” Lorias cocked his gun and said plainly.

  He walked out into the hallway and was immediately fired upon. What should have been intense heat that could cook him from the inside out was instead merely a sense of pressure passing over him. Lorias glanced over at the three soldiers, aimed, and fired at each of them without a second thought. One of the kneeling soldiers merely flinched as the other three didn’t respond at all.

  “Peculiar.” Lorias said before reloading his PAW with far more deadly ammo. But before he could shoot, he saw the flash of three more shots from a weapon mere feet beside him. The three soldiers’ heads exploded in a mess of bone and gore, despite the bulky helmets they’d been wearing. “Peculiar.” Lorias said once more, delivering the line just as monotonously as he had before.

  “Onwards.” Srell tried to shout, but his voice still sounded sleepy and quiet.

  He turned towards the stairwell doors and took off running. Everything seemed like it was slowed down, as though he were running through a swamp of sticky taffy. He didn’t even notice the automated turrets drop down from the corridor’s ceiling, or when they started pelting his body with hundreds of armor-piercing rounds.