Arthur hovered over the prison, concealed by low-hanging clouds. I’m in position, Arthur thought into his earpiece. It was a nifty piece of technology that read the electrical impulses in his brain and communicated them to Iris. She trusted that more than magic in such an ether-charged environment.Received. Engage in three, came Iris's curt reply. Arthur rolled his shoulders and gave the order. There was a dull whine of wards failing, and alarms began to blare. In the three seconds it took the sound to reach Arthur’s ears, Wovan’s dimensional magic locked in place, and they were through. His Soul Splinter had succeeded. The familiar steel walls of Ace’s jail cell surrounded him, the man himself lying prone on the floor. Arthur’s infiltration had been noticed the instant Wovan began her magic, mere seconds ago, but in the world of elites, that might as well have been all the time in the world. Already, he could feel the dimensional fabric around him roiling as Wovan struggled to hold off guards trying to teleport in. Just as Inca had warned him, the weight of the black site's restrictive wards came crashing down on him.He was attacked with fire, lightning, sound, poison, biomancy and a host of magics he couldn’t name. While the wards were focused on him, some of the magic inevitably hit Ace, and he woke up crying out in pain. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks were gaunt, and patches of his hair were missing, but Ace did not look like a man who’d given up. There was a fire in his eyes that he’d seen reflected in Inca’s, only his was a raging bonfire to her smouldering flames. Arthur’s brain did a quick analysis of the man even as he focused on defending himself. Where Inca was a towering brute of a warrior, Ace looked bookish, delicate even. Arthur knew all about opposites attracting, but Ace looked entirely too fragile for a woman of her stature.“I’m with Inca,” Arthur shouted over the din of ongoing (...)