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He climbed to his knees and finally regained a proper sense of environmental awareness as his vision cleared. And yet he felt more confused than ever, because he could hardly understand what he was looking at.

The entire world was on fire. Everything around him. Ablaze.

Even himself. All up his arms and legs and chest. But these weren’t the reddish flames of his lutetium.

And strangest of all, they didn’t hurt, either. Because of numbness? No. The flames weren’t burning him. Not cooking his flesh.

If anything, he was feeling somewhat better, actually. Invigorated. This was the intense heat that he felt before. It wasn’t painful. It was like a deeply warm embrace, covering his entire body.

But he could see other things burning around him, too. Smoke and damage. Craters in the ground. Burning men running across his vision. Screaming.

What the hell was happening here?

Kerikos stirred within his grasp. ‘Ogh...’

‘Kerikos!’ thought Vito. ‘You’re conscious?!’

‘Mgh... I don’t... what...?’

Before he could question the reaper any further, however, a blinding light in the sky stole his attention, and he had to shield his eyes. When it abated, he saw a great fireball suspended there, looking not unlike a meteor, but it was just hung there in midair, seemingly not moving.

And then it clicked for him. Could that be Jackson up there?

Vito had heard that the Radiant Sentinel, the Star of the West, had gone mysteriously missing after a terrible battle with the Mad Demon in the Uego Desert. Theories abounded about what might have become of him, but one of the more popular ones had been that he was recovering here in Intar.

If that was really him, then perhaps the situation wasn’t so--

Agh, he was getting distracted, Vito realized. He needed to find Prince David again. In all this chaos, that was going to be difficult. He needed a reaper’s senses.

‘Kerikos, can you hear me?’

‘Rgh...’

‘Kerikos!’

No response, this time.

Shit.

He tucked the reaper under his arm as he looked around. The flames all over his body had diminished, but they weren’t entirely vanishing, and the same could be said for those covering the courtyard. It was a bit easier to see, at least. And he recalled the general direction in which the Prince had been fleeing.

So he started running.

Whatever else was going on around him, whatever this mad battle was and whatever big names might be involved in it, Vito Sebolt knew his task. And he was going to see it done.