"It looks real. Yeah, these gems are decent."
An old man at the counter muttered the words without looking up, turning a gem slowly under the scrutiny of a magnifying glass. His eyes were steady. His voice was flat. He had assessed things like this for a long ti and nothing about his expression suggested this was complicated.
Carnite Gems were not mana crystals. Unlike mana crystals, they were ford from pure mana that had undergone a specific purifying process native to the five elents school's house of earth. The process was long and the conditions precise. One gem equaled a thousand gold coins, and there was no credible way to fake the interior glow. The money was complete.
The attendant stared at the side of his head.
"Are you sure, old man?"
The suspicion in her eyes hadn't moved.
The old man set the gem down and picked up another one without answering imdiately.
'Did they steal from soone in the elents school?' She turned the thought over. 'Or were they just lucky sohow?'
She didn't know what was going on. But she was going to find out.
She grabbed a few of the gems from the bag and walked back to the front of the store where Arian and Ember were standing.
The two of them were not paying attention to her at all.
They were looking at the dress.
Arian held it carefully, her eyes moving across the seams and the fall of the material with genuine attention. Ember leaned in slightly beside her, equally absorbed. The craftsmanship was difficult to ignore up close. The weave was impossibly fine, the material catching the light in a way that suggested it had been treated with sothing beyond ordinary technique. Sothing at the level of a proper mage's work had gone into every inch of it.
This thing could probably withstand the full strength of a level three mage without tearing.
"Hello."
The attendant stepped in front of them, her voice flat.
"Please hand over the dress. These gems are fake."
Arian looked up from the dress.
She looked at the attendant for a mont. Then she sneered.
"Fake." She said the word back like she was tasting how stupid it was. "You're kidding ."
This woman was obviously trying to steal their gems. Arian had seen shaless people before. She had dealt with liars, cheats, people who smiled while planning sothing ugly. But soone this openly hateful was a different category.
"What do you think, I'm stupid?" The attendant's voice rose slightly, her hand coming up and pointing at the two of them. "How can people like you have Carnite Gems? You must have stolen them. Or worse, killed soone to take them."
She took a half step forward.
"If you know what's best for you, leave now. Or I'll be forced to call the city guard and have you both arrested."
The words landed loud enough to turn heads nearby. A few people in the surrounding area had gone quiet.
At this mont, a man in long black robes appeared from the side.
He moved without hurry, stepping into the space between the attendant and the two won with an easy confidence, a faint smirk sitting on his face as his eyes moved to Arian and Ember.
"There's no need to call the city guard." His voice was calm. Almost pleasant. "I alone am enough to solve this problem."
Transcendent.
Arian saw it in one second flat. The weight behind him, the particular quality of the energy sitting around his fra, the way the air felt slightly different in the space he occupied.
Her pupils shrank.
Her eyes moved instantly around the room, scanning, calculating. A trace of panic crossed her face, fast and then gone, but it had been there.
She didn't waste another second.
She pushed her aura upward through the roof of the building like a bonfire suddenly fed with oil, a vertical spike of energy ant to carry as far as it could reach, aid at the courtyard a mile away where Leon was still working.
The clothes on the nearest racks fluttered violently outward from the force of it.
The attendant shrieked and stumbled back two steps, her hands coming up instinctively.
"Hm!!"
The man in black didn't give Arian the chance to follow through on anything else.
He moved.
His hand shot forward and closed around Ember before the motion had fully registered. A trace of mysterious energy discharged from his grip in the sa instant, thin and precise, and Ember's body went slack. Unconscious in a second. No struggle, no sound. Just gone.
Then the sky shook.
An earthshaking roar tore through the air from sowhere a mile out, deep and enormous, the kind of sound that didn't just travel through the atmosphere but through everything beneath it.
"WHO DARES!!!"
The roar was already moving. Anyone with any sensitivity at all could feel the direction of it, feel the speed behind it, feel that whatever had made that sound was not standing still.
The man in black didn't hesitate.
He threw Ember across his back, turned, and detonated upward.
—boom!!
The roof of the store shattered outward in every direction as he punched through it with a sonic boom trailing behind him, pieces of material and frawork spinning away into the open sky.
A second later, Leon's figure tore through the sa gap, barely a breath behind him, moving in the sa direction at a speed that made the air around the hole crack.
Then they were gone.
The store went completely silent.
On the floor of the shop, surrounded by scattered fabric and settling dust, the attendant sat where she had fallen. Her arms were wrapped around herself. Her hands were shaking.
She looked at Arian.
Arian stood up slowly from the crouch she had dropped into when the roof went. She straightened her clothes. Her expression was difficult to read.
The attendant couldn't move.
The person she had been looking down on from the mont they walked through the door was a great mage.
And the other one. The one with the aura that had hit the room like a wall of fire.
She didn't have a category for what that one was.
She had ssed up.
She had ssed up badly.
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