Without a Soul to anchor it, the venomous Radiance lodged in Aria's sole Aperture quickly fell apart. Already trapped by Sovereign Guard, it was quickly torn apart and absorbed, freeing her just in time as the air around her flooded with far more Radiance than she'd ever felt before in her life.

It was chaotic, unbalanced by weight of Will or gravity, crashing in on itself. Sparks filled the air, and where the flowing currents of power would concentrate upon themselves, lightning would spontaneously erupt.

It was a beautiful sight.

Aria couldn't breathe.

The air was too thick with Radiance. Her singular Aperture couldn't refine it fast enough, and even if it could, she wouldn't be able to expel it fast enough. Her Soul had already ruptured once today; it wouldn't withstand a second, not so soon.

She had little luck trying to guide the Radiance with her Presence. She simply did not have the potency required to guide such a massive confluence of energy, and her attempts mostly just brought more lightning bolts exploding near her head.

Trying to summon her Externality would have required her to cast it out far wider than she was willing to risk. But staying where she was, each breath drew in so much Radiance that it would rupture her soul in short order.

Aria rose to shaky feet, and forced as much Radiance as she could into her Body. She was still gaining more than she was losing, a simple function of pressure differential, which put her on a hard time limit.

She had to make it out of this storm before it killed her. And really, once dying was on the table, everything else seemed like comparatively a basically-okay option.

Aria sighed, and grit her teeth, rolling up her sleeves. Her Presence cast out, reading the flows of energy around her.

She felt the Radiance gathering together, clumping. Naturally, this would result in an explosive electrical discharge in order to dissipate the energy and bring the system back to equilibrium.

So Aria did what any sane person would've done in such a situation, and stuck her hand straight in it.

She wasn't insane. Of course she rolled up her sleeves. She wasn't gonna have her clothes ruined!

Lightning erupted in the air where her hand was, and immediately cast itself right into her waiting flesh. It hurt. It burned. It seized. Her limb felt leaden, this time from the awful muscle contractions that always came part and parcel with any electrocution.

Her skin charred, which may have hurt had she still had any nerves to feel. Thankfully, those were incinerated after a moment as well, which made the operation overall a shockingly painless one.

The cost of knitting back her flesh was, if anything, an upshot given her current circumstances. More importantly, while the lightning had absolutely overloaded her capacity for absorbing energy — usefully confirming that there was a limit, and it was not all that high — it had only done so after filling her with so much energy she could barely move.

A cultivator's "barely" was still considerable however, and while her gait was shambling and off-kilter — a state assisted greatly by the shoes that kept constricting her muscles to keep her from going tumbling — Aria did manage to bring herself up to a proper sprint, aiming herself at the edge of the mesa. She couldn't see how large the storm was — not even her eyes, which she begrudgingly had to admit were still quite useful, could see far enough — so she simply pointed herself at the terrain that she could most quickly traverse.

That did put her squarely in an opposite direction from home, but, she would gladly take the flight back there if she managed to survive long enough.

Although, she pondered, if she did die here, she found she wouldn't have any particular regrets about it. She wasn't the martyr-for-the-cause type — much too pragmatically-minded — and yet she found that, in a strictly transactional sense, if all she'd ever manage to accomplish with her cultivation was freeing those damned, trapped Wills from the torment they'd been yoked into…she would consider that to have been quite worthwhile.

Still not a martyr, though.

At the very edge of the mesa, Aria released all of the energy stored within her, leaping off her front foot and across the gorge. She felt the stone give beneath her feet, holding together just long enough for her to push off of it before a wide fissure branched out from the site of the impact.

It wasn't quite flying, Aria reflected, looking down into the dark, jagged depths below her, but there was evidently just some intrinsic euphoria an immortal derived from staring death's many faces in the eyes, standing proud, and saying, I do not acknowledge your strength.

Aria tucked her body close, rolling as she hit the ground. Or at least, that was what she was expecting to hit.

Gentle, loving arms wrapped around her, cradling her. Arms wrapped in flowing, black-and-red fabric.

It took Aria, even with her enhanced Mind, what felt like several seconds to reconcile the dissonance there. And yet, as she came to a stop, still held in a fucking princess carry, it couldn't be denied. Looking up, she saw the smiling face of her Martial Mother.

"You acquitted yourself admirably, Little Firebrand." No venom in her words. No backhand, no distant coldness. If Aria didn't know better, she might even have mistaken the expression for one of pride.

She couldn't have discerned such fine details, as she very very quickly looked away, a blush blooming on her face. She did not squirm — that would somehow make the whole ordeal even more mortifying and undignified — but it was a close thing.

"Martial Mother, could you please put me down?"

"No." And there was the Volkova Aria knew and…evidently had unexpectedly complicated feelings about.

"This is humiliating, Martial Mother. And also, not to put too fine a point on it, but I feel fairly certain that if I stay here much longer, I'll probably die."

"Hm? Oh, yes, that." The gilded cage that hung around Volkova's neck unclasped its door. Aria could feel the power coming off of the stone contained within, like the awful warmth that radiated off of the blast doors — bulkheads — in the maintenance tunnels whenever one of the Sentinels fired.

She felt, with absolute certainty, that whatever power lay behind that door would annihilate her in an instant if she so much as looked at it.

Volkova spoke, and through her Presence, Aria felt the intricate weaves of power contained within, flows of energy far too complex for her to grasp more than that they were there.

"Three pillars of heaven descend to cage the god of two mouths gnashing in the cup that drinks down the ocean of the sky and remains unsatiated until its drowning demise. Return."

The storm above howled as the final word released the power contained within the chant. It came together, binding, tighter, denser, forming into a twisting lance aimed straight at Volkova's heart.

The lance descended, striking its mark, unerring — the gem that hung from her Martial Mother's neck. The blood-red stone drank deeply, and Aria could feel some tinge of the Intent that animated it. It was a thirst, a lust, rabid, leashed, disdainful of what contained it.

The door on the little gilded cage closed itself shut, and the pressure lifted off Aria's senses. She could breathe now, freely, though the air felt dead and hollow compared to the animating spark it had been so eagerly suffused with mere moments before.

"Thank you, Martial Mother. May I be put down now? I can make my own way home."

"No you can't, Firebrand. Your Facets are still pliable, and you pushed them further over the span of an hour than most do in centuries. Your Soul will be strong. Your Will shall be yours. And I shall be very, very proud to call you my student."

"You will also spend the next week more sore than you've ever been in your life, hurting in ways you didn't know you could hurt. But first, you will sleep."

Aria tried to resist, but Volkova's Presence pressed gently around her. Not drowning ocean depths, but the cool spray of a flowing river, guarding against the scorching summer heat.

"The fight's over. You can breathe easy now. You can rest."

Aria didn't know if Volkova's voice contained another spell. If it did, it was too subtle for her to notice the flows of energy before she fell asleep, still cradled in her teacher's arms.