A time limit was approaching. One everyone could feel—even if they didn’t know when that limit would arrive.
“You couldn’t have made this easy on yourself, could you?” Jin snarled as Kira sprinted toward the circle she’d targeted.
“Why don’t we leave off on questioning my judgment for the moment and worry about my impulsiveness later,” Kira grumbled.
Like when she wasn’t trying to attempt the impossible.
She dodged several traps her senses told her were waiting below the sand, along with a chunk of stone the fierot hurled at her.
“Do you have a plan to get inside?” Jin asked, unable to disguise the worry in his voice.
Even for Kira, this was a bad idea.
Changing the fundamental rules of a competition like this simply because you willed it was impossible.
Despite that, she couldn’t force herself to divert to another course.
Something compelled her forward.
Kira was curious enough not to resist—for the moment.
“I’m working on it,” Kira said as she arrived at the perimeter of the safe zone.
She touched the wall of the circle, an invisible force preventing her hand from pushing through by so much as a centimeter.
“You’d better work fast. There’s thirty more seconds before this symbol changes over, and I don’t think we want to be standing on the outside when that happens.”
Kira squinted up at the tendrils of nearly invisible ki she could see feeding into each of the circles, not letting Jin’s words bother her.
There were two ways she could see this going.
The first was to use brute force to force her way inside.
While such a method was impossible for most, Kira sensed she could do it.
There were several reasons she preferred to avoid that option. One—because it would show too much of what she was capable of.
The most pressing reason, however, was that everything inside her was telling her this wasn’t the end of the adva ka.
It couldn’t be.
Everything they’d done to this point was far too easy for a rite of passage that instilled trepidation into anyone considering an attempt.
There had to be something more. Which meant she needed to conserve her strength and not waste it unnecessarily.
That left finding a way inside that didn’t require her to tap too deeply into the well of massive soul’s breath waiting at her center.
“Fifteen seconds,” Jin’s emotionless voice came as his training kicked in. “Ten.”
Under Kira’s palm, the resistance in the outer wall of the circle abated.
Just slightly.
Sensitive to the change, Kira pushed forward, her hand sinking in about a centimeter.
Thinking of something, Kira twisted to take in the tendrils of ki.
Wasn’t that interesting?
