Shade took a deep breath and narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the diviner's figure within the bloody light high above, but he could see nothing.
Behind him, great swathes of steam mist billowed out from some unknown source. A steam whistle gave a long cry, and bells rang out through the void.
When a Ring Arcanist summoned a Destiny Ring, the bells sounded loud to the caster, but in reality, they abruptly ceased beyond a certain distance. Thus, there would never be a situation where Ring Arcanists fought in city alleys and half the street heard the bells.
But at this moment, those echoing bells gradually spread from the tiny patch of wreckage above the tree canopy to the entire island.
Clang~ clang~ clang~
The echoing bells seemed capable of shattering all the oppression and confusion brought by that mass of red light. They were grand and sacred, ancient and distant. Like bells rung by priests of the oldest era to herald the arrival of gods, and like echoes from Old Days, carried into the present by wind and stories.
The bells even calmed the waves beyond the island, suppressed the monsters' frenzy, restrained the torrential rain still falling outside the island, and caused the rift in the night sky above Green Lake in the real world to reveal the image of Another Island where everyone now stood.
Megan stood right behind Shade, and she felt the bells ringing amid the steam mist more deeply than anyone else.
At some point, the hand gripping Shade's sleeve loosened. The man standing before her with his back to her was clearly right in front of her, yet she somehow felt that he had already flown into the sky:
*So this is the feeling Galina spoke of, the feeling that he