Lucien stepped forward, the straight disposition of his eyebrows and mouth contorting to a more exaggerated, tense state.
"You... you can't be serious. We can't go back home?"
His eyelids were violently twitching, the refraction of a tear glistening as it trailed down along his cheek.
Soon, like the opening of a dam, Liora's previously detached expression turned to one of solemnity, the pooling of her tears forming its own rapids that tugged on the integrity of Rowan's soul, a blue, dark sensation oozing from his sternum.
"No... this can't be real..." she cried, bringing her hands up to her face to cover her eyes and bits of her mouth.
Kaia's fire was diminished, her eyes relaxed as she simply looked down, her lower lip caught between her teeth, a trail of blood originating from her canine teeth.
Elias turned his head away, tiny droplets of water hanging in the air where his eyes were from the sudden shift in force.
Rowan was the only one who stood unimpeded, his focus of attention on the king.
"I understand how you lot must feel, and I offer my deepest condolences. However, I assure you that you may yet return to your homelands."
The four heroes all turned to the king, eyes wide with gratuitous expression as their one stiffened bodies received a second breath, throwing themselves forward to inch closer and closer to the king.
"How," Lucien inquired, raising open palms to accentuate his questioning.
"While the Gods have given us the minimum number of runes for a Tenth Sigil, it is said that a portal opened by the Gods themselves would allow the heroes home's refuge, the door back home only opened once the hero's duty is fulfilled." The king explained, his eyes closed and mouth wide as he smiled through his speech.
"The hero's duty?" Lucien asked, his eyebrows grubbed with anxiety.
The king stepped forward, laying his hand on Lucien's shoulder.
"To restore balance to the Way."
Wait, that sounds familiar!
A couple of them tried but failed to withhold a small gasp of laughter, the air clawing its way from their lungs.
Hah, so the others also know about Star Wars.
Lucien—his demeanor still calm—simply looked on with scrutiny, backing up a couple paces and diminishing contact with Viral.
"And how exactly are we supposed to do that," Lucien followed up with, his eyes vying for some type of answer, "if you didn't notice, we're just a group of teenagers or young adults. What is it that makes us different?"
The king opened his eyes, his fingers relaxing as he again stepped forward, closing the distance between the two.
"It is prophesized that the heroes are the only quadra-resonants in existence, wielding four of the seven Ways individually."
All five of the heroes let out an audible gasp, the king's words a thundering bellow in the most arduous of stormy nights.
Like the crashing of cymbals eviscerating your eardrums and echoing a hollow ring in your disorientation, the surrounding environment entered a wave motion, solid objects blurring together to form abstract delusions of the mind.
This is it! This is my isekai!
"Okay, and how do we know which 'Ways' we have?" asked Kaia, her left hand raised with a resounding pump as her skin stretched and wore, her veins almost tearing their way out and walking away.
"Yes, that is what I was about to get into," Viral replied, raising his arm to direct a forward motion with his pointer finger, "you see, it'll take a little bit of time to procure a resonance matrix due to how... stretched thin our supply of gauging devices is, but you heroes can receive grimoires right now."
As promptly as the king spoke, a man ventured from the halls with a cloaked device in tow.
The machine was bulky, towering the person carrying it by cart by several shoulders, with four legs that stood five feet apart respectively.
While the size of the thing was already grounds for astonishment, what most stood out was the same feeling of tiny needles coyly tacking away at the skin, the tingling dulling Rowan's senses to such a degree that the light taps of his heartbeat turned into violent thuds.
Touching his hand to his chest, it felt as if his ribcage would erupt, a sledgehammer timing its strikes with the battering of his heart.
No, it wasn't fair to say that he felt his heart pounding because his senses were dulled—there was a genuine horror felt in the thing's presence, like solid death's cold embrace.
The man brought the machine in front of them, the waving black cover succumbing to gravity and laying still. The king laid his hand on the cover, gripping it tightly as a 'swoosh' swished through the air.
Rowan opened his eyes even further as his jaw hung freely, the feeling of a tall skyscraper enervating all animation in his joints as a dark shadow loomed over him.
There was a large chasm built of a golden material, the many different weaving paths creating the illusion of a full sphere. With this came small engravements in varying abstract fractals along the metal.
The constitution of a single engraving encompassed what seemed to be millions of smaller engravements, Rowan's mind unable to properly process all the information as he perused the designs deeper.
However, the space between each interwoven stretch of metal revealed something even more grandeur as it hardly struggled to peek through.
There stood—or rather, floated—a large, radiant crystal ball. Somehow, the ball was positioned directly in the middle of the chasm with no railing to support it against its own weight, giving it a sluggish inertia.
The same feeling of dread that Rowan had originally felt being amplified to its maximum intensity as he looked on at the source.
He believed this feeling to be arcana, but why was it this crystal ball had so much of it?
"This is what this world refers to as a god glass, vestiges of their heavenly decree." The king explained, tapping on one of the many strips of metal covering the ball.
The ball thrummed in response, shifting back from the impulse ever so slightly.
"And this is what grants all the inhabitants of this world their grimoires, conduits of the Way."