Mark woke up in a battle zone.
The air roared.
A hurricane blew.
Someone yelled something.
Overhead, wings spread in the storm and rain lashed the world. Bright light shattered the hurricane in a line, evaporating the sky from left to right. Mark felt heat on his face and the rain turned hot, and then someone stood over him with an umbrella as the world turned to steam.
Breathing was hard.
Someone screamed.
A blanket went around Mark and strong arms grabbed him and then shoved him through a space, onto cushions. He couldn’t see shit and he could barely understand himself, but then someone slammed in behind him, shoving him to the side, shoving him into the cushioned box. Words filled Mark’s ears like cotton and the world lurched underneath.
He was in a car. The back seat.
“GO GO GO!” yelled a person. “GO!”
“I’M GOING!” yelled another. “The shields are drawing too much power!”
“I’m supporting them!”
Mark didn’t recognize either voice but he did recognize that the voices existed. He felt his body once again and he worked his arms around his face. Mark ripped off the blanket.
He was in a flying car. A woman sat in the seat beside him, her skin reddened and burned here and there, where it wasn’t covered with white cloth. She was bald with a silver breastplate with chainmail spilling out onto her shoulders. She was a paladin outside of her full armor... Or a cleric or priest. Mark wasn’t sure. The guy in the front seat, driving the flying car, wore the full set of silver armor.
It was Paladin David, with his blond hair. His hair was half burned away.
Mark glanced at the woman again. He had thought the woman was simply bald, but no. Her hair had been burned away—
David drove the car into the top of an oak tree and the car lurched and tumbled, all the world flowing around the cabin and beyond the sunroof. Gravity mostly maintained direction in the vehicle with down being toward the floor; hover cars had gravity magics, of course. Trees tumbled beyond the sunroof—
There.
In the sky.
Mark saw a dragon.
That could be the only explanation for that thing up there, half-hidden in the clouds.
Mark couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. He could only look without seeing.
Wings, wide and silver and backlit with lightning. A tail, dipping below the clouds, bright black. Claws weaving water and lightning.
And then the clouds opened like jaws, like a maw, and the car tumbled more, and the dragon left Mark’s view.
He saw another monster, but it was not a dragon. It was a kaiju in the bay. It seemed almost simple by comparison. Big as fuck, towering over suburbia and the water and with one leg in the water and five legs on land. It was a spider-type—
Mark recognized the suburbia.
It was home. Gladegrove. All of it, and more besides. There was the paintball court. There was the trailer park on that side of town. There was the pizza place that had the best pizza around, and the ice cream place by the beach. Everything was either on fire, or broken.
Mark was supposed to appear exactly where he had left, right? In his house, right? Wasn’t Addashield, too? But Mark had appeared on the ground, in the rain, right?
In the rain?
… In the rain?
Not inside the house?
Oh.
The dragon was Addashield and the house was gone.
That’s when things stopped making any sense at all. The woman beside him yelled at David to go faster while David tried not to fly too high, or else the blaring warnings about the shield overloading would become more than warnings, and then they’d fall out of the sky because they were near two kaiju fighting in the sky and in the bay, and the world turned horrible around those sorts of events.
There was no city down there.
Just blasted trees and houses on fire and craters. So many craters.
David lifted the cover of a switch on the dash, as he shouted, “I’m turning off inertia-control and gunning it! Hold on!”
Mark held on—
Suddenly, he was sucked onto the bottom of his chair, his head slamming into the headrest, and then the car went sideways and David was belted in but no one else was. Mark hit the door, and the door held. The woman on the seat crashed into him, and still the door held. All Mark could see was reddened arm and chainmail and blood but he didn’t need to see anything to know that the car was going very, very fast—
And then the car turned back horizontal.
The woman scrambled off of Mark.
Mark looked out the window as a great beam of lightning poured out of the sky, onto the many-legged kaiju, and then through the monster—
Mark slammed into the top of the car as the woman near him shouted to put on his seat belt and the car went down into a crater. Out of the sunroof Mark saw power flow across the world. Clouds shredded. The storm parted. Trees and boulders flew from left to right.
It was the sound of ten thousand trains rumbling through reality itself. They had barely dodged the shockwave of what might have been a nuclear blast. Mark wasn’t sure.
All he was focused on was getting his seat belt on and watching the display in the middle of the dashboard. It was an image of the car, surrounded by a red circle.
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Mark had never been so happy to see a red circle in his life.
That was the shield readout, and the shields were near-broken, but they weren’t actually broken at all. The rest of the readout showed the car was at half-full of fuel, though they had been at full just minutes ago, maybe. David sighed in relief. Mark was close behind him.
The woman giggled, and then said, “Holy Gods and Monsters! That was fucking terrifying!”
She said it like she was happy.
Mark was pretty sure his home had just been nuked.
A lot of stuff had just happened.
And he was alive, so that was great?
Yes! That was a good thing.
Being alive was very good.
But there was still a dragon up there—
Malaqua had called it a High Dragon.
Mark’s panic doubled.
“What the FUCK is a HIGH dragon?!” Mark exclaimed, and the woman instantly lost her joy. David sucked in a deep breath and looked back at Mark, like he was going to ask a question. Mark answered faster than the question could be asked, “I saw Malaqua! He told me Addashield is gone. That High Dragon up there is 95% him, but Addashield is gone?”
The world overhead was still rumbling but the major firestorm had already passed. Nuclear fallout came next, but that would descend over the next few days. Faster though, with the rain. There was still a hurricane out there, because Addashield had timed it—
Addashield had timed Mark’s Tutorial to coincide with a kaiju hurricane, in the middle of hurricane season, didn’t he? He had. He had caused the hurricane, hadn’t he! He had needed cover for whatever happened after the Tutorial, because he had always known that he was going to die at the end of Mark’s Tutorial, to hybridize with his demon and become a dragon. And he wanted his High Dragon to survive.
Mark had exited the Tutorial a little dazed.
Addashield probably exited the Tutorial dazed, too.
So of course there would have been gathered forces out there waiting to murder him. That’s probably why David and this woman had been there, to grab Mark; they had been there to partake in Addashield’s murder, but they ended up rescuing him instead?
How much planning did Addashield put into this—
He had removed 4 of the bay’s barrier pillars before Mark started his Color Drop regimen.
And Mark had asked Quark about the weather once, and he had gotten no answers.
Mark felt his eyes go wide. He stared at his own hands, and breathed out, “He planned on all of this.”
The woman looked at David. She mouthed something.
David spoke loudly, “We’re leaving here, Mark. Everyone hold on again. We need to avoid the fallout rain and I’m not turning on the dampeners.”
Mark sat back in his seat, worried as fuck, as David gunned it out of the crater—
He saw the High Dragon again, out of his window, far in the distance. It was like he was seeing the city center from a tram. The dragon was silver, all throughout, except where it was black with stripes and spines. Its wings were wide, its mouth open to the sky. It was huge. Big as the kaiju it had killed.
It roared as it stood upon the body of the kaiju that Addashield had let into Orange City in order to serve as a distraction, while he was briefly insensate from the Tutorial, all so that his High Dragon could survive.
In a distant sort of way, Mark wondered why he had never gotten the option to enter Daihoon after the Tutorial. He probably already had the answer. Malaqua had dictated that Mark would get sent back to where he entered, and thus Addashield would, too. They had been waiting for Addashield here. Who knew where he could have escaped to if he had gone directly into Daihoon, and how much damage the kaiju would have done.
So Addashield had at least cleaned up the mess he had made, then?
… had Malaqua purposefully delayed Mark’s entry back into the world, so that he didn’t get dead in the same instance as the dragon’s arrival?
He probably had.
Mark found himself asking, “Is it Addashield at all? He cleaned up the mess he made, right?”
David asked, “Did you get an option of where to come back?”
“No. I just now realized that I didn’t have an option at all.” Mark felt his insides tumble some. He puked— Into a rapidly handed-to-him bag, thanks to the woman sitting beside him. Mark spat into the bag. “… Thanks.” Mark looked out the window, but the hurricane blew in, the brief respite over, and rain occluded everything.
Except for the roar.
Addashield’s High Dragon roared again and again and again.
The woman waited for a break in the roar, and then a full 20 more seconds, to say, “I’m glad we were able to rescue you. Most people were… They were preparing to kill him. But he appeared and the bombs had no effect because he was already transforming. He appeared a full 5 minutes before you appeared, too. We thought you were lost. Freyala spoke directly to David and I and told us to wait for you, though.” Almost as an afterthought, she said, “She told us that before the bombing attempts. We knew we weren’t going to hit you.”
Mark puked again but it was just bile.
David flipped the inertia control back on, and Mark’s stomach settled quite a lot. The whole flight smoothed out and the shields were already back to green, and double-layered once again. When the third layer appeared, that's when Mark would stop panicking so much. Maybe. David turned on the autopilot and made it go full-power.
The hurricane seemed to part for the dart that was their flying car.
David turned around and looked at Mark. “We’re going to get somewhere safer, and then we want you to—”
The world rippled.
Mark had no idea what had happened, but he had felt that ripple just the same as the other two people in the quickly-flying car.
The woman sighed and lay back in her seat, saying, “Shit.”
David sighed, “So there goes our chance of killing him.”
“What happened?” Mark asked, trying not to be desperate as he questioned everything.
The woman said, “Bastard opened a tear.”
Ah.
Tears were breaks in the Veil.
The tear that happened when Neil Armstrong touched down on the Moon in 1969 rippled all across the planet, creating tears everywhere, and bringing magic to Earth and causing the downfall and transformation of the previous civilizations of Earth into what they were today.
Mark shuddered. “It’s bad to open tears, right?”
David said, “Tears don’t cause big problems these days, but we’ll have to get Menders out to fix it.”
“Other people will do that,” said the woman. “We need to decide if we’re going to keep escaping, or go back.”
David and the woman shared a look— And then David glanced at Mark, and decided, “We’re not going back. We’re heading to the Citadel. Freyala’s mission was clear. Rescue Mark.” As the woman nodded, David told Mark, “You are, unfortunately, a little bit of a prisoner. We hope you don’t mind overmuch. We’ll give you good accommodations and help you learn about your new magics, whatever they might be. But Addashield had a bunch of hidden dragons out there, probably waiting for him to become what he became, and we’re not sure if you’re a hidden dragon or not. When we verify that you are not a hidden dragon, then we’ll let you go. It is our hope that you will choose to stay, though.”
Mark felt kinda numb.
He simply asked, “Are my parents okay?”
Mark watched a quietness overcome David’s face, and the woman went still.
It was a horror in small motions, though Mark didn’t realize that for half a second. When he saw what he saw, that was when something like ice knives drove into his guts and played around with his heart and spine.
Without preamble, the woman said, “A lot of things happened while you were information-quarantined. Your parents are dead. Addashield told us the demon desired them dead and to use them against you, so he killed them instead. Addashield incinerated them completely in the killing so they couldn’t be used against you. That is what he told us. That is all we know right now. The investigation for this will be ongoing, alongside all of the other events of this tragedy, from the involvement of Orange Arcan...”
Mark zoned out. The woman spoke. Maybe she said her name. Maybe she talked about the investigation. David said something about inquisitions. Maybe it might have been important. Probably not.
Mark wasn’t sure what happened for a long while.
Rain fell.