‘Katherine’ was off buying a feathered blob for the wolf to eat.
The mental image was too chaotic to tell what it was.
It had a feeling that beyond a name, ‘Katherine’ didn’t know what it looked like either.
And while it didn’t particularly mind her doing that while ‘Emreeil’ updated herself on what was going on in the nest, after the first thirty minutes of waiting for ‘Emreeil’ to stop talking to the fat human and just go already, it was too impatient to just sit guard.
Besides, it didn’t like being defensive. It was an annoying mindset.
So it took the blanket back from the little green human, threw it on its back, covering most of its mutations except its arms and the spikes on its forearms, which it did its best to hide by puffing its fur up and pinning them to its skin as flat as it could get them, and descended into an alley before walking out into the open again, ‘Scruffy’ hiding in its shadow, her head barely as high as its shoulders.
And while the fact that it was as big as ‘Emreeil’ on all fours before her upgrade and almost twice as wide certainly drew quite a few looks, which was as mildly alarming every time as it was the first time, the wolf was not even close to being the most eye-catching creature or object in this ‘market’.
There were people with floating… vaguely animal-shaped blobs of light ducking and mucking about their heads, people in strange distinctive armors, a giant scaled creature on a leash that was almost as big as the wolf itself, and that was without counting the bizarre objects and devices strewn about the place and stalls. It even saw something covered in multicolored feathers wreathed around a green beak, which was a sight so genuinely awe-inspiring it stared at the thing until its keeper started giving the wolf suspicious glares.
It even saw some things that blurred the line between animal and human so much that it wasn’t sure what it was even looking at, a giant scaled biped with a snarling snout, a man with a beak and feathers all over his body, and even someone with feline features and fur along their hands.
So, while a proportionally giant canine with glowing eyes was quite eye-catching, ‘Emreeil’ had been right.
There were a lot of eye-catching things for people to stare at in the ‘market’ that weren’t the wolf, and with the blanket and the green human by its side, most people just took a second glance and kept moving.
Some glances were much more covetous and shrewd, but it mentally marked those people and did its best to avoid them rather than disemboweling a human because they tried to control it again like that woman with blue hair had tried to, ages ago.
Following ‘Katherine’ from a couple hundred feet away while incessantly checking for any creatures it could eat yielded many interesting results, but few that it thought would help with its current goal.
This trip through the ‘market’ wasn’t for leisure and curiosity like its first one, no matter how much it wanted to grab another ‘chur-ball’ and taste sweetness again. It had a concrete goal to accomplish.
Upgrades.
Considering its growth hormone hadn’t been tuned down yet, it would keep growing bigger, and it wanted to have more options, mutate further. To do that, it needed things to copy from.
The wolf was reasonably creative, but its best personal creations were more… strokes of inspiration than a consistent thing. It needed something new.
Eventually, however, as it passed by a stall, its eye was drawn by a beautiful colony of little lights.
Had about a dozen of them not suddenly began to shift and scuttle about, it would have walked right past them.
It paused, resisting the urge to open additional eyes, and slowly stepped forward, ignoring the way the crowd awkwardly shifted around its form, the flow of traffic changing to accommodate it with muffled hisses from disgruntled humans.
The lights were moving.
It tilted its head, stepping closer to the glass tanks.
The lights were skittering around. They were… insects. Of some kind. All glowing.
One tank had orange-red bugs, while another had green like those flies that lived by the burning rivers, and one even had blue ones which were covering their enclosure in some kind of vein-patterned glass.
It wanted them. It wanted all of them.
Problem was that if it just walked up and threw the bugs into its mouth, it was pretty sure the humans would get angry again about not getting their shinies for what it ate. Then the people chasing them might hear of it.
Hm…
It turned, and slowly squeezed around the back of the stall.
The stall’s structure was more akin to a box of mechanical joints and thin metal sheets that unfolded to make a squared metal tent when fully expanded, and since the more solid constructions were generally large and surrounded the more open spaces, the stalls were tightly wound together, forcing the wolf to squeeze between them and position itself so the little human could somewhat follow.
Then it spent a moment mapping out the stall itself. It was about twenty by twenty feet, with one corner dedicated to some wheeled cart of sorts, presumably to carry their things away with when they were done sitting here.
But the back of the stall was covered in jars full of liquid and tons of other tanks, inside which it could feel the tapping or bulbous forms of its chosen prey.
It wreathed its claws in silence, and cut a relatively round hole into the back of the tent, gingerly taking the resulting piece of metal and laying it on the floor when it was done.
It pointed to the green human, then down at the ground to indicate she should stay, and after she did the head-bob thing that humans did to indicate agreement, it slithered into the back section of the tent.
Forcibly stilling its wagging tails before it knocked something over, it took a quick glance at its choices.
Lots of small, skittering things, glowing softly in their containers. Their variety wasn’t tremendous, but the sheer numbers guaranteed some fairly in-depth knowledge of its prey.
It carefully felt for the two people in the stall, antennae wriggling around its legs and arms to brush against the floor, and after making sure that neither was looking in its direction or moving much, it picked up a small tank with its secondary arms and lowered it to the floor off its jointed shelf.
After a moment of fiddling with the glass to get the top off, it reached inside, and without much caution nor delay, grabbed a giant fistful of the luminous orange bugs and tossed them into its mouth, hurriedly chewing and swallowing.
It had to cover itself in darkness from head to toe to release a startled snarling cough when the sheer heat emanating from the bugs’ innards began to boil its throat, and it hurriedly swallowed them all down, using a stumpy thumb to massage its throat, lips pulled back in a snarl.
That had to have been at least a dozen, so it quickly flicked the ones trying to escape back into their place, closed the top and put the diminished tank full of angry insects back on its shelf, and carefully reached for the blue ones.
It had no idea what a blue glow meant, besides electricity. Which it had plenty of already, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.
Assuming these ones were of a similar nature to the orange ones, it was careful about not biting down, if only to save itself the bruised throat. It carefully swallowed one whole and blinked at the soothing cold that passed through its tissues, before the bug dropped into its stomach and vanished.
After a brief shiver borne out of the inherent discomfort of swallowing something that was still squirming and wriggling, it powered through to scarf them down, one by one, until it was done.
The moment it was about to reach for the green ones, it felt one of the humans get up and turn halfway towards it.
It didn’t bother putting anything back, instantly turning around, using its human arms to grab onto the blanket again, and jumping out through the hole it had made, jogging away as ‘Scruffy’ followed.
The experience made it realize that while it could feel a lot of things through vibrational senses, knowing the shape of something, even if in-depth, was not quite the same as knowing what it was, so it slowed down a bit to manually check any interesting places it could steal some progress from.
There weren’t many, truth be told. Not because they weren’t there, but because it couldn’t really find a way to steal and be sneaky about it. Too many eyes, too small of a stall, too well-lit, not partitioned, so on and so forth.
The only place of interest was a shop that ‘Scruffy’ seemed to get excited over, some kind of edible plant collection from what it could see. It wasn't sure what context made her give this shop in particular so much attention, but she was practically bouncing in excitement over it.
This one was thankfully inside a building rather than an open stall, so it wasn’t terribly difficult for the wolf to send ‘Scruffy’ in to make a distraction while it went and ate whatever it fancied from around the back.
The variety was extensive.
And very pretty.
And it smelled incredible.
Its only complaint for a while was that some of the plants were alive and feisty. One shimmering one turned into glass in its mouth which it eventually decided to just swallow down anyway, another hissed at it and ineffectually tried to bite its tongue off even as the wolf chewed on it, one burned its mouth with a sensation that wasn’t similar at all to fire, just… warm pain, and the last one it had tried before deciding to go for some of the more mundane ones was a plant that grew spikes out of everything when damaged and excreted something that tasted horribly.
The spikes didn’t even tickle but it was still terribly uncomfortable to swallow.
It would have gone on to try some of the more tame and more numerous plants, had it not felt one of the human guards of the shop reach down to slap ‘Scruffy’.
It hadn’t been paying too much attention to what kind of distraction she was providing, just enough to keep track of ‘Katherine’ and the guards, but the sudden vibration of the strike worked to yank its attention to them.
After a brief thought of jumping on the guard and yanking his spine out of his ass, it took a deep breath, ran quietly around the racks of plants to jump out of the back window again, and went around the front of the store, where the guard was dragging a struggling ‘Scruffy’ by the hair, glancing around the entrance of the shop as if looking for someone.
It turned the corner, the snarl it let out more akin to a chainsaw, making the human startle and let go of ‘Scruffy’, who quickly scrambled up and ran to its side, eyes shining with… water?
Why was she leaking water?
After a brief sniff for any blood and a jaw-to-hair lick of its tongue to get rid of the oddly salty fluid, it glared at the guard, who hurriedly backed up, each regarding the other for a moment.
Humans all looked the same to the wolf, so it wasn't sure it would ever remember his face, but his scent? It would stay for a while.
Ignoring the urge to shoot a spike through his throat, it instead turned around and left, its human arms vibrating in rage it didn’t care to show to the world, clenched in fists against its ribs, holding the blanket closed.
It wasn’t all that angry about ‘Scruffy’ getting hit, it was more angry about the fact some weakling dared to do that to someone of its pack, and the fact it hadn’t done anything about it.
Turning away like this, it felt like it was surrendering, or admitting weakness.
It hated being weak. No, it wasn’t weak, but it didn’t want to bring more trouble to itself now, so it kept walking away.
After another couple minutes of weaving in and around crowds, it found a decent route with little to no traffic, and swung ‘Scruffy’ onto its back before using its slime and claws to scramble up a crystal light pole, and jump off its top onto a pathway made of equally-sized pipes spewing some kind of green gas, meters and devices clamped along their length.
It was a great shortcut because it mostly went over and through the market, and the market was a pretty open space, meaning that it could skip weaving around buildings and people to just follow the pipes.
Another ten minutes of squeezing itself and its human into the gaps where the pipes squeezed through and over, and it had ‘Katherine’ in sight, talking to someone who was glancing around and gesturing to their left, each of them bobbing their heads every few seconds.
Five more minutes of tailing ‘Katherine’, and it watched her go inside a building eerily similar to the one it had escaped from when it had been separated from ‘Emreeil’, full of cages and animals.
The temptation to jump in through a window was there, but the entire place had too different a structure for the wolf to do anything without being noticed.
For starters, there was no stage nor seats. It was just rows of cages in two floors, and humans could freely walk around them and pick whatever they wanted to take with them.
For most, that is.
The ones which didn’t have such a treatment were the large, likely dangerous ones, which were held in a more exclusive room in the back, but even if it wanted to go for those ones, there were people there as well, and it would take quite a while to eat them.
Begrudgingly, it pushed down its greed, and sat down to wait.
—
She glanced down at the little cage containing three lyrebirds, just in case the wolf needed… sample size?
Katherine frankly wasn’t quite sure why Em hadn't given her any ideas as for other things the wolf could eat, considering they had a decent enough pile of coin, but she was bit too mentally preoccupied to concern herself with the question.
Mostly trying to get herself to accept what she’d heard and feel something about it.
She was used to death and losing people. She was torn out of her family’s arms as a child, and then out of her slave group to be shipped to this godforsaken island at the behest of Emhreeil’s mother, and then she had to get used to having the staff around her rotate or disappear beyond a specific few, her included.
She was very used to losing people, whether through death or estrangement or separation.
It was all the same in her mind, really. Did it matter if someone was alive out there if she would never see them again? It was pretty much the same thing to her, as far as she was concerned. Someone unseen was someone dead.
That had been why she’d gotten that coin necklace of Emhreeil made when she stumbled upon that old artisan. She never believed she’d see her again.
The first time she lost her family and home, she’d bawled and wailed and screamed.
The years that followed, she’d cried a few times.
The first time, after seeing a kind, gray-haired man who’d smiled at her, gutted in the hot sands of the arena, and being forced to clean up the rust-red sand he left behind, going through the sand with a sieve to gather whatever teeth and bits of gore had ended up within the golden dust, late into the freezing night.
After coming to Carmera, outside tears of pain, involuntary, she only ever cried after she’d watched Emhreeil’s figure retreat into the distant crowd for what she thought was the last time.
Two years ago.
This numbness wasn’t new to her.
But it felt like she should be feeling something more, even if just to make right by Lady Anna and her father. The people who gave her the chance to learn to fight instead of endure, the chance to learn how to read instead of looking for symbols in every sign she looked at.
If only so she could abide by the comforting idea that people mourn others when they pass. Even a fraction of the grief that forced tears out of her eyes back then, like squeezing blood from stone would be enough, but all that came was an exhausted, vague, accepting sadness.
Her first thought was that the news was too impersonal and just hadn’t felt or become real yet. It was too sudden, out of nowhere. They were beating up some of Ghoul’s involuntary messengers and then she learned her only real connection since Emhreeil was killed.
Mentioned like an afterthought.
So she’d snatched a couple newspapers on the way, and beyond the first page, she found it. There was even a skilled needle-sketch of the ruins, the press machine distorting the image but leaving enough to see the outline of crumpled ruins.
The words were few.
It read like a eulogy spoken solemnly before a casket being lowered into the incinerator.
The papers went into a trashcan on her way to the store.
The idea to visit the place was there, but she wasn't sure what purpose it would serve. It was too out of the way for where they were heading.
The lyrebirds inside the cage repeated random sounds as she began to walk back to their designated meetup location, and she quickly affirmed what she’d known about these birds when one began perfectly imitating a rumbling steam engine, even down to the creak of metal and rattle of a startup failure.
It was uncanny, what kind of noises they could make.
The thought of the wolf’s voice turning from the broken mess of snarls and rasps and whistles it currently was into whatever it wished, was quite appealing. She would like to feel a bit more at ease with the mythical monster that was leading them.
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A mental image of the wolf speaking in a perfectly enunciated seductive drawl came to her mind unbidden, and she shuddered in horrified disgust, discarding the thought.
At least it would be more legible.
Maybe-
A rough, snarly scoff came from behind her, right behind her, and she dropped the cage on the floor to jump forward then whirl around, hand flying to the handle of her recently looted enchanted dagger, only to freeze stiff when her brain caught up to notify her that the sound was a chuff.
The realization was accompanied by the sight of the wolf staring at her nonchalantly, Scruffy stumbling in place dizzily beside it, holding onto the blanket.
Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.
No, it, it shall appear.
Em might think the wolf was a person- or an individual, or perhaps an equal to a human, but she was hesitant to think the same, even if she could admit to warming up to the wolf significantly during the past week.
The lyrebirds suddenly began screaming and making every threatening noise they could think of while they uselessly fluttered and scrambled about their cage, and she winced at the volume.
She let go of the dagger, and took a deep breath, closing her eyes momentarily as she straightened her trench coat.
The noise from the birds suddenly cut out, and she opened her eyes to a familiar ball of smoky darkness, taller than her and just as wide, the cage by her side nowhere to be seen.
Scruffy’s hand peeked through the ball of darkness, pawing at the air, before the goblin stumbled out of it, blinking before finding her and giving her a smile.
The darkness receded, revealing a shredded cage on the floor and bloodied feathers on the ground.
The wolf chuffed at her, mild gratitude in the sound. Then it yawned, wide as it could, and she unconsciously took a step back as she goggled at its teeth, snow-white and perfect with canines more akin to small knives with how large and long they were.
Its mouth clacked shut, and with a toss of its head, it walked away.
She sighed, and followed.
She wished they had some concrete goal to follow. Something more than just ‘find a safe space to rest and go from there’. Maybe this would feel a bit less like wandering, then.
Not that it was a bad plan, all things considered.
Just too abstract.
The wolf was likely used to this method of living. Small, simple goals with unknown paths to acquirement. Get food, get shelter.
She was used to far more order and certainty than this however.
Not for the first time, she wished that Em was the one leading the pack, but reasoned to herself that if it wasn’t for the creature in front of her, Em would likely be long dead.
And she couldn't deny that the wolf was learning about the world fast.
She mutely followed, turning on [Vigilance] and letting her mind scatter to the winds as the world stripped itself of context and reason around her, sinking into her defensive fugue like dropping into a soft bed.
It was a terrible coping mechanism, but she didn’t have much else.
—
Emhreeil sighed as she stepped out into the alley, ignoring the man who brushed past her to enter the building she just left.
She massaged her temples, resisting the urge to whimper in pain as the migraine continued pounding through her brain, as it had for latter half of her conversation with the man.
After a few seconds, she began to trudge her way to the corner they agreed to regroup at, and tried to organize the information in her mind.
She learned a lot.
None of it was good news, not really.
The information package she paid for wasn’t very in-depth, because she could save money by using [Psychometric Vision], but it covered a very wide variety of subjects, out of which she squeezed as much info as she could. Probably too much.
The Grate, where the second floor turned into the third, was now a warzone between the newly formed Syndicate and The Guard. It was escalating enough to make the Kingdom teleport troops down into the second floor, which were currently marching down. Open warfare was starting, and sooner than later, it would stop being melee combat and bombs and turn into magical devastation once the Kingdom pulled the Crimson Guard out of wherever they kept their resident demigods.
Or so she assumed through simple logic, really.
In response, the gangs had apparently seized control of all teleporting stations in the third floor and were fortifying them as heavily as they could. The adventurers from the Adventurer’s Guild were sort of turtling at their local branches, waffling between helping or keeping their head down and between their shoulders.
House Kervile had ‘mysteriously’ burned down, which she already knew.
Then she learned of the dozen gangs operating on the third floor, in a spew of information so dense she was starting to forget their names already. Mostly because if there was a Syndicate, and if Ironheart was a part of it, that meant he had multiple gangs under his thumb, and she wanted to know exactly which people to kill. Or avoid.
Intellectually, she knew there were a lot of gangs around. Of course there were, people could literally starve to death here without an ounce of pity, and the churches could only give so much, so people had to feed themselves somehow.
Still, hearing about all of them was a slight wake-up call in their sheer number and complexity, as well as the simple fact that some people really just didn't have a choice as to being gang members, for all that it mattered.
There were the Dockside Merchants, closest to their current location, and apparently the people they’d killed just a day and a half ago were part of them, according to her Skill. They had roots in Carmera’s dockworkers, about a hundred and sixty-something years ago, before the Leviathans decided that they liked the Black Sea and moved in.
The Dockside Merchants were apparently just small-time drug peddlers now, and some of the most chaotic of the bunch. Their only stable holdings were night clubs and seedy bars around the walls. Their leader was some crass man whose name she didn’t care to remember.
There were the Snake Eyes, Ironheart’s apparent lackeys, judging from what Ghoul had said, mostly dealing in protection rackets and services for the ‘Dungeon Barons’, like protection rackets, peacekeeping, debt collection, gambling, intimidation, and the occasional ‘hit’.
She wasn't familiar with the slang of these circles but she assumed that meant assassination.
In short, they were pseudo-mercenaries. Their strongest group was the very same people that tried to kill her and Katherine, called The Butchers, in a name that she found both stupid and arrogant, personally.
Their general territory was less of a sprawl and more of a cylindrical area going from the middle of the third quadrant of the floor all the way to the top of the fourth, which was not terribly far from where they were, at the moment.
There were The Enforcers, Baron Simian’s attempt at recreating what Ironheart did with Snake Eyes, mostly localized around the more ‘high-class’ areas of the third floor, like the very same market they’d been blindly prancing through in Fleabag’s quest to satisfy his curiosity, but they weren’t much of a gang as much as they were Baron Simian’s law enforcers.
Specifically, his laws. Man’s ego could rival a king, considering that was what he was trying to be.
A petty kingdom of thugs and druggies. How grand…
Thankfully, he had an openly antagonistic relationship with Ironheart, so she wasn’t terribly concerned about them being buddy enough to have Simian run to Ironheart the moment something black and canine walked into his sight.
The Beakers, a group of doctors, scientists, and miscellaneously skilled people and craftsmen who banded together to try and stop the forceful recruitment of such individuals going on by Tillenhall and the gangs.
They were the least evil from what she’d gleamed, mostly doing black market products and magitech trading, regular old drugs but with a twist of alchemy, and providing discrete medical aid without having to worry about someone hearing about it. They held a small amount of territory but had it locked down tight, and were almost anarchistic beyond that, operating in small mobile pockets across the more peaceful or uncontested areas of the third floor. Only those in the know would hear of their new black market, and anyone going to investigate or wreck it would find it gone in a few days.
Lady Lauren’s Mice, or The Mice, were a seeming oddity, a gang mostly made up of children picked off the streets and used for low-tier espionage. They were slowly groomed into being drug movers and muscle for the gangs once they came of age and ‘graduated’, so the gangs mostly left them alone. If the kids failed in being useful, before their 'graduation' and weren't good enough to be sent to a gang, they were either sent to brothels and other disreputable pits of villainy, or sent to Tillenhall for ‘rehabilitative stay’.
Much as she wanted to go burn this Lady Lauren alive, she doubted Fleabag would give a shit about human children.
Red Spring was another minor gang, which mostly ran fighting pits. Mostly dog fighting rings, where canines as well as anything with legs was thrown into a pit to die and kill for entertainment. It was led by a very powerful beastman who took the racial stereotype of a feral melee fighter and ran with it, and it was with his strength alone that his gang had any foothold in the cliff race. He’d fought against the Butchers and won, apparently.
The feat didn’t sound that impressive because Fleabag destroyed them, but for normal people who weren’t nigh-mythical beasts of carnage, the Butchers had earned their name.
There was a group of informants around the bottom of the third floor, and some people who specialized in moving people and objects for long distances, discreetly.
It was the latter that really drew her attention.
Fleabag’s simple solution echoed in her mind.
If she hated her mother so much, she just had to go and kill her.
The group that moved people for a fee was called Railroad, and was centered around a man called Reeman, with presumably few members.
Whatever or whoever Reeman was, he had some kind of ability that allowed teleportation of tagged objects whose mana cost did not rise with distance, and he did not like people telling him what to do.
That’s who she wanted to meet, but the price for that information was too much, and her Skill had so much crap to work with that she could barely wrangle it in Railroad’s direction enough to tear the knowledge of their general whereabouts from the man before she felt warm blood trickle down her nose, at which point she had to stop and loudly sniffle before she gave the game away.
There were more players in the criminal underworld, many more, but most of them were so small-time or disconnected from their needs that she couldn't really find it in herself to try and remember them.
The more immediately concerning part was almost an afterthought, a mere mention of ‘lamp-heads’ prowling around the fourth and third floor, half-said in jest. After a bit of forceful prodding, she got an elaboration, likely because she had the potential to be a good client in the man's eyes.
Whatever that golem with the cloak was doing, it wasn’t alone. A lot of folks had spotted a lot of “people” with giant lenses and bulbs for faces prowling around the dark alleys, and even more suspiciously, not one of them had been caught.
Rumor on the street was some kind of augmentation-based group that was just starting to go crazy from putting too much metal in their bodies, letting the Dungeon have too much influence over their forms and minds.
It was more plausible than a non-aggressive golem, she could agree with that.
Two maps and a couple vain pleasantries later, she had everything they needed to get the hell out of here.
There was a lift along the edge of this plate, and the route to hitting the bottom of the third floor wasn’t nearly as timely and convoluted when there was an entire network of lines on paper for her to show to Fleabag. There were also a couple marked inns along the way they could finally get a proper shower in as well, which was very appreciated.
When she finally got to the meeting point, a little corner next to some kind of industrial chem compressor, she found Fleabag half-sprawled across Katherine’s lap as she hesitantly pet him, Scruffy having no such compunctions.
The sight filled her with something warm and fuzzy, and she smiled, before the migraine took the expression away from her.
An eye on Fleabag’s hip opened to stare at her, and with a long-suffering groan, he got off Katherine and stretched with a wide yawn.
She linked their minds again.
Question, the link immediately sent, flavored and presented from the wolf, followed by clarification of knowledge and a mental image of her speaking to a vaguely human figure.
As they began the long, long walk to the lift indicated on the map, she filled the silence with careful recollections and translations of everything she learned, while the wolf focused on navigating them around areas of trouble and conflict by using its vibrational senses.
The walk was slow, both because of relative exhaustion from her and Kat, and because they constantly had to dodge armed people the closer they got to the local Adventurer Guild branch.
She only barely got to explaining some background context needed for the wolf to comprehend what exactly a gang was and why it was not a pack, when a distant light suddenly bathed everything in yellow-orange hues, making them all startle and whirl in its direction, tense and confused.
Far above and somewhere behind them, she could see the source of that light peeking through smog and pipeworks to cast light down on them like a strange sun, but not the least bit as stable. It sure felt like she was staring straight into the sun, especially with how unused to bright light her eyes were. She could barely see anything through the squint.
She walked forward to peek out of the alley, hearing distant screams and gasps, and saw nothing but a rapidly approaching wave of shattering debris.
Wide eyed and frozen in confusion, her new eyes were only saved by the tails that suddenly yanked her back into the alley as the shockwave passed them, slamming into everything like a wall of roaring thunder, deforming the alley itself as the building’s foundations cracked and snapped with whirring shrieks of metal, starting to topple over them.
The world spun, and then they slammed into something, someone. Arms snapped shut around her, and she only managed to stop her motion enough to see Fleabag shove all three of them under his chest, one arm covering his head and the other supporting him as they were showered with broken glass and a torrent of broken metal, sheets of metal thudding against his back with tiny grunts.
She hurriedly curled her wings in, closing them around their makeshift pile.
Even through the screaming ring in her ears, she could hear the calamitous groaning of something distant bending under pressure.
She leaned out of cover for a moment, staring up at the suddenly smog-cleared sky, only half of it visible due to the building to their right tilting heavily over them, and watched countless structures and towers all tilt bend and break under the concussive shockwave, tumbling down like dominoes.
One of said dominoes was slowly falling right on top of them, a monstrosity of steel spewing wheezing steam and lightning as it crumbled. A factory’s spire, a pipe, she couldn’t tell what it was. She could only tell that it was wider than the buildings on either side of where they were currently cowering.
The eye on Fleabag’s neck likely told him before she could, because he jumped off and sent her a mental sense of urgency.
She didn’t hesitate to buff Katherine and herself with [Haste], use her wings to throw herself upright, pick Scruffy up, and run.
She vaulted over piles of brick and followed in Fleabag’s steps as he barreled through the doors of fallen buildings and ran on walls turned to floors, through a stretch of jagged obstacles made up of overturned walkways, grates, pipes spewing acids and pink gasses, buildings crumpled like tin cans, navigating the maze of a broken city all around them as blood ran down her face from her bleeding ears while an insistent whine rendered her as close to deaf as she'd ever been.
She could smell the blood, could see the suffering of innocents all around her.
This time, she hardened her heart, and ignored it.
Another mental tactile image came from Fleabag, one that made her newfound confidence after the ritual crumple like wet paper.
Buried underneath the mind-jolting impacts and vibrations, deep underground, blobs of motion and metal were surging upwards with a horrifying speed in all directions.
Including theirs.
-
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