The soldiers of Grandesia Power Company unleashed a new string of bullets at the girl.

Swinging her weight back for a moment, her feet drove forward so that she could latch onto the underside of the grate. With as much of her body shielded by the metal as possible, her eyes squeezed shut tightly beneath her goggles.

All the while, eX-0281 scaled the building as fast as he could. His talons gained purchase, propelling him in a four-legged, vertical run.

A scream belted from her throat, this time in pain as some splashes of red spurted from her leg.

Target: "Lottie" [Human]

Vitality: 65%

Her well-being immediately decreased by the couple of bullets that riddled her leg. Based on the stream of red that continually dribbled down her calf, Lottie would bleed out in five minutes at this rate.

The math was calculated for him on the screen where her vitality updated.

Vitality: 63%

Vitality: 61%

eX-0281's arms and legs moved in a greater frenzy. Desperation coursed through him, straining in every muscle to get there in time. That girl was their bargaining chip with the Disco Menace, so he needed to save her.

If the enemy visors detected the motion of his frame slinking up the building's side, either the system marked him as an ally or the other soldiers ignored him. Once he had scaled this section of the tower, eX-0281 slung his machine gun off his back and peppered his former allies.

"Whoa, whoa, hey!" one guard said as he backed up. They had opened the short-range communication channel with him.

With a wince, eX-0281 remembered that he had reacted with similar disbelief when eX-057 had attacked him.

"Aim a bit lower mate!" another guard said, huffing some hard breaths.

Since he had been careful to aim at their armored trunks, none of his former coworkers at Grandesia Power Company sustained serious injury—not like Lottie anyway.

His gun went back into its holster. Hastily, he extended one clawed hand out to the girl. "Take my hand! I'm here to help."

Lottie clung to dear life like a sloth. Upside down, she looked at him with eyes widened nearly as large as her goggles. With no other option, she clasped her hand onto his forearm.

That was all he needed. eX-0281 yanked her from the underside of the platform and threw himself off the side of the tower.

"Ah!" Lottie was screaming her head off as though he did not have wings.

eX-0281 spread them wide and focused on balancing himself, trying to adjust the swinging weight of the person that he had as cargo. He used the claws on his feet to snatch a better hold of her unceremoniously.

Confident that the other sub-dragons could not hit them, he ignored the racket of gunshots from behind. A few came so close, he swore that the air swooshed by them.

They were hardly gliding, more like haphazardly dropping through the air at a weird angle. "Ugh!" He grunted and strained from the effort, flapping his wings a few times in a desperate attempt to correct their course.

Still belting out a high-pitched shriek, Lottie was not helping at all. Her weight twisted around as she struggled in eX-0281's claws.

"Stop moving!" he yelled.

Thanks to her, their trajectory had been thrown off to the left, headed straight towards an air return pipe. Thick like a skyscraper in the underground city, eX-0281 did not have time to steer them around it.

"Hold on!" In preparation for impact, he interlocked his claws in such a way that the tips should not stab himself nor Lottie needlessly. To lessen damage to his wings, he wrapped them around his body.

And so, eX-0281 flung out his free claws, lowered his horns, and braced the muscles in his neck.

The acrylic glass was designed to withstand high impacts, but the cold air in the return pipe turned it brittle. It was not made to endure the weight of a sub-dragon compounded by gravity. Shards of thick glass smashed into the pipe's interior, followed by eX-0281 and Lottie ending up in the air return pipe.

His horns and thick skull bore the brunt of the damage, nothing a sub-dragon could not endure. The jagged sides of the glass scraped at the backs of his wings, luckily not severe enough to gash them.

The windy upflow filled eX-0281's wings like sails. "No. Oh no!" he cried. Though he tried to keep his wings folded into himself and dive back down to the hole that he had made, the air kept sucking him upward.

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They flew up the height of the elevator terminals, as high as the tallest buildings in Grandesia.

"Ah!" Lottie's throat must be as raw as his ears by now, considering how she started shrieking anew.

When eX-0281 looked up, a morbid cry escaped him too. "Ah!"

They screamed together and rightfully so. A massive fan awaited them up head, its loud beats resounding with each rapid rotation.

Desperately, his mind reached out for the [Prediction Analytics]. In a split second, his visor had mapped out the pattern of the fan. A red laser light appeared on his monitor with where he should go, and the countdown for the time in which he needed to be there.

3 sec….

They were going too slow—not going to make it in time. A second too late, and their guts would be splattered at the top of the air return vent.

eX-0281 flung out his wings as wide as they would go, capturing as much air as possible to propel them upward. Yes! His thoughts lit up with exhilaration, thinking that they could make it.

2 sec….

He clutched Lottie close to his chest, bringing her feet up to his face. Somehow, the combination of their frantic struggles had resulted in her facing backwards in his claws. Her arms wrapped around his lower back, clinging to him in kind.

1 sec….

A shallow breath of the frigid air chilled his windpipe. eX-0281 folded his wings like a cocoon around them both and tried to make himself as small as possible.

0 sec

A hard surface smacked into him, knocking all the breath out of his lungs. eX-0281 happily gasped because he was alive; nothing hurt all that much—not like it would have if the blade had split him open.

The two of them had ended up on the other side of the fan, flattened like a pancake against the metal grate.

It was too bad that he could not have busted through steel like he could acrylic glass. So close to freedom, eX-0281 had to gaze up to the outside world with his claws clinging to the bars like a jail cell.

Likewise, the spines at the top of his wings latched onto the grate. This helped keep them safe from falling the few feet back towards the fan.

Panic seized his heart when his tail drooped down faster than he could curl it back up.

No! eX-0281 was mortified. The fan was right below them, ready to cleave off his poor tail.

Suddenly, his tail stopped falling but not by his own muscles. A small hand had wrapped around the end of it, squeezing tightly.

Since Lottie had been safeguarded within his wings, she had ended up strewn across his body like a hammock. Her knee had smacked into the chin of his helmet, the gory calf uncomfortably close to his visor. Given how her body lay across him backwards, she had reached between his legs to grab his tail.

Relieved, he cooed, "You saved my tail."

"You saved my tail!" Lottie said right back. Gently she lifted his tail up enough so that he could thread it through the metal grate.

eX-0281 encircled his tail carefully around a bar so that it would not risk slipping again. Since the immediate ordeal had been resolved, his attention flitted to his status.

Name: eX-0281 [Sub-Dragon Shifter (Dragon Form)]

Vitality: 95%

Discrete Parts: Right Wing (90%), Left Wing (90%), Tail (100%)

He was fine; nothing to worry about. The injuries to his wings could heal on their own with time.

It was Lottie whose immediate condition he worried about.

Target: "Lottie" [Human]

Vitality: 22%

She had lost a lot of blood during their chaotic flight. Only a minute and a half of her life remained, according to the system interface. Her gunshot wounds needed pressure applied to slow the bleeding, but stuck clinging onto the grate, eX-0281 did not know what to do about that.

Lottie swung herself around on top of him, pressing her own fingers up against her wounds. Her lips contorted with pain, one of the only parts of her visible through the ski mask save for her hazel eyes. "Your wings are blue! Are you a water elemental? Do you know [Cure]?"

"Sorry." He felt oddly self-conscious about his hissing pronunciation; his first interaction with somebody as a free man had to be admitting how useless he was. "I'm ice."

"Of course," she said, shaking her head. Murmuring to herself, Lottie went on. "With all the thunder elementals in the city, of course GPC would employ a type resistant to thunder. Water elementals would conduct the electricity."

Snapping back to the moment, Lottie asked instead, "Do you know how to make a tourniquet?"

eX-0281 shook his head.

"Darn. That's too bad."

According to her slurred speech, her head must feel woozy from the blood loss. Similarly, her voice would falter on occasion from her evident pain levels. None of this stopped her from launching into another explanation, eyes lighting up.

"In lieu of a proper treatment mechanism, your ice might work to form a bandage. The application of ice directly against the skin will risk frostbite, but I'm not worried about that. Worst comes to worst, I lose my leg. I don't want to bleed out right now."

Though she talked a lot, Lottie talked so fast that he barely understood what she said.

"I can't make ice," eX-0281 said simply.

"What do you mean?" she asked, her tone pitching higher. "You're an ice elemental! Even E-grade mages can [Manifest] their element."

He hemmed and hawed, knowing that he was a B-grade mage. "I don't know. I've just never done it before."

Though he had the innate ability, magic was hard to learn without formal instruction.

"I suppose mages are harder to train," Lottie said with a thoughtful finger tapping against her lips. "Battle formations of corporate military forces always prioritize protecting the mages, probably to keep their basic grunts easy to replace."

Those words stung. It reminded him that her friend, the Disco Menace, had cut down twenty-seven of his clones earlier that day. He could not help but wonder which numbers had been lost.

Only by luck did my number survive, he thought wryly.

eX-0281 blinked a few times, trying to clear his mind and focus on his objectives—the way that the Disco Menace could help him. Therefore, he needed to save Lottie.

"How can I make ice?" he asked.